The strictest injunctions had been given both to Captain Bullock and Captain Semmes, to avoid doing anything that would by any possibility be construed into an infringement of either the municipal law, or the anxiously-guarded neutrality of England; and as the Foreign Enlistment Act clearly forbade the _equipment_ of ships of war for belligerent uses, it was necessary that the new cruiser should leave England unarmed, and take her chance of capture, until some safe place could be found for taking her armament on board.
This was, of course, a delicate operation, and one requiring the preservation of strict secresy, that the cruisers of the United States might at least not be enabled to pounce upon their new enemy, until she had been placed to some extent in a condition for self-defence.

Nor was this the only ground on which caution had to be observed.

The career of the Sumter had given Captain Semmes a clearer idea than he had probably before possessed of the precise meaning of the word neutrality, as applied to the present war, and there was too much at stake to run the risk of detention from any such views of its obligations as had been put forward in the case of his captive officer at Tangier.

The law of the case might be--he certainly thought it was--clear enough; but there was no use in throwing temptation in the way of those by whom it was to be interpreted.

The recent cases of the Alexandria, the El Tousson, and the El Monassir, have shown with sufficient clearness that this calculation was tolerably correct.
Accordingly, the reticence which has so distinctively marked the men of the South throughout the struggle, was most religiously observed in the case of the Alabama.