New London - In November of 1861, a lot of folks were wondering what the heck was going on.

Area farmers were tearing down their walls and carting the stones to the harbor, where the stones were being loaded into eight decrepit whaling ships until they sat low in the water.

But why, and for what purpose, was someone (And who was this someone?) paying farmers 50 cents a ton to fill whaling ships with stone?

Everyone involved in the business was tight-lipped. And neither The New London Daily Chronicle nor The New-London Daily Star wrote a word about it. William O. Irish, the editor of the Chronicle, would later confess he had been sworn to secrecy.

But it wouldn't be long before the world learned of their purpose: The ships were to be sunk at the mouth of the Savannah River in Georgia and the channels into the harbor at Charleston, S.C., as a blockade.

As the eight ships anchored in the Thames were being loaded with stones, another 17 old whaling and cargo ships were being similarly "provisioned" in New Bedford, Mass.

Together they would be the first wave of what soon would be known as "The Stone Fleet."

The plan was the brainchild of Gustavus V. Fox, the assistant secretary of the Navy. He assigned the job of procuring the ships to Guy D. Morgan of New York, who was assisted by Richard H. Chapell of New London and Isaac Bartlett of New Bedford.

In an order dated Sept. 21, 1861, Morgan was told to secretly purchase 25 old vessels "of not less than 250 tons each." Another 20 vessels were ordered soon after.

Among the other instructions:

• "Have a pipe and valve fitted under skillful direction so that after anchoring in position the water can be readily let into the hold."

• "Load with blocks of granite to utmost content considering their safe transit down the coast."

The men went about buying old vessels all up and down the coast, from ports ranging from New York to Portland, Maine. The largest number - 16 - came from New Bedford. New London supplied eight whalers; Mystic, two.

Most of the ships they bought were near the end of their useful lives. A correspondent for the New York Herald described the New London whaleship Fortune as "an ancient hulk that might have been engaged in the blubber business before the Revolution for aught I know, as she looked rusty enough and venerable enough to have claimed a century as her age. ... Her sails were yellow and her rigging innocent of any coating of tar."

By November, they had assembled their first fleet. They stripped the ships of their whaling gear and loaded them with hundreds of tons of stone. They drilled a 5-inch diameter hole below the waterline in the hull of each ship, and they plugged it with a capped lead pipe.

Supposedly, when they opened the pipe, the ship would sink within 15 to 20 minutes. But just in case there was a glitch, each ship also was equipped with two augers to drill more holes.

Perhaps, though, the most remarkable thing about the whole plan is how successful they were at keeping it under wraps in New London.

The commodore of the New London fleet was John P. "Bony" Rice, an old whaler from way back, but even he didn't know his destination until he opened his sealed orders aboard the Fortune on the open sea.

Word seemed to have leaked out, at least in New Bedford, as the fleet set sail Nov. 20, with people turning out to wave and cheer. By Dec. 2, the 25 ships from New Bedford and New London had arrived at the Savannah River.

Ironically, the Confederates mistook the fleet for armed invaders and rushed to sink three steamers in the channel to keep them from sailing in. Of course, that also kept the Confederates from sailing out. Capt. S.F. DuPont, who oversaw the operation, wrote that the Confederates were "doing the work for us."

Still, several of the ships - the Phoenix and Lewis of New London, and the Meteor of Mystic among them - were sunk or grounded off Tybee Island at the mouth of the river. This, in part, because they were, as one correspondent put it, "in a sinking condition."

And so the Stone Fleet sailed on to Charleston, and on Dec. 20, they began to scuttle the ships to block the main channel. Sixteen vessels were sunk there. In January, another 20 would be sunk in Maffit's Channel, another way into the harbor.

The correspondent for Harpers Weekly wrote of the sinking of the Rebecca Simms, "she sank slowly and in a dignified manner, rocking uneasily, to be sure, as the water poured in, but going down with every rope and spar in place, as a brave man falls in battle, with his harness on."

When 15 ships had been sunk in the channel, the Harpers correspondent wrote, "Here were fifteen dismasted hulks, in every possible position, lying across the channel - some on their port, others on their starboard sides. Some were under water forward, others aft.

"The sea swept over some of them; others stood on upright keels, and spouted water from their sides, as the heavy swells raised them and dropped them heavily down upon the sand again; and proudly, among them all, was the East Indiaman, brave Robin Hood, with her graceful, tapering masts towering aloft, and apparently still afloat."

That night they set fire to the Robin Hood of Mystic, which burned down to the water line.

The correspondent for the New York Times had a different take: "How venerable the doomed things now appeared, short, broad, square sterned, bluff-bowed ... Queer old tubs with queer fittings-up and quaint names set in elaborate beds of quaint carved work. Yet many of these fossil vessels were celebrated in their time."

But the Times also described the mission this way: "It is the duty of the stone fleet to block up each and every one of these 'rat-holes' leading into that breeding-nest of treason, Charleston."

The world reacted to the blockade with outrage.

Southern newspapers called it "a barbarous act," and France, Prussia and Great Britain condemned it as "immoral," neglecting to mention how their own financial interests were tied up in trade with the South.

"People who would do an act like this would pluck the sun out of the heavens and put their enemies in darkness or dry up the rivers that no grass might forever grow in the soil where they had been offended and such acts ought not to be permitted by the guardians of the civilizations of mankind," opined The London Times.

Northern newspapers responded to those protestations by dredging up multiple instances in which the British had used just such a tactic.

Secretary of State William H. Seward replied to the critics that the blockade was but a temporary measure.

He was more right than he knew.

By the spring of 1862, blockade runners in Savannah were getting around it, and by May there was a new channel carved by the currents in Charleston.

A year later, soundings taken off Charleston could find no evidence of the ships at all. They had all been washed away by powerful currents, devoured by shipworms or buried deep in the mud.

k.robinson@theday.com

REMEMBERD IN VERSE

The Stone Fleet would be commemorated in a poem, "The Stone Fleet, An Old Sailor's Lament," published by Herman Melville in 1866, the last stanza of which read:

And all for naught. The waters pass -

Currents will have their way;

Nature is nobody's ally; 'tis well;

The harbor is bettered - will stay.

A failure, and complete,

Was your Old Stone Fleet.