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

[494] came in sight, steering to the north-west. She was under all sail, with studding-sails, and sky-scrapers set, and Evans, having been sent for, pronounced her ‘Yankee.’ The small craft was probably Yankee, too, but we were like a maiden choosing between lovers—we could not have both—and so we took the biggest prize, as maidens often do in a similar conjuncture. The large ship was standing in our direction, and we had nothing to do, but await her approach. When she came sufficiently near to distinguish our colors, we showed her the stars and stripes, which she was apparently very glad to see, for she began, of her own accord, to shorten sail, as she neared us, evidently with the intention of speaking us, and getting, it might be, a welcome newspaper from ‘home.’ The stars and stripes were, by this time, flying from her own peak. She was terribly astonished, as her master afterward confessed, when the jaunty little gun-boat, which he had eyed with so much pleasure, believing her to be as good a Yankee as himself, fired a gun, and hauling down ‘hate's polluted rag,’ hoisted, in its stead, the banner of the Southern Republic.

The stranger had not much more to do, in order to surrender himself a prisoner. His studding-sails had already been hauled down, and he now hauled up his courses, and backed his mainyard. We were once more in gentle airs, and a smooth sea; and in a few minutes, the boarding-officer was alongside of him. She proved to be as we had expected, an East India trader. She was the T. B. Wales, of Boston, from Calcutta, for Boston, with a cargo consisting chiefly of jute, linseed, and saltpetre. Of the latter, she had 1700 bags, sufficient to supply our pious Boston brethren, who were fighting for nothing but ‘grand moral ideas,’ with a considerable quantity of powder. But for the Wales meeting with the Alabama, it would, probably, have gone into some of the same Yankee mills, which, just before the war broke out, had supplied the Confederate States under the contracts which, as the reader has seen, I had made with them. The jute, which she had on board, was intended as a substitute for cotton, in some of the coarser fabrics; the Boston people being somewhat pressed, at the period, for the Southern staple.

The captain of the Wales, though a Northern man, had very