The article was published in Polish. Below is an English translation of its opening. Wersja polska
In January 1862, the Confederate navy could oppose the overwhelmingly superior US Navy with only very small forces. Given the twofold task facing the Confederate fleet – defending ports and naval bases scattered along the South’s long coastline, and attacking Northern merchant shipping on the Atlantic – it needed two types of ships. Navy Secretary Stephen R. Mallory decided that ironclads, which were being built within the Confederacy, would be most useful for the first of these tasks.
Because of the limited capacity of its own, largely improvised shipbuilding industry, however, new ocean-going ironclads could only be built in foreign yards. The efforts of CS Navy representatives in Europe resulted in the acquisition of a number of unarmoured ships, which carried out commerce raiding with varying success. A separate chapter is the attempt to build ironclads in England and France (as ready-made ships could not be bought). This article tells the story of one of those initiatives, which produced two ships very modern for their time that – owing to effective pressure from Union diplomacy on the British government and Britain’s wish to remain neutral – never joined the Confederate fleet: the ironclads that were to be named CSS North Carolina and CSS Mississippi.
