NARRATOR: Deep beneath the surface
lie secrets from America's darkest days.
MAN: Think we're starting to come over something right now.
NARRATOR: Hidden evidence
of the bloodiest war in US history,
when this nation almost tears itself apart.
MAN: Mag's going crazy.
MAN: You've got something big here.
MAN: It's big.
NARRATOR: Stories are now emerging
that tell of a revolution in warfare.
MAN: Earlier conflicts employed both ships and troops on land.
The Civil War took it to a whole new level.
NARRATOR: This is war waged not just by armies
but entire societies.
A remorseless conflict over land, food and money
raging in every corner of the world.
MAN: The American Civil War was an all-encompassing experience.
It was a war that involved the entire economy of both sides.
It spread itself through the entire social fabric.
MAN: This was total war.
In total war, you sink everything the enemy sends in.
♪
NARRATOR: April 1861.
11 Southern states break away
and form the Confederate States of America.
[gunshot]
In the years that follow,
cannons roar and muskets crackle
across Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
But what does a wreck in a Florida river
reveal about the forgotten battle lines of the Civil War?
The state of Florida is a bastion
of the rebel Confederacy.
Although it's a full 700 miles from the front line,
it's a vital bread basket supplying the South's army
with everything from pork and beef to corn and potatoes.
12 miles south of Jacksonville...
JAMES DELGADO: That's Mandarin Point right there, right?
KEITH HOLLAND: Right in front of us.
NARRATOR: Maritime archaeologist James Delgado
and explorer Keith Holland are on the St. John's River.
The team's magnetometer is picking up a powerful signal
from the riverbed.
KEITH: The mag's going crazy.
NARRATOR: The unmistakable signature of a shipwreck.
JAMES: There's something there.
NARRATOR: Sonar equipment generates an image
of what's down there.
MAN: Alright, it looks like we're starting
to come over something right now.
NARRATOR: A chunk of metal rests on the bottom.
A tantalizing hint of a wreck buried in sediment.
But the black water creates an impenetrable cloak.
KEITH: The visibility in the very bottom is zero.
You are swimming in a thick, viscous suspension of mud.
JAMES: Literally, when you dive there are times you can't see
your hands in front of your face.
NARRATOR: The team deploys a sub-bottom profiler.
Its low-frequency sound waves penetrate the sediment
and return data on the structure
hidden beneath the mud.
Combining this data with reports from exploratory dives,
we can reveal what no camera could ever see.
As the water begins to drain away,
the object picked up by the sonar is revealed:
a rusted, 40-foot length of iron.
It's the axle of a paddle wheel.
Stripping back the black Florida mud
exposes wooden planks.
The remains of a long deck.
♪
And more rusted metal.
The broken leftovers of two smoke stacks and a boiler.
This is a side-wheel paddle steamer.
50 years after their invention in 1807,
paddle steamers had come to dominate the rivers
of the American South
as transporters carrying trade goods, mail and people.
So what can this one tell us about the Civil War?
Keith hunts for answers deep within the wreck.
Diving the dark waters of the St. John's,
archaeologists must rely on touch.
But deep inside the ship,
Keith's team makes a massive discovery.
Hundreds of wooden boxes, mostly intact.
Each one inscribed with faded letters.
KEITH: Every single box we opened up
had somebody's name on it, and their regiment.
This was a United States Northern military transport.
NARRATOR: The wreck is a fascinating time capsule,
containing more than 6,000 items:
belt buckles with the insignia "US"
confirm that the boxes belong to the northern Union Army,
but there are no firearms and not one case of ammunition.
KEITH: We expected we would find
primarily military weapons, military gear.
In fact, what we found was mostly personal items.
NARRATOR: Toothbrushes.
Smoking pipes.
Molded clay checkerboard pieces and chessmen.
Ordinary everyday objects.
Keith's discovery is one of the largest recoveries
of Civil War artifacts ever.
But what was this paddle steamer doing
carrying toothbrushes and chess pieces
deep into the Confederate South?
