-

I attended elementary school at St. Mary's in Dumont NJ.  The teaching staff were Sisters of Charity and I have always wondered what their actual qualifications were, other than being virgins.

Art class consisted of Sister _____ distributing postcards of famous works for us to paste in a scrapbook, then she would dictate a paragraph about it for us to copy and also paste in.  That was it.

Among all the paintings of Jesus and Mary was one by Edouard Manet of the 1864 sinking of the CSS Alabama by the USS Kearsarge.

Built in an English shipyard and sold to the Confederates in 1861, the Alabama was a state-of-the-art ship—220 feet long, with a speed of up to 13 knots. The cruiser was equipped with a machine shop and could carry enough coal to steam for 18 days, but its sails could greatly extend that time. Under its captain, Raphael Semmes, the Alabama prowled the world for three years, capturing U.S. commercial ships. It sailed around the globe, usually working out of the West Indies, but taking prizes and attacking Union shipping in the Caribbean, off Newfoundland, and around the coast of South America. In January 1863, Semmes sunk a Union warship, the Hatteras, after luring it out of Galveston, Texas.

During its career, the Alabama captured 66 ships and was hunted by more than 20 Federal warships.  

Her final battle took place on June 19, 1864, in international waters off the coast of France, although close enough to be visible from shore. The two warships circled one another, firing as fast as the crews could load. The quality of Alabama’s shells proved an even greater defense than Kearsarge’s chain mail armor. Several rounds failed to explode, including a shell that lodged in the sternpost of Kearsarge and almost certainly would have been fatal had it detonated. Instead, it was Alabama that took several hits and began taking on water. Semmes fought her until she sank, then — defiant to the last — threw his sword into the sea and swam to the safety of a nearby British yacht that had come out to watch the excitement.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
 Was George Washington sterile? Today marks the 1731 birth of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, our first "First Lady", although the term was not in use at the time.  She married for the first time at age 19 to Daniel Parke Custis who was almost 20 years her senior.  During their seven year marriage which ended with his death, Martha gave birth to four children, two survived to adulthood. Custis' death left Martha a very wealthy widow.  On her own she managed five plantations that were left to her, with 300 slaves and the equivalent of $4,000,000 in today's money.  And she apparently negotiated with her British factors in an able manner. Unlike the matronly, frumpish image we have of Lady Washington today, contemporary accounts demonstrate the 28 year old whom Washington (and others) courted to be attractive and lively.  Since early colonial days, in New England love was considered to be a necessary prerequisite for marriage.  Not so in Virginia wher...
Read more
-
Image
  At six o’clock in the evening on July 23, 1914, nearly one month after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand   and his wife by a young Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, the ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Serbia, delivered an ultimatum to the Serbian foreign ministry. Acting with the full support of its allies in Berlin, Austria-Hungary had determined in the aftermath of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination to pursue a hard-line policy towards Serbia. Their plan, developed in coordination with the German foreign office, was to force a military conflict that would, Vienna hoped, end quickly and decisively with a crushing Austrian victory before the rest of Europe—namely, Serbia’s powerful ally, Russia—had time to react. On receipt of the ultimatum, Serbia at once appealed to Russia, whose council of ministers met on July 24 to determine a course of action. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov voiced his belief that Germany was using the crisis over the archdu...
Read more
-
Image
  Professor Thaddeus Lowe was born August 20 in 1832. During the Civil War, Lowe became "Chief Aeronaut" for the U.S. Army after he ascended into the air above Washington to demonstrate for President Lincoln the usefulness of tethered observational balloons for map making, artillery spotting, and observing enemy movements. Lowe was just one of many accomplished balloonists to demonstrate the technology's usefulness, but by the end of the summer he took over the position from John Wise. Under Lowe, the Balloon Corps made over 3,000 ascensions and supported numerous campaigns. It disbanded in 1863 due to financial and personnel problems, but left its legacy as the first U.S. air force.
Read more