The Confederate cruiser CSS Alabama has quite a history. Our sister blog, Cool at Hoole, has a series of posts telling the ship’s story, which — if you’ll believe it — starts with construction in secrecy in England and ends in defeat in France.

But when those posts were written, a really cool resource about the CSS Alabama wasn’t yet digitized: a photo album of the ship and crew. The album, given by friends to crewmember Edwin Maffitt Anderson, was assembled in Liverpool, England, in 1864.

This is the ship at sea, probably a drawing.

Here is her captain.

Among the many portraits of crewmembers, you’ll find placeholders for those who died in service.

You’ll also find images of non-crewmembers like this unidentified woman, perhaps one of Anderson’s friends.

And there were, as expected, several images of Edwin Maffitt Anderson — and a man with a similar name, Eugene Anderson Maffitt. This photo of them together (on left and right, but no idea which is which!) seems to prove the similar names on the roll were not a mistake or mixup.

You’ll notice that the photo has been artificially colored in, a not-uncommon occurrence in early photography. Check out the rest of the album online, to see what else you can learn about the Alabama or the cartes de visite photograph format.

According to the collection Finding Aid, “Edwin Maffitt Anderson, a native of Georgia, was midshipman on the CSS Alabama during the Civil War. He joined the crew of the Alabama in 1862 and remained with them until June 19, 1864, when the USS Kearsarge sunk the ship off the coast of France. Anderson was wounded in the battle. After he recovered, he joined the crew of the blockade runner Owl, and he was later promoted to lieutenant. He died in Georgia in 1923.”