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

[415] of their property, for which they hoped ultimately to be paid, should seem to be admitted to have been done under the sanction of the laws of nations. They could as logically have called General Robert E. Lee a bandit, as myself a pirate; but logic was not the forte of the enemy, either during or since the late war.

Before we commence operations, a glance at the personnel of the ship may not be uninteresting. If the reader is to embark on the cruise with us, he will very naturally desire to know something of his future shipmates. Having made the cruise in the Sumter, he is, of course, acquainted with the officers of that ship, and if, after the fashion of the sailor, he has formed a liking for any of them, he will naturally be inclined to know what became of such of them as did not follow me to the Alabama. Of the lieutenants, only one of my old set followed me. Accident separated the rest from me, very much to my regret, and we afterward played different roles in the war. The reader has not forgotten Chapman, the second officer of the Sumter, who made such a sensation in Cienfuegos, among the fair sex, and who slept in such a sweet pair of sheets at the house of his friend, that he dreamed of them for weeks afterward. Chapman finished the cruise in the Sumter, serving everybody else pretty much as he served the Cienfuegos people, whenever he chanced to get ashore. He was always as ready ‘to tread one measure—take one cup of wine,’ with a friend, as to hurl defiance at an enemy. He carried the garrison mess at Gibraltar by storm. There was no dinner-party without him. He talked war and strategy with the colonel, fox-hunted with the major, and thrum bed the light guitar, and sang delightful songs, in company with the young captains, and lieutenants, beneath the latticed windows of their lady-loves. It is astonishing, too, the progress he made in learning Spanish, which was attributable entirely to the lessons he took from some bright eyes, and musical tongues, in the neighboring village of San Roque, only a pleasant canter over into Spain, from Gibraltar. Chapman was, unfortunately, going from London to Nassau, in a blockade runner, while I was returning from the latter place to Liverpool, preparatory to joining the Alabama. It was thus