Commander James Dunwoody Bulloch, a key Confederate procurement agent overseas, would have nothing to do with iron bottoms, but Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury settled for Japan because wood (which could be coppered) was being superseded in Great Britain by the new metal; consequently wooden newbuilding contracts were not easy to buy up in British shipyards.

On 1 April 1863, she departed Greenock, reputedly bound for the East Indies and carrying a crew of fifty who had shipped for a voyage to Singapore.

Calling at Bahia, Brazil and at Trinidad, Georgia recrossed the Atlantic Ocean to Simon's Bay, Cape Colony, Africa, where she arrived on 16 August 1863.

On 2 May 1864 she was taken to Liverpool and sold on 1 June 1864 to a merchant of that city over the protest of Charles Francis Adams, Sr., United States Minister to Great Britain.

The property of the Quebec and Gulf Ports Company and still named SS Georgia, she was on a voyage from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Portland, Maine, when she was wrecked without loss of life on the Northern Triangles, a reef in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, at 43°55′39″N 069°01′40″W / 43.92750°N 69.02778°W / 43.92750; -69.02778 (Georgia) on 14 January 1875 while steaming at night in a snowstorm.