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completed by twenty-four hours of steady work; and after some of the usual uncomfortable delays which wait on military expeditions, we were at last afloat.
I had tried to keep the plan as secret as possible, and had requested to have no definite orders, until we should be on board ship.
But this larger expedition was less within my own hands than was the St. Mary's affair, and the great reliance for concealment was on certain counter reports, ingeniously set afloat by some of the Florida men. These reports rapidly swelled into the most enormous tales, and by the time they reached the New York newspapers, the expedition was “a great volcano about bursting, whose lava will burn, flow, and destroy,” --“the sudden appearance in arms of no less than five thousand negroes,” --“a liberating host,” --“not the phantom, but the reality, of servile insurrection.”
What the undertaking actually was may be best seen in the instructions which guided it.1
In due time, after touching at Fernandina, we reached the difficult bar of the St. John's, and were piloted safely
Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co. University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge. 1870.
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