Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States

[330] me. I could not, of course, have complained, if their bearing toward me had been simply that of open enemies. This was to be expected. But they descended to bribery, trickery, and fraud, and to all the other arts of petty intrigue, so unworthy of an honorable enemy. Our Southern people can scarcely conceive how little our non-commercial Southern States were known, in the marts of traffic and trade of the world. Beyond a few of our principal ports, whence our staple of cotton was shipped to Europe, our nomenclature even was unknown to the mass of mere traders. The Yankee Consul and the Yankee shipmaster were everywhere. Yankee ships carried out cargoes of cotton, and Yankee ships brought back the goods which were purchased with the proceeds. All the American trade with Europe was Yankee trade—a ship here and there excepted. Commercial men, everywhere, were thus more or less connected with the enemy; and trade being the breath of their nostrils, it is not wonderful that I found them inimical to me. With rare exceptions, they had no trade to lose with the South, and much to lose with the North; and this was the string played upon by the Federal Consuls. If a neutral merchant showed any inclination to supply the Sumter with anything she needed, a runner was forthwith sent round to him by the Federal Consul, to threaten him with the loss of his American—i. e. Yankee—trade, unless he desisted.

Such was the game now being played in Gibraltar, to prevent the Sumter from coaling. The same Federal Consul, who, as the reader has seen a few pages back, stated in an official letter to the Spanish Admiral, that the Neapolitan had been captured within the marine league of the Spanish-African coast, whilst the captain of the same ship had sworn positively that she was distant from it, nine miles, was now bribing and threatening the coal-dealers of Gibraltar, to prevent them from supplying me with coal. Whilst I was pondering my dilemma, I was agreeably surprised, one morning, to receive a visit from an English shipmaster, whose ship had just arrived with some coal on board. He was willing, he said, to supply me, naming his price, which I at once agreed to give him. I congratulated myself that I had at last found an independent Englishman, who had no fear of the loss of Yankee