The struggle, however, was not protracted. The cannon balls not taking effect upon the embankments of earth, they prepared their furnaces and commenced the fire of hot shot, directed at the principal magazine. This mode proved more successful. A ball, fully heated, reached the powder in the magazine. The small size of the fort, and the great number of people in it, rendered the explosion unusually fatal. Many were entirely buried in the ruins, others were killed by falling timbers, while many bodies were torn in pieces. Limbs were separated from bodies to which they had been attached, and death, in all its horrid forms, was visible within that doomed fortress.[35]
Of three hundred and thirty-four souls within the fort, two hundred and seventy were _instantly killed_; while of the sixty who remained, only _three_ escaped without injury.[36] Two of the survivors--one negro and one Indian--were selected as supposed chiefs of the allied forces within the fort. They were delivered over to the Indians who accompanied Colonel Clinch, and were massacred within the fort, in the presence of our troops;[37] but no report on record shows the extent of torture to which they were subjected.
We have no reliable information as to the number who died of their wounds. They were placed on board the gun-boats, and their wounds were dressed by the surgeons; and those who recovered were afterwards delivered over to claimants in Georgia. Those who were slightly wounded, but able to travel, were taken back with Colonel Clinch to Georgia and delivered over to men who claimed to have descended from planters who, some three or four generations previously, owned the ancestors of the prisoners. There could be no proof of identity, nor was there any court authorized to take testimony, or enter decree in such case; but they were delivered over upon _claim_, taken to the interior, and sold to different planters. There they mingled with that mass of chattelized humanity which characterizes our Southern States, and were swallowed up in that tide of oppression which is now bearing three millions of human beings to untimely graves.
Sailing-Master Loomis informed the Naval Department, through Commodore Patterson, that the value of the property captured in the fort was "not less than two hundred thousand dollars." He also stated that a portion of this property was "delivered over by Colonel Clinch to the Indians who had accompanied him, on the _express agreement that they should share in the plunder_." Another portion of property was held by Colonel Clinch, as necessary for the use of the troops. A list of the articles thus taken is given in the report: it embraces spades, shovels, pickaxes, swords, sword-belts, pistols and muskets. The remainder of the property was taken on board the gun-boats, and held subject to the order of the Secretary of the Navy.[38]