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| View of the Navy Yard after the fire.1 |
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| Temporary three-gun Battery.2 |
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left on shore, excepting two, reaching their boats in safety, followed by the light of the great fire, and overtook the Pawnee off Craney Island, where the two vessels broke through the obstructions and proceeded to Hampton Roads.
The two officers left behind were Commander Rogers and Captain Wright, who failed to reach the boats.
They were arrested after day-dawn and were taken to Norfolk as prisoners of war.
The great object of the conflagration was not fully accomplished.
The attempt was, in fact, a failure.
The Dry-dock was very little injured.
The mechanics' shops and sheds, timber-sheds, ordnance building, foundries, sawmill,
provisions, officers' quarters, and all other buildings in the yard, were saved, excepting the immense ship-houses, the marine barracks, and riggers, sail, and ordnance lofts.
The insurgents immediately took possession of all the spared buildings and machinery, the Dry-dock, and the vast number of uninjured cannon, and proceeded at once to make use of them in the work of rebellion.
Several of the heavy Dahlgren guns were mounted in battery
along the river-bank, at the Navy Yard, and other places near; and soon afterward the fortifications in the Slave-labor States were supplied with heavy guns from this post.
The gain to the insurgents and loss to the National Government, by this abandonment of the Gosport Navy Yard at that time, was incalculable.3 The mere money value of the property
1 this picture is from a large sketch made by a young artist, Mr. James E. Taylor, a member of a New York regiment, and kindly placed at my disposal by him.
2 this picture is also from a sketch by Mr. Taylor. It is a view of a three-gun Battery, placed so as to command the approach to the Navy Yard by the Suffolk road.
3 William H. Peter, appointed by the Governor of Virginia a commissioner to make an inventory of the property taken from the National Government at this time, said, that he deemed “it unnecessary to speak of the vast importance to Virginia, and to the entire South, of the timely acquisition of this extensive naval depot, since the presence at almost every exposed point on the entire Southern coast, and at numerous inland intrenched camps in the several States, of heavy pieces of ordnance, with their equipments and fixed ammunition, fully attest the fact.” --Report in the Richmond Enquirer, February 4, 1862.
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