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

Having captured the Lafayette at nightfall, it was as late as ten P. M. before we got through with the business of ‘robbing’ her—robbing her, in spite of all those nicely contrived certificates, and British consular seals—when we set her on fire. In a few hours, she was a mere beacon-light, upon the sea, marking, as so many other fine ships had marked, the track of the ‘pirate.’ Though I have given the reader already a pretty large dose of the meteorology of the Gulf Stream, in which we are still cruising, I cannot forbear to call his attention to other proofs of the rotary character of the winds which prevail along this hot-water river in the sea. From the 2d to the 22d of October, a period of twenty days, the wind had gone nine times entirely around the compass, with the regularity of clock-work. With the exception of the cyclone of the 16th, we had had no regular gale of wind; though the wind frequently blew very fresh, with the barometer sometimes as low as 29.60. These rotary winds were circles of greater or less diameter, obeying the laws of storms, and travelling along in the direction of the current, or about north-east. There was an interval of only a few hours between them, the barometer rising regularly as one circle or whirl departed, and falling as the next approached. I was much struck with the exceeding regularity of the recurrence of this phenomenon. The received impression is, that it is only the great gales, which we call cyclones, or hurricanes, that gyrate. From my observations in the Gulf Stream—and I lay in it, continuously, for something like a month, changing place, in all this time, but a few hundred miles—gyration is the normal condition of the winds in this stream—that even the most gentle winds, when undisturbed by local causes—the proximity of the land, for instance—are gyrating winds, winding around, and around their respective vortices, against the motion of the sun, as we have seen the tendril of the vine to wind around the pole to which it clings.

On the third day after capturing the Lafayette, having chased and overhauled, in the meantime, a number of neutrals, we descried