'To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth' Review: A Civil War Hunt at Sea
By: Jonathan W. Jordan (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Good naval-pursuit stories walk a fine line. Days and nights of dull watches and putrid food are punctuated by the terrors of sea storms and savage battles. Balance and pacing are crucial to the story's flow. From Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" to C.S. Forester's "The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck," sea-hunt tales, when done right, combine "man versus nature" and "man versus man" conflicts into a single narrative.
In "To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth," Phil Keith and Tom Clavin—whose many books on American history include their previous collaborative effort, "All Blood Runs Red" (2019)—dive into the true story of two naval commanders who played a deadly game of cat-and-mouse across the Atlantic Ocean during the American Civil War.
Because the opposing navies were unevenly matched, big naval battles were rare. Lacking the resources to produce more than a handful of capital ships, the Confederate Navy resorted to asymmetrical warfare: Riverine defense, blockade-breaking and commerce-raiding summed up its roles. The U.S. Navy’s job was more formidable: Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s grizzled secretary of the Navy, directed the fleet to support Union armies near the coasts and rivers, to protect American trade with Europe, and to clamp an economic tourniquet on the South by blockading its ports.
The U.S. Navy’s longest-running mission was to sink CSS Alabama, the most successful Confederate commerce raider of the war. Built near Liverpool, England, Alabama could move under sail or steam power, making her one of the fastest warships on the waves. The presence of her 10 heavy guns meant she rarely had to fire on Yankee merchant ships; her usual method was to stop the merchantman, bring her crew aboard, burn the ship and deposit the crew at the nearest port. Then off to sea again.
From her commissioning in August 1862 to her final battle in June 1864, Alabama sent 52 Union merchant ships and $6 million worth of cargo to the Atlantic floor, and sank the Union gunboat Hatteras in a fight off the Texas coast. Northern newspapers raged. The U.S. Navy ranked the destruction of Alabama and her sisters, CSS Florida and Georgia, as one of its top priorities.
To sink the Alabama, the United States deployed three-masted “sloops of war” that, like their Confederate prey, could run on either wind or steam. The seven-gun steamer USS Kearsarge, launched in 1861, plied the Atlantic waters from Spain to the Gulf of Mexico chasing rumors and old sightings of Alabama and her crew. Alabama evaded the seaborne posse by sticking to the North Atlantic and Europe’s coast—and sailed around Africa, capturing merchantmen as far away as the South China Sea.
“To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth” trains its spyglass on two captains who sailed under opposing flags. Raphael Semmes was a Maryland-born adventurer who rose to the rank of commander in the U.S. Navy. When his adopted state of Alabama seceded in January 1861, he resigned his commission to serve the Confederacy. During the war’s first full year, the Confederate government assigned him to command Alabama.
Semmes’s prewar companion was John Winslow, a North Carolinian who, like Semmes, joined a navy of wooden ships and rose through the ranks. In 1846, during the war with Mexico, the two Southerners shared a cabin aboard USS Cumberland and chased fleeting glory. But Winslow, an abolitionist at heart, remained loyal to the Union. He would be tasked with hunting down his old shipmate.
After establishing backstories for the captains, their ships and key officers, Messrs. Keith and Clavin turn to the hunt. In a piece of detective work out of a Patrick O’Brian novel, Winslow narrows down the likely routes Semmes could take. “The Confederate commerce raiders, at one time or another, would have to return to some port to coal, offload their prisoners, buy supplies, and make repairs,” the authors write. “Once all these points were plotted out, a solution became obvious: target the French ports, especially Brest, Calais, and possibly Cherbourg.”
As Winslow hunted the hunters, Semmes and the Alabama, like their cause, began running out of steam. “As with his uniform, Semmes was frayed and tired,” the authors write. “He was well into his third year of being away from home and hearth. He confided in his journal, ‘The fact is, I am past the age when men ought to be subjected to the hardships and discomforts of the sea.’ ”
But neither man would back down from a fight, and when Winslow finally found Alabama at anchor at Cherbourg, both captains knew the long chase had come to an end. “Every Union captain was aware of the battering given to the Hatteras,” the authors note. “Semmes knew his former shipmate John Winslow was unlikely to be intimidated, but the Rebel captain believed his ship, even in its deteriorated condition, could beat the Kearsarge.”
The battle plays out in a rousing shot-by-shot narrative that covers the book’s final quarter. Shells fly, limbs are shattered and ships shudder under the weight of hot, flying iron. The human toll is brutal, as the authors describe in a scene aboard the Alabama: “As the battle raged above, more men were being brought below. For most, there was little the surgeons could do. Shrapnel and splinters had made an unholy scarlet mess of bodies. The groans of suffering almost drowned out the noise of the explosions.”
Those not killed or wounded did not weather the storm unscathed. For the Kearsarge’s gunners, the authors write, “the smoke stung their eyes until, red and watered, they could hardly see. Each roar of a gun assaulted the ears until they were temporarily deaf. It was nearly impossible to breathe as particles of gunpowder, smoke, dust, and fumes from the ship’s stack choked their lungs nearly shut. Snaking lines wrenched arms and legs; deadly splinters flew with each shot the enemy landed; shrapnel was always flying about, and the noise and the pounding literally rattled their brains inside their skulls.”
The book’s prose is highly accessible, as when Semmes and Winslow meet aboard Cumberland: Semmes, “two years Winslow’s senior, would share Winslow’s cabin and become a pal to light cigars with at sunset, as they leaned over the taffrail and gabbed about the war.” The book is also mercifully free of the nautical jargon that regularly sends fans of Patrick O’Brian’s novels to Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine.
“To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth,” completed after Phil Keith died last year, is entertaining from beginning to end, though its pace is slowed at times when delving into the backstories of other ships and characters. For fans of O’Brian and Forester, it is a welcome addition to the lore of navies whose sailors braved storms and shrapnel in a war for America’s destiny.
—Mr. Jordan is the author of “Lone Star Navy: Texas, the Fight for the Gulf of Mexico, and the Shaping of the American West.”
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