CSS Florida was a sloop-of-war in the service of the Confederate States Navy. She served as a commerce raider during the American Civil War before being sunk in 1864. Service history Florida was built by the British firm William C. Miller & Sons of Toxteth, Liverpool, and purchased by the Confederacy from Fawcett, Preston & Co., also of Liverpool, who provided her engines. Known in the shipyard as Oreto and initially called by the Confederates, the ship was the first of several foreign-built commerce raiders commissioned as into the Confederate States Navy as CSS Florida. Union naval records often referred to her as Oreto or confused her with , another Confederate vessel. Florida departed England on 22 March 1862, bound for Nassau in the Bahamas. To avoid suspicions that she was destined for Confederate service, the ship was only loaded with enough coal to reach Nassau. However, once in Nassau she planned to meet with a Confederate ship, take on a portion of that ship's coal, and use the additional fuel to steam to the nearest Confederate port. However, having been built under foreign licence, she was the subject of much diplomatic and intelligence correspondence. The governor of Nassau prevented Florida from attempting a rendezvous with her planned tender in Nassau harbor, so the two ships met instead near the more isolated Green Cay. There, stores, armaments, and coal were taken aboard the ship. While anchored off Green Cay, she was officially commissioned into the Confederate States Navy as CSS Florida on August 17, with Lieutenant John Newland Maffitt in command. During her outfitting, yellow fever raged among her crew, in five days reducing her effective force to one fireman and four deckhands. In desperate plight she ran across to the Spanish colony of Cuba. In Cárdenas, Lieutenant Maffitt too was stricken with the disease. In this condition, against all probability, the intrepid Maffitt sailed her from Cárdenas to Mobile, Alabama. In an audacious dash the "Prince of Privateers" braved a hail of projectiles from the Union blockaders and raced through them to anchor beneath the guns of Fort Morgan in Mobile Bay, where she was received with a hero's welcome by the war-weary citizens of Mobile. Florida had been unable to fight back not only because of sickness but because rammers, sights, beds, locks and quoins - necessary to use her guns - had, inadvertently, not been loaded in