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

I now ordered my paymaster to get his public chest, and papers ready for throwing overboard, if it should become necessary. At this crisis the engineer came up from below, bringing the welcome intelligence that the ‘foaming’ of his boilers had ceased, and that his engine was ‘working beautifully,’ giving the propeller several additional turns per minute. The breeze, too, favored me, for it had freshened considerably; and what was still more to the purpose, I began to perceive that I was ‘eating’ the Brooklyn ‘out of the wind’; in other words, that she was falling more and more to leeward. I knew, of course, that as soon as she fell into my wake, she would be compelled to furl her sails. This she did in half an hour or so afterward, and I at once began to breathe more freely, for I could still hold on to my own canvas. I have witnessed many beautiful sights at sea, but the most beautiful of them all was when the Brooklyn let fly all her sheets, and halliards, at once, and clewed up, and furled, in man-of-war style, all her sails, from courses to royals. We now began to gain quite perceptibly on our pursuer, and at half-past 3, the chase was abandoned, the baffled Brooklyn retracing her steps to Pass à l'outre, and the Sumter bounding away on her course seaward.

We fired no gun of triumph in the face of the enemy—my powder was too precious for that—but I sent the crew aloft, to man the rigging, and three such cheers were given for the Confederate flag, ‘that little bit of striped bunting,’ that had waved from the Sumter's peak during the exciting chase, as could proceed only from the throats of American seamen, in the act of defying a tyrant—those cheers were but a repetition of many such cheers that had been given, by our ancestors, to that other bit of ‘striped bunting’ which had defied the power of England in that olden war, of which our war was but the logical sequence. The reader must not suppose that our anxiety was wholly allayed, as soon as we saw the Brooklyn turn away from us.

We were, as yet, only a few miles from the land, and our coast was swarming with the enemy's cruisers. Ship Island