Five Flags

As wooden ships gave way to ironclads in the middle of the nineteenth century, one warship stood out. Born in the American Civil War and buffeted by the rivalries of North and South and Europe, it ultimately helped secure the foundations of modern Japan. Its career encompassed two civil wars and featured high politics and secret diplomacy, arms dealers and royal courts, spies, sailors, and samurai. In a vivid narrative traveling from London to Paris, from Copenhagen to Havana, from Washington to Tokyo, Ships of Five Nations brings to life this incredible true story.

Strangled by the Union’s naval blockade, the Confederacy needed ships—and turned to Europe to build them. In 1862 it hired a French shipbuilder to secretly construct one of the deadliest warships built to that time: an ironclad mounting a 300-pounder gun, two 70-pounders, two 6-pounders, four 4-pounders, a Gatling gun, and a 20-foot ram off its bow, and clad in armor nearly 5 inches thick.

Before the mighty ironclad was finished, U.S. agents discovered it, and the ship was sold to Denmark, which changed its mind but agreed to transfer it to the Confederacy. Christened Stonewall after the legendary general, the ship was damaged in a storm and took refuge in Spain. By now, the U.S. had located the Stonewall, but feared the gunship and did not give chase when the ironclad disembarked. The Stonewall reached Cuba in May 1865—after the end of the Civil War—and the captain sold the ship to Spain, which then sold it to the United States.

But the ironclad would not end its career mothballed at the Washington Navy Yard. In 1867 the Tokugawa shogunate approached the U.S. to buy naval vessels for its conflict with resurgent imperial forces in Japan. The U.S. agreed to sell the Stonewall, but by the time the warship reached Japan, imperial forces had taken the upper hand, and the U.S. now sold the ship to the new Imperial Japanese Navy, which deployed it—renamed Kotetsu—as the centerpiece of the fleet that would defeat the shogunate and secure the Meiji Restoration, setting Japan on the path of modernization, industrialization, and expansion that would end in World War II.