Hunting Confederate Raiders
She was built at Portsmouth Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire under the 1861 American Civil War emergency shipbuilding program. The new 1,550 long tons (1,570 t) steam sloop of war was launched on 11 September 1861 sponsored by Mrs. McFarland, wife of the editor of the Concord Statement, and commissioned on 24 January 1862, with Captain Charles W. Pickering in command. Soon after, she was hunting for Confederate raiders in European waters.
Kearsarge departed Portsmouth on 5 February 1862, for the coast of Spain. She thence sailed to Gibraltar to join the blockade of Confederate raider CSS Sumter, forcing her abandonment in December. However, Sumter's commanding captain, Raphael Semmes, soon commissioned Confederate raider CSS Alabama on the high seas off the Azores.
From November 1862 to March 1863, Kearsarge prepared for her fight with Alabama at Cádiz, then searched for the raider from along the coast of Northern Europe to the Canaries, Madeira, and the Outer Hebrides. Arriving at Cherbourg, France, on 14 June 1864, she found Alabama in port where she had gone for repairs after a devastating cruise at the expense of 65 ships of the United States' merchant marine. Kearsarge took up patrol at the harbor's entrance to await Semmes' next move.
Read more about this topic: USS Kearsarge (1861)
Famous quotes containing the words hunting, confederate and/or raiders:
“The French manner of hunting is gentlemanlike; ours is only for bumpkins and bodies. The poor beasts here are pursued and run down by much greater beasts than themselves; and the true British fox-hunter is most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to this country, which no other part of the globe produces.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“This is our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster,
crazily tangled like the Book of Kells:
the dream’s distortion and the land’s division,
the midnight raiders and the prison cells.”
—John Hewitt (b. 1907)