230 WHALING 



At Porto Proya Captain Semmes found the 290 and her 

 supply ship, and with her he proceeded to Angra Bay where a 

 more protected harbour made it easier to place guns and stores 

 on board the new vessel. Then, off the island of Terceira, he 

 commissioned the 290 as the Confederate man-of-war Alabama, 

 raised the flag of the Confederate States, signed on a crew — 

 eighty of the ninety men who had come out in the Alabama 

 and the Bahama elected to join him — and headed northeast to 

 strike at the whaling fleet of the Azores. 



On September 5th, off Fayal, the Alabama sighted a ship 

 lying to with her fore-topsail to the mast, and bore down on 

 her with the United States flag at the gaff. The ship — the 

 Ocmulgee of Edgartown — had a big sperm whale alongside, and 

 her men, hard at work cutting in, believed the Alabama to be 

 a Federal gunboat sent by the North to protect the whalers, 

 until she struck her Union colours and raised the Stars and Bars. 



Semmes ordered the crew of the Ocmulgee on board the Alabama, 

 took various supplies from her, lay by her all night, lest fire 

 should be seen in the dark by other whalers, and burned her in 

 the morning. 



The next whaling vessel that he overhauled proved to be 

 Portuguese, and of her he makes the remark, especially in- 

 teresting as from a witness who wasted no flattery on anything 

 Northern, ''this was the only foreign whaling-ship that I 

 ever overhauled, the business of whaling having become almost 

 exclusively an American monopoly — the monopoly not being 

 derived from any sovereign grant, but resulting from the superior 

 skill, energy, industry, courage, and perseverance of the 

 Yankee whaler, who is, perhaps, the best specimen of a sailor 

 the world over.'' 



The same afternoon he chased a ship that loomed up "almost 

 like a frigate," and overhauled her in the early evening. She 

 was the large whaler Ocean Rover, of New Bedford, returning 

 home by way of the Azores after three years and four months 

 abroad, and thereby a story hangs, one of the bitter minor con- 

 troversies of the war. 

 Semmes placed a prize crew on board the Ocean Rover and 



