Booknotes: William Watson and the Rob Roy

New Arrival:

• William Watson and the Rob Roy: The Adventures of a Civil War Blockade Runner by Walter E. Wilson (McFarland, 2026).

William Bryant Watson was a Scottish emigrant who eventually settled in Louisiana, prospering as a Baton Rouge businessman during the late antebellum years. He enlisted in the famed Third Louisiana volunteer infantry regiment and fought with it as a sergeant. Wounded at Corinth in October 1862, Watson traded army service for the adventure and financial allure of blockade running. He is best known for captaining the Rob Roy, a shallow-draft schooner. Watson penned memoirs of his Confederate Army service and his two years of blockade running exploits, both published as standalone works decades after the war ended. Of the pair, the one under consideration here is his 1892 book The Adventures Of A Blockade Runner; Or, Trade In Time Of War.

Authoring both army and navy memoirs has to be a pretty rare occurrence in the Civil War literature (offhand, I can't think of another individual who did that), and Watson's wartime account of sail-powered blockade running also excites interest when weighed against the more common picture of the mature phase of the illicit international trade as primarily involving sleek and swift steamships. I've never read it before. Google Books tells me that Texas A&M University Press published a version of it in paperback in 2021 (still in print). In terms of its degree of critical reassessment, the set of sample pages available do not indicate editorial work beyond J. Barto Arnold's introduction. What certainly does offer critical analysis of Watson's memoir is Walter Wilson's new book William Watson and the Rob Roy: The Adventures of a Civil War Blockade Runner.

From the description: "The Rob Roy may be the American Civil War's most famous blockade running schooner. Its fame stems from the spellbinding wartime memoir of its owner and captain, William Watson. This obscure but articulate Scotsman's rollicking tale is a standard maritime reference for scholars and students of America's most tragic conflict. However, his sea story is only partly true. It blends verifiable facts with liberal doses of exaggeration and omission. It was his story after all, and he saw no harm in making himself its hero."

More: "This first-ever critical examination of William Watson's "eyewitness" account relies on widely dispersed contemporary accounts and official reports." In the author's own words, the aim of his narrative is to provide "the true history surrounding William Watson, his schooner Rob Roy and his blockade-running tales." In getting at that truth, "(t)he text and notes will identify Watson's exaggerations and misstatements as appropriate." Wilson's narrative will "also fill in the historical gaps that Watson left untold" (pg. 9).