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

[668] derbilt, late the flag-ship of Admiral Wilkes, and now under the command of Captain Baldwin, had left the anchorage, only the Friday before, and gone herself to cruise off the Cape, in the hope of falling in with the Alabama. She had taken her station, as it would appear, a little to the eastward of me, off Cape Agulhas and Point Danger. On the day the Vanderbilt went to sea, viz., Friday, the 11th of September, it happened that the Alabama was a little further off the land than usual, which accounts for the two ships missing each other. The following is the record on my journal, for that day: ‘Weather very fine, wind light from the south-west. At half-past 6, showed the English colors to an English bark, after a short chase.’ On the following Sunday, we were in plain sight of Table Mountain. The two ships were thus cruising almost in sight of each other's smoke.

The Vanderbilt visited both Cape Town, and Simon's Town, and lay several days at each. I did not object that she had been ‘painting ship,’ and should have been sent to sea earlier. The more time Baldwin spent in port, the better I liked it. Indeed, it always puzzled me, that the gadflies should insist upon my being sent to sea so promptly, when nearly every day that the Alabama was at sea, cost them a ship.

I had scarcely come to anchor, before Captain Bickford, of the Narcissus, came on board of me, on the part of the Admiral, to have an ‘explanation.’ The gadfly had continued its buzzing, I found, during my late absence from the Cape. A short distance to the northward of the Cape of Good Hope, in the direction of Angra Pequeña, there is an island called Ichaboe, a dependency of the Cape colony. It had been represented to the Admiral, by the Consul, that the transactions which have been related as taking place at Angra Pequeña, had taken place at this island, in violation of British neutrality. In what the evidence consisted I did not learn, but the Consul, in his distress and extremity, had probably had recourse to some more Yankee affidavits. It was this charge which Captain Bickford had come on board to ask an explanation of. The following letter from Sir Baldwin Walker, to the Secretary of the Admiralty in London, will show how easily I brushed off the gadfly, for the second time:—