A deadly Civil War clash off the coast of Normandy left behind artifacts and art.

Story from the magazine by Margaret Foster / Jan. 2, 2004

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"The Battle of the U.S.S Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama," Edouard Manet, 1864 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection)

It could have been the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark: Hundreds of wood crates stretched out in long, straight rows within a cavernous warehouse known as Building 46 in the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. On a warm autumn morning, I stalked its dim recesses, past brass ship bells, huge wood steering wheels, and nailed crates stacked high above my head, searching for the remains of one of the Civil War's most notorious ships, the C.S.S. Alabama, a Confederate raider lost on an unlikely battlefield off the coast of France.

The sinking of the Alabama on June 19, 1864, was big news. Hundreds of journalists, in Cherbourg for the opening of a new casino, witnessed the battle from nearby hills. Reports reached the Paris studio of artist Edouard Manet, who, using newspaper articles and his imagination, quickly painted "The Battle of the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama" and hung it in a print shop window in the city. Manet's oversized painting—his first of the ocean—inspired Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Berthe Morisot, and other Impressionist artists to head to Normandy to paint in coastal resorts like Trouville and Boulogne. (Manet's sea paintings, along with those he inspired, have been assembled for the first time in an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 15 through May 31, 2004.)

In the 22 months it roved the seas, from Brazil to Singapore, the Alabama obliterated 65 Union merchant ships. The 220-foot-long vessel, fitted with eight cannons and a retractable smokestack, was built for Rafael "Old Beeswax" Semmes, an Alabama captain with a waxed handlebar mustache (hence his nickname) and a track record for burning enemy ships. The vessel was constructed in secrecy in Liverpool, England, under the name 290. On July 29, 1862, Semmes told customs officials he was taking the finished ship out for a test run. Packed with ladies and gentlemen who were treated to champagne and lunch, the 290 left Liverpool for a "short excursion." At the mouth of the Mersey River, Semmes unloaded the surprised merrymakers into a tugboat and high-tailed it 2,000 miles southwest to the Azores, where guns, ammunition, and a crew were waiting. Within two months, the Alabama—renamed for its captain's home state—had burned 19 Union ships without firing a shot: Semmes's ploy was to raise a British flag, board the ship, seize its goods, take prisoners, and set it afire. The New York Times and Harper's Weekly dubbed Semmes a pirate, but the South celebrated him as a hero.

The Union, out millions of dollars, offered a $300,000 reward for sinking its nemesis and $500,000 for its capture. After almost two years at sea, Semmes paused in the Cherbourg harbor to repair the Alabama's hull and take on fresh ammunition. Hearing of the elusive vessel's landing, Capt. John Winslow of the 201-foot-long U.S.S. Kearsarge blocked its exit. Winslow, who had been Semmes's cabinmate in the U.S.-Mexican War, ordered his crew to fortify the side of the Union ship by stringing chains across a 50-foot section and covering them with inch-thick planks.

A few minutes before 11:00 a.m., the Alabama fired the first shot. One shell hit the Kearsarge's unprotected stern post—a potentially fatal wound—but didn't explode. The Alabama was less fortunate. "Nearly every shot from our guns was telling fearfully on the Alabama," Winslow reported. "I saw now that she was at our mercy, and a few more guns, well directed, brought down her flag." By noon, the Alabama had slipped beneath the waves, its captain and crew rescued by a British yacht and Kearsarge rowboats. (Nine sailors died on deck, and 10 drowned.) Of the 140 survivors, about 40 escaped with Semmes to England.

In 1984, the French minesweeper Circe discovered an unknown wreck at the bottom of the English Channel, six miles from Cherbourg. Divers retrieved a telltale brass steering wheel inscribed in French: "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves," and three years later, the French government announced it had found the Alabama. Yet because both France and the United States claimed the wreck as their own, a diplomatic touch was needed before excavation could continue. For help, the French turned to Ulane Bonnel, an American maritime historian and former WAVE whose marriage to a French naval officer had led her to settle in Paris.

