The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (76 page)

Semmes held his course, closing fast. Resplendent in a new gray
uniform, long-skirted and with a triple row of bright brass buttons down the breast, epaulets and polished sword making three fierce glints of sunlight, he had had all hands piped aft as soon as he cleared the breakwater, then mounted a gun carriage to deliver his first speech since setting out from the Azores. “Officers and seamen of the
Alabama!”
he declaimed, pale but calm behind the fantastical mustache whose spike-tips quivered as he spoke. “You have, at length, another opportunity of meeting the enemy — the first that has been presented to you since you sank the
Hatteras
.… The name of your ship has become a household word wherever civilization extends. Shall that name be tarnished by defeat? The thing is impossible! Remember that you are in the English Channel, the theater of so much of the naval glory of our race, and that the eyes of all Europe are at this moment upon you. The flag that floats over you is that of a young Republic who bids defiance to her enemies, whenever and wherever found; show the world that you know how to uphold it. Go to your quarters!” Having said as much, he set the example, while the crew still cheered, by taking station on the horseblock abreast the mizzenmast, a vantage point from which he could see and be seen by the enemy throughout the fight to come.

Watch in hand, he waited until there was barely a mile between the two ships bearing down on each other, then at 10.57 turned to his executive, Lieutenant John Kell, a six-foot two-inch Georgian who, like himself, was a veteran of the old navy: “Are you ready, Mr Kell?” Kell said he was. “Then you may open fire at once, sir.”

The Blakely roared. Its 100-pound shell raised a sudden geyser, well short of the target, and was followed within two minutes by another, which, overcorrected, went screaming through the Federal’s rigging. By now the other guns had joined, but their shots too were high, fired without proper calculation of the reduction of space between the rapidly closing vessels. Not until the range was down to half a mile did Winslow return fire, sheering to bring his starboard battery to bear. All the shots fell short, but Semmes had to port his helm sharply to keep from being raked astern. He succeeded, though at the cost of having
Kearsarge
close the range. As the Confederate swung back to starboard, Winslow followed suit and the two warships began to describe a circle, steaming clockwise around a common center and firing at each other across the half-mile diameter.

Alabama
drew first blood with a shell that exploded on the Union quarterdeck and knocked out three of the after Dahlgren’s crew. Then came what Semmes had prayed for, ashore at church last night. A shell from the Blakely struck and lodged itself in the sternpost of the
Kearsarge
. But as he watched through his telescope, awaiting the explosion that would signal the end of the enemy vessel — “Splendid! Splendid!” he exclaimed from his perch on the horseblock — the long moment passed with no sign of smoke or flame in that vital spot. The projectile,
a dud, accomplished nothing except to make the helmsman’s job a little harder by binding the rudder, which was already set to starboard anyhow.
Alabama’s
gunners kept hard at it, firing fast while straining for another, luckier hit.

Winslow’s gunnery was methodical by contrast, and a good deal more effective; he would get off a total of 173 shots in the course of the engagement, only about half as many as Semmes, but the accuracy in both cases, a tally of hits and misses would show, was in inverse ratio to the rate of fire. As the two sloops continued their wheeling fight, churning along in one another’s wake, a three-knot current bore them westward so that they described a series of overlapping circles, each a little tighter than the one before, with the result that the range was constantly shortened, from half a mile on the first circle, down to little more than a quarter-mile on the seventh, which turned out to be the last.

From the outset, once the blue crews got on target, the damage inflicted by the 11-inchers was prodigious;
Alabama
was repeatedly hit and hulled by the 135½ -pound shells aimed at her waterline by the Dahlgrens, in accordance with Winslow’s orders, while the 32-pounders swept her decks. The combined effect was devastating: as for example when a projectile breached the 8-inch smoothbore’s port, disemboweling the first man it struck, then plunging on to mangle eighteen others when it blew. Survivors and replacements cleared away the wounded and heaved the corpses overboard, but resumption of fire had to wait for a shovel to be used to scrape up the slippery gobs of flesh and splinters of bone; only then, with the deck re-sanded, could the crew secure a proper footing for its work. Meantime, Semmes had seen the most discouraging thing he had encountered since the shot lodged in the enemy sternpost failed to explode. Observing that shells of all sizes were bouncing ineffectively off the Federal’s sides, like so many tennis balls, he told Kell to switch to solids for better penetration. Yet these too either splintered or rebounded, and it was not until after the battle that he found out that the cause lay in anything more than the weakened condition of his powder.
Kearsarge
was armored along her midriff with 120 fathoms of sheet chain, suspended from her scuppers to below her waterline, bolted down and boxed out of sight with one-inch planking. Indignant at the belated disclosure that his adversary was “iron-clad,” Semmes protested that this violation of the code duello had produced an unfair fight. “It was the same thing as if two men were to go out and fight a duel, and one of them, unknown to the other, were to put on a suit of mail under his outer garment.”

