Five Flags: The Warship that Reshaped the World
by By Stuart Buxton 24 Feb 13:54 PST
As wooden ships gave way to ironclads, and sail gave way to steam in the nineteenth century, one warship fought through the civil wars that shaped modern America, Germany and Japan. Its career spanned high politics and secret diplomacy, arms dealers and royal courts, spies, sailors, and samurai across three continents. In a vivid narrative travelling from London to Paris, from Copenhagen to Havana, from Washington to Tokyo, Five Flags brings this incredible true story to life.
Strangled by the Union’s naval blockade, the Confederacy needed ships - and turned to Europe to build them. In 1862, Emperor Napoleon III agreed to deliver a unique new design whose 300-pounder canon, 5 inches of armour, and twenty-foot bow ram made her a threat to every warship on earth.
Before the mighty ironclad was finished, U.S. agents discovered it, and she was sold to Denmark, only to be smuggled back after her defeat by Prussia. Christened Stonewall after the legendary general, the ship took on an elite crew with 5 captains among them, narrowly survived terrifying storms, took refuge in Spain and had to run the gauntlet of Union warships and Spanish courts to escape. The Stonewall reached Cuba in May 1865 - too late to change the Civil War - before her sale to the Queen of Spain, and a handover to a newly re-united America.
But the ironclad would not end its career mothballed at the Washington Navy Yard. Though sold to the Tokugawa shogun in 1867, she was delivered to his bitter enemy the emperor and led the brutal and harrowing war at sea that secured the Meiji restoration and set Japan on a path of modernization, industrialization, and expansion that would end in World War II.
About the Author:
Stuart Buxton spent three decades in product management and marketing for tech companies in Asia. He lives in Australia.
Excerpt - Chapter 11: A Second Flag
On September 10, 1863, a disgruntled Arman shipyard employee named Trémont walked into the Union’s stately three-story Parisian embassy with an offer that seemed too good to be true.
He knew the Confederates had lost their Laird rams to the turncoat Clarence Yonge’s testimony. Would they pay for information on new rebel warships in France? His price was 20,000 francs. There was hardly a figure he could have quoted that Consul General John Bigelow wouldn’t have happily paid. Sample documents were requested and supplied. This was no mere tipoff—it was a paper trail all the way to the Little White House. Twenty-one documents followed, laying out French complicity in black and white. Bigelow raced the documents to the US minister to France, William L. Dayton, who very publicly called the French out, and to William H. Seward who added a threat to embarrass Napolean III with their lucrative rebel tobacco trade and designs on a proxy Mexican monarchy.
This was the final straw for senior French officials who’d indulged the emperor to this point. Foreign affairs minister Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys took both threats at face value and was so exasperated he later said of Napoleon III when he’d led them to ruin against Prussia, “The emperor has immense desires and limited abilities.”
French officials presented Lucien Arman with papers alleging the twin rams under construction were not for Sweden and could represent a violation of neutrality. It was enough to force Arman, who was, after all, a national legislator himself, to distance himself from them, too. Arman was summoned to the king, “who rated him severely, threatened imprisonment, ordered him to sell the ships at once. . . . The two corvettes at Nantes [Texas and Georgia] were also ordered to be sold. The order is of the most peremptory kind, not only directing the sale but requiring the builders to furnish proof to the minister of foreign affairs that the sale is a real one . . . in a style of virtuous indignation.”
Bigelow called it out for the theater it was, “when you call to mind the fact that this same Minister of Marine on the 6th day of June, 1863, wrote over his own official signature a formal authorization to arm those very ships with 14 heavy guns each ‘canons raye de trentes,’ the affectation of having just discovered them to be suitable for purpose of war is really astonishing.”
A chastened French government declared that the twin rams and four corvettes under construction would be sold to governments then at peace. Perhaps they even meant it, though they certainly didn’t honor it. Confederate efforts to use new cutouts were rebuffed. James Dunwoody Bulloch advised the rebel Congress that the French administration was becoming “more unfriendly than Earl Russell,” the two-time prime minister of England.
With the question of who they wouldn’t serve settled, Arman turned to who they would. Denmark was at war with Prussia and Austria. Two corvettes and the second flagship ram, Cheops, were sold to Prussia. The other ram was sold to a Swedish banker acting for Denmark after initial approaches to the Italian and Mexican navies amounted to nothing. Two corvettes were sold to Peru. Bulloch stayed in touch at every step, looking for a loophole, and later affirming, “I believe that M. Arman has acted in a perfectly loyal manner thus far in these transactions, and he sincerely regrets the present turn of events. He has proposed that a nominal sale of the vessels should be made to a Danish banker, and that there should be a private agreement providing for a redelivery to us at some point beyond the jurisdiction of France.”
Bulloch’s belief in Napoleon III never wavered, convinced he “favours us so far as to tell us frankly to sell out and save our money,” though “there was still a large balance in question at the end of the war, which has never been settled.” Despite the hope of a later resale, Bulloch despaired at their loss. “The two Bordeaux ironclads and the four corvettes would have been a formidable attacking squadron and would have enabled its commander to strike severe and telling blows upon the Northern seaboard. The loss of the ironclads changes the whole character of the force, and deprives it of its real power of offence. There really seems but little for our ships to do now upon the open sea.
