The Last Confederate Ship At Sea

The CSS Shenandoah fired the last shot of the Civil War and was the only Confederate warship to circumnavigate the globe. But what was Captain James Waddell's true relationship with his Yankee prisoner Lillias Nichols and how did it determine the ship's final destination? Without orders, Waddell undertook a dangerous three month voyage through waters infested with enemy cruisers. He risked mutiny by a horrified crew who, having been declared pirates, could be hanged. This is the true story behind the cruise of the Shenandoah--one of secret love and blackmail--brought to light for the first time in 150 years.

Assembled from hundreds of original documents, including intimate shipboard journals kept by Shenandoah officers, Sea of Gray is a masterful narrative of men at sea The sleek, 222-foot, black auxiliary steamer Sea King left London on October 8, 1864, ostensibly bound for Bombay. The subterfuge was ended off the shores of Madeira, where the ship was outfitted for war. The newly christened CSS Shenandoah then commenced the last, most quixotic sea story of the Civil War: the 58,000-mile, around-the-world cruise of the Confederacy's second most successful commerce raider. Before its voyage was over, thirty-two Union merchant and whaling ships and their cargoes would be destroyed. But it was only after ship and crew embarked on the last leg of their journey that the excursion took its most fearful turn. Four months after the Civil War was over, the Shenandoah's Captain Waddell finally learned he was, and had been, fighting without cause or state. In the eyes of the world, he had gone from being an enemy combatant to being a pirate—a hangable offense. Now fearing capture and mutiny, with supplies quickly dwindling, Waddell elected to camouflage the ship, circumnavigate the globe, and attempt to surrender on English soil. "A superb account of how the Confederate raider Shenandoah brought the American Civil War to the farthest reaches of the world." -- Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower and Sea of Glory

As the Confederacy felt itself slipping beneath the Union juggernaut in late 1864, the South launched a desperate counteroffensive to shatter the U.S. economy and force a standoff. Its secret weapon? A state-of-the-art raiding ship whose mission was to prowl the world’s oceans and sink the U.S. merchant fleet. The raider’s name was Shenandoah, and her executive officer was Conway Whittle, a twenty-four-year-old warrior who might have stepped from the pages of Arthurian legend. Whittle would share command with a dark and brooding veteran of the seas, Capt. James Waddell, and together with a crew of strays, misfits, and strangers, they would spend nearly a year sailing two-thirds of the way around the globe, destroying dozens of Union ships and taking more than a thousand prisoners, all while continually dodging the enemy.Then, in August of 1865, a British ship revealed the shocking truth to the men of Shenandoah: The war had been over for months, and they were now being hunted as pirates. What ensued was an incredible 15,000-mile journey to the one place the crew hoped to find sanctuary, only to discover that their fate would depend on how they answered a single question. Wondrously evocative and filled with drama and poignancy, Last Flag Down is a riveting story of courage, nobility, and rare comradeship forged in the quest to achieve the impossible.

Blending high-seas adventure and first-rate research, The Last Shot is naval history of the very first order, offering a riveting account of the last Southern military force to lay down its arms in June 1865. Following orders received the previous autumn, the Confederate raider Shenandoah fell upon a fleet of whalers out of New England working the waters near Alaska's Little Diomede Island. More than two dozen ships went down in a frenzy of destruction that occurred three months after the South's official surrender. In breathtaking detail, author Lynn Schooler re-creates one of the most astonishing events in American military history—a final act of war that brought about the near-demise of the New England whaling industry and effectively ended America's growing hegemony over worldwide shipping for the next eighty years.

The Confederate cruiser Shenandoah was the last of a group of commerce raiders deployed to prey on Union merchant ships. Ordered to the Pacific Ocean, the Shenandoah's successes compared favorably with the exploits of the more celebrated Alabama and Florida but have never been as well known because the Shenandoah's story coincided with the war's end. The expedition, however, from England to the Indian Ocean, Australia and the South Pacific, the Bering Sea, San Francisco, and finally to port in Liverpool, was one of the best documented during the Civil War. Among the most significant accounts of the expedition is the journal of Lieutenant William Whittle Jr., which is presented here with annotations from other journals, the official records and logs, and newspaper accounts or the Shenandoah's activities. These fascinating primary sources bring to life the history of this remarkable voyage. Book jacket.

The last shot of the Civil War was fired, not on an obscure battlefield, but in the ice-locked Sea of Okhotsk off Siberia seven months after Lee’s surrender. The last armed Confederate cruiser was the C.S.S. Shenandoah, a beautiful but dangerous vessel which scattered and burned the New Bedford whaling fleet in Arctic waters. She was the last cruiser sent to sea by James Dunwoody Bulloch, the captain who built the Confederacy’s navy in the shipyards of Europe. Constructed at a cost of £53,715, the Shenandoah captured thirty-eight ships and burned thirty-two. She inflicted damage to Union commerce which was officially judged at $1,361,983. She took 1,053 prisoners. In fact, she took so many her skipper, Lieutenant-Commanding James Waddell, had to rig a chain of whaleboats that could be towed along by his vessel, to accommodate captured Union seamen and the crews of the whalers he had burned. A few years after the war, Waddell wrote his account of the Shenandoah’s great cruise, and it is published here complete for the first time. He tells of his own career in the United States Navy and in the Confederate Navy, and also of the events leading up to his taking command of the Shenandoah.