Recounts the exploits of the Confederacy's privately armed ships and of the sailors known as "gentlemen adventurers" The Confederate Privateers recounts the exploits of the Confederacy's privately armed ships and their sea battles with the Union. Using naval war records and other archives, William Robinson describes the privateers, their cruises, their successes, their failures, and their ultimate fates. This narrative history is the first to portray the privateer Confederate cruises of the Jefferson Davis, the Dixie, the Sally, and the pygmy submarine Pioneer.

Sir George Cockburn emerged from the Napoleonic War the best-known British admiral since Nelson. He first came to public notice for his part in the British attack on Washington in 1814. He also escorted Napoleon to St Helena after Waterloo. His greatest impact was as the Admiralty Commissioner who presided over much of the transition of the British navy from sail to steam between 1818 and 1846.

The standard biography of the man who pioneered the modern submarine A classic of maritime history updated with new information, John P. Holland, 1841–1914 is the sole full-length biography of the man whose technological innovations led to the launching of the first modern submarine in May 1897. While David Bushnell may be considered the father of the submarine, Holland devised the technical improvements that enabled a craft to operate equally effectively whether submerged or surfaced, and it was his design that the U.S. Navy purchased in 1900. Richard Knowles Morris draws on diaries and papers left by his grandfather, a longtime friend of Holland and an superintending engineer of the Holland Torpedo Boat Company (later Electric Boat), to trace the inventor's eventful life. Morris recounts Holland's early years, his frustration in dealing with the Fenians and the U.S. Navy, and his company's negotiations with Japan, Great Britain, and Russia for Holland boats. Of particular interest is the selection of photographs that offer an enlightening pictorial of early submarine history.

A saga of battles, blockades, great fleet cruises, and above all, failures and lost opportunities.

Book by Gibson, Andrew, Donovan, Arthur

An inside look at the Confederacy's military science and technology Loaded with previously unavailable information about the Confederate Navy's effort to supply its fledgling forces, the wartime diaries and letters of John M. Brooke (1826–1906) tell the neglected story of the Confederate naval ordnance office, its innovations, and its strategic vision. As Confederate commander of ordnance and hydrography in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War, Brooke numbered among the military officers who resigned their U.S. commissions and "went South" to join the Confederate forces at the onset of conflict. A twenty-year veteran of the United States Navy who had been appointed a midshipman at the age of fourteen, Brooke was a largely self-taught military scientist whose inventions included the Brooke Deep-Sea Sounding Lead. In addition to his achievements as an inventor, Brooke was a draftsman, diarist, and inveterate letter-writer. His copious correspondence about military and personal matters from the war yields detailed and often unexpected insights into the Confederacy's naval operations. Charged with developing a vessel that could break the Union blockade, Brooke raised the Merrimack, a wooden vessel scuttled by the Union Navy, and outfitted it with armor plates as the CSS Virginia. Brooke's papers trace his conception of the plan to create the first Confederate ironclad warship and offer insight into other innovations, revealing a massive amount of factual information about the Confederacy's production of munitions.

The exciting story of how an earthen fort defended a Southern city against ironclad monitors Built out of sand and mud and designed to serve as the southern anchor in the coastal defenses of Savannah, Georgia, Fort McAllister was constructed in June 1861 on the Great Ogeechee River, twelve miles south of the Savannah River. Roger S. Durham offers a comprehensive history of the fort's construction, strategic importance during the Civil War, and postwar restoration in this vivid account of how an earthen defense withstood not only devastating naval assaults but also the effects of time. Durham intertwines historical facts with human fates through frequent use of primary sources, letting the fort's defenders and attackers speak for themselves and bringing readers into the fiery heat of battle. Two innovations in warfare wrought by the Civil War were the rifled cannon―which proved detrimental to the masonry construction of Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River―and the ironclad warship, but neither could compromise the earthen parapets of Fort McAllister. Over the course of the war, McAllister's original four-gun design was augmented to include twenty-two guns, making the fort a much more difficult challenge to Union assaults. The monitor USS Montauk was twice summoned to take Fort McAllister and twice failed. In a third Union attempt, three ironclads and a supporting fleet of wooden gunboats bombarded the fort for seven hours, though the defenders suffered no casualties and the fort withstood the blasts. In all, seven unsuccessful naval attacks were made against the fort. McAllister's final threat did not come from the water but from the western reaches of the state. In December 1864 General William T. Sherman's famed March to the Sea negated the viability of coastal defenses, and Fort McAllister, like Savannah itself, fell at last. Fort McAllister's story did not end with the war. In the 1930s the site was owned by the industrialist Henry Ford, who was instrumental in the initial preservation efforts to restore the fort as a historical monument. Ownership later passed to the International Paper Company, which in turn deeded the land to the State of Georgia. The historical site was opened to the public in 1963, on the centennial of the bombardments by the Union ironclads. Durham's harrowing account of life and combat at Fort McAllister, and of the subsequent restoration, is augmented by twelve maps and sixty photographs―including rare images of Sherman's troops at the end of the March to the Sea and of early preservation initiatives.

