time we will go back to the beginning, when the Florida was built and first took to the seas. This was no easy task. Getting the job done required some clever deception, steely determination, much boldness, and a large dose of luck. the Navy, the South developed a multi-pronged strategy to deal with a far superior foe. Much depended on innovative technologies. Ironclads were built to protect Confederate ports and inland waterways. Numerous navigable rivers, highways into the very vitals of the Confederacy, were seeded with torpedoes1 capable of destroying any Federal ship trying to steam upstream. Everyone knows about the Hunley, which claimed the first warship in history to be sunk by a submarine. Small surface torpedo boats were also used against the blockade. Commandos were formed to attack vulnerable enemy ships lingering too near the coast. The final component of the Confederacy’s strategy was commerce raiding on the high seas. The CSS Florida, next n a recent issue, I wrote of the final days of the CSS Florida and the diplomatic row which followed the
ship’s capture by a Federal warshipin a neutral port. This
Under Stephen Mallory, the Confederate Secretary of
By Gould Hagler
to the CSS Alabama, was the most famous Confederate warship preying on merchant vessels flying the flag of the United States.
James Dunwoody Bulloch led the Confederates’ effort to have these commerce raiders built in Britain. In June 1861, Bulloch contracted with two Liverpool firms to build the ship and her engines. Built according to the design for a Royal Navy screw-sloop built in the same yard, the 185foot long, 700-ton vessel, under the cover name Oreto, was ostensibly intended for buyers in Palermo. Bulloch carefully navigated around the British neutrality laws and did all he could to conceal his activities from watchful U.S. officials. By October, Ambassador Charles Francis Adams had become suspicious of the Oreto and her supposed destination.
The ambassador’s efforts to convince British authorities to impound the Oreto were unsuccessful. There were no armaments on board, and the ship’s papers were in order. The authorities permitted the Oreto to sail in late March 1862. She was captained by a British master mariner and, according to her papers, bound for Palermo. On board was one John Low, a “passenger” according to the documents. Somehow, the papers failed to indicate that Low was an officer in the Confederate Navy.
Lt. John Newland Maffitt was assigned to take command of the vessel when she reached her real destination, the Bahamas. Born in 1818, Maffitt served in the U.S. Navy from the age of 13 until his resignation in May 1861. He had a distinguished career and rose to the grade of lieutenant.2
Maffitt took command in May. In Nassau U.S. authorities again tried to have the vessel seized by the British. This caused a delay, but in August, the Oreto sailed and managed to evade a pursuing U.S. warship. Maffitt retired to a quiet anchorage where he met a ship carrying the arms meant for the CSS Florida, as the ship was christened when it was commissioned at sea.
The small crew, 22 men and a few officers, far below a full complement of 130, labored mightily to transfer the
