CSS Alabama

  • Enrica

The CSS Alabama was built in 1862 by order of the Confederate States of America ( South ) at the shipyard Laird Brothers at Birkenhead (England ) under the name Enrica. In the navy of the Southern States under the name service ( Confederate States Ship ) CSS Alabama to the same state it was to capture their main task, ships of the U.S. in the Caribbean and the North Atlantic or to sink. Later, the privateering were extended to the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Overall, she has 55 ships of the Union applied or sunk. In her two years of plunder they never saw a domestic port. On 19 June 1864, she was sunk by the USS Kearsarge off the coast of France to Cherbourg. The captain, Raphael Semmes, was picked up by a British ship and returned from England back to further participate in the war. The wreck was discovered in the 1980s at a depth of 59 m by the French Navy.

The Alabama was eponymous for the dispute between Great Britain and the United States of America, whether Britain should pay for the damage that had caused the built and equipped in the UK privateers of the southern states (so-called Alabama question ).

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