Taken by the Enemy
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Adams, William Taylor. [As Oliver Optic] Taken by the Enemy. 1888. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1889. [The Blue and the Gray Series] Out of print.
In the spring of 1861, Captain Horatio Passford is sailing into New York Harbor after an extended cruise on his steam yacht the Bellevite. Newspapers brought on board by a pilot reveal that the two separated halves of the Union are now at war. Horatio resolves to make a daring journey into Mobile Bay to retrieve his daughter Florry and his plantation-owner brother Homer. But after he runs the coastal guns by subterfuge and reaches Mobile, Horatio finds that Homer is an implacable Confederate. Homer resolves to take the Bellevite into the Southern navy. But Horatio escapes, with the help of his son Christy Passford, who is taken by the enemy (hence the title) but then commandeers an armed tugboat and helps his father run past the guns the other way and out to sea.