Confederate vessel a technological wonder

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SEA OF GRAY: THE AROUND-THE-WORLD ODYSSEY OF THE CONFEDERATE RAIDER SHENANDOAH

By Tom Chaffin, Hill and Wang, $25, 448 pages,

This book tells the harrowing story of the last Confederate sea raider's mission around the globe.

On Oct. 8, 1864, the British merchant Sea King set sail from London bound for Bombay. She vanished, and word spread quickly in seaports that she was lost at sea. In fact, the Confederate navy had reinvented the Sea King as the commerce raider CSS Shenandoah.

Openly building or procuring a vessel to assist the Confederacy in the war would have violated England's neutrality. So Mr. Chaffin introduces readers to Cmdr. James D. Bulloch, the Confederacy's premier agent in England.

Bulloch procured 33 blockade runners and masterminded the building of CSS Alabama, a 1,050-ton screw steam sloop of war that made her captain, Raphael Semmes, a hero of the Confederacy.

The Shenandoah's captain, U.S. Naval Academy graduate James Iredell Waddell, and his crew ultimately destroyed 32 ships, ransomed six, took more than 1,000 prisoners and destroyed or captured $1.4 million in Union assets. The Shenandoah never fired a shot in anger — a remarkable feat of daredevil nerve.

In addition, Waddell and his men managed to round up and send home safely every one of her captive seamen without serious injury to any man.

The Shenandoah's tale is easily the most quixotic and previously neglected sea story of the Civil War. Her 58,000-mile circumnavigation of the globe made her the Confederacy's second-most-successful merchant raider.