I returned on board, without further delay, and gave orders to get up steam, and make all the other necessary preparations for sea. As we were weighing our anchor, an aide-de-camp of the Governor came off in great haste to say, that his Excellency had heard from Madrid in reply to his telegram, and that her Majesty had graciously given me permission to remain another twenty-four hours; but that at the end of that time I must depart without fail. The aide-de-camp added that his Excellency, seeing that we were getting up steam, had sent him off to communicate the intelligence to me verbally, in advance of the official communication of it by letter, which he was preparing. I directed the aide to say to his chief that he needn’t bother himself with the preparation of any letter, as I should not avail myself of her Majesty’s gracious permission—she having been a little too ungracious in meting out the hours to me. He departed, and we got under way. As we passed abreast of the Government House, a boat shoved off in a great hurry, and came pulling out to us, with a man standing up in the bow, shaking a letter at us with great vehemence. It was the letter the aide-de-camp had spoken of. We paid no attention whatever to the signal, and the boat finding, after some vigorous pulling, that she could not overtake us, turned back. In half an hour afterward, we were outside the Cadiz bar, and had discharged the pilot.
This was the second Spanish experiment we had made in the Sumter. I never afterward troubled her Majesty, either in her home ports, or those of any of her colonies. I had learned by experience that all the weak powers were timid, and henceforth, I rarely entered any but an English or a French port. We should have had, during all this controversy, a Commissioner at the Court of Madrid, one having been dispatched thither at the same time that Mr. Yancey was sent to London, and Mr. Mann to Brussels, but if there was one there, I did not receive a line from him. The Federal Chargé seemed to have had it all his own way. There is no proposition of international law clearer, than that a disabled belligerent cruiser—and a steamer without coal is disabled—cannot be expelled from a neutral port, and yet the Sumter was, in fact, expelled from Cadiz. As remarked some pages back, the Demos, and the Carpet-bagger will revenge us in good time.
We did enjoy some good things in the harbor of Cadiz, however. One was a superb dinner, given us at the principal hotel by an English admirer, and another was the market. The latter is unexcelled in any part of the world. Fine beef and mutton from Andalusia, fish from the sea, and fruits and wines from all parts of Spain, were present in profusion. Although we were in midwinter, there were a variety of vegetables, and luscious oranges and bananas that had ripened in the open air—all produced by the agency of that Mexican Gulf heating-apparatus, of which we spoke through the lips of Professor Maury, a few pages back. Before leaving Cadiz I saw the first annual report of the Federal Secretary of the Navy since the breaking out of the war. Old gentleman Welles was eloquent, and denunciatory when he came to speak of the Sumter. The vessel was a “pirate,” and her commander everything that was odious. The latter “was courageously capturing unarmed merchant-ships, and cowardly fleeing from the Federal steamers sent in pursuit of him.” There were six of these ships in full hue and cry after the little Sumter, any one of which could have hoisted her in upon deck. At the same time that these denunciations were hurled against the Captain of the Sumter, gallant naval officers, wearing Mr. Welles’ shoulder-straps, and commanding Mr. Welles’ ships, were capturing little coasting-schooners laden with firewood, plundering the houses and hen-roosts of non-combatant citizens along the Southern coast, destroying salt-works, and intercepting medicines going in to our hospitals. But I must be charitable. Mr. Welles was but rehearsing the lesson which he had learned from Mr. Seward. What could he know about “pirates” and the laws of nations, who had been one half of his life editing a small newspaper, in a small town in Connecticut, and the other half “serving out” to Jack his frocks and trousers, and weighing out to him his sugar and tea, as Chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing? It was late in life before the old gentleman, on the rising tide of the Demos, had been promoted, and allowance must be made for the defects of his early training.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE SUMTER OFF CADIZ—THE PILLARS OF HERCULES—GIBRALTAR—CAPTURE OF THE ENEMY’S SHIPS NEAPOLITAN AND INVESTIGATOR—A CONFLAGRATION BETWEEN EUROPE AND AFRICA—THE SUMTER ANCHORS IN THE HARBOR OF GIBRALTAR—THE ROCK; THE TOWN; THE MILITARY; THE REVIEW AND THE ALAMEDA.
The afternoon was bright and beautiful as the Sumter, emerging from the harbor of Cadiz, felt once more the familiar heave of the sea. There was no sail in sight over the vast expanse of waters, except a few small coasting-craft, and yet what fleets had floated on the bosom of these romantic waters! The names of Nelson, Collingwood, Jervis, and others, came thronging upon the memory. Cape St. Vincent and Trafalgar were both in the vicinity. The sun, as he approached his setting, was lighting up a scene of beauty, peace, and tranquillity, and it was difficult to conjure those other scenes of the storm, and the flying ships, and the belching cannon, so inseparably connected with those great names.
It was too late to attempt the run to Gibraltar that night, with the hope of arriving at a seasonable hour, and so we “held on,” in nautical phrase, to the light—that beautiful red flash which I have before described—until midnight, when we gave the ship her steam, and turned her head in the direction of the famous Strait, or Gut, as the sailors sometimes less euphoniously call it. The weather, in the meantime, had changed, the wind had died entirely away, and the sea was calm, but rifts of cloud were passing over the moon, indicating an upper current in the higher atmosphere, that might portend storm or rain on the morrow. We steamed along the bold Spanish coast, at a distance of only a few miles, and entered the Strait before daylight, passing the Tarifa light at about five A. M.
The Pillars of Hercules, that for so many centuries bounded the voyages of the ancient mariners, rose abruptly and majestically on either hand of us, softened and beautified by the moonlight. We had the Strait all to ourselves, there being no sail visible. The Genius of the ancient time seemed to hover over the scene, so solemn and mysterious did everything appear. But no! the Genius of the ancient time could not be there, for the quiet waters were broken by the prow of the steamship, from a hemisphere of which the Genius had not conceived. And that steamship, what flag did she bear? A flag that neither Phœnician, nor Carthaginian, nor Roman had dreamed of. It had arisen amid the wreck and ruin of a new empire, that had decayed before its time, was floating above a thousand dead nationalities, and was struggling, as the polished Greek had struggled, long centuries before, against the “long-haired” barbarian of the North, who was repeating history by overrunning the fair lands of the South.