She was then propelled by her own machinery to within about five hundred yards of the shore.

There the clockwork, which was to explode her within a certain length of time, was set and she was abandoned.

Everybody left, and even the vessels put out to sea to prevent the effect of the explosion upon them.

At two o'clock in the morning the explosion took place--and produced no more effect on the fort, or anything else on land, than the bursting of a boiler anywhere on the Atlantic Ocean would have done.

Indeed when the troops in Fort Fisher heard the explosion they supposed it was the bursting of a boiler in one of the Yankee gunboats.
Fort Fisher was situated upon a low, flat peninsula north of Cape Fear River.