234 WHALING 



The prize master was in his shirt sleeves, hence his uniform 

 did not give him away. ''That," he said, "is a Brazilian 

 packet-steamer come over to the colony to bring some con- 

 victs." 



''And what," said they, "are you doing here?" 



"We sprang a pretty bad leak in a late gale and have come 

 in to see if we can repair dam.ages." 



Suddenly the m.en in the whaleboats started. 



Someone bawled, "Stam all!" 



The whaleboats backed away, the men sprang to their oars, 

 and in a twinkling they were gone. 



The bewildered prize master, an Englishman who had tried 

 to pass as a Yankee, looked around and discovered that a small 

 Confederate flag was hanging on the spanker-boom to dry. 



Already, though, the Alabama was steaming out of the 

 harbour. She seized both vessels, which lay just outside the 

 three-mile line beyond some shoals. One, the barque La- 

 fayette, of New Bedford, Semmes burned immediately; the 

 other, the hermaphrodite brig, Kate Cory of Westport, he 

 burned a day or two later. Sailing for Fernando de Noronha 

 on April 22nd, he sighted within twenty-four hours the old 

 whaler Nye of New Bedford, homeward bound from a voyage to 

 the Pacific, and her, too, he burned. 



Concerning the charge that Semmes set his prizes on fire as 

 decoys and lay by to seize unwary vessels that might come to the 

 rescue, much has been said, and bitterly. But although many 

 an old whaling captain has believed it to the day of his death, 

 Semmes himself, having recounted in detail the circumstances 

 of his taking each and every prize, points out, to prove the 

 charge false, that he never thus captured a single vessel. And 

 if he did, what of it? War is not a country-club sport. 



The cruise of the Alabama came to an end on June 19, 1864, 

 when she went down in the English Channel in battle with 

 U. S. S. Kearsarge. It was the boast of Captain Raphael 

 Semmes that the Yankee whalers he had taken outnumbered 

 the British whalers Captain David Porter took when he went 

 cruising in the Essex, frigate, during the War of 1812; but the 