♪
Searching through military reports,
Keith discovers that a Union paddle steamer was lost
in the river in 1864; three years into the war.
The Maple Leaf.
It's a civilian vessel being used by the Union Army.
Not carrying troops,
but transporting the belongings of three regiments.
An occupying force.
The Maple Leaf is an important cog in the Union war machine.
The support boat for an infantry invasion.
The Union wants to take control of northern Florida,
and cut off crucial supplies flowing to Confederate soldiers
on the front lines.
So how did the transport ship
end up at the bottom of the St. John's River?
Jim and Keith look for clues in the silt.
MAN: Couple of meters of good data down there.
NARRATOR: By combining the sub-surface information
with archaeological and historical research,
we can return to the drained wreck
and reconstruct the exact shape of the hull
buried below the river bottom
for the first time since it sank.
The 180-foot-long wooden vessel remains largely intact,
but on the starboard side
the structure appears to be punctured.
The damage at the Maple Leaf's bow
almost certainly caused it to sink.
KEITH: Okay.
NARRATOR: Hunting for an explanation,
Keith digs further into the historical records.
He uncovers eyewitness testimony
given by the ship's pilot, local navigator Romeo Murray.
KEITH: "For 16 years I've been acting as a pilot
on the St. John's River, and between that..."
NARRATOR: He describes a clear, moonlit night
and reveals some key evidence.
KEITH: He's holding the wheel,
and all of a sudden Romeo describes the whole pilot house
being raised up and then falling forward,
and standing up he smells powder, black powder.
NARRATOR: There are no other ships on the river,
and no cannon fire from the shore,
so who or what delivered the fatal blow?
Keith finds the reports written by Confederates
defending the river.
They reveal that the Southern forces employ a new tactic.
They plant homemade river mines
moored just below the surface of the water;
the Civil War equivalent of IEDs.
They call them torpedoes, and they are highly controversial.
CRAIG SYMONDS: One of the things about the American Civil War
is that it pushes the boundary
of what's considered acceptable in warfare.
There was a sense on both sides when the war began
that putting a torpedo in the path of a ship
was somehow a violation of the rules of war.
It was inhumane behavior.
NARRATOR: For the Confederacy, there's no choice.
It's a rural economy, lacking military resources,
desperately trying to land punches
on an industrial heavyweight.
JAMES: The South was always at a disadvantage in the Civil War.
In a sense, it was a David versus Goliath fight.
CRAIG: The Confederacy needed to be more inventive,
more creative in the kind of naval weapons it employed.
JAMES: The torpedo was an effective and innovative weapon
that has never been used in naval combat
until the Civil War.
NARRATOR: This is a new, merciless type of conflict
where the old rules of engagement are blurred.
Even a transport ship becomes a critical strategic target.
It's now possible to piece together
the final moments of the Maple Leaf.
The Union's campaign in Florida
threatens to cut the Confederacy supplies
to the front line,
so the South responds in the only way it can:
with guerrilla tactics.
4:00 AM, April 1, 1864.
The Maple Leaf's hull touches the trigger
of a Confederate torpedo.
There's a huge explosion.
The pilot house topples as the mast falls forward.
The ship sinks in minutes.
As tactics evolve, the war becomes a remorseless struggle
to destroy the enemy's logistics,
resources and supplies.
What does a bizarre set of wrecks
off the South Carolina coast
reveal about the Union's determination
to drive the South to ruin?
NARRATOR: Union commanders are battling for the survival
of the United States of America.
But they're not just fighting an army,
they're fighting an idea: Southern independence.
To kill it, they need to target its economy.
In 1861, that means cotton.
CRAIG: The Confederacy thought of their cotton as white gold,
almost the bullion that would underwrite their economy.
NARRATOR: The Confederate war effort depends on
exporting cotton to Europe in exchange for vital supplies.
JAMES: The more cotton that can go out
and feed a hungry British textile market,
means more credit and the ability to buy things abroad.
