Memoirs of Service Afloat, During the War Between the States

by Raphael Semmes

The reader may be curious to know the explanation of this current of ships. It is simple enough. They were all Mediterranean ships. At the strait of Gibraltar there is a constant current setting into the Mediterranean. This current is of considerable strength, and the consequence is, that when the wind also sets into the strait—that is to say, when it is from the westward—it is impossible for a sailing-ship to get out of the strait into the Atlantic. She is obliged to come to anchor in the bay of Gibraltar, and wait for a change of wind. This is sometimes a long time in coming—the westerly winds continuing here, not unfrequently, two and three weeks at a time. As a matter of course, a large number of ships collect in the bay, waiting for an opportunity of exit. I have seen as many as a hundred sail at one time. In a few hours after a change of wind takes place, this immense fleet will all be under way, and such of them as are bound to the equator and the coast of Brazil, the United States, West Indies, and South America, will be found travelling the blazed road of which I have spoken; some taking the forks of the road, at their respective branching-off places, and others keeping the main track to the equator. Hence the exodus the reader has witnessed.

Perhaps the reader needs another explanation—how it was, that amid all that fleet of ships, there was not one Yankee. This explanation is almost as easy as the other. Commerce is a sensitive plant, and at the rude touch of war it had contracted its branches. The enemy was fast losing his Mediterranean trade, under the operation of high premiums for war risks.

We began now to observe a notable change in the weather, as affected by the winds. Along the entire length of the American coast, the clear winds are the west winds, the rain-winds being the east winds. Here the rule is reversed; the west winds bringing us rains, and the east winds clear weather. The reason is quite obvious. The east winds, sweeping over the continent of Europe, have nearly all of their moisture wrung out of them before they reach the sea; hence the dryness of these winds, when they salute the mariner cruising along the European coasts. Starting now from the European seas as dry winds, they traverse a large extent of water before they reach the coasts of the United States. During the whole of this travel, these thirsty winds are drinking their fill from the sea, and by the time they reach Portland or Boston, they are heavily laden with moisture, which they now begin to let down again upon the land. Hence, those long, gloomy, rainy, rheumatic, easterly storms, that prevail along our coast in the fall and winter months. The reader has now only to take up the west wind, as it leaves the Pacific Ocean, as a wet wind, and follow it across the American continent, and see how dry the mountains wring it before it reaches the Atlantic, to see why it should bring us fair weather. The change was very curious to us at first, until we became a little used to it.

Another change was quite remarkable, and that was the great difference in temperature which we experienced with reference to latitude. Here we were, in midwinter, or near it, off the south coast of Spain, in latitude 36°, nearly that of Cape Henry at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay, and unless the weather was wet, we had not felt the necessity of a pea-jacket. Whence this difference? The cause, or causes, whatever they are, must, of course, be local; for other things being equal, the heat should be the same, on the same parallel of latitude, all around the globe which we inhabit. Captain Matthew F. Maury, of the late Confederate States’ Navy, to whom all nations accord, as by common consent, the title of Philosopher of the Seas, accounts for this difference of temperature in the following manner: “Modern ingenuity has suggested a beautiful mode of warming houses in winter. It is done by means of hot water. The furnace and the caldron are sometimes placed at a distance from the apartment to be warmed. It is so at the Observatory. In this case, pipes are used to conduct the heated water from the caldron under the Superintendent’s dwelling, over into one of the basement rooms of the Observatory, a distance of one hundred feet. These pipes are then flared out, so as to present a large cooling surface; after which they are united into one again, through which the water, being now cooled, returns of its own accord to the caldron. Thus, cool water is returning all the time, and flowing in at the bottom of the caldron, while hot water is continually flowing out at the top. The ventilation of the Observatory is so arranged that the circulation of the atmosphere through it is led from this basement room, where the pipes are, to all parts of the building; and in the process of this circulation, the warmth conveyed by the water to the basement, is taken thence by the air; and distributed all over the rooms.

“Now, to compare small things with great, we have, in the warm waters which are confined in the Gulf of Mexico, just such a heating apparatus for Great Britain, the North Atlantic, and Western Europe. The furnace is the torrid zone; the Mexican Gulf and Caribbean Sea are the caldrons; the Gulf Stream is the conducting-pipe. From the Grand Banks of New Foundland to the shores of Europe is the basement—the hot-air chambers—in which this pipe is flared out so as to present a large cooling surface. Here the circulation of the atmosphere is arranged by nature, and it is such that the warmth conveyed into this warm-air chamber of mid-ocean is taken up by the genial west winds, and dispensed in the most benign manner, throughout Great Britain and the west of Europe. The maximum temperature of the water-heated air-chamber of the Observatory, is about 90°. The maximum temperature of the Gulf Stream is 86°, or about 9° in excess of the ocean temperature due the latitude. Increasing its latitude, 10°, it loses but 2° of temperature; and after having run three thousand miles toward the north, it still preserves, even in winter, the heat of summer.

