USS SASSACUS vs. NUTFIELD

Blockade running was a complicated pursuit even for the most skilled of seamen.  European goods were shipped to staging points in Bermuda, the Bahamas, or the Caribbean.  Here, smaller, sleek, fast ships would load for the dash into Southern ports.  Runners would skirt Union blockaders as best they could, then run close inshore where their shallow draft proved an advantage.  Only the luckiest threaded the thin line between uncharted shoals and dogged blockaders.  The paddle-wheel steamer Wild Dayrell for example, ran aground the night of 31 January 1864 at New Topsail Inlet, North Carolina, where she was discovered the following day by LCDR Francis A. Roe in USS SASSACUS.  Roe worked in vain until the 3^rd trying to free the steamer but ultimately had to burn her.

By 0700 this day SASSACUS had returned to her station on the Bermuda Line when she sighted another suspicious vessel about 12 miles to the northwest.  Roe fired his boilers and set his 205-foot, double-ender sidewheel gunboat in hot pursuit.  Through the morning, SASSACUS sustained 12.5-13 knots, enough to steadily gain on the blockade runner.  This was obviously noted aboard the pursued vessel, for through his spyglass Roe observed cargo being thrown overboard to lighten ship.  Around noon SASSACUS had closed within range of her forward 100-pounder.  Union shells began splashing around the still fleeing runner.  Tellingly, she turned sharply toward shore to duck into shallower water.

Perhaps accidently, perhaps not, the mystery ship ran aground at New Inlet, North Carolina.  Her crew set her aflame and fled to the lifeboats, leaving her engines running.  As SASSACUS pulled to within musket range one of the lifeboats capsized, spilling rebel crewmen.  Roe lowered a boat but was only able to save the blockade runner’s purser.  From him he learned the vessel was the brand-new iron-hulled steamer Nutfield, making her first run from Bermuda.  She measured 750 tons burden and carried munitions, Enfield rifles, a battery of eight Whitworth rifled cannon, quinine, assorted merchandise and a quantity of pig lead to be recast into musket balls.  The cannon and the lead had been the cargo Roe observed being thrown overboard.

Recognizing Nutfield to be one of the newest and best steamers off the Thames ways, Roe worked through the night to free the runner.  But alas she was too fast to be re-floated.  Roe off-loaded the Enfield rifles, the quinine, and several compasses, then set her afire.  USS FLORIDA shortly arrived, and together they pummeled the stranded runner with gunfire.  Finally, convinced the steamer was completely wrecked, SASSACUS departed about 1900 the evening of the 5^th.

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CAPT James Bloom, Ret

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, pp. IV-12, IV-15.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 6 “R-S”.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1976, p. 350.

“Report of Commander Crosby, U.S. Navy, Commanding U.S.S. Florida.”  IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 9, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from May 5, 1863, to May 4, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1899, pp. 460-61.

“Report of Lieutenant-Commander Roe, U.S. Navy, commanding U.S.S. Sassacus.”  IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 9, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from May 5, 1863, to May 4, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1899, pp. 459-60.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  SASSACUS survived the war, seeing subsequent duty in North Carolina’s sounds against the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle.  She participated in the siege of Fort Fisher and patrolled the Chesapeake in April 1865 in search of conspirators in the Lincoln assassination.  She was sold in 1868.  Sassacus remembers a great sachem of the Pequot tribe of Massachusetts in the early 1600s.  He endured the rebellion of the Mohegans, a subjugated tribe, who eventually defeated Sassacus with the help of the English and Narragansett Indian allies in what is known today as the Pequot War.  Sassacus fled to Iroquois lands near present-day Long Island, New York, but there was betrayed and killed by the Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederation.

The wreck of Wild Dayrell was surveyed in 2006 by Tidewater Atlantic Research, Inc., as a North Carolina cultural resource.  She lies in Rich Inlet, about 20 miles north of Fort Fisher.  The wreck of Nutfield has not been surveyed to this writer’s knowledge.

Pig lead is lead in ingot form.  Molten lead is smelted from lead ore, galena.  A channel conducts the molten lead from the smelting furnace and into multiple side channels coming off perpendicularly, all in the same direction.   As such, the side channels resemble piglets suckling from a sow.

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