The full-rigged, fast-sailing clipper ships, fitted with auxiliary screw propellers, found one of the finest representatives of their class in the _Sea King_, which was built at Glasgow for the trade with China, where several splendid vessels, fast under sail and carrying powerful auxiliary engines, were engaged. They were peculiarly suitable for those waters, for the coaling stations were few and far between, and coal was expensive, and their engines consumed a great deal more fuel in proportion to results than do those of modern steamers. The _Sea King_ was composite built; that is, she had an iron frame with wood planking. Her screw could be lifted when the wind was favourable, and her ability to show a clean pair of heels to most sailing craft afloat is proved by her making the passage home from Shanghai in seventy-nine days, or, after allowing time for coaling _en route_, seventy-four days. She was of 1018 registered tonnage, and her engines were of 200 nominal horse-power; she was 220 feet in length by 32¹⁄₂ feet beam, and 20¹⁄₂ feet depth. Her career for a time was exciting. She was one of the many vessels bought by the agents of the Confederate States in 1864, nominally as a blockade-runner, but she became a privateer--pirate the Northerners called her--and as such she had the distinction of being the only vessel which carried the Confederate flag round the world. Her name was changed to _Shenandoah_ when she was purchased; she was neither the first nor the last famous sailing vessel of that name. The last _Shenandoah_, the biggest wooden sailing vessel ever built in America, a four-masted barque, returned the fire of a Spanish gunboat in the recent Spanish-American War, and then out-sailed her. The commander of the _Shenandoah_ of the ’sixties was James Tredell Waddell, whose record justified his appointment. He was formerly an officer in the United States Navy, and was wounded and lamed for life in a duel in 1842. He nevertheless served in the Mexican War and then commanded the American storeship _Release_ at the building of the Panama Railway. All his officers and crew were down with yellow fever, but with a few convalescent seamen he sailed his vessel to Boston. He declined, in 1862, the offer to command one of the vessels in the bomb fleet then being fitted out to attack New Orleans, but instead he got through the blockade from Annapolis to Richmond and joined the Confederate Navy. He was in command of the ram _Louisiana_ when the Southern fleet was attacked and scattered by the Federal fleet under Admiral Farragut, and sank the _Louisiana_ rather than let her be captured. Next he was ordered to take command of the _Shenandoah_, then being fitted out at Liverpool for a cruise in the Pacific. He commissioned his ship off Madeira in October 1864 and set sail for the south. He captured and either burnt or sank nine American sailing ships before he arrived at Melbourne on January 25, 1865, but the ship’s stay was a short one, for