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Career
Laid down:	Unknown
Launched:	August 1863
Acquired:	1864
Commissioned:	October 19, 1864
Decommissioned:	November 6, 1865
Status:	Turned over to British authorities and sold at auction on authority of the US consulate
General Characteristics
Displacement:	1160 tons
Length:	230 ft (70 m)
Beam:	32 ft (9.8 m)
Draft:	20 ft 6 in (6.2 m)
Propulsion:	Sails and steam engine
Speed:	9 knots (17 km/h) under steam
Complement:	109 officers and men
Armament:	4 x 8 in (203 mm) smoothbore cannons, 2 x 32 pounder (15 kg) rifled cannons, 2 x 12 pounder (5 kg) cannons

The CSS Shenandoah, formerly Sea King, was an iron-framed, teak-planked, full-rigged vessel with auxiliary steam power, under Captain James Waddell, CSN, a North Carolinian with twenty years' service in the Federal navy. The Shenandoah fired the last shot of the American Civil War, in waters off the Aleutian Islands.

She was designed as a British transport for troops to the East, and was built on the River Clyde, Scotland, but the Confederate Government purchased her in 1864 for use as an armed cruiser. On October 8, she sailed from London ostensibly for Bombay, India, on a trading voyage. She rendezvoused at Funchal, Madeira, with the steamer Laurel, bearing officers and the nucleus of a crew for Sea King, together with naval guns, ammunition, and stores. Commanding Officer Lieutenant James Iredell Waddell supervised her conversion to a ship-of-war in nearby waters. Waddell was barely able, however, to bring his crew to half strength even with additional volunteers from Sea King and Laurel. The new cruiser was commissioned on October 19 and her name changed to Shenandoah.

In accord with operation concepts originated in the Confederate Navy Department and developed by its agents in Europe, Shenandoah was assigned to "seek out and utterly destroy" commerce in areas as yet undisturbed, and thereafter her course lay in pursuit of merchantmen on the Cape of Good Hope-Australia route and of the Pacific whaling fleet. En route to the Cape she picked up six prizes. Five of these were put to the torch or scuttled, after Capt. Waddell had safely rescued crew and passengers; the other was bonded and employed for transport of prisoners to Bahia, Brazil. Still short-handed, though her crew had been increased by voluntary enlistments from prizes, Shenandoah arrived at Melbourne, Australia, on January 25, 1865, where she filled her complement and her storerooms, she also took on 40 crew who were stowaways but had enlisted in town hall meetings in Ballarat where the crew had been entertained during her refit at Williamstown.

Shenandoah had taken but a single prize in the Indian Ocean, but hunting became more profitable as she approached the whaling grounds. Waddell burned four whalers in the Caroline Islands and another off the Kurile Islands, without loss of life. After a 3-week cruise in the ice and fog of the Sea of Okhotsk failed to yield a single prize, due to a warning which had preceded him, Waddell headed north past the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. On June 23, he learned from a prize of General Robert E. Lee's surrender and the flight from Richmond, Virginia of the Confederate Government 10 weeks previously. Nevertheless, he elected to continue hostilities, and captured 21 more prizes, the last 11 being taken in the space of 7 hours in the waters just below the Arctic Circle.

Waddell then ran south to intercept commerce bound from the West Coast to the Far East and Latin America, and on 2 August received intelligence from a British bark of the American Civil War's termination some 4 months before. Immediately Shenandoah underwent physical alteration. She was dismantled as a man-of-war; her battery was dismounted and struck below, and her hull repainted to resemble an ordinary merchant vessel. Waddell brought her into Liverpool on November 6 and surrendered her to British authorities, who turned her over to the United States.

Shenandoah had remained at sea for 12 months and 17 days, had traversed 58,000 miles (carrying the Confederate flag around the globe for the first and only time) and sunk or captured 38 ships, mostly whalers. Waddell took close to a thousand prisoners, without a single war casualty among his crew: two men died of diseases.

A recent historian of the Shenandoah has assessed Waddell's depredations at dealing a death-blow to the New England whaling industry and crippling Union shipping: in 1860, two-thirds of the shipping tonnage leaving New York harbor was in American ships. Three years later foreign shipping, especially that of Great Britain, carried three-quarters of the trade. "By the time the Shenandoah lowered its flag, 715 American vessels had been transferred to the British flag to escape capture or bankruptcy" (Schooler 2005). The stage was set for a British domination of world shipping that lasted until World War I.

• Lynn Schooler, 2005. The Last Shot: The Incredible Story of the CSS Shenandoah and the True Conclusion of the Civil War (HarperCollins).

• Tom Chaffin, 2006. "Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah" (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

• History on navy.mil

This article includes text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

Cruisers of the Confederate States Navy

Alabama | Archer | Chickamauga | Clarence | Florida | Georgia | Nashville | Rappahannock | Shenandoah | Sumter | Tacony | Tallahassee

List of ships of the Confederate States Navy