This chapter begins with detailing the arrival of His Royal Highness Prince Alfred Earnest Albert, second son of Queen Victoria and second in line to the throne, on the public wharf in Nassau. It investigates how the royal visit had by chance coincided with the beginning of one of the most action-packed eras in the history of the island. Nassau was about to experience a storm of events that would be remembered long after Prince Alfred was long forgotten. A little over three years later another boat made a much less auspicious landing. On February 26, 1865, Captain John Maffitt lowered a small boat from the blockade runner Owl into the roaring surf off Shallotte Inlet, about forty miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina. The chapter traces the implications of the two arrivals to Nassau and in the Confederate capital. It analyzes how William Boyd Sterrett, a native Virginian, made his way to Nassau in the second half of the Civil War. The chapter then outlines the adventure of Irishman Thomas Connolly, a member of Parliament from County Donegal, in the dying Confederacy.
