whole course of the storm, a good deal of rain had fallen. It is the rain which adds such fury to the wind. These storms come to us, as has been said, from the tropics, and the winds, by which they are engendered, are highly charged with vapor. In the course of taking up this vapor from the sea, the winds take up, along with it, a large quantity of latent heat, or heat whose presence is not indicated by the thermometer. As the raging cyclone is moving onward in its path, the winds begin to part with their burden-it begins to rain. The moment the vapor is condensed into rain, the latent heat, which was taken up with the vapor, is liberated, and the consequence is, the formation of a furnace in the sky, as it were, overhanging the raging storm, and travelling along with it. The more rain there falls, the more latent heat there escapes; the more latent heat there escapes, the hotter the furnace becomes; and the hotter the furnace, the more furiously the wind races around the circle, and rushes into the upper air to fill the vacuum, and restore the equilibrium. In four hours and a half, from the commencement of the gale, the Alabama was left rolling, and tumbling about in the confused sea, which the gale had left behind it, with scarcely wind enough to fill the sails, which, by this time, we had gotten upon her, to keep her steady. Little more remains to be said of the cyclone. If the reader will take a last look at the diagram, he will see how it is, that the wind, which appears to him to change, has not changed in reality. The wind, from first to the last, is travelling around the circle, changing not at all. It is the passage of the circle over the ship—or over the observer upon the land-which causes it apparently to change. The Alabama lay still during the whole gale, not changing her position, perhaps, half a mile. As the circle touched her, she took the wind from S. to S. S. E., and when it had passed over her, she had the wind at north-west. In the intermediate time, the wind had apparently hauled first to one, and then to the other, of all the intermediate points of the compass, and yet it had not changed a hair's breadth. The weather did not become fine, for several days after the gale. On the following night, it again became thick and cloudy, and the wind blew very fresh from the south-west. The sea, though it had somewhat subsided, was still very rough, and the night was so dark, that the officer of the deck could not see half the length of the ship in any direction. The south-west wind was a fair wind from the enemy's ports, to Europe, and we kept a very bright look-out, to prevent ourselves from being run over, by some heavy ship of commerce, hurrying, with lightning speed, before wind and sea. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF SHIPS- CAPTURE OF THE LA- CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CRIES ALOUD IN PAIN LADY PRISONERS. HE day after the gale recorded in the last chapter, we set all hands at work repairing damages-the carpenters fishing, and the boatswain and his gang refitting the broken main-yard; the gunners putting their battery in order, the sailmaker repairing sails, and the old signal-quartermaster "breaking out" his signal-lockers, which had been invaded by the sea-water, and airing his flags. The latter was enabled, by this time, to make quite a display of Yankee flags, from his signalhalliards- the Alabama having captured seventeen ships in six weeks. As the Yankee ships now began to wear, out of pure patriotism, (though they were out of the war, and profitably chasing the honest penny,) the biggest sort of "flaunting lies," there were several bagsful of these flags. We began now to overhaul sails again. From the 16th to the 20th of October, we chased and boarded nine, all of which were neutral! We were, in fact, in an American sea-the Gulf Stream being the thoroughfare of American and West Indian -commerce to Europe-and yet the American flag was begin ning to disappear from it. Such of the Federal ships as could not obtain employment from the Government, as transports, or be sold under neutral flags, were beginning to rot at the wharves of the once thrifty sea-ports of the Great Republic. Our "nautical enterprise" was beginning to tell on the enemy, and if we had had the ability to imitate Massachusetts, in the war of the first revolution, in the way of putting forth armed cruisers, to prey upon the enemy's commerce, the said enemy would not have had so much as a rope-yarn upon the sea, in the course of twelve months. But at the time of which I am writing, the Alabama and the Florida were the only two Confederate ocean cruisers afloat. On the 21st of October, we observed in latitude 39° 35′, and longitude 63° 26', and on that day, we made our first capture since the gale. We were lying to, as usual, when a large ship was descried, in the north-west, running in our direction. Though the wind was very fresh, she had her royals and foretopmast studding-sails set, and was, in consequence, running before the wind, with great speed. I shook the reefs out of my own topsails, and prepared to set the topgallant-sails if it should be necessary, and filled away, and moved toward the path of the stranger as she approached, with the English colors at my peak. The fine, large ship, as she ran down to us, presented a beautiful picture-all the more beautiful because we knew her to be Yankee, although she had not yet shown her colors. We had become now very expert in detecting the nationalities of ships. I had with me a master's mate- Evans-who had a peculiar talent in this respect. He had been a pilot out of Savannah, and had sailed in the Savannah, privateer, at the beginning of the war. He escaped the harsh treatment, and trial for piracy, which, as the reader may recollect, were the fate of the prisoners captured in that little vessel, by being absent in a prize at the time of her capture. He afterward joined me at Liverpool. Whenever I had any doubt about the nationality of a ship, I always sent for Mr. Evans, and putting my telescope in his hand, I would say to him, “Look at that ship," pointing in the given direction, "and tell me to what nation she belongs." A glance of a minute or two was all he required. Lowering his glass at the end of this time, he would say to me, "She is a Yankee, sir," or, "She is not a Yankee," as the case might be; and if she was not a Yankee, he would say, "I think she is English," or French, or Dutch, or whatever other nation to which he supposed her to belong. He sometimes failed, of course, in assigning their proper nationality to neutrals, but his judgment seemed to amount to an instinct, with regard to the question, Yankee, or no Yankee. When he pronounced a ship a Yankee, I was always certain of her. I never knew him to fail, in this particular, but once, and that can scarcely be said to have been a failure. He once mistook a St. John's, New Brunswick-built ship, for an enemy; and the ships built in the British Colonies, on the Yankee border, are such counterparts of American ships, that it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other. The ship which was now running down for us was, as I have said, a picture, with her masts yielding and swaying to a cloud of sail, her tapering poles shooting skyward, even above her royals, and her well-turned, flaring bows—the latter a distinctive feature of New York-built ships. She came on, rolling gracefully to the sea, and with the largest kind of a "bone in her mouth." She must have suspected something, from our very equivocal attitude in such weather, and in such a place; but she made no change in her course, and was soon under our guns. A blank cartridge brought her to the wind. If the scene was beautiful before, it was still more so now. If she had been a ship of war, full of men, and with hands stationed at sheets, halliards, and braces, she could not have shortened sail much more rapidly, or have rounded more promptly and gracefully to the wind, with her main topsail aback. Her cloud of canvas seemed to shrivel and disappear, as though it had been a scroll rolled up by an invisible hand. It is true, nothing had been furled, and her light sails were all flying in the wind, confined to the yards only by their clew-lines, but the ship lay as snugly and conveniently for boarding, as I could desire. I frequently had occasion, during my cruises, to admire the seamanship of my enemies. The Yankee is certainly a remarkable specimen of the genus homo. He is at once a duck, and a chicken, and takes to the water, |