This text is part of:
[192]
June; that her adaptation to warlike use was admitted; that her readiness for sea was known; that evidence was submitted on the 21st, the 23d, and finally on the 25th of July that put her character beyond a doubt; and that in spite of all this, she was allowed to sail on the 29th, make the real foundation of the case against Great Britain.
The Alabama arrived at Port Praya, in the Azores, on the 10th of August.
Here she was joined on the 18th by the bark Agrippina of London, bringing her battery, ammunition, stores, and coal; and two days later the steamer Bahama came in from Liverpool, with Semmes and the remainder of the officers and crew.
After a week spent at Angra Bay, preparing for the cruise, Semmes left his anchorage on the 24th of August; and, going a few miles off the coast to be outside of neutral jurisdiction, he complied with the formalities of putting his ship in commission.
His crew had been shipped at Point Lynas for a fictitious voyage.
Of these, eighty were now re-shipped; and the remainder were obtained from the men that had come out in the Bahama.
Nearly all belonged to Liverpool.
Those who were unwilling to go returned to England in the other vessel; and the Alabama started on her cruise.
The first two months were spent in the North Atlantic.
In this time twenty prizes were taken and burnt.
In one or two cases, there were at least doubts as to the hostile ownership of the cargo; but the prize-court of the Confederacy now sat in Semmes's cabin, and all questions of law and fact were settled by the captain's decision.
The interested neutral in these cases was Great Britain, and Semmes had doubtless satisfied himself beforehand as to how far he could safely go. There was no probability that the British Government, after making so little effort to prevent his departure, would quarrel with him about the destruction of
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.