Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship

by Ron Powers

As the Confederacy felt itself slipping beneath the Union juggernaut in late 1864, the South launched a desperate counteroffensive to shatter the U.S. economy and force a standoff. Its secret weapon? A state-of-the-art raiding ship whose mission was to prowl the world's oceans and sink the U.S. merchant fleet. The raider's name was Shenandoah, and her executive officer was Conway Whittle, a twenty-four-year-old warrior who might have stepped from the pages of Arthurian legend. Whittle would share command with a dark and brooding veteran of the seas, Capt. James Waddell, and together with a crew of strays, misfits, and strangers, they would spend nearly a year sailing two-thirds of the way around the globe, destroying dozens of Union ships and taking more than a thousand prisoners, all while continually dodging the enemy.
Then, in August of 1865, a British ship revealed the shocking truth to the men of Shenandoah: The war had been over for months, and they were now being hunted as pirates.
What ensued was an incredible 15,000-mile journey to the one place the crew hoped to find sanctuary, only to discover that their fate would depend on how they answered a single question. Wondrously evocative and filled with drama and poignancy, "Last Flag Down" is a riveting story of courage, nobility, and rare comradeship forged in the quest to achieve the impossible. "From the Hardcover edition."

Audiobook

Published May 15, 2007

About the author

Ron Powers (born 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer. His face include White Town Drowsing: Journeys to Hannibal, Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, and Mark Twain: A Life. With James Bradley, he co-wrote the 2000 #1 New York Times Bestseller Flags of Our Fathers.

Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1973 for his critical writing as TV-radio-columnist for Chicago Sun-Times about television during 1972. He was the first television critic to win the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1985, Powers won an Emmy Award for his work on CBS News Sunday Morning.

Powers was born in 1941 in Hannibal, Missouri — Mark Twain's hometown. Hannibal was influential in much of Powers' writing — as the subject of his book White Town Drowsing, as the location of the two true-life murders that are the subject of Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore, and as the home of Mark Twain. Powers has said that his fascination with Twain — the subject of two of his books — began in childhood:

"When I was a little boy in Hannibal, he was a mystic figure to me. His pictures and books and images were all over (my friend) Dulany Winkler's house, and I spent a lot of time there. I just wanted to reach out and touch him. Eventually I was able to."

In addition to writing, Powers has taught for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, and at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

Powers is married and has two sons. He currently resides in Castleton, Vermont.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather interesting story of a seldom renowned piece of Civil War history, for which the publisher uses the phrase, "wondrously evocative," which I would consider just a touch of hype. It would certainly be an appropriate story to tell of the woes of slow and unsure long-distance communication. The main players were a curious pair into which the Confederate States of American seemed to place much stock, but that is likely just a manifestation of their desperation.