However true or false the analogy — and Old Beeswax, one of the trickiest skippers ever to prowl the sea lanes, was scarcely in a position to protest the use of a stratagem that had been common in all navies ever since Farragut employed it, more than two years ago, to run past
the forts below New Orleans — the
Alabama
, with all her timbers aquiver from the pounding being inflicted by the
Kearsarge
, was clearly nearing the end of her career. Semmes, nicked in the right hand by a fragment of shell as the raider went into her seventh circle, had a quartermaster bind up the wound and rig a sling, never leaving his perch on the horseblock. From there he could see better than anyone the damage being done his ship and the ineffectiveness of his return fire. This seventh circle must be the last. The only course left was to attempt a run for safety. Accordingly, he told the exec: “Mr Kell, as soon as our head points to the French coast in our circuit of action, shift your guns to port and make all sail for the coast.”

Kell tried, but Winslow quickly interposed the
Kearsarge
, slamming in shots from dead ahead and at a shorter range than ever. At this point the
Alabama’s
chief engineer came topside to report that his fires were being flooded by rising water from holes the Dahlgrens were blasting in the hull. “Go below, Mr Kell,” Semmes said grimly, “and see how long the ship can float.”

The Georgian went, and on his way through the wardroom saw a sight he would never forget. Assistant Surgeon David Llewellyn, a Briton and the only non-Southerner among the two dozen officers aboard, stood poised alongside where his operating table and patient had been until an 11-inch solid crashed through the adjoining bulkhead, snatching table, wounded seaman, and all his instruments from under the ministering hand of the doctor, who stood there, abruptly alone, with a dazed expression of horror and disbelief. Kell continued down to the engine room, where he saw through the steam from her drowned fires that the ship could scarcely remain afloat another ten minutes. He picked his way back up, through the wreckage and past the still-dazed surgeon, to report to the captain that the
Alabama’s
ordeal was nearly over.

“Then sir,” Semmes replied, “cease firing, shorten sail, and haul down the colors. It will never do in this nineteenth century for us to go down, and the decks covered with our gallant wounded.”

Across the water, less than 500 yards away, Winslow saw the rebel flag come down, but being, as he later explained, “uncertain whether Captain Semmes was using some ruse,” called out to his gun crews: “He’s playing a trick on us. Give him another broadside.” They did just that, adding to the carnage on
Alabama’s
bloody, ripped-up decks with every gun that could be brought to bear; whereupon a white flag was run up from the stern. “Cease firing!” Winslow cried at last.

Through his telescope he observed on board the sinking raider a pantomime that called up within him, in rapid sequence, mixed emotions of pity, mistrust, sympathy, and resentment. Settling fast, with only a thread of smoke from her riddled stack, the
Alabama
had lost headway; Semmes, though still on his horseblock, obviously had given
the order to abandon ship. While some of the crew milled about in confusion, engaging Winslow’s pity by their plight — which, after all, might have been his own if the 100-pound shell lodged in his sternpost had not turned out to be a dud — others aroused his mistrust by piling into a dinghy and shoving off, apparently in an attempt to avoid capture. This was disproved, however, when the dinghy made for the
Kearsarge
and he saw, when it came within hailing distance, that it was filled with wounded men, including a master’s mate who shouted up a request that boats be sent to rescue survivors gone over the side and thrashing about in the water.

