''I'll tell you what, ,' its captain told one of Shenandoah's officers as he left his ship for the last time. Its first capture was the bark Alina out of Searsport, Maine. The thoughts of the captains whose ships the Shenandoah seized were more personal. The Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, Chaffin notes, believed that the depredations of Confederate commerce raiders would drive up insurance and operating costs for New England's fishing and whaling industries and, in Mallory's words, ''have a decided tendency to turn the trading mind of New England to thoughts of peace.' In ''Sea of Gray,' Tom Chaffin, a visiting scholar at Emory University, gives a spirited account of the Shenandoah's odyssey - both an intriguing Civil War story and a bracing nautical yarn. In early 1864, at the height of the Civil War, so successful had Confederate commerce raiders been at destroying Union merchant ships that the Confederacy's agent in London was reporting to the South's navy secretary, ''There really seems nothing for our ships to do now upon the open sea.'īut within months of making that report, James Bulloch was securing a Scottish-built auxiliary clipper for use as yet another raider, the CSS Shenandoah, which, during a yearlong around-the-world voyage, would seize 38 American merchant ships and whalers, destroying all but the few used to send off crews of the destroyed ships. Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah, By Tom Chaffin, Hill and Wang, 432 pp., illustrated, $25

Sea of Gray by Tom Chaffin