“A Prize Disposed and one Proposed.”
(The Florida in chase, having burnt the Star of Peace.)
After a painting by R. S. Floyd.
In considering violations of neutral ports, one may say that in practice the neutral port of a weak power has always been violated whenever there was any occasion for it. Moreover, since respect for a neutral port is a matter of courtesy only, we may be sure that whenever wars shall occur in future, weak neutral ports will be violated as they have been in the past. It is a question of policy in each case, and the captain of the aggressive ship must decide for himself whether the circumstances warrant the insult to the weak power.
As to this particular case, it is the sentiment of the people of the United States, if the writer knows that sentiment, that Captain Collins was entirely justified in capturing the Florida, especially as the Brazil authorities had permitted Semmes, of the Alabama, to use Fernando de Noronha as headquarters, so to speak, while cruising against American commerce. Indeed, Semmes took an American ship, the Louisa Hatch, into the port at that island, coaled his ship from her, and then towed her outside and burned her. While lying there, too, he saw two American vessels in the offing, went out and burned them, and came back again within a few hours to hobnob with the Governor. The mouth of Brazil was stopped. If Collins had sunk the Florida in port or burned her outside, it would have been proper for the United States government to set off the Alabama’s case against that of the Wachusett, and leave it to arbitration to decide which government should pay damages. But the most interesting feature of this case is found in the attitude of the British writers on the subject. When one recalls how the Essex was captured at Valparaiso after Porter’s too generous treatment of Hillyar, and how the Armstrong was attacked in the Azores, and how the Levant was taken at Porto Praya, one might suppose that the British would be rather lenient with their cousins across the sea, especially as blood is thicker than water; but we find in a work printed in 1896, called “Ironclads in Action,” by H. W. Wilson, a work that deals with ironclads as late as 1895, the capture of the Florida is denounced (page 151, vol. 1) as “disgraceful.” The writer really goes out of his way to do this, for neither the Wachusett nor the Florida was an ironclad in any sense. Moreover, he asserts that “the Florida’s officers were very badly treated,” which is simply a false statement.
Nevertheless, there was one disgraceful feature of the Florida affair. When Brazil demanded the restoration of the ship with her crew on board in the harbor of Bahia, the United States agreed to give her up, and Collins, who had captured her, was ordered to take her back as a punishment for his violation of international law. But the Florida never left the waters of the United States as a warship. She was lying at Hampton Roads when the order was issued—lying “just at the spot where the Cumberland was sunk in very deep water. An engineer was placed on board in charge with two men to assist him in looking after the water cocks; but, strangely enough, although the Florida was to all appearances water tight when she reached Newport News, she sank that night at 2 o’clock in ten fathoms.” “When the sinking of the vessel was reported to Admiral Porter (he was there fitting for the Fort Fisher expedition) he merely said ‘Better so’; while the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Navy never asked any questions.”
Those quotations are from Admiral Porter’s “Naval History of the Civil War,” and they are not unlikely to give the reader a choking sensation, for they show that the sinking of the Florida was the work of a sneak—that the “two men,” when “looking after the water cocks,” opened them under orders. The humiliating story is inserted here because the shame of it should serve to prevent the necessity of ever writing another of the kind.
The story of the Alabama is longer but not more interesting than that of the Florida. She was built by the Lairds and was known as No. 290, because she was the 290th ship the firm had built. The British government had full information that she was building for a Confederate cruiser under the supervision of Commander James D. Bullock of the Confederate navy, and, later, that Bullock was shipping men (British subjects) for her, promising petty offices to this and that capable man. The reader who wants to go into the details of this matter will find plenty of them in an Englishman’s work on the “Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War,” by Mountague Bernard, of Oxford University. It furnishes, curiously enough, abundant proof that England escaped with a light penalty when in court in the matter of the “Alabama claims.”
The Alabama was a perfect cruiser for her day—long, lean, and shoal of draft. She was 230 feet long, only thirty-two wide, and she drew but fifteen feet of water. She had the rig of a barkentine, with long lower masts to give her plenty of fore and aft sail so that she could lie closer to the wind than any ordinary square-rigged ship. She had also a steam power able to drive her ten knots an hour, and her screw propeller could be detached and hoisted out of water whenever it was desirable to work with sails only. She carried eight guns, of which one was a hundred-pounder Blakely rifle, mounted on a pivot forward; one an eight-inch smooth-bore on a pivot aft, and six were thirty-twos in broadside.
Semmes, for his activity in the Sumter, was ordered to the new cruiser. He gathered his officers and crew at Liverpool, and shipping the outfit of all kinds in the merchant ship Bahama, he, with all hands, took passage in her. The cruiser, that was still known only as No. 290, was allowed to go on a trial trip. Although the ship was plainly a cruiser, and although men had testified under oath that they had shipped in her as a Confederate cruiser, the law officer of the customs authority decided that the evidence was insufficient, and she did not return from that trial trip. She met the Bahama at Terceira, a Portuguese island, and there, a marine league from land, on Sunday, August 24, 1862, No. 290 became the Alabama, and Semmes her captain, in the usual form. She was without any doubt a Confederate man-of-war. The people who still persist in calling her a pirate craft are probably unaware that if she had really been a pirate the United States would never have presented any claims against Great Britain for the damages she did to American commerce. And as for Semmes, he is entitled, in his official capacity as her captain, to as courteous treatment at the hands of historians as any captains that ever went afloat. Of his personal character it need only be said that he has written it into his “Memoirs.”