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

[235] clerk. They were evidently not prepared for so interesting a spectacle. The officers were all dressed in bright and new uniforms of navy blue—we had not yet been put in gray, along with the army—the gorgeous epaulettes of the lieutenants flashing in the sun, and the midshipmen rejoicing in their gold-embroidered anchors and stars. The men attracted no less attention than the officers, with their lithe and active forms and bronzed countenances, heavy, well-kept beards, and whitest of duck frocks and trousers. One of my visitors, turning to me, after the muster was over, said, pleasantly, in allusion to the denunciations of us by the Yankee newspapers, which he had been reading, ‘Ces hommes sent des pirates bien polis, Monsieur Capitaine.’

In the afternoon, one watch of the crew was permitted to visit the shore, on liberty. To each seaman was given a sovereign, for pocket-money. They waked up the echoes of the quaint old town, drank dry all the grog-shops, fagged out the fiddlers, with the constant music that was demanded of them, and ‘turned up Jack’ generally; coming off; the next morning, looking rather solemn and seedy, and not quite so polis as when the Frenchman had seen them the day before. The United States Consul having come down from St. Pierre to receive his imprisoned countrymen, himself, I caused them all—except three of them, who had signed articles for service on board the Sumter—to be parolled and sent on shore to him. Before landing them, I caused them to be mustered on the quarterdeck, and questioned them, in person, as to the treatment they had received on board—addressing myself, especially, to the two masters. They replied, without exception, that they had been well treated, and thanked me for my kindness. From the next batch of Northern newspapers I captured, I learned that some of these fellows had been telling wonderful stories, about the hardships they had endured on board the ‘pirate’ Sumter. It will not be very difficult for the reader, if he have any knowledge of the sailor-character, to imagine how these falsehoods had been wheedled out of them. The whole country of the enemy was on the qui vive for excitement. The Yankee was more greedy for news than the old Athenian. The war had been a god-send for newspaperdom. The more extraordinary