Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

I investigated the causes of this change in the water and came to the conclusion that the water we drank was rain water, which had sunk into the sand and been prevented by capillary attraction from flowing into the sea. When an opening was made, it percolated through the sand into the barrel. But this sand itself had been thrown up by the sea, and while in the sea had attracted to itself the adhesive animalculae with which sea water is filled. Thus it contained animal matter, and this was carried into the barrels by the rain water, and, after a few days' exposure to the sun, it putrified, destroying the water in which it was found.

We also found upon experiment that we were entirely mistaken in our idea that the sand would affect our eyes, and consequently our provision of spectacles and glasses was a useless one. But this attracted my attention: We found that when the wind blew the sand flew with great ease and rapidity, and sprinkled everything. Indeed, in the storms it banked up about our tents and on our plankwalks, exactly as the snow would do in a northern climate. Why, therefore, it should not affect the eyes as the shifting sands in the Desert of Sahara do, as I have read, I could not understand. In my younger days I had been something of a microscopist, and I had taken my telescope and microscope, as well as other scientific instruments, when I came on the expedition. Upon examining the sand I found that the reason it did not affect our eyes was that every particle of sand that I could find was globular in form, like the larger shingle of the beaches, where it is rolled about and washed by the waters. Being globular, it had no sharp corners with which the eye might be scratched, and when the sand got into the eye it worked out without injury, like the little pebble called an “eye stone,” or a flax seed, which is in some parts of the country used for the same purpose.

Notwithstanding all my unfortunate delays I found that I was quite in season in my arrival at Ship Island. Indeed, I had to wait there not only for the admiral's fleet to get to the mouth of the Mississippi, but some fourteen days more, while the ships were being worked over the bar.

When I contemplated my position at Ship Island it seemed as if I had an herculean task before me. In the first place, I learned