CRAIG: Abraham Lincoln was convinced
if you could limit the availability
of critical elements in the South,
it cannot continue to fight such an all-embracing conflict.
NARRATOR: It seems impossible.
The Confederate coastline stretches 3,500 miles.
It includes 189 harbors, inlets and river mouths.
How do you lay siege to half a continent?
♪
JIM SPIREK: Let's do four to five knots, should be good.
NARRATOR: Marine archaeologist Jim Spirek
has come to the epicenter of the South's cotton trade:
Charleston, South Carolina.
JIM: One, two, three.
NARRATOR: Jim believes this harbor could hold clues
to the Union's strategy.
JIM: Fish looks good. Let's go.
NARRATOR: As he crisscrosses the coastline,
his equipment picks up some surprising signals.
JIM: Alright, there's some magnetic readings.
A large amount of iron down there.
Can you see anything on the sonar, Ryan?
RYAN: I mean, there's some relief.
There's no real structure to it.
NARRATOR: On the southern approach to the harbor,
Jim's sonar uncovers an unusual formation.
JIM: There is definitely a scatter of material.
NARRATOR: The scans appear to show irregular mounds.
Not just one, but more than a dozen,
almost all long and narrow and shaped like boats.
♪
Churned up sediment clouds the water.
Visibility is just a few feet.
But he can identify an unusual pile of rocks.
How did these get here?
To find out, we can shed light
on the murky South Carolina seabed.
♪
As water pours away, it reveals
that there are multiple piles of rock
resting on the muddy bottom.
♪
And pieces of metal, now clearly visible,
jutting up from the rocks.
♪
Rocks are often used as ballast to control a ship's buoyancy.
But there are far more here than any ship would need.
What is this ghostly fleet of stone ships?
Jim believes clues might lie in the rocks themselves.
He retrieves a sample from one of the wrecks.
[ship horn blows]
♪
Analyzing the stone, he discovers the rock piles
are composed almost entirely of granite.
JIM: There are no natural occurring granite outcrops
along the South Carolina coast,
so these would've had to been brought in.
NARRATOR: But 750 miles away, there is a rich source
of this type of rock in Union-controlled New England.
These must be the wrecks of Union ships.
So why was the Union Navy carrying granite
into the heart of the Confederacy?
Returning to the drained outer harbor,
a closer look at the protruding metal reveals
that they are short lengths of lead pipe
that aren't normally part of a ship's structure.
♪
Jim digs into military intelligence reports.
He finds that in 1861 the Union Navy
buys a fleet of New England whaling vessels.
The fill them with locally quarried granite,
and set a course south.
And there's one further clue:
each is fitted with a pipe and valve.
They must be designed to let in water on purpose.
The whaling vessels are not the victims of a sea battle;
they're scuttled,
sunk by their own crews.
Jim wants to know why the Union
would sail all the way down to Charleston,
only to sink its own ships.
He compares the location of the rock piles
to historical maps of the harbor's geography,
where he deciphers the still-visible signs
of a remarkable Union strategy.
In 1861, a natural sandbar blocks ships
from entering Charleston Harbor.
Five separate channels offer a safe passage through the bar.
The Union Navy scuttles its armada of granite-filled wrecks
in the two largest channels,
and then guards the other channels with warships.
JIM: The purpose of the stone fleet off Charleston Harbor
was to, in effect, completely isolate Charleston
from the world.
NARRATOR: By the end of January 1862,
more than two dozen wrecked hulks rise up from the seabed,
blocking the main channels
in and out of the South's largest cotton trading port.
A bold attempt to starve the Southern economy.
But historical sources suggest that the Union blockade
is far from watertight.
CRAIG: The Confederate blockade runners got in and out
with some regularity, and every time that happened,
Northern newspapers would shout
that the blockade was not working, that it was a failure.
NARRATOR: The Union has spent
hundreds of thousands of dollars scuttling ships
to block the entrance to Charleston.
Why isn't the stone fleet doing its job?
