* * * * *

Right glad was the Alabama to fall in, on the day after this last capture, with an English brigantine, the master of which proved willing, in consideration of a gift from Captain Semmes of one of his noble collection of captured chronometers, to relieve him of the crowd of prisoners with which he was encumbered.  To the number of forty-one they were forthwith transferred, along with a stock of provisions sufficient for a fortnight’s consumption; and the Alabama breathed freely again, relieved of her disagreeable charge.

It may not be an uninstructive, and it is most assuredly an amusing comment, upon the claims of neutrality so loudly insisted upon, to quote the following extract from a New York letter, captured on board one of the recent prizes.  It is dated April 7th, and addressed to a correspondent in Buenos Ayres:—­

“When you ship in American vessels, it would be as well to have the British Consul’s certificate of English property attached to the bill of lading and invoices; as in the event of falling in with the numerous privateers, it would save both cargo and vessel, in all probability.  An American ship, recently fallen in with, was released by the Alabama on account of a British Consul’s certificate showing the greater part of the cargo to be English property.  If you ship in a neutral vessel, we save five per cent, war insurances.”

Another prize.  The Talisman, a fine ship of 1100 tons, under United States colours and register, with no claim of neutral property in cargo; and before the glare of her funeral pyre had faded from the horizon, another hove in sight, so evidently American, that notwithstanding the English ensign flying at her peak, she was at once brought to and boarded.  And American she proved to be in her origin; but her owners had been wise, and, so far as her papers went, she had been regularly transferred to the protection of the British flag—­humiliating, perhaps, to the proud “Yankee nation,” but effective as a precaution against capture; though, had the Confederate cruiser been able to send her into port for adjudication, the transfer might very possibly, when the evidence came to be sifted, have proved but a “bogus transaction” after all.

So the “Englishman” had to be released, consenting, however, to relieve the Alabama of a prisoner and his wife, recently captured on board the Talisman.  A week passed away, and then came another instance of a similar transfer under the strong pressure of fear, the whilom Yankee barque Joseph Hall, of Portland, Maine, now seeking a humiliating safety as the “British” Azzopadi, of Port Lewis, Isle of France!

Alas! for the Stars and Stripes, the Azzopadi was not hull down on the horizon ere the once-renowned Yankee clipper Challenger lay humbly, with her maintopsail to the mast, in the very place in which her countryman had just been performing a similar penance, claiming, as the British-owned Queen of Beauty, a similar immunity.