The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner — Reading Companion

A Voice That Shifts Between Official Report and Anecdote

The narrative voice moves between two registers. One is the formal tone of an after-action report: Wilkinson cites Commodore Mitchell's unpublished official document and aims to present facts from "a new point of view." The other is a conversational, almost novelistic style that emerges in set pieces. In one episode, pilot Dyer and the sailing captain nearly come to blows on the wharf, Dyer brandishing a drawn knife and shouting, "Come ashore you d—d English hog, and I'll make mince meat of you!" The captain, struck speechless, turns to Wilkinson and pleads, "Do I look like a Henglish og?" The juxtaposition of deadly serious blockade-running with such comic relief is a deliberate structural choice.

Pacing Through Peril and Digression

Wilkinson controls pace by alternating tense, fast-moving passages with leisurely digressions. A typical chase sequence—slowing down, showing colors, dipping flags to a sloop of war—builds suspense through precise nautical detail: "shaping our course for Beaufort, and slowing down, as we were in no haste to get there." The relief is palpable when "the sun sank below the horizon" and the ship makes full speed for Masonboro' Inlet. Immediately after, the narrative slows for a chapter on Dyer's discharge, a quarrel, and a portrait of Major Ficklen's charities. This rhythm of action then reflection gives the memoir a novelistic shape.

Recurring Details That Anchor the Account

Certain details recur and become motifs. The transfer of the steamer Giraffe to the Confederate government and its renaming to R. E. Lee is a turning point. Wilkinson repeatedly notes the use of captured blockade-runners as Union transports, a fact that enables his ruse of showing U.S. colors. He also emphasizes the role of signal stations along the coast, established "for the benefit of the blockade-runners." These small, concrete observations—the coaling station at Beaufort, the "tail of the shoals," the courtesy of dipping colors—ground the narrative in the material realities of blockade running, lending credibility to the more dramatic episodes.

The Preface as a Key to the Author's Intentions

Wilkinson's preface is unusually revealing. He admits the title is a compromise, that the book covers more than blockade running, and that he hopes to "amuse Northern readers" and "leave them in a pleasanter and better state of mind." This conciliatory aim is paired with a firm refusal to "sacrifice principle." The preface thus frames the entire work as an attempt at post-war reconciliation through historical recollection, a goal that shapes both the selection of episodes and the measured, often wry tone.

Readers will find that Wilkinson's account rewards attention to its shifts in pace and voice. The comic interludes and digressions are not mere padding; they are part of a deliberate strategy to make the history palatable to a post-war audience. The narrative is best approached as a crafted memoir rather than a straightforward report, one that uses the structure of a sea story to advance a larger argument about honor, duty, and reconciliation.

Reading Wilkinson’s calm account of steering through dark waters, I remembered sitting with my grandfather, who spoke of the Pacific fog the same way—waiting, listening. That anxious quiet returned in reading Cape Gloucester: The Green Inferno — Background and Themes, where the jungle itself becomes that unseen enemy. Both books left me holding my breath long after the page turned.