Bulloch ordered down-scaled steamships as a last-gasp option with smaller European yards prepared to face penalties for a customer paying overs. Six modest iron-hulled twin-screw torpedo boats were contracted in London. Six variants were contracted in Liverpool. More detail survives on the London designs, which featured a semi-submerged hull for a low silhouette on the water and light armor. None are recorded as having served, though at least one completed trials on the Thames, and at least three were shipped to North America as deck cargo on the Confederacy’s largest blockade-runners. Though these were ultimately reported by the Union’s consular network to Charles Francis Adams, no formal protests were made, and the Navy focused on intercepting their carriers. None fought.
As late as October 1864, new agents like chief engineer Quinn were still being dispatched to Europe with plans for a torpedo boat fleet that amounted to nothing. The South’s last gasp was the 230-foot steamship Hawk, which was funded by the speculative Scottish firm Henderson and Colborne and fitted out by the blockade-runner Thomas Sterling Begbie, but stranded in Bermuda by their bankruptcy.
Numerous other projects were rumored. The five-nation ship’s future captain noted, “Every ship then being built in Europe acquired this reputation.” The British Crown’s representative in America, Sir Frederick W. A. Bruce, recorded, “There is no doubt that agents of the confederates were on the look-out to purchase the more powerful vessels of the squadron from the Chinese,” when the Qing emperor rejected them. Four were returned to Britain, while the remainder transferred to new owners in Bombay (followed partway by the raider Alabama trying to persuade a former Fraser, Trenholm & Company employee to hijack them, who declined, but later helmed the blockade-runner Lady Stirling).
Commander M. F. Maury still dreamed of a twin-turret oceanic ironclad with a full spread of sail and a 16-knot top speed and progressed to securing loans against future crops and having drawings made, before cooler heads prevailed. Confederate diplomat John Slidell directed no further ships could be commissioned unless the Confederacy was granted diplomatic recognition, or they could be openly contracted for. Their window had closed.
Bulloch was indefatigable. If guns and rams couldn’t get the job done, perhaps new technologies could.
When the North declined the Winans steam gun, which looked like a five-ton steampunk tank with a steam-powered centrifugal gun capable of flinging two hundred rounds per minute, it was smuggled to Harper’s Ferry, though it ended the war with a whimper stored in Lowell, Massachusetts. In 1862, architectural engineer William C. Powers built a full-size mock-up of a steam-powered Archimedean screw helicopter in Mobile, which could never have worked. Experimental double-barreled cannon failed trials in Georgia when they only managed to damage a chimney in one direction and a cow in another. Henry Clay Pate’s Confederate revolving cannon, which scaled up a revolver action to field artillery, failed. Desperation closed in. When Georgia governor Joe Brown ordered ten thousand pikes to arm local troops, he knew what chance medieval weapons would stand on a modern battlefield.
Not all innovations floundered. The Union’s Cairo was sunk by an electrically detonated naval mine on the Yazoo River in Mississippi in December 1862. Armored railcars defended against raiders. Both sides developed a balloon corps for observation. The North’s Thaddeus S. C. Lowe had been about to attempt a lighter-than-air crossing of the Atlantic when war broke out, and he oversaw new designs with generators and telegraph sets. The Confederates matched them, barely, with silken petticoat donations, wood, fabric, and the heat of oil-soaked pinecones. Because neither side commissioned these aeronauts into the army, the legal situation for these pioneers was murky so they risked being hung as spies.
Finned grenades were first thrown. New rifled barrels transformed infantry range and firepower. Terrible new 0.58 Minié bullets almost as big as a dime flattened as they pulled skin, bacteria, and clothing into their wounds and often failed to exit, driving a wave of brutal battlefield amputations. Triage surgeons quickly learned who to treat first. Seventy-one percent of those hit in their extremities survived, but gut shots were almost always fatal. Changes quickly rippled out from their battlefields. The anesthesia inhaler was a new mercy. Income tax was introduced for the first time, though at just 7.5 percent at war’s end. Clothing and shoe sizes were standardized. Lime lights made new night action possible. Jellybeans were conceived to reach beloved soldiers.
The Confederate Torpedo Bureau under Lieutenant H. Davidson continued the pioneering work of Commander M. F. Maury. Though America’s Robert Fulton had demonstrated the destruction of the brig Dorethea with floating mines in 1805, neither England nor France was moved to buy a weapon “that would give great advantage to weaker maritime nations.” Improvised versions in the War of 1812 were seen more as terrorism than warfare. British captain Thomas Hardy of the HMS Ramillies declared if America used any “torpedo boat” in this “cruel and unheard-of warfare,” he would “order every house near the shore to be destroyed.” Russia has no such qualms employing in the Crimea, and the Confederacy didn’t either. While they were a defensive deterrent for the South—and certainly sunk Union vessels—they couldn’t address the Union blockade.
In all, just five ships built in western European ports provided active service in the Confederate navy. At least five ironclads, fourteen cruisers of varying sizes, and numerous smaller gunboats had been thwarted by the Union’s policing.
Everything the South had to fight with was already at sea. Their would-be flagships, now in service to Prussia and Denmark, then found themselves not fighting for Southern secession, but on opposite sides of a sharp continental war that would be instrumental in shaping the future German state.