evaluation of Captain Gundersen as an experienced shipmaster and the reader is generally left to conclude that he was virtually incompetent. Tango had her share of heavy weather rounding Cape Hom in the southern latitudes' winter months with the insufficient gear and sorely tried crew. ShearrivedinCapeTown 105 days out and spent weeks discharging part of the lumber cargo and then more time in Durban finishing the out-tum. Some of the crew asked to be paid off and were replaced by foreigners. Yet, one of the most militant, Joe Kaplan, remained by the ship though it was he who had confronted the captain at every tum, roused the crew to action at sea, and documented the shortcomings of the ship and owners. Fed up with the delays and costs, the owners in New York finally accepted a very large offer to sell the ship for a price in excess of $400,000 and the Tango passed to Portuguese owners in 1944. The story of Tango reveals the inevitable collision between old traditions and changing times. Captain Gundersen, as noted, had never sailed with a union crew and the agreement struck by the Sailors Union of the Pacific and the Transatlantic Navigation Company of New York left him in the bight of the wire. Lawrence Barber has described the literate crew, who could comprehend and interpret shipping articles and union agreements-and write letters abouttheir''conditions.''His narrative is the epitaph to this last gasp of the sailing ship era of nearly a half century ago. CAPTAIN HAROLD D. HUYCKE
Gray Raiders of the Sea: How Eight Confederate Warships Destroyed the Union's High Seas Commerce, by Chester G. Heam (International Marine Publishing, Camden ME, 1992, 351 pp, 87 b+w illus, appendix , notes, biblio; $24.95hb) This book is a definite candidate for honors in several categories: maritime history, naval history, and commercial history, to suggest a few. Heam's text not only provides interesting and fluent reading, but it is destined to become a landmark reference for the Confederacy's high seas raiders: Sumter, Nashville, Florida, Tallahassee, Chickamauga, Alabama, Georgia, and Shenandoah, which did indeed destroy the Union's maritime commerce. But this is a book about people as well as ships. Hearn brings to life John Newland Maffitt, Raphael Semmes, SEA HISTORY 61 , SPRING 1992
Gideon Welles, James Dunwoody Bulloch, and John A. Winslow, in exquisite biographic detail , and to an appropriately lesser extent, Steven R. Mallory, John Mcintosh Kell, Lord John Russell, Charles Francis Adams, Charles M. Morris, Arthur Sinclair, and James Evans. A host of other characters catch rays of biographic illumination in appropriate settings also, bringing together a breathtakinglyclearpictureofmen,ships, and destruction on the high seas. The tale of James D. Bulloch's struggle against the political might of the United States of America, as he operates in a foreign land , and his ultimate success against enormous odds to bring the raiders into being, is spread through the pages of Gray Raiders of the Sea. While the Union Navy is not overlooked, this is primarily the story of the raiders and their victims. One shudders at the chillingly narrated scenes of destruction. Beautiful clipper ships put to the torch, flames leaping up the rigging, until the charred remains slip beneath the sea. The appended list of Union merchantmen captured and destroyed, or ransomed, provides awesome evidence in support of the effectiveness of the Confederate warships. The pace ofHeam's narrative is rather slow through the opening chapters as he relates the cruises of Sumter and Nashville. It is as though they were there and tales must be told. But the author hits and maintains his stride with Alabama, giving a construction to destruction narrative of Raphael Semmes's ship in prodigious detail from her birth at Liverpool in 1862 to her death off Cherbourg two years later. The policy of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's navy secretary, to ignore the ocean in favor of manning the blockade, receives a telling critique, especially relative to the decline of the American merchant marine. Those eccentric scientists, Charles Wilkes and Matthew Fontaine Maury, who became such impersonal and thoughtless leaders of men, deservedly gamer their own share of Heam' s criticism. The book is written from an unusual Civil War perspective-an international one. In an underlying fabric, Heam weaves the tale of the Confederacy itself, particularly in terms of its popularity as a cause celebre in foreign lands. He relates how exaggerated domestic and overseas newspaper tales of piratical acts begin to work against the Confederates. Great Britain begins to realize she may have overstepped the bounds of prudent international rela-
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