Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 2.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[233] scattered along the coast, was henceforth confined to the exercise of a kind of police duty, designed to prevent the enemy from gradually recapturing the belt of islands and canals which had been so easily delivered up to the Federals, and which now separated him entirely from the sea. Hence the vast number of small expeditions and disconnected reconnaissances, having no other object in view than to explore some new channel, to prevent the erection of some battery, to wreak vengeance for an ambuscade, or to capture any trading craft still sailing in those inland waters. We shall confine ourselves to a brief enumeration of some of these minor operations.

The gun-boat Crusader was specially detailed to watch the Bay of North Edisto. On the 19th of April, Commander Rhind landed with a few soldiers near the Seabrook plantation for the purpose of hunting out some of the enemy's sharpshooters who had frequently troubled him; he met them and dispersed them after a slight skirmish, in which he had three men wounded. On the 29th of April, he went up Dawhoo River to destroy a battery of two guns which the enemy had placed on that stream. After receiving the fire of these two guns, which did him no injury, he landed, and finding them abandoned rendered them unfit for service. A field-battery, with a few sharpshooters concealed in the woods, was waiting for him at a turn in the river a little lower down; the Federal commander had foreseen this ambuscade, and passed the dangerous point without losing a single man.

In the mean while, two gun-boats at the other extremity of the line of the coast, occupied by Dupont, were trying to remedy the bad effect produced by the evacuation of Jacksonville, by making their appearance every three or four days before that town; they even sailed up St. John's River several times, and proceeded as far as Picolata, on a line with St. Augustine.

Each of the naval stations established in the principal bays along the coast organized expeditions similar to those of which North Edisto Sound and the entrance of St. John's River had been the point of departure. A foreign brig having run the blockade to reach Sapelo Sound, two of the gun-boats stationed at that point, the Wamsutta and the Potomska, followed her into Riceboroa River; they proceeded thirty miles up this river; but