There it met a cargo vessel carrying its guns and ammunition, and a week later, Confederate navy lieutenant John N. Unwilling to wait for the arrival of a prospective captain, Bulloch ordered the Oreto to sea on March 22 under the command of a British captain and with a British crew.Ī month later, the Oreto arrived at Nassau. would have been practically useless to a Confederate cruiser.” The Oreto was ready for sea by early January 1862, the same month that the Sumter dropped anchor in Cadiz, though it remained in port until March when Bulloch returned from a blockade running trip to Savannah. As Bulloch said, “A vessel without good sailing qualities. Dependent in part on supply ships that would meet it at predetermined locations, the Oreto would necessarily have to conserve its fuel and rely mostly on sail power to move from place to place. These characteristics were essential for a ship that would have no home base of operations.
(Bulloch could have ordered an iron-hulled ship, but he wanted a vessel that did not require a major shipyard to make repairs.) Though it had two 300-horsepower engines, it also carried an oversize suite of sails and a retractable brass propeller that allowed it to sail more efficiently. The Oreto was a bark-rigged wooden-hulled steam ship. Though the sides of the Oreto were pierced for 16 guns and it had platforms fore and aft for pivot guns, because it had no actual guns on board, British officials overlooked its obvious purpose and left it unmolested.
Bulloch’s solicitors argued that “the mere building of a ship within her Majesty’s dominions” was not, by itself, a violation of British law, and that “the offence is not the building but the equipping.” In effect, so long as the ship in question did not have guns on board, it could not be classified as a warship. Dudley-met only frustration in their efforts to convince the British government to step in and halt the project. Minister, Charles Francis Adams, and the American consul at Liverpool, Thomas H. It was constructed from a set of plans that Miller & Sons had on the shelf for a Royal Navy gunboat, and even Bulloch acknowledged that the builders had to have guessed the ship’s real owner and intended use, but with a wink and a nudge, they kept quiet about it and participated in the hoax by calling the vessel the Oreto and putting it out that it was being built for the Italian government, though the Italian Minister denied any knowledge of it. Miller and Son even before Bulloch received any funds from Richmond to pay for it.Īfter the war, Bulloch insisted that “the contract was made with me as a private person, nothing whatsoever being said about the ultimate destination of the ship, or the object for which she was intended.” But the true purpose of the ship was an open secret. Because of that, the first ship built expressly for Confederate commerce raiding was under construction at the Liverpool shipyard of William C. A South Carolina native, Priolieu personally guaranteed Bulloch’s letter of credit, effectively bankrolling the effort. Priolieu, the managing partner of Fraser, Trenholm, and Company in Liverpool, the same company that played a key role in blockade running.
Bulloch was aided greatly in his eff ort by Charles K. To fulfill his mission of obtaining warships specially designed for commerce raiding, Bulloch had to walk a fine line, for building warships in a neutral country was a violation not only of Britain’s proclamation of neutrality, but also of its Foreign Enlistment Act, which set very specific limits on what British subjects could do in dealing with foreign governments. Taking passage on a steamer from Montreal, Bulloch arrived in Liverpool in June of 1861, the same week the Sumter was commissioned in New Orleans.
Bulloch did not hesitate he announced that he was ready to leave as soon as Mallory told him what he was to do there. He was an active and vigorous man whose first choice of duty was command at sea, but when he reported to Richmond, Mallory declared at once that he wanted him to go to England. Despite his relative youth, Bulloch had a receding hairline for which he compensated by sporting spectacular mutton chop whiskers. naval officer named James Dunwoody Bulloch, who among other claims to fame was the uncle of the then four-year-old future president Theodore Roosevelt. To orchestrate this effort, he relied on a Georgia-born, 38-year-old former U.S. In 1862 Stephen Mallory had already moved to acquire more, bigger, and better-armed ships for commerce raiding. On February 12, 1863, Florida intercepted the giant clipper ship Jacob Bell. John Newland Maffitt, the commanding officer of CSS Florida.
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