The Fleet Offshore

Surf in the foreground, and along the horizon a line of masts and hulls — the United States fleet lying off Morris Island, photographed from the beach by Haas & Peale.

The other side counted this same picture every morning. Fort Sumter's returns logged the fleet inside the bar ship by ship — one January count ran to the New Ironsides, four monitors, two wooden gunboats, two mortar-boats and fifteen sailing vessels. What the camera renders as a thin grey line was, to the men across the water, the arithmetic of their siege.