In ''Sea of Gray," Tom Chaffin, a visiting scholar at Emory University, gives a spirited account of the Shenandoah's odyssey -- both an intriguing Civil War story and a bracing nautical yarn.
The Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, Chaffin notes, believed that the depredations of Confederate commerce raiders would drive up insurance and operating costs for New England's fishing and whaling industries and, in Mallory's words, ''have a decided tendency to turn the trading mind of New England to thoughts of peace."
The thoughts of the captains whose ships the Shenandoah seized were more personal.
Its first capture was the bark Alina out of Searsport, Maine. ''I'll tell you what, [matey]," its captain told one of Shenandoah's officers as he left his ship for the last time. ''I've a daughter at home that that craft yonder was named for, and it goes against me cursedly to see her destroyed."
For Shenandoah's crew, however, the sight of burning ships was a tonic. ''I have rarely seen any thing which is more beautifully grand than a ship burning at sea," Shenandoah's first officer exclaimed. Conversely, a week or more without a capture was a cause of frustration and discontent.
Whatever effect Mallory's commerce-destroying strategy might have had on the course of the war, by mid-June of 1865, when Shenandoah reached the Arctic whaling grounds where it would seize 24 whalers, General Robert E. Lee had already surrendered the main Confederate Army some two months before.
The first of those whalers carried news of the surrender. But as one of the Shenandoah's midshipmen recalled, ''I put the best face on the matter possible & try not to believe it."
Shenandoah proceeded, on one day alone seizing eight whalers, abandoning its mission only when its passage farther north was increasingly blocked by ice floes.
Definitive news of the Confederate surrender then came from a British merchant ship. Captain James Waddell decommissioned his ship, stowing its armaments, and headed back toward England. Shenandoah dodged Union ships searching for it and arrived back in Liverpool on Nov. 6, 1865, 13 months after its departure.
The crew members, many recruited from ships Shenandoah had seized, scattered, and the officers were eventually paroled. The ship, returned to merchant service, sank after striking a reef in the Indian Ocean.
A final curious twist came with an unexpected honor for Captain Waddell. In 1964, ''in a spirit of Civil War centennial sectional-reconciliation," Chaffin writes, the US Navy commissioned the USS Waddell, ''a destroyer named in honor of the former U.S. Navy officer who had resigned that commission to command the CSS Shenandoah."
