Convalescence Reading

As I recover from this cold (must be just a cold because I had a flu shot months ago) I’ve begun reading again. Yes, during my illness I stupored through a couple of murder mysteries and a few science fiction tales, but a week later I can’t even remember what they were.

But over the past few days I’ve really enjoyed Tom Chaffin’s Sea Of Gray: The Around-The-World Odyssey Of The Confederate Raider Shenandoah. It’s the best book of this sort I’ve ever read.

During the War Between The States, the enemy’s “Anaconda Plan” strangled the South by blockading all southern ports. The federal navy cut off imported necessities from the Confederate homeland and prohibited the export of cotton, on which Southern economy depended, by sealing ports and rivers.

The South responded by enlisting privateers, privately owned ships outfitted for wartime duty, by commissioning blockade runners, swift vessels which tried to break through the yankee stranglehold, and by outfitting a dozen raiders to prey on yankee commerce.

The idea behind the raiders was to thin out enemy warships by drawing them away from blockading ports, and to run up insurance rates so yankee merchants would sue for peace—hit the enemy where it hurts—his pocketbook.

The C.S.S. Shenandoah’s mission as she left Liverpool, England, required her to destroy the yankee whaling fleet in the Arctic’s Bering Sea, and whatever and wherever else she could attack.

Here’s a photograph taken of her during a stop in Melbourne, Australia, in February, 1865:

Chaffin’s book, drawing heavily on journals kept by Shenandoah officers, details the ship’s voyage that circumnavigated the globe. Covering 58,000 miles, she was the only Confederate ship to do so. During her quest she burned 32 yankee ships, ransomed six others, and captured 1,053 prisoners of war.

Oddly enough in this war, during the Shenandoah’s operation, not a single man on either side was killed in battle.

Problem was…

While the raider cruised out of touch of land and news of the day in the Arctic, much of the damage the Shenandoah inflicted occurred two months after General Lee had surrendered to Grant effectually ending the war. The yankees labeled the Shenandoah a pirate ship saying all officers and crew should be hanged… The Shenandoah had to make it from the Arctic, down the Pacific around the Horn of South America, and back up the Atlantic to Liverpool to surrender to the British there without falling into yankee hands.

What a tale!

Delightful.

Great reading!

Also, this morning I finally finished reading the Book of Genesis, first book of the Old Testament. Yes, I’m way behind in my resolution the read the Bible through this year. Is being sick a good excuse (or the fact that I read murder mysteries and Sci/Fi instead)?

Anyhow, my general impression of Genesis is a sense of wonder at how God dealt with people who were busy doing ordinary things.

When visited by God, most of these folks were breeding goats, tending sheep, digging wells, watering camels, buying fields, dreaming dreams. They seldom seemed to be doing religious things at all.

Yet the Lord God had His hand on them.

Even the people who were religious didn’t make a Thing out of it. They worshiped the Lord and milked their cows and cooked dinner and got married and buried their dead and squabbled among themselves and fled famines and simply lived in the light of God.

Yet they were by no means flippant about it. They held the Lord in highest regard while weaving Him into the warp and woof of their lives without much fuss.

I’m impressed.