“With this temperature it crosses the 40th degree of North latitude, and there, overflowing its liquid banks, it spreads itself out for thousands of square leagues over the cold waters around, and covers the ocean with a mantle of warmth that serves so much to mitigate in Europe, the rigors of winter. Moving now slowly, but dispensing its genial influences more freely, it finally meets the British Islands. By these it is divided, one part going into the polar basin of Spitzbergen, the other entering the Bay of Biscay, but each with a warmth considerably above the ocean temperature. Such an immense volume of heated water cannot fail to carry with it beyond the seas a mild and moist atmosphere. And this it is which so much softens climates there. We know not, except approximately in one or two places, what the depth or the under temperature of the Gulf Stream may be; but assuming the temperature and velocity, at the depth of two hundred fathoms to be those of the surface, and taking the well-known difference between the capacity of air, and of water for specific heat as the argument, a simple calculation will show that the quantity of heat discharged over the Atlantic from the waters of the Gulf Stream in a winter’s day would be sufficient to raise the whole column of atmosphere that rests upon France, and the British Islands from the freezing-point to summer heat. Every west wind that blows, crosses the stream on its way to Europe, and carries with it a portion of this heat to temper there the northern winds of winter. It is the influence of this stream upon climates, that makes Erin the ‘Emerald Isle of the Sea,’ and that clothes the shores of Albion in evergreen robes; while in the same latitude on this side, the coasts of Labrador are fast bound in fetters of ice.”

To pursue Captain Maury’s theory a little farther: the flow of tepid waters does not cease at the Bay of Biscay, but continues along the coasts of Spain and Portugal, thence along the coast of Africa, past Madeira and the Canaries, to the Cape de Verdes; where it joins the great equatorial current flowing westward, with which it returns again into the Gulf of Mexico. The Sumter, being between Madeira and the coast of Spain, was within its influence. One word before I part with my friend Maury. In common with thousands of mariners all over the world, I owe him a debt of gratitude, for his gigantic labors in the scientific fields of our profession; for the sailor may claim the philosophy of the seas as a part of his profession. A knowledge of the winds and the waves, and the laws which govern their motions is as necessary to the seaman as is the art of handling his ship, and to no man so much as to Maury is he indebted for a knowledge of these laws. Other distinguished co-laborers, as Reid, Redfield, Espy, have contributed to the science, but none in so eminent a degree. They dealt in specialties—as, for instance, the storm—but he has grasped the whole science of meteorology—dealing as well in the meteorology of the water, if I may use the expression, as in that of the atmosphere.

A Tennesseean by birth, he did not hesitate when the hour came, “that tried men’s souls.” Poor, and with a large family, he gave up the comfortable position of Superintendent of the National Observatory, which he held under the Federal Government, and cast his fortunes with the people of his State. He had not the courage to be a traitor, and sell himself for gold. The State of Tennessee gave him birth; she carried him into the Federal Union, and she brought him out of it. Scarcely any man who withdrew from the old service has been so vindictively, and furiously assailed as Maury. The nationalists of the North,—and I mean by nationalists, the whole body of the Northern people, who ignored the rights of the States, and claimed that the Federal Government was paramount,—had taken especial pride in Maury and his labors. He, as well as the country at large, belonged to them. They petted and caressed him, and pitted him against the philosophers of the world, with true Yankee conceit. They had the biggest country, and the cleverest men in the world, and Maury was one of these.

But Maury, resisting all these blandishments, showed, to their horror, when the hour of trial came, that he was a Southern gentleman, and not a Puritan. The change of sentiment was instantaneous and ludicrous. Their self-conceit had received an awful blow, and there is no wound so damaging as that which has been given to self-conceit. Almost everything else may be forgiven, but this never can. Maury became at once a “rebel” and a “traitor,” and everything else that was vile. He was not even a philosopher any longer, but a humbug and a cheat. In science, as in other pursuits, there are rivalries and jealousies. The writer of these pages, having been stationed at the seat of the Federal Government for a year or two preceding the war, was witness of some of the rivalries and jealousies of Maury, on the part of certain small philosophers, who thought the world had not done justice to themselves. These now opened upon the dethroned monarch of the seas, as live asses will kick at dead lions, and there was no end to the partisan abuse that was heaped upon the late Chief of the National Observatory.

Maury had been a Federal naval officer, as well as philosopher, and some of his late confrères of the Federal service, who, in former years, had picked up intellectual crumbs from the table of the philosopher, and were content to move in orbits at a very respectful distance from him; now, raised by capricious fortune to place, joined in the malignant outcry against him. Philosopher of the Seas! Thou mayest afford to smile at these vain attempts to humble thee. Science, which can never be appreciated by small natures, has no nationality. Thou art a citizen of the world, and thy historic fame does not depend upon the vile traducers of whom I have spoken. These creatures, in the course of a few short years, will rot in unknown graves; thy fame will be immortal! Thou hast revealed to us the secrets of the depths of the ocean, traced its currents, discoursed to us of its storms and its calms, and taught us which of its roads to travel, and which to avoid. Every mariner, for countless ages to come, as he takes down his chart, to shape his course across the seas, will think of thee! He will think of thee as he casts his lead into the deep sea; he will think of thee, as he draws a bucket of water from it, to examine its animalculæ; he will think of thee as he sees the storm gathering thick and ominous; he will think of thee as he approaches the calm-belts, and especially the calm-belt of the equator, with its mysterious cloud-ring; he will think of thee as he is scudding before the “brave west winds” of the Southern hemisphere; in short, there is no phenomenon of the sea that will not recall to him thine image. This is the living monument which thou hast constructed for thyself; and which all the rage of the Puritan cannot shake.