A firsthand account of a nineteenth-century sealing expedition that recalls the spirit of Herman Melville Lewis Coolidge (1783-1871) was a nephew of Billy Dawes, the man who accompanied Paul Revere on his legendary midnight ride. An adventurous spirit seems to have run in the in 1806 Coolidge set out on a five-year voyage around the globe aboard the China trader Amethyst. The crew's mission was to catch and skin fur seals to trade in China for tea, porcelain, silk, and other highly prized commodities while avoiding entanglements with European traders and ports unfriendly to the young American republic. Edited by Evabeth Miller Kienast and Coolidge's descendant John Phillip Felt, Coolidge's private diary of this voyage sheds light on the nineteenth-century sealing trade and offers a thoughtful vantage on maritime culture of the era as experienced by a highly literate Bostonian on the adventure of a lifetime. The Amethyst sailed from Boston in September 1806 to Gough Island in the Antarctic, where a few men were dispatched to seal hunt as the ship continued around the horn to the Pacific Ocean. Coolidge was left in charge of a sealing party in the Cerros Islands off the coast of Spanish-controlled California while the ship returned to Gough. Almost a year later, the Amethyst finally retrieved Coolidge and his crew from the barren Cerros Islands, where they not only had to catch and skin seals but had to sustain themselves on whatever they could find. After more sealing off California, the Amethyst sailed next to the Hawaiian Islands and then on to China to trade the accumulated skins. The ship then sailed to the Palau Islands, where the crew obtained a cargo of sea cucumbers, a delicacy in China. The crew returned to China to sell this cargo and the ship itself, and then Coolidge and the others embarked for home on other vessels. With a keen eye, sharp wit, and a literary style reminiscent of Herman Melville, Coolidge ably chronicles all aspects of his odyssey in the diary published here for the first time. Coolidge's well-annotated historical account is supplemented by eighteen illustrations, Felt's brief survey of the "Old China trade" enterprise, and his account of Coolidge's life following the voyage. Collectively these elements paint a vivid portrait of an adventurous era on the high seas and of a young man eager to find his way in the world.

The Defeat of the German U-Boats explains the significance and the outcome of World War II's single most important naval campaign in the European theater—the air and sea battle that ended Germany's bid to sever Allied supply lines in the Atlantic. David Syrett's blow-by-blow recounting of the conflict offers a comprehensive analysis of the effort to stop German U-boat attacks on Allied merchant vessels, which, by 1943, ranked as the Allies' top priority in their strategy to defeat Hitler's forces. Syrett argues that the Germans were unable to match Allied communications, technological, and tactical advances and that the Allies prevailed largely because of their skill in utilizing the material and intelligence resources at their disposal. Beginning with a detailed description of the U-boat's attributes and flaws, Syrett discusses the ship-borne high frequency direction finders, radar, acoustic torpedoes, and improved aircraft developed and deployed by the Allies to stop, German U-boats. He uses Ultra decrypts, or communication intelligence, to plot the progression of each Allied convoy, German U-boat assault, and Allied response. Crediting the Allied victory with keeping Britain in the war and making possible the 1944 invasion of northwest Europe, Syrett emphasizes the pivotal role that the Battle of the Atlantic played in determining World War II's conclusion.

South Carolinian Alexander F. Warley (1823–1895) was an exceptional naval officer who enjoyed a robust life of far-flung adventures at sea during several dramatic periods in American maritime history. Warley's career began in the 1840s, when he served as a midshipman on Old Ironsides and later took part in the Mexican War. His military exploits reached their zenith when he commanded the CSS Manassas ―the first ironclad ship to engage in combat―at New Orleans in October 1861. John M. Stickney's richly detailed biography of Warley as an officer first in the United States Navy and later in the Confederate navy offers a representative example of America's professional military class during the nineteenth century. An ambitious youth of little means, Warley secured an appointment as a midshipman at the age of seventeen through the influence of John C. Calhoun. Over the next two decades of maritime adventures, Warley faced four courts-martial, combat and capture in the Mexican War, and the challenges of rising in the ranks. After South Carolina seceded in December 1860, Warley joined the newly formed Confederate navy and gained recognition for his service at New Orleans, commanding the Manassas until the Confederate defeat there in 1862. Warley's career in the Confederate navy ended with his command of the CSS Albemarle and its destruction at Plymouth, North Carolina. With vivid details and rich narration, Stickney portrays one young man's struggle for glory and success in a divided nation. Using ships' logs and naval records, Stickney unravels Warley's naval career and explores the Civil War naval actions that unfolded in New Orleans, Charleston, Galveston, Savannah, and Plymouth during this critical time in American history, revealing the pluck and fortitude of a previously unknown combatant.