NARRATOR: Marine archaeologist Jim Spirek and his team
are exploring the drowned remnants
of the Union's blockade of the South.
Records suggest that the strategy wasn't working.
Ships ran the blockade more than 3,500 times
in the first year of the war.
But how?
By clearing the rock
from the scuttled New England whaling ships,
we can see what lies beneath.
The last signs of the original vessels.
The remains of their wooden hulls.
But also copper fasteners used by shipbuilders
to hold the planks in place,
but something's not right.
If the wooden hull had rotted away,
the copper spikes should be standing straight,
but these are bent out of shape.
Jim's research turns up an account of the stone fleet
observed from the shore.
It describes the wrecked hulks poking up out of the water,
blocking the channel.
But there's a twist to this story.
Within weeks, the scuttled ships are falling apart.
JIM: The stone fleet really wasn't doing its job
because large sections of the shipwreck were breaking away,
and some of them coming into the harbor itself.
NARRATOR: The Union Navy is floundering
in its attempt to close off
the Confederacy's chief source of income,
because it fails to factor in the rough winter seas.
[waves roaring]
Atlantic waves quickly rip the hulks apart,
twisting the copper pins as the wood is pulled away,
leaving behind only their heavy stone cargo.
The stone fleet is failing.
So the Union ploughs more money into more warships,
until as many as 500 ships with a total crew of 100,000 men
patrol the Southern ports.
CRAIG: More ships, more men were involved
in trying to blockade the Southern coast
than had been involved
in all of America's previous naval wars combined.
NARRATOR: Soon every important Southern harbor
has 20 or more ships circling offshore.
Only Wilmington, North Carolina,
remains open to Confederate trade.
CRAIG: The total amount of trade in and out of the Confederacy
dropped by 90%.
The South was constantly gasping for economic breath.
NARRATOR: The Union is starving the South of income,
while on land its army inflicts famous defeats
at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
but somehow the Confederacy clings on.
♪
What does the wreck of a Confederate ship
in the middle of the Atlantic
reveal about how the South fights for its life?
On August 25, 1864,
the Mary Celestia successfully clears the blockade,
carrying 550 bales of cotton from Wilmington.
Four days later, she offloads her cargo in Bermuda,
a convenient drop-off point for European merchants.
But just seven days later, on a flat, calm day,
she sinks in mere minutes in what should be safe waters.
Anthropologist Philippe Rouja is one of a team of experts
working to unravel what happened to the Mary Celestia.
♪
PHILIPPE ROUJA: This wreck in particular,
especially on a day like this where it's starting to kick up,
something might get moved or something might get exposed
that we hadn't anticipated, but every dive is different.
♪
NARRATOR: In the century and a half
since the Mary Celestia's sinking,
the ocean has buffeted her remains.
She's been buried, stripped bare, and buried again
as hurricanes lash the seabed.
Philippe explores her rusting carcass
after every major storm, looking for new clues.
But a single dive gives only a snapshot view of the wreck.
Now we can integrate data from archaeological surveys
in all conditions, and drain the shores of Bermuda.
♪
As the water recedes,
the blades of a paddle wheel emerge.
Remarkably, it still stands upright,
even after more than 150 years on the ocean floor.
Her bow lies on its port side,
sheared off from the rest of the structure.
The steamer's engine room remains vertical.
And now, fully visible, the ship's riveted all-iron hull.
Enough of the ship's architecture survives
to reconstruct her.
And she's an extraordinary piece of engineering.
Unusually narrow for her length,
her hull is streamlined.
Her powerful engines are oversized,
and the paddle wheel blades could be tilted
to hit the water at the perfect angle.
JAMES: Mary Celestia was built to be fast, with a sleek hull,
and also with a low profile
to help blend in with the environment;
an ideal blockade runner.
NARRATOR: Confederate blockade runners are specially designed
to carry goods swiftly through lines of warships,
and outrun the Union guns.
