About 300 ships tried to run the blockade a total of 1,300 times during the war, succeeding over 1,000 times. Blockading ships captured 136 runners and destroyed 85. The average runner made four trips; the Syren was the most successful with 33 trips, while the Denbigh made 26 trips.
Salt that cost $6.50 in the Bahamas sold for $1,700 in the South. Such immense profits made blockade running worth the risks.
In order to meet the new difficulty, a new device was adopted. Cargoes were sent out to Nassau, and were there transshipped, sometimes directly, from vessel to vessel, in the harbor, sometimes after being landed on the wharf; and thence were transported in a new conveyance to the blockaded port. Return cargoes were transshipped in the same way. This had a double advantage. It made the continuity of the transaction much more difficult of proof, and it enabled the capitalists engaged in the trade to employ two different classes of vessels, for the service for which each was specially adapted. For the long voyages across the Atlantic heavy freighters could be used, of great capacity and stoutly built; and the light, swift, hardly visible steamers, with low hulls, and twin-screws or feathering paddles, the typical blockade-runners, could be employed exclusively for the three days' run on the other side of Nassau or Bermuda
The instructions were perfectly general in character, naming no particular port or country. The agents of the blockade-runners, however, styling themselves merchants of Nassau, adopted a tone of righteous indignation, and actually had the effrontery to complain of this "unjust discrimination'' against what they ingenuously called the trade of the Bahamas. As if, indeed, the Bahamas had had any trade, or Nassau any merchants, before the days of blockade-running
To be a blockade runner required a special temperament. In the words of one skipper, "The men who ran the blockade had to be men who could stand fire without returning it. ... He who made a success of it was obliged to have the cunning of a fox, the patience of a Job and the bravery of a Spartan warrior."
Because of the blockade, Union ships were allowed to board merchant ships bound for the South and seize the ships and cargos as prizes. However, if the ships were en route to a neutral destination, they could not be seized. Consequently the ships began heading for Nassau, Bermuda and Havana, and from there to Charleston, Savannah and Wilmington, which were only three days and five or six hundred miles away – a much shorter exposure to Union ships.
another advantage of going to ports like Nassau was that cargos could arrive in large, deep-draft freighters from England and then be transferred to the small, fast, shallow draft, dark-colored, low-profile boats known as "blockade runners." Piloted by experts and departing the Bahamas only at night, the blockade runners could elude the Union ships, which had to remain well offshore in deeper water.
federal ships attempting to enforce the blockade at Wilmington had to contend with several obstacles. The two entrances to the river were through shallow channels widely separated by Smith’s Island and Frying Pan Shoals extending for miles into the ocean. Consequently, the Union had to maintain two blockades, and it took several hours going around the shallow shoals to get from one blockade to the other. Confederate signal stations on shore signaled to the incoming blockade runners which entrance was more lightly guarded.
As the war progressed, the blockades closed down all the Southern ports but Wilmington, which became the sole lifeline for supplies to the Confederacy. However, in January of 1865, Fort Fisher fell to a major assault, and Union forces were able to take over Wilmington. The supply line was cut, and the fate of the Confederacy was sealed.
The Biminis, the westernmost of the group, are about 97 km (about 60 mi) east of Miami, Florida
The Bahamas is a major transit point for South American cocaine and Jamaican marijuana en route to the U.S. By virtue of the country's involvement in drug trafficking, its banking industry is vulnerable to money laundering. Very small amounts of cannabis are grown on the islands for domestic consumption. The country will likely remain a target of narcotics traffickers well into the future due to its geographic location. Strategically located on the air and sea routes between Colombia and the U.S., the Bahamas encompasses hundreds of small, deserted islands used for transshipment and temporary drug storage, and its territory is also used for smuggling illegal migrants into the U.S. It is only 40 miles from south Florida at its closest point. Traffickers are increasingly using tactics that make it difficult for U.S. and Bahamian law enforcement to intercept their shipments. Among these are the ever-increasing use of Cuban airspace and territorial sea to evade law enforcement forces, the use of very high speed, low profile boats, and the use of well-hidden compartments on large coastal freighters