Today the twenty-gun sloop USS Constellation is a floating museum in Baltimore Harbor; in 1859 it was an emblem of the global power of the American sailing navy. When young William E. Leonard boarded the Constellation as a seaman for what proved to be a twenty-month voyage to the African coast, he began to compose a remarkable journal. Sailing from Boston, the Constellation, flagship of the U.S. African Squadron, was charged with the interception and capture of slave-trading vessels illegally en route from Africa to the Americas. During the Constellation's deployment, the squadron captured a record number of these ships, liberating their human cargo and holding the captains and crews for criminal prosecution. At the same time, tensions at home and in the squadron increased as the American Civil War approached and erupted in April 1861. Leonard recorded not only historic events but also fascinating details about his daily life as one of the nearly 400-member crew. He saw himself as not just a diarist, but a reporter, making special efforts to seek out and record information about individual crewmen, shipboard practices, recreation and daily routine―from deck swabbing and standing watch to courts martial and dramatic performances by the Constellation Dramatic Society. This good-humored gaze into the lives and fortunes of so many men stationed aboard a distinguished American warship makes Gilliland's edition of Willie Leonard's journal a significant work of maritime history.

A Sea of Misadventures examines more than one hundred documented shipwreck narratives from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as a means to understanding gender, status, and religion in the history of early America. Though it includes all the drama and intrigue afforded by maritime disasters, the book's significance lies in its investigation of how the trauma of shipwreck affected American values and behavior. Through stories of death and devastation, Amy Mitchell-Cook examines issues of hierarchy, race, and gender when the sphere of social action is shrunken to the dimensions of a lifeboat or deserted shore. Rather than debate the veracity of shipwreck tales, Mitchell-Cook provides a cultural and social analysis that places maritime disasters within the broader context of North American society. She answers questions that include who survived and why, how did gender or status affect survival rates, and how did survivors relate their stories to interested but unaffected audiences? Mitchell-Cook observes that, in creating a sense of order out of chaotic events, the narratives reassured audiences that anarchy did not rule the waves, even when desperate survivors resorted to cannibalism. Some of the accounts she studies are legal documents required by insurance companies, while others have been a form of prescriptive literature—guides that taught survivors how to act and be remembered with honor. In essence, shipwreck revealed some of the traits that defined what it meant to be Anglo-American. In an elaboration of some of the themes, Mitchell-Cook compares American narratives with Portuguese narratives to reveal the power of divergent cultural norms to shape so basic an event as a shipwreck.

Patroons and Periaguas explores the intricately interwoven and colorful creole maritime legacy of Native Americans, Africans, enslaved and free African Americans, and Europeans who settled along the rivers and coastline near the bourgeoning colonial port city of Charleston, South Carolina. Colonial South Carolina, from a European perspective, was a water-filled world where boatmen of diverse ethnicities adopted and adapted maritime skills learned from local experiences or imported from Africa and the Old World to create a New World society and culture. Lynn B. Harris describes how they crewed together in galleys as an ad hoc colonial navy guarding settlements on the Edisto, Kiawah, and Savannah Rivers, rowed and raced plantation log boats called periaguas, fished for profits, and worked side by side as laborers in commercial shipyards building sailing ships for the Atlantic coastal trade, the Caribbean islands, and Europe. Watercraft were of paramount importance for commercial transportation and travel, and the skilled people who built and operated them were a distinctive class in South Carolina. Enslaved patroons (boat captains) and their crews provided an invaluable service to planters, who had to bring their staple products rice, indigo, deerskins, and cotton to market, but they were also purveyors of information for networks of rebellious communications and illicit trade. Harris employs historical records, visual images, and a wealth of archaeological evidence embedded in marshes, underwater on riverbeds, or exhibited in local museums to illuminate clues and stories surrounding these interactions and activities. A pioneering underwater archaeologist, she brings sources and personal experience to bear as she weaves vignettes of the ongoing process of different peoples adapting to each other and their new world that is central to our understanding of the South Carolina maritime landscape. "

Captain James Carlin is a biography of a shadowy nineteenth-century British Confederate, James Carlin (1833-1921), who was among the most successful captains running the U.S. Navy's blockade of Southern ports during the Civil War. Written by his descendent Colin Carlin, Captain James Carlin ventures behind the scenes of this perilous trade that transported vital supplies to the Confederate forces. An Englishman trained in the British merchant marine, Carlin was recruited into the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey Department in 1856, spending four years charting the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. Married and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, he resigned from the survey in 1860 to resume his maritime career. His blockade-running started with early runs into Charleston under sail. These came to a lively conclusion under gunfire off the Stono River mouth. More blockade-running followed until his capture on the SS Memphis. Documents in London reveal the politics of securing Carlin's release from Fort Lafayette. On his return to Charleston, General P. G. T. Beauregard gave him command of the spar torpedo launch Torch for an attack on the USS New Ironsides. After more successful trips though the blockade, he was appointed superintending captain of the South Carolina Importing and Exporting Company and moved to Scotland to commission six new steam runners. After the war Carlin returned to the southern states to secure his assets before embarking on a gun-running expedition to the northern coast of Cuba for the Cuban Liberation Junta fighting to free the island from Spanish control and plantation slavery. In researching his forebear, the author gathered a wealth of private and public records from England, Scotland, Ireland, Greenland, the Bahamas, and the United States. The use of fresh sources from British Foreign Office and U.S. Prize Court documents and surviving business papers make this volume distinctive.