On her maiden voyage, the blockade-runner Condor ran aground off Fort Fisher while trying to evade the USS Niphon and enter the Cape Fear River. military supplies and uniforms for the Confederate army. After a brief stopover in Bermuda, the Condor steamed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she spent more than two weeks taking on coal and water and additional passengers. Joining Greenhow was Lieutenant Joseph D. Wilson of the com-merce raider CSS Alabama, freed on his word of honor after capture of his ship in France. Also joining the voyage was James Holcombe, Confederate commissioner to Canada. They embarked from Halifax on September 24, bound for Wilmington. The Condor managed to slip past Union cruisers prowling the shipping lanes off the North Carolina coast, but as she approached New Inlet, the northern entryway into the Cape Fear River, before dawn October 1, 1864, she was spotted and fired upon by the USS Niphon. The Condor suddenly turned hard to starboard and then came to a crashing halt. The pilot had inadvertently grounded the ship on a sand bar as he attempted to avoid hitting another blockade-runner, the Night Hawk, that earlier ran aground. Fearing possible imprisonment and other dire consequences of capture, Greenhow and Commissioner Holcombe implored Captain Hewett to get them ashore at once. The captain believed he could free the Condor on the next rising tide, but in the meantime, assured them that the ship was under the protection of the guns of Fort Fisher, only 500 yards away. They persisted, however, and Hewett finally gave in to his panicking passengers. He deployed a lifeboat with sailors instructed to shuttle Greenhow, Thomas Brinkman, Lieutenant Wilson, and James Holcombe to the beach. Shortly after the dinghy was lowered to the ocean, it cap-sized in rough surf. The men clung desperately to the over-turned boat until waves pushed it onshore, but Greenhow, weighed down by her hoopskirt and corsets, disappeared beneath the dark, turbulent sea. Thomas Taylor, an agent for the Anglo-Confederate Trading Company that owned the Night Hawk, appeared on the oceanfront at daylight to supervise rescue operations for his company’s stranded vessel. He claimed that he found Greenhow’s body washed up on the beach. But Colonel William Lamb wrote, shortly after sunrise on the morning of October 1, a stranger arrived drip-ping wet at his headquarters at Fort Fisher, and identified himself as “one of the party who, in attempting to leave the Condor in a boat, had been upset and barely escaped drown-ing; that he feared Mrs. Greenhow was drowned.” Lamb rushed to the beach only to find his soldiers had rescued Holcombe and the sailors, but Greenhow was indeed missing. “Her lifeless body was soon found,” the colonel lamented, “the cruel waves having cast it up on the cold, wet sands, as the flowing tide came in. It was a sad, a touching sight.” Lamb speculated that the gold she carried may have contributed 70 WBM september 2014 PAINTING BY MARTIN PEEBLES COURTESY OF CHRIS E. FONVIELLE JR.
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