Nevertheless, there was one disgraceful feature of the _Florida_ affair. When Brazil demanded the restoration of the ship with her crew on board in the harbor of Bahia, the United States agreed to give her up, and Collins, who had captured her, was ordered to take her back as a punishment for his violation of international law. But the _Florida_ never left the waters of the United States as a warship. She was lying at Hampton Roads when the order was issued--lying “just at the spot where the _Cumberland_ was sunk in very deep water. An engineer was placed on board in charge with two men to assist him in looking after the water cocks; but, strangely enough, although the _Florida_ was to all appearances water tight when she reached Newport News, she sank that night at 2 o’clock in ten fathoms.” “When the sinking of the vessel was reported to Admiral Porter (he was there fitting for the Fort Fisher expedition) he merely said ‘Better so’; while the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Navy never asked any questions.” Those quotations are from Admiral Porter’s “Naval History of the Civil War,” and they are not unlikely to give the reader a choking sensation, for they show that the sinking of the _Florida_ was the work of a sneak--that the “two men,” when “looking after the water cocks,” opened them under orders. The humiliating story is inserted here because the shame of it should serve to prevent the necessity of ever writing another of the kind. The story of the _Alabama_ is longer but not more interesting than that of the _Florida_. She was built by the Lairds and was known as _No. 290_, because she was the 290th ship the firm had built. The British government had full information that she was building for a Confederate cruiser under the supervision of Commander James D. Bullock of the Confederate navy, and, later, that Bullock was shipping men (British subjects) for her, promising petty offices to this and that capable man. The reader who wants to go into the details of this matter will find plenty of them in an Englishman’s work on the “Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War,” by Mountague Bernard, of Oxford University. It furnishes, curiously enough, abundant proof that England escaped with a light penalty when in court in the matter of the “_Alabama_ claims.”