Jules Verne channels his passion for seamanship and engineering into a pulse-pounding adventure set during the American Civil War. Captain James Playfair, a British merchant with a fast steamship called the Dolphin, sees opportunity in chaos: run the Union blockade into Charleston harbor, sell supplies to the Confederacy at vast profit, and return with cargo cotton. But the waters around Charleston in the early 1860s were graveyard of ships, and Playfair's scheme demands more than just speed and nerve. When a young woman named Jenny Halliburtt stows away, desperate to reach her imprisoned father in the besieged city, the voyage becomes something more than a commercial speculation. It becomes a test of honor under fire. Verne wrote this novella in 1865, and his pro-Confederate sympathies give the story a particular period flavor, but what endures is his visceral depictions of blockades, naval pursuit, and the grim mathematics of war. The Dolphin must outthink and outrun Federal warships, and Verne, ever the engineer, makes you feel every shaft of steam pressure and every turn of the screw. It's a slender book, but it crackles with the pure adventure that made Verne the 19th century's most addictive storyteller. For readers who want their history served with adrenaline.
