In October 1864 the Scottish-built tea clipper Sea King left London listed for Bombay while the steamer Laurel slipped out of Liverpool carrying guns and Confederate officers. Off Madeira, Commander James Iredell Waddell, a North Carolinian with decades in the U.S. Navy, mounted 8-inch smoothbores and Whitworth rifles and commissioned the ship as the CSS Shenandoah on October 19. With fewer than half the men he needed, he crossed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans capturing Union merchant ships, then put into Melbourne, where 40 stowaways appeared and enlisted once the ship cleared British waters.

In the Bering Sea the Shenandoah captured 20 of 58 Yankee whalers. On June 27, 1865, Waddell read a San Francisco paper reporting Lee’s surrender alongside Jefferson Davis’s call to fight on, and the next day he took 10 whalers in seven hours. On August 3 the British ship Barracuda confirmed the war was over. Facing piracy charges, he struck the guns below, sailed around Cape Horn, and surrendered at Liverpool on November 6, 1865.

• The ship covered 58,000 miles, took 38 vessels and nearly 1,000 prisoners, and caused over $1.4 million in damage without a combat death.
• Captured captains signed bonds pledging payment to the Confederacy and carried prisoners to San Francisco.
• At Liverpool not one crewman admitted to being British, and the authorities paroled them all.
• Waddell farmed in Argentina, returned in 1875, and later commanded Maryland’s oyster police.
• The Sultan of Zanzibar bought the ship as El Majidi, and it sank in the Gulf of Aden in 1879.