…Warships Clashed Off the Coast of France
"When the Confederate warship CSS Alabama glided out of the French port of Cherbourg, her captain, Rafael Semmes, and her crew knew that the USS Kearsarge was waiting just offshore.
It was Sunday, June 19, 1864. The U.S. Navy had been chasing Alabama since her commissioning 22 months earlier. During that time, the Confederate vessel had destroyed 65 U.S. merchantmen and one Union warship in a cruise that had taken her from Great Britain, where she was built, to the American east coast, the Gulf of Mexico, across the South Atlantic, through the Indian Ocean, into the South Pacific, and now back to the English Channel.
Kearsarge, like Alabama, was a modern steam-powered sloop-of-war. She was one of dozens of U.S. Navy ships searching for the handful of Confederate cruisers that were preying on U.S. merchant ships around the world…."
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Armand