Winslow had only two boats not smashed in the course of the fight, but he ordered them lowered without further delay and gave permission, moreover, for the rebel dinghy to be used as well, once the wounded had been unloaded. Obviously, though, these three small boats would not hold all the men in the water; so he called through his speaking trumpet to a nearby English pleasure yacht whose owner had sailed out of Cherbourg that morning for a closeup view of the duel: “For God’s sake, do what you can to save them!” The yacht responded promptly, and as she did so Winslow turned his telescope back to the final scene of the tableau being enacted on
Alabama’s
canted deck.

The rebel skipper by now had descended from his perch, and he and another officer, a large, heavily bearded man — John Kell — began to undress for their leap into the Channel. The big man stripped to his underwear, but Semmes, apparently mindful of his dignity, retained his trousers and waistcoat. He seemed to part reluctantly with his sword. After unbuckling it rather awkwardly with his unhurt left hand, he held it above his head for a long moment, flashing brightly in the noonday sunlight, before he did the thing that brought Winslow’s resentment to a boil. He flung it whirling and glinting into the sea, thereby making impossible the ceremony of handing it over to his vanquisher. Winslow could scarcely expect him to bring it along while he swam one-handed across four hundred yards of choppy water to the
Kearsarge
to surrender, but it seemed to the Federal captain that his adversary took a spiteful pleasure in this gesture which deprived him of a customary right.

Semmes followed Kell and his sword into the Channel, and the two men struck out as best they could, the former clutching a life preserver, the latter a wooden grating, to avoid the suction that might pull them under when the
Alabama
sank. She was filling fast now, air gurgling, hissing, chuckling under her punctured decks while the sea poured in through rents in her hull. Her stern awash, her prow was lifting, and suddenly it rose higher as her guns, still hot from battle, tore loose from their lashings and slid aft. The breeze freshening, she recovered a little headway with her sails, and as she moved she left behind her a broad ribbon of flotsam, broken spars and bodies, bits of
tackle and other gear. Fifty yards off, Semmes turned to watch her die. Backward she went, beginning her long downward slide, anchors swinging wildly in the air below her bow; the main-topmast, split by a solid in the fight, went by the board when she paused, nearly vertical; then she was gone, the Channel boiling greenly for a time to mark the place where she had been.

It was 12.24, just under ninety minutes since she fired her first shot at the
Kearsarge
. For all his grief, Semmes was glad in at least one sense that she was on the forty-fathom bottom with his sword. “A noble Roman once stabbed his daughter, rather than she should be polluted by the foul embrace of a tyrant,” he later wrote. “It was with a similar feeling that Kell and I saw the
Alabama
go down. We had buried her as we had christened her, and she was safe from the polluting touch of the hated Yankee!”

By now the trim British yacht
Deerhound
— whose captain-owner John Lancaster, a wealthy industrialist on vacation with his family, had had her built up the Clyde by the Lairds two years ago, at the same time they were at work on the sloop that became the
Alabama
— was within reach of the crewmen bobbing amid the whitecaps. She lowered her boats and began fishing them out, including Semmes and Kell and Marine Lieutenant Beckett Howell (Varina Davis’s younger brother) but not Dr Llewellyn; a nonswimmer, he had drowned. Forty-two men were saved in all by the
Deerhound
in response to Winslow’s plea; another dozen by the captains of two French pilot boats, who needed no urging; while seventy more were taken and made captive aboard the
Kearsarge
. Semmes himself might have been among these last except for Kell’s quick thinking. Exhausted, the Confederate skipper was laid “as if dead” on the sternsheets of one of
Deerhound’s
boats when the
Kearsarge
cutter came alongside. “Have you seen Captain Semmes?” a blue-clad officer asked sharply. Kell, who had put on a
Deerhound
crewman’s cap and taken an oar to complete the disguise, had a ready answer. “Captain Semmes is drowned,” he said, to the Federal’s apparent satisfaction. Aboard the yacht, after the shipwrecked men had been given hot coffee and shots of rum to counter the chill and exhaustion, Lancaster put the question: “Where shall I land you?” This time it was Semmes who had the answer that meant salvation. “I am now under English colors,” he said, “and the sooner you put me, with my officers and men, on English soil the better.”