elieved the blockade was effective, but because she didn't want to get involved in the war. Britain's recognition did not imply that she refused to have anything to do with blockade-running. On the contrary, Britain was glad to profit from the business opportunity, and British companies owned and controlled a large share of the blockade-runners. The British no doubt realized the blockade's ineffectiveness when, in the words of a U.S. consul at Liverpool, “Members of Parliament, mayors, magistrates, aldermen, merchants, and gentlemen are all daily violating the laws of nations. Nine-tenths of all vessels now engaged in the business were built and fitted out in England by Englishmen and with English capital, and are now (1862) owned by Englishmen.”[5] Fast blockade-runners would travel between Confederate ports and the ports of Nassau, Bermuda, and Havana, and then ships would sail cargoes between these ‘depot’ ports and England. The task on hand for the Union Navy was made nearly impossible by the size and geography of the Southern coast. It spans 3,600 miles and has almost 200 river mouths, inlets, bays and harbors. In addition it is basically a double coastline because it is filled with interior channels. Small ships did not have to leave directly from a port; instead they could take an inner channel and pop out into the open sea from almost anywhere they wanted. The Navy did not have the ships to guard every inlet, so they had to concentrate on putting a cordon of ships around the major ports, like Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and the big ports in the Gulf of Mexico. Even this was hard because those ports were often protected by forts, and thus blockading ships had to keep their distance.[6] The result was that many hundreds of miles of coast were left unguarded and small or shallow-draft ships could escape through the protected waterways. Since much of this trade was done in secret by small saili...
