Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg are familiar American Civil War sites. But Cherbourg?

How did Cherbourg become the site for an important naval battle between the Union and the Confederacy so far from the theater of the war--the last great sailing ship gunnery duel in history?

It all began with construction of a cruiser at the Laird Brothers shipyard in Birkenhead, England, secretly ordered under a fictitious name by the representative of the Confederate Navy in Europe. Completed in 1862 and ostensibly destined for the Chinese Empire, the ship took off on a trial run from which she never returned. Instead, in a successful ruse, she sailed to the Azores, where, just outside the three-mile limit of the Portuguese islands, she was outfitted with artillery and stores from another ship and commissioned in the Confederate States Navy under the command of Captain Raphael Semmes, who raised the Stars and Bars over CSS Alabama.

© C. Henze 1999