They drop off their cargo
at points in and around the North Atlantic,
close enough to the South
for a steamer to reach on minimal fuel,
but far enough away to escape the Union warships
guarding the coast.
Three years into the war, the blockade runners
are keeping the Southern economy afloat.
By September 6, 1864,
the Mary Celestia has already beaten the blockade
eight times in four months.
Now she's safe from Union warships in Bermuda,
and unloads her precious cotton.
So with the Union Navy 650 miles away,
why does she sink?
♪
Searching through local newspapers,
Philippe discovers a customs report.
PHILIPPE: There it is.
NARRATOR: It lists the cargo carried by the Mary Celestia
on her final planned voyage,
another run through the blockade back into Wilmington.
PHILIPPE: So we see here that the records are indicating
that she was carrying bacon and 534 boxes of merchandise.
NARRATOR: Some details of the report don't add up.
PHILIPPE: The first thing they say
is that she's going to Nassau, and she just absolutely is not.
She's actually running the blockade,
you know, we know that this log is not accurate.
And so what was actually on the Mary Celestia?
Well, that is a mystery.
NARRATOR: The wreckage of the Mary Celestia
still holds secrets.
NARRATOR: Clues to the Mary Celestia's sinking
may lie in what the blockade runner
was bringing back to the Confederacy.
To uncover the ship's secret cargo,
we can return to the drained ocean floor.
At the bow, the ship's forepeak now lies exposed.
This tight space was used in ships like this
for secure storage.
Based on archaeologists' data, it can now be reconstructed.
When the ship is built, this locker is used by the bosun,
the ship's head of maintenance.
Now its wooden compartments are rotted away,
leaving the contents uncovered.
Among the finds are tins of paint and lengths of rope,
a pair of shoes
and a foot-shaped wooden mold used by shoemakers.
They could simply be the bosun's personal supplies,
but they could also hint at a larger cargo.
The discovery of a letter
written by the ship's chief engineer, Charles Middleton,
contains clues to some of the merchandise
declared by the captain as the Mary Celestia left Bermuda.
PHILIPPE: Charles Middleton describes in one of his letters
very specifically the things that he lost
on the Mary Celestia.
This includes ladies' dresses, barrels of sugar,
tea, and 59 pairs of shoes.
JAMES: Amazingly enough,
shoes were in short supply in the Confederacy.
Most of the leather manufacturing,
most of the shoemaking was up in the Northern states.
Shoes become invaluable.
NARRATOR: Not only does the blockade
prevent the Confederacy from getting cotton out,
it stops it bringing in daily essentials,
hurting Southern morale.
CRAIG: The goal was to asphyxiate
not only its military, but its civilian society,
and demonstrate to Southerners
that they'd made a terrible mistake
to secede from the Union.
NARRATOR: The cargo in the forepeak reveals
the Mary Celestia's mission, and the pressure on the South.
But it doesn't explain what happened to her.
Perhaps the discovery of items not listed
on the customs report can help reveal the truth.
PHILIPPE: There are lots of local stories
about early divers finding things on the Mary Celestia.
They found cases of guns, cases of rifles.
NARRATOR: If she was carrying a cargo of weapons and ammunition
bound for the Confederate Army, the Mary Celestia would be
a prime target for Union warships.
But Bermuda is a safe haven,
650 miles from the Union Navy
patrolling the Confederate coast.
♪
Returning to the drained seafloor,
a closer look at the wreck's surviving structure
reveals more detail.
Her twisted bow is separated from her engine space
and the rest of the hull.
Whatever caused this destruction
did so with huge force,
but there's no sign of damage to the boilers.
There was no explosion.
And there were no sea mines
this far from the American coast.
The wreck lies surrounded by a different threat: coral.
Beneath the ocean's surface, a giant reef encircles Bermuda.
A lethal barrier reaching up from the seabed.
PHILIPPE: It's as hard as marble,
and a ship hitting that literally gets torn to pieces.
NARRATOR: The Mary Celestia must have struck the reef,
but reports suggest conditions were flat and calm.
