Wilmington, Charleston, and Mobile; and
round these three the stern blockaders grew stronger every day.
The Sabine Pass and Galveston also remained in Southern hands;
and the border town of Matamoras still imported contraband. But
these other three points were closely watched; and the greatly
lessened contraband that did get through them now only served the
western South, which had been completely severed from the eastern
South by the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. The left arm of
the Union navy now held the whole line of the Mississippi, while
the gripping hand held all the tributary streams--Ohio, Cumberland,
and Tennessee--from which the Union armies were to invade, divide,
and devastate the eastern South this year.

Several Southern raiders were still at large in '64. But the most
famous or notorious three have each their own year of glory. The
_Florida_ belongs to '63, the _Shenandoah_ to '65. So the one great
raiding story we have now to tell is that of the _Alabama_, the
greatest of them all.

The _Alabama_ was a beautiful thousand-ton wooden barkentine, built
by the Lairds at Birkenhead in '62, with standing rigging of wire,
a single screw driven by two horizontal three-hundred horse power
engines, coal room for three hundred and fifty tons, eight good
guns, the heaviest a hundred-pound rifle, and a maximum crew of
one hundred and forty-nine--all ranks and ratings--under Captain
Raphael Semmes, late U. S. N. Semmes was not only a very able officer
but an accomplished lawyer, well posted on belligerent and neutral
rights at sea.

For nearly two years the _Alabama_ roved the oceans of the Old
World and the New, taking sixty-six Union vessels valued at seven
million dollars, spreading the terror of her name among all the
merchantmen that flew the Stars and Stripes, and infuriating the
Navy by the wonderful way in which she contrived to escape every
trap it set for her. She was designed for speed rather than for
fighting, and, with her great spread of canvas, could sometimes
work large areas under sail. But, even so, her runs, captures,
and escapes formed a series of adventures that no mere luck could
have possibly performed with a fluctuating foreign crew commanded
by ex-officers of the Navy. Her wanderings took her through nearly
a hundred degrees of latitude, from the coast of Scotland to St.
Paul Island, south of the Indian Ocean, also through more than
two hundred degrees of longitude, from the Gulf