The civil war artist Alfred R Waude made several sketches of naval vessels during the war and it cannot be denied he had a good eye for both proportion and detail, in particular his depiction of the blockade runner Alliance was very accurate as a post war newspaper drawing clearly shows. The illustration below, made by Waude for Century Magazine is an imaginary portrait of 3 blockade runners produced using his wartime sketch book, two of these ships, Neptune and Alliance were well known vessels so their accuracy can be verified, the third is of a an unknown paddle steamer called "Vesta" which is of interest to me because the two sketches I have of her are the only remaining unidentified pictures in my collection. In order to identify the "Vesta" I have had to make two reasonable assumptions, firstly, that Waude was a historically serious artist so the vessel in the picture probably did exist, and that she looked similar to the way he portrayed her, unfortunately, despite the fact she was obviously British built I know that no paddle ship of this name ever left British shores so the only conclusion I can make is her name had been changed to hide her identity. The "Vesta" was either from Clydeside or London and would be catagorised as a "River Steamer" locally, these were such frail vessels that you wonder how they ever got across the Atlantic and all of them needed to be reinforced amidships to withstand the strains of deep wave troughs seen in open waters. There were around 22 river steamers sent to run the blockade but this number can be reduced because "Vesta" had two funnels , also we can easily eliminate most of the other twin stacked river boats because we know their histories, the only ship not accounted for in this sweep was a James Henderson, Renfrew built steamer called the Pearl, she was seen coaling at the Danish colonial port of St Thomas and left for Nassau on 14th January 1864 but she did not make it to Nassau, It is reported that she was intercepted by the small double ender gunboat USS Tioga and as she carried a small cargo of gunpowder she loaded in Kingstown she was captured as a blockade runner on the high seas. To further strengthen this identity, Waude has reproduced her unusual asymmetric funnel layout similar to her smaller sistership Gem which is consistent in both sketches. In the drawing below the artist has taken some licence in using an American style paddle box pattern on two of these ships which is incorrect and I am sceptical about the large paddle box name on Neptune which may have been added post war, however Waude has observed details like Neptune's uniquely small paddle wheels (at least on the wartime sketch) and the execution of the Alliance drawing does him great credit.
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