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Lot description
SAMUEL FINLEY MORSE BADGER Massachusetts, 1817-1919 "Her Last Cruise", the U.S.S. Kearsarge. Signed lower left "S.F.M. Badger". Provenance: Eldred's auction, July 1994. Acquired from the above at that sale by the Kelton Foundation. Kearsarge was built at Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine, under the 1861 American Civil War emergency shipbuilding program, and she was launched September 11, 1861. The U.S.S. Kearsarge is noted for engaging in the last significant single-ship action of the Civil War when she sank the Confederate Commerce Raider C.S.S. Alabama off Cherbourg, France on June 19, 1864. Kearsarge departed Portsmouth on February 5, 1862 for the coast of Spain. She then sailed to Gibraltar to join the blockade of Confederate Raider C.S.S. Sumter , forcing the ship's abandonment there in December of 1862. However, Sumter 's commanding captain, Raphael Semmes, having returned to England for reassignment, was soon on the newly built British sloop Enrica as the C.S.S. Alabama . One hour after she fired her first salvo, Alabama was reduced to a sinking wreck by Kearsarge 's accurate gunnery and its powerful 11-inch Dahlgren smooth-bore pivot cannons. Alabama went down by the stern shortly after Semmes struck his colors, threw his sword into the sea to avoid capture, and sent one of his two remaining longboats to Kearsarge with a message of surrender and a rescue appeal for his surviving crew. Kearsarge finally sent ship's boats for the majority of Alabama 's survivors, but Semmes and 41 others were rescued by the nearby British yacht Deerhound and escaped to the United Kingdom. After several recomissionings, Kearsarge was on Caribbean patrol and departed Haiti on January 20, 1894 for Bluefields, Nicaragua, but she wrecked on a reef off Roncador Cay on February 2. Her officers and crew made it safely ashore. She was struck from the list of ships in 1894. From the Kelton Collection of Marine Art & Artifacts. Oil on canvas, 22" x 36". Framed 25.5" x 39.5".