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 of Mexico to the China Sea. She captured "Yankees" within one day's steaming of the New York Navy Yard as well as in the Straits of Sunda. West of the Azores and off the coast of Brazil her captures came so thick and fast that they might have almost been a flock of sheep run down there by a wolf. Finally, to fill the cup of wrath against her, she had sunk a blockader off the coast of Texas, given the slip to a Union man-of-war at the Cape of Good Hope, and kept the Navy guessing her unanswered riddles for two whole years.