Commander Raphael Semmes

PR/674/6

Information

Lantern slide with a composite image based on two photographs taken at Southampton in June 1864, after the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama was sunk by USS Kearsarge during the Battle of Cherbourg. Raphael Semmes and a few other members of his crew, including John McIntosh Kell, escaped justice when the British yacht Deerhound rescued them from the Atlantic and sailed for Southampton, rather than delivering them as prisoners of war to the captain of the Kearsage. The two photographs from which this composite was made were published in Vol. 6 of Barnes, James. 1911. "The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes." New York: The Review of Reviews Co.