Encyclopedia of Civil War Shipwrecks
By W. Craig Gaines

Illustrated, index, bibliography, 231 pp., 2008. Louisiana State University Press, 3990 W. Lakeshore Dr., Baton Rouge, LA 70808, $39.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Patrick E. Purcell
Patrick E. Purcell, a graduate of Northeastern University, is a retired railroad manager. He is a former president of the Old Baldy Civil War Round Table in Philadelphia and was on the Board of Governors of the Civil War Library and Museum in Philadelphia.

Review:
Organized by country, state, or body of water, this Encyclopedia records an astonishingly large number of vessels, U.S., Confederate, blockade runners, and other civilian ships that met an untimely end through combat, accident or storm during the Civil War.

Each vessel is described and its history given, as well as the probable location of the wreck. (A number of the ships were later raised and restored to service.) Several maps show approximate locations of wrecks at those areas that had particularly heavy vessel loss, such as Charleston, S.C.

The book covers the famous lost ships: the Monitor, Virginia, Hunley, and the Confederate vessels lost at the actions on the Mississippi below New Orleans and at Memphis.

Less known are ships like the Brother Jonathan, a wooden side-wheeler, that struck a reef off Crescent City, Calif., on July 30, 1865, with the loss of 213, including Brig. Gen. George Wright, the Union commander on the West Coast during the Civil War. The wreck was located in 1993 and about $5 million in coins and gold bars were recovered.

Then there was the little Seagull, which drifted ashore at Brigantine, N.J., on March 11, 1864, with a cargo of oysters but missing her crew — surely an interesting mystery.

 For wreck locations, there is the USS Mississippi, which had served as Commodore Perry’s flagship on his expedition to Japan in the l850s and was sunk by Confederate cannon fire at Port Hudson, La. It is believed to be under Solitude Point Swamp, about three-quarters of a mile west of the present west bank of the Mississippi River.

Obviously a great deal of research has gone into this project; it is an invaluable reference work as well as a fascinating read.