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I ask the reader to take into consideration the difference between a silent fort and a silenced one. Fortress Monroe is silent to-day, but it is far from being silenced.
From Fort Fisher and the batteries the enemy fired occasional shots all the forenoon.
It is fair to say that when the Brooklyn was in near the Flag Pond Hill battery she did some splendid shooting and the enemy concluded not to fire a great deal.
We stood in, the transport fleet lying each side of me. I lay within eight hundred yards of the shore when we commenced debarking the troops.
The moment we got on shore skirmishers were to advance and take possession of some woods.
This they did, and then the small party moved down upon Flag Pond Hill battery.
The enemy held out a white flag as our skirmishers came up, and the navy sent in boats and took the prisoners off.1 Among them were sixty-five prisoners from the Seventeenth North Carolina, a regiment which lay before my line when I left before Richmond.
Porter reports that no land reinforcements got there, and yet we captured and brought back with us sixty-five men of a rebel regiment which I left at Richmond.
When we landed, the fort was entirely silent, with the exception of a gun fired now and then at some small navy boats which were apparently dragging for torpedoes or taking soundings.
My plan was: First to land five hundred men and reconnoitre, and if it was found that they could hold the landing for the others, then to land force enough to assault the place, and then, if it was possible, to land the rest of the men and what material I had, and intrench.
The first five hundred men were easily landed, and then the boats were sent back and more put on shore as fast as possible.2
As soon as the landing was in good progress, I ran down to a point within five hundred yards of Fort Fisher, in General Graham's army boat, “Chamberlain,” and at the right of where the monitors lay that were firing upon the fort.
I could run in nearer than they could because my vessel was of lighter draft.
I there met General Weitzel returning from a reconnoissance.
He stated to me that he had been out to the front line, and had seen Fort Fisher,
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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