It was a Confederate commerce raider
built in England and left there in the guise of a merchant ship.
She was outfitted at sea as a combatant after she rendezvoused with
supply ships and was placed in commission on 24 August 1862.
Alabama spent the next few months capturing and burning
ships in the North Atlantic and intercepting American grain ships
bound for Europe, capturing over two-dozen Union merchant ships, of
which all but a few were burned.
She then moved into the South Atlantic in 1863, stopped at Cape
Town in August, and went on to the East Indies, seizing nearly 40
more merchantmen during the year, destroying the majority and doing
immense damage to the seaborne trade of the United States.
But it is while she was in South African waters our story
becomes a bit interesting. She was in Saldana bay, and the crew had
rowed ashore to do a bit of hunting. On the way back, Lt Simeon
Cummings accidently shot himself with his own weapom (oops), and
was buried in Saldana.
Our story now moves on a 100 years or so, and back to America
where a lady in the diplomatic corps was watching a bit of TV, and
the program was about a “lost” confederate soldier of the civil
war, and how they just don't know what happenned to this bloke. Her
face lights up and she immediately contacts the appropriate people,
“I know where this soldier is,” she says to them, “he's in my
brothers farm's family grave.”
Well, armed with that bit of imformation, the Americans quickly
organize to bring him home! So they exhumed him and he now lays in
a grave in Tennessee.
As for the Alabama, she came to her demise on the 19 June
outside the port of Cherbourg, from the guns of the Union ship, the
Kearsage, and her wreck was located by the French Navy in 1980.
PLEASE DO
NOT DO THIS CACHE AT NIGHT, EVEN THOUGH THE OWNERS DO NOT MIND
PEOPLE VISITING THE GRAVE SITE!!! THIS IS ON PRIVATE
PROPERTY