♪
PHILIPPE: "Loss of the steamer, Mary Celestia.
It is our painful duty to record the loss
of that beautiful little steamer..."
NARRATOR: Philippe learns that on the day she sinks,
the Mary Celestia is piloted
by an experienced Bermudian navigator, John Virgin.
His job is to carefully guide the ship
clear of Bermuda's dangerous reef,
but the account of the sinking
suggests the vessel is moving with reckless speed.
PHILIPPE: The ship was traveling at 12 to 13 knots.
That's fast. I mean, that's really fast.
NARRATOR: A local pilot plows into a well-known reef
at 13 knots.
It could have simply been misfortune,
but for some experts the clues point elsewhere.
JAMES: In my opinion, there's no way
the wreck of Mary Celestia is an accident.
John Virgin picked the right spot to wreck her.
It's the perfect spot to destroy the ship
while making sure that the crew has a chance to live.
NARRATOR: Some believe that John Virgin is a secret enemy
of the Confederacy,
or a saboteur in the pay of Union spies.
If that's true, then he does a very effective job,
wrecking one of the best blockade runners of them all.
By shutting down its every effort to trade,
the Union is slowly squeezing the Confederacy.
The idea of an independent South is beginning to die.
But 3,500 miles from the American coast,
a mysterious wreck reveals
a final desperate Confederate plan
to take the Civil War global.
June 19, 1864.
A crowd gathers on the cliffs of northern France
to watch a fiery spectacle.
The last stand of a legendary Confederate warship,
the CSS Alabama.
The Alabama has been the scourge of the seas,
sinking dozens of Union ships wherever she can find them.
JAMES: There are ships that don't leave harbor
because they're not sure
that they can get away from the Alabama.
NARRATOR: The Union Navy needs to end her reign of terror.
CRAIG: A total of 18 warships were finally sent out
to try to find the Alabama.
NARRATOR: Finally, in French waters,
the Union Navy catches up with its nemesis,
and sinks her with an hour of continuous fire.
[man yells]
NARRATOR: For years, historians have wondered
just what made the Alabama so deadly.
When archaeologists finally locate the wreck,
six miles out from Cherbourg on the coast of Normandy,
they discover she lies at the very edge of diving technology,
200 feet below the surface
in the frigid waters of the English Channel.
JAMES: It's deep but it's also dark.
It's cold, the water's fast, and your time is limited.
NARRATOR: In these depths,
divers have less than 15 minutes on the seafloor
before they run out of air.
Now, combining the latest sonar data
with the archaeologists' observations,
we can pull the plug on the English Channel
to reveal the secrets of a Confederate ocean raider.
At the stern, a cone-shaped ruin.
The remains of a propeller fin.
Sitting beneath an H-shaped frame,
clearly designed to pull the propeller out of the water.
The evidence reveals Alabama is powered by steam,
but able to lift her prop and travel by sail.
And there's something else unusual:
the remains of a strange smokestack.
It's divided into several sections.
This means it was telescopic; it could be lowered.
At this time, warships are increasingly clad in iron.
♪
But with her propeller retracted,
and her smokestack lowered,
the Alabama looks more like an ordinary merchant sail ship.
♪
British maritime historian Sam Willis is an expert
in naval tactics.
He has a theory
about the Alabama's special design features.
SAM WILLIS: The Alabama would approach
looking as friendly as possible,
but as she got close,
she might haul up the colors of the Confederacy,
and she would transform from a seemingly harmless merchant ship
into an extremely powerful ship of war.
NARRATOR: Her disguise means she can sneak up
on unsuspecting Union ships.
How did the Confederates manage to build
such a terrifying wolf in sheep's clothing?
NARRATOR: The Confederate warship CSS Alabama
is a hunter.
But she's not targeting the Union Navy.
She's built like a merchant ship,
making her a perfect commerce raider.
SAM: The Alabama is specifically designed
to overpower other merchant ships.