To find out more about recent discoveries at the wreck site, I traveled to Normandy last summer. In Cherbourg, I met Madame Bonnel, the stately, loquacious president of L'association CSS Alabama, founded in 1988. It was clear on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line her sympathies lay: "My parents never spoke of the Civil War with any satisfaction," the Texas native told me primly. Now 83, she has devoted the past two decades to raising money to excavate the wreck, even donating some of her own. In 1995, she helped broker an agreement between the two governments that allowed her group to oversee the project. The site is both well known and well protected. "It has never been pillaged for the good reason that it's 60 meters [185 feet] down, and it's located in a major tidal current," Bonnel said. The tides churn the sand on the ocean floor so forcefully, she said, that "what you see one day, you may not see for the next month. Nothing is simple about the Alabama."

The following morning, Bonnel and I boarded a small boat to visit the site. As the roaring engine idled, Bonnel shouted, "We're over the Alabama now," but when a member of the crew shot me a sheepish glance, I suspected that after only 10 minutes, we were not yet six miles from Cherbourg. Still, I tried my best to picture the smoke and hear the thud of cannon, but what I recognized most was the green tint of the waves from Manet's famous painting.

After 20 years of summer dives that have recovered hundreds of items, conserved in the Navy Yard and a lab in Charleston, S.C., Bonnel's group and its American counterpart, the CSS Alabama Association (USA), want one more year to bring up crucial artifacts. "The principal goal will be to excavate the crew's quarters, in order to learn a lot more about life aboard that ship," Robert Edington, president of the three-year-old nonprofit, based in Mobile, Ala., told me when I returned to the States. Edington says that last dive will take place in 2005.

But they will have to do it without further help from the U.S. Navy, which owns the wreck. Since 1993, the U.S. Department of Defense's Legacy Resource Management Program has given $1,277,000 toward the conservation of artifacts from the Alabama. "At this time, there are no plans to go back at all," says Barbara Voulgaris, cultural resources manager at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. "The Alabama folks really need to look elsewhere for funding."

In the Navy's warehouse I finally found the pieces of the Alabama, with the assistance of Claire Peachy, a conservator at the Navy Yard. Peachy led me through Building 46 to a row of white metal lockers, where she showed me 12 dinner plates divers retrieved last year. I was amazed: not a chip after almost 140 years at the bottom of the rough Channel. Wearing white gloves, Peachy carefully unwrapped more artifacts: green glass bottles, glass pitchers, copper coins from Brazil, a mother-of-pearl button. "These are some of my favorites," she said, showing me an eggcup, then a wineglass, its stem snapped. "I can't believe they took these on a ship."

Inside a large plastic bin filled with orange water, what looked like chunks of rust-colored coral turned out to be corroded metal objects clotted with barnacles. "Most of the discovery is in the lab," Peachy explained. Her first step is to desalinate the unidentified artifacts by soaking them in tap water. To see past the layers of concretions, she then X-rays the pieces. Watching this freckled Bostonian work, I couldn't help but think of Rafael Semmes, who wrote that his only consolation in watching his ship sink was that "she was safe from the polluting touch of the hated Yankee."

"U.S.S. Kearsarge off Boulogne— Fishing Boat Coming in Before the Wind," Edouard Manet, 1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art

A month after the Alabama's demise, Manet glimpsed the Kearsarge in the harbor at Boulogne, where he was vacationing. Not one to let a coincidence pass, he then painted the victor. Thirty years later, the Kearsarge foundered on Central America's Roncador Reef. Aside from Manet's painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the only remnants of the ship that destroyed the Alabama are in a small museum in the Navy Yard. After I left Peachy, I headed there to see the Kearsarge's Bible. Nearby was the damaged section of the stern post, which had been saved as a souvenir after the battle. The Alabama's unexploded shell was still embedded in the dark wood. Although the Kearsarge won that day, the Alabama, whose artifacts and admirers outnumber its conqueror's, has outlived the ship that sent it to the bottom of the sea.

"Manet and the Sea," an exhibition sponsored by the Lincoln Financial Services Group Foundation, will be at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 15 through May 31, 2004. For more information, visit www.gophila.com.

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