Five Flags (The Warship that Reshaped the World)

As wooden ships gave way to ironclads, and sail gave way to steam in the nineteenth century, one warship fought through the civil wars that shaped modern America, Germany and Japan. Its career spanned high politics and secret diplomacy, arms dealers and royal courts, spies, sailors, and samurai across three continents. In a vivid narrative travelling from London to Paris, from Copenhagen to Havana, from Washington to Tokyo, Five Flags brings this incredible true story to life.

Strangled by the Union’s naval blockade, the Confederacy needed ships - and turned to Europe to build them. In 1862, Emperor Napoleon III agreed to deliver a unique new design whose 300-pounder canon, 5 inches of armour, and twenty-foot bow ram made her a threat to every warship on earth. 

Before the mighty ironclad was finished, U.S. agents discovered it, and she was sold to Denmark, only to be smuggled back after her defeat by Prussia. Christened Stonewall after the legendary general, the ship took on an elite crew with 5 captains among them, narrowly survived terrifying storms, took refuge in Spain and had to run the gauntlet of Union warships and Spanish courts to escape. The Stonewall reached Cuba in May 1865 - too late to change the Civil War - before her sale to the Queen of Spain, and a handover to a newly re-united America.

But the ironclad would not end its career mothballed at the Washington Navy Yard. Though sold to the Tokugawa shogun in 1867, she was delivered to his bitter enemy the emperor and led the brutal and harrowing war at sea that secured the Meiji restoration and set Japan on a path of modernization, industrialization, and expansion that would end in World War II.