CRAIG: This is the traditional strategy
of the weaker naval power;
to attack your enemy's merchant fleet.
NARRATOR: The Union is slowly crippling the Southern economy,
strangling its cotton exports
and choking it of essential supplies.
So the Confederacy fights fire with fire,
and targets the Northern economy,
sending the Alabama on a global expedition
to seek out Union merchant ships wherever they operate.
But how can the blockaded South
produce such a devastating warship?
Returning to the drained wreck site reveals further evidence.
The ship's cannon lie on the deck,
just as they were when the Alabama went down.
Each is encased in more than a century of concretion,
rock-hard mineral deposits clinging to the iron.
♪
Archaeologists lift the cannon from the wreck.
♪
French conservator Paul Mardikian is the first
to lay hands on the weapons.
His first job is to remove the mineral deposits.
PAUL MARDIKIAN: Generally on shipwrecks,
you cannot easily predict what you're going to find.
So it's always, there's always a surprise factor.
NARRATOR: Beneath the carbonate layer encrusting the iron,
he discovers a clue:
a maker's mark.
PAUL: The 32-pounders were clearly stamped,
"Fawcett and Preston, Liverpool, 1862."
NARRATOR: She may have flown the Confederate flag,
but the stamp reveals the Alabama's cannon
are not from the South.
They're forged across the Atlantic in Britain.
Under international law,
Britain cannot supply arms to either side in a civil war.
So why is the Alabama armed with British guns?
The cannon's manufacturer no longer exists,
but its archives and sales records have been preserved.
Today they're held
in Liverpool's Merseyside Maritime Museum.
Sam Willis discovers a set of plans.
Cannon matching the guns found on the Alabama's wreck.
There's no mention of the Confederacy on the plans,
only a mysterious set of initials: IDB.
SAM: The original drawing of this was sent to IDB.
Now I think that stands for
someone called James Dunwoody Bullock.
He's a really important person in this naval war.
NARRATOR: Bullock's name is well-known
to British maritime historians.
He's a Confederate secret agent operating in Britain.
SAM: Britain was officially neutral in the war,
but there was a particularly strong link between Liverpool
and Liverpool merchants and the Confederacy,
and that was because of cotton.
NARRATOR: In 1860, 80% of Britain's cotton imports
comes from the American South, through Liverpool's docks.
But this city is more than a trade hub,
it is Britain's industrial powerhouse.
The evidence is clear.
The Confederate agent wasn't just sourcing guns here,
but ships.
Sam uncovers Bullock's name
on a contract with a local shipbuilder, Lairds.
The firm's Victorian shipyard still exists.
SAM: What's interesting about this document
is that if you look at the dimensions, the construction,
the details match almost exactly everything we know
about the Alabama; about her hull, her rig, her outfitting.
That means I'm confident to be able to say
that this is a contract for the building of the Alabama,
and that means that the Alabama was built in that dry dock.
We know that the Confederates paid
for the Alabama to be built, but nowhere in this entire document
does it mention the Confederacy of the Southern states.
They exist behind the words like a ghost.
NARRATOR: Desperate to strike blow to the Union juggernaut,
the Confederacy builds a secret warship in Britain
and releases her into the Atlantic
to decimate the Union fleet.
In her first month at sea,
the South's stealth raider burns 10 American whalers.
She avoids capture while taking on coal in French Martinique,
and then wreaks havoc off the coast of Brazil.
Her odyssey of destruction takes her all the way
to the South China Sea.
♪
The raider makes the Civil War global.
♪
By the time the Alabama is caught in 1864,
she has sunk more than 60 Union merchant ships.
But despite all of its secret tactics and innovations,
the writing is on the wall for the Confederates.
When Ulysses S. Grant accepts the surrender of Robert E. Lee
in 1865, the American Civil War is over.
The war that launches modern America
has given birth to a new mode of warfare,
a war on the water as well as on the battlefield.
A war between societies fought over money and resources.
Total war!
Captioned by Side Door Media Services