35 Facts About Raphael Semmes

Raphael Semmes was an officer in the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War.

Raphael Semmes graduated from Charlotte Hall Military Academy and entered the US Navy as a midshipman in 1826.

Raphael Semmes first served on the Lexington, cruising the Caribbean and the Mediterranean until September 1826, when he was placed on leave for reasons of ill health.

Raphael Semmes then studied law and was admitted to the bar.

Raphael Semmes became extremely popular, and the nearby town of Semmes, Alabama was named after him.

Raphael Semmes maintained a home in Josephine, Alabama on Perdido Bay.

Raphael Semmes was promoted to the rank of commander in 1855 and was assigned to lighthouse duties until 1860.

Raphael Semmes's crew surveyed the vessel while in neutral Gibraltar and determined that the repairs to her boilers were too extensive to be completed there.

Raphael Semmes sailed on Alabama from August 1862 to June 1864.

Raphael Semmes's operations carried him from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, and into the Pacific to the East Indies.

Captain Raphael Semmes took Alabama out on June 19,1864, and met the similar Kearsarge in one of the most famous naval engagements of the Civil War.

Raphael Semmes was eventually rescued, along with forty-one of his crewmen, by the British yacht Deerhound and three French pilot boats.

From England, Raphael Semmes made his way back to America via Cuba and from there a safe shore landing on the Texas gulf coast.

Historians John and David Eicher show Raphael Semmes as appointed to the grade of temporary brigadier general on April 5,1865.

Historian Bruce Allardice notes that Raphael Semmes was vague about this appointment in his memoirs and considered his naval rank of rear admiral to be the equivalent of a brigadier general.

Raphael Semmes insisted on his parole being written to include the brigadier general commission in anticipation of being charged with piracy by the United States government.

Raphael Semmes later returned to Mobile and resumed his legal career.

Raphael Semmes's teaching method in classes incorporated mainly formal lectures, with very little discussion.

In May 1867 Raphael Semmes resigned from academia to take over as editor of a newspaper, the Memphis Bulletin.

Raphael Semmes defended both his actions at sea and the political actions of the southern states in his 1869 Memoirs of Service Afloat During The War Between the States.

In 1869 Captain Raphael Semmes released his American Civil War memoirs entitled Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States.

Raphael Semmes was denounced by Abraham Lincoln as a 'pirate' and a bounty put on his head by the USNavy Department of Admiral David Farragut.

Raphael Semmes seeks sanctuary for the CSS Alabama on the Brazilian volcanic island of Fernando de Noronha, where he takes on coal from his supply ship Agrippina whereas Captain Nemo seeks sanctuary for the Nautilus within the flooded crater of a secret volcanic island where his crew proceed to mine their own coal.

Whereas Captain Raphael Semmes compares the CSS Alabama to his wife Captain Nemo compares the Nautilus to himself.

Raphael Semmes was rescued from the waters of the English Channel by the yacht Deerhound of the Royal Mersey Yacht Club of Tranmere, Birkenhead.

Raphael Semmes's journals were saved from the waters of the English Channel by the CSS Alabama crewman Michael Mars and returned to him aboard the Deerhound.

Raphael Semmes was then taken by John Lancaster, the owner of the Deerhound to the Port of Southampton, where according to Raphael Semmes's memoirs he was met by the Reverend Francis Tremlett.

Raphael Semmes remained in Paris for a few days longer, perhaps preferring the more discrete safety of travelling alone after the conspicuous company of his English friends.

John Lamb hypothesized that it must have been at this time that Raphael Semmes handed over his journals to the French author Jules Verne as those same journals were to become the literary template of Verne's 1869 masterpiece Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

Raphael Semmes sailed on the Brandywine as a young midshipman in the 1820's.

John Lamb hypothesized that Jules Verne uses the coded term 'brandy grog' to refer to Semmes's ship Brandywine as Raphael Semmes had used the word 'grog' dozens of times in his Memoirs of a Service Afloat.

Raphael Semmes did effectually render such aid by rescuing the commander of the Alabama and a portion of his crew from the pursuit of the Kearsarge, and by furtively and clandestinely conveying them to Southampton, within British jurisdiction.

Raphael Semmes has a cut on one cheek and a mighty pleasant way with him, particularly in drink, has my mate Bill.

Raphael Semmes's giving up and hiding his 'Confederate gold' in Birkenhead would be an insignificant part of his possible repentance, but a highly symbolic affirmation of that possible repentance in its own right.

When Raphael Semmes returned to the South from England, he brought a ceremonial Stainless Banner with him.