They were among the most feared seaborne raiders of the Civil War, sweeping from the North Atlantic to the West Indies and the China Sea, stealing Union cargo from scores of vessels before setting them ablaze.
The crew of the Confederate raider Alabama lived the good life. They ate off fine porcelain, brewed tea in ornate pewter pots and bathed in perfumed soap. And when it was time to repair to the head, they perched on flush toilets -- complete with a delicate 18th-century boating scene painted inside the bowl.
"But they didn't have pictures of Lincoln in there!" quipped Betty L. Seifert, chief conservator for the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.
For the past year, the Crownsville-based lab has been restoring artifacts from the Alabama, which finally met its end in 1864 at the hands of the Union warship Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France. It sat on a rocky patch in 185-feet of water until it was located by French navy Capt. Max Guerout in 1987.
Parts of the once proud sloop-of-war and its booty are scattered in the basement lab, set in plastic and wooden tubs under an ignoble fluorescent glare. There are glass goblets, white plates rimmed in blue, sturdy coffee mugs with a stenciled anchor on the bottom.
"The people handled these things. They ate from the dishes," she said, turning a mug in her hand. "They all have stories." She picked up a wooden box lid with black letters: "Winchester Perfumed Salted Soap, Boston Mass."
"We didn't find any soap," she deadpanned.
There also is a spongeware chamber pot that archaeologists believe was used by the captain, Raphael Semmes, a Charles County native who resigned his U.S. Navy commission to fight for the South. Buried in a protective blanket of sand on the ocean floor, many of the porcelain and stoneware artifacts would look at home in a modern cupboard.
"They had the best. They really were out looking for things, " said Ms. Seifert, picking up the dripping teapot from its corrosion-fighting chemical bath. "They were able to go so far and to so many places."
Ms. Seifert, 54, has worked on so many ship excavations in New York, Maine and Massachusetts that she's earned the nickname "The Ship Lady." But she conceded she had never seen ornate flush toilets on board a ship. "That to me was surprising," she said. "But that ship had the latest."
Together with her assistant, Alexandra Elliot, Ms. Seifert has worked on about 160 items plucked from the wreckage, including the ship's 300-pound mahogany helm, a pulley and a large wooden mast bitt, all sharing space in the same tub. So far the lab has received $120,000 in grants from the Navy for the project, which is expected to extend into 1998.
The Maryland lab also has worked on other nautical projects, ranging from the remains of the 18th-century Steward Ship Yard on the West River in Galesville to a World War I German U-Boat.
"They were our first choice," said Claudia Pennington, director of the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington, where some of the Alabama's artifacts are on display. "We knew they had an excellent facility for underwater artifacts."
French divers still comb through the wreck, but the strong currents off Cherbourg allow only two weeks for searching in early summer. While divers can make out the captain's cabin and the ship's rail in the murky water, time constraints and the ravages of salt and age likely will keep those relics from rising to the surface, said Ms. Seifert.
Some of the restored relics already have been part of a traveling exhibit that two years ago went to Mobile, Ala., the adopted home of Captain Semmes. Last year, the exhibit went to Paris and Cherbourg. The CSS Alabama Scientific Committee was created by the French and U.S. governments to manage the artifacts.
A lab in Cannes, France, also is involved in the Alabama project. The lab, owned by France's national electric company, has restored a number of artifacts, including two toilets, a 110-pound cannon and the ship's massive wooden wheel, wrapped in a brass band with a phrase engraved in French: "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves."
Captain Semmes and his crew took that saying to heart.
Secretly constructed for the Confederates in Liverpool, England, the ship set sail in July 1862 for the Azores, off Portugal, where Capt. Semmes and his officers came aboard. They outfitted the 220-foot ship with cannon and gave it the name Alabama.
A wiry, confident man nick named "Old Beeswax" for his handlebar mustache and noted for his disdain of New England Yankees, Captain Semmes got right to the point: "Now my lads," he told them, "we are going to burn, sink and destroy the commerce of the United States."
For the next 22 months, the swift ship, powered by steam and sail, terrorized the Union merchant fleet.
Captain Semmes burned whalers off Newfoundland and grain ships bound for Europe. He used a desolate island off Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, as a base and later attacked more ships off Capetown and Singapore. Each time he would take the captured crew aboard or direct them to land in their small boats, then torch his wooden prize.
By 1864, he had taken 64 ships worth $6 million and gave hope to a Confederacy on its last legs. His luck, however, changed in June 1864 when he pulled into Cherbourg for refitting. The captain was spotted by the U.S. consul there, who urgently cabled John A. Winslow, captain of the USS Kearsarge in Holland.
Captain Winslow rushed to the scene. Before long the two ships were circling each other six miles off the coast, cheered by crowds on the shore. But the Alabama was not built to fight a warship, and its crew had not drilled regularly at its guns. Within an hour, the Alabama was sinking.
Wily to the end, Captain Semmes jumped over the side and was whisked to England by a British yacht that was bobbing on the sidelines. Members of the 120-man crew were not as fortunate; 20 died and were buried in a mass grave in France.
Although fascinated by the project, Ms. Seifert admitted she has little respect for the Confederate captain who was later promoted to rear admiral and spent his final days practicing law in Mobile, Ala.
"I think he was probably a pretty arrogant guy, from the way he stands in his pictures," said the Ship Lady. "The fact that he burned them. He made these beautiful descriptions and then he said, 'I burned her at dawn.'"