A year later Captain Hood was employed in Trinidad as a commissioner, and, upon the death of the flag officer commanding the Leeward station, he succeeded him as Commodore.
These were at once accepted; he was requested to sit on the Naval Retiring Board - a board then specially constituted for clearing the navy of unfit or disloyal officers - and a few months later was appointed to the command of the "Western Gulf Blockading Squadron," with the rank of flag-officer, and ordered to proceed forthwith, in the "Hartford," to the Gulf of Mexico, to collect such vessels as could be spared from the blockade, to proceed up the Mississippi, to reduce the defences which guarded the approaches to New Orleans, and to take and hold the city.
To oppose them the Confederates, limited as they were for means, managed to construct various ironclads, and to improvise a considerable fleet of minor vessels, and, though a fighting navy never assembled under a Confederate flag-officer, the Southern warships found another more damaging and more profitable scope for their activity.
