The sleek, 222-foot, black auxiliary steamer The Sea King left London on October, 8, 1864, ostensibly bound for Bombay. The subterfuge was ended off the shores of Madeira, as the ship was rechristened and outfitted for war. With new gun ports cut to accommodate additional cannon, the CSS Shenandoah commenced the last, most quixotic sea story of the Civil War, the 58,000-mile, around-the-world cruise of the Confederacy’s third most successful merchant raider. Before its voyage was over, thirty- two Union merchant and whaling ships and their cargoes would be sunk. But it was after ship and crew had rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, stopped long enough in Australia to cause a diplomatic crisis, and navigated the ice floes of Siberia’s Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea, and the Arctic Ocean that their journey took its most fearful turn.

Four months after the Civil War was over, the Shenandoah’s Captain Waddell finally learned he was, and had been, fighting without cause or state. In the eyes of the Union, he had gone from being an enemy combatant to a pirate, a hangable offense. Hunted by Union and British men-of-war, his polyglot crew rife with hints of mutiny, and with dwindling supplies, Waddell elected to camouflage the ship, circumnavigate the globe, and attempt to surrender on English soil.

Assembled from hundreds of original documents, including intimate shipboard journals kept by Shenandoah officers, Sea of Gray is a masterful narrative of men at sea.