by Terry Smyth
Was it the Alabama? The description of the ship, and its tactic of flying a false flag to avoid identification and lure its prey, fit those of a Confederate raider. On the same day, however, the anti-abolition and anti-Lincoln Northern newspaper Patriot & Union reported that the Alabama was in Kingston, Jamaica, after being ‘severely riddled’ in its battle with USS Hatteras. Semmes and his ship’s company had been in Kingston since 20 January bringing with them 165 prisoners – the officers and crew of the defeated Yankee warship. The report continued, ‘Captain Semmes had a reception at the Commercial Exchange, at Kingston, which was given to him by the merchants of that city. He was lustily cheered.
‘The American consul had chartered the ship Borodino to bring the crew of the Hatteras to the United States. A portion of the crew of the Alabama had been before the magistrate for creating a row in a drinking saloon.’11
The depredations of the Confederate raiders sparked a diplomatic duel between Washington and Westminster. The United States was concerned that Britain’s recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent power might be the first step to recognising the Confederate States of America as a sovereign nation. US Secretary of State William H. Seward summed up the case for the Union: ‘The United States claim that in this war they are a whole sovereign nation, and entitled to the same respect as such they accord to Great Britain. Great Britain does not treat them as such a sovereign; and hence all the evils that disturb their intercourse and endanger their friendship.’12
The British, in turn, reminded Seward that Britain claimed to be a whole sovereign nation when France recognised the independence of the United States during the Revolutionary War.
Seward also complained about British subjects enlisting in the Confederate service, prompting Britain’s Foreign Secretary (later prime minister) Earl Russell to reply: ‘If thousands of British subjects are to be found fighting in the ranks of the Federals, on the invitation of the United States authorities, it is no breach of neutrality that some hundreds should be found in the ships and armies of the Confederates upon a similar invitation on their part.’13
As the trans-Atlantic war of words wore on, with neither side giving ground, at the sharp end of the shooting war, Raphael Semmes’ luck ran out on 19 June 1864, when, off the coast of Cherbourg, France, the Alabama engaged the Union warship Kearsarge. Semmes opened fire but, outgunned and unaware that the hull of the Kearsarge had been iron-plated, was forced to strike his colours after an hour-long battle. Sinking fast after an 11-inch (28cm) shell tore her open below the waterline, the Alabama waved a white flag of surrender.
As his ship went down by the stern, Semmes threw his sword into the sea, denying the victor the satisfaction of a formal surrender. He also denied the Kearsarge’s skipper, Captain John Acrum Winslow, the pleasure of his company. While boats from the Union warship were busy plucking the Confederate raider’s crew from the sea, Semmes was rescued by a private British yacht, the Deerhound, and sailed off for England and the chance to fight another day.
The North declared the Battle of Cherbourg a famous victory, and medals were struck in its honour. The South immortalised it in a sea shanty, ‘Roll, Alabama, Roll’, written, according to tradition, by Frank Townsend, a sailor who served on the Alabama. The closing lyrics go:
From the Western Isles she sailed forth
To destroy all commerce of the North.
Down to Cherbourg came she straight one day
For to take her toll in prize money.
There many a sailor lad met his doom
When the ship Kearsarge hove in view
And a shot from the forward pivot that day
It shot the Alabama’s stern away.
In the three-mile limit in sixty-five,
The Alabama sunk to her grave.
Such was Raphael Semmes’ fame worldwide that a deal of the excitement when the Shenandoah arrived in Melbourne the next year was due to a rumour that Semmes was aboard. Yet while this captain who did not go down with his ship was hailed a hero, the one brave officer who gave his life to save the lives of others was forgotten.
When the order came to abandon ship, the Alabama’s surgeon, Dr David Llewellyn, continued attending to the wounded and helping them into overcrowded lifeboats. A fellow officer shouted to him to board the last lifeboat but he refused, replying that he would not risk causing the boat to capsize with so many wounded aboard.
As the Alabama went down, Dr Llewellyn, who could not swim, jumped into the sea and was drowned.
In 1984, 120 years after she was sunk by the Kearsage, the wreck of the Alabama was found off the coast of Cherbourg by the French Navy minesweeper Circe.
The vessel James Bulloch had in mind to replace the Alabama was the Sea King. He had sent Charles Prioleau’s son-in-law, Richard Wright, to cast an eye over her, and Wright’s glowing report that she was one of the fastest ships afloat convinced him the sleek merchantman would make an ideal Confederate cruiser.
At the same time, Bulloch’s nemesis, US Consul Thomas Dudley – who had planted spies in the Liverpool shipyards – had reached the same conclusion. With the Sea King identified as a likely privateer, his agents were keeping a close eye on it.
Bulloch, suspecting as much, arranged to buy the ship in Richard Wright’s name, and hatched a plan to refit it, arm it, man it and get it out to sea, all without arousing suspicion.
On 7 October, while Bulloch prepared to sool his next attack dog on a vulnerable enemy, his first commerce raider, the Florida, came to grief in Brazil. While at anchor in a neutral port, and when her captain, Charles Manigault Morris and most of his crew were ashore, she was boarded and seized by the men of a Yankee warship, USS Wachusett. When the Brazilian Government protested that the hostile act in a neutral harbour was illegal, the Wachusett’s commander, Napoleon Collins, was court-martialled and found guilty of violating Brazil’s sovereignty. Still, the US Navy chose not to punish but promote him.
The Florida, after taking 37 prizes, was gone, like the Alabama before it. It was all up to the new ship now, and to Jimmy Bulloch’s talent for distracting the enemy with smoke and mirrors.
Unlike her predecessors, which had set out to damage the Yankee merchant fleet in general, the new ship had a specific target. It would target the most lucrative branch of the enemy’s commercial marine – the whaling fleet.
Bulloch had hatched the idea after a conversation with Lieutenant John Mercer Brooke, a Confederate naval officer who, when serving in the US navy before the war, had been a member of a scientific expedition that cruised the Arctic whaling grounds. Reasoning that where you found whales you were sure to find whalers, he obtained a set of whaling charts and planned the expedition.
The ideal ship for such a mission would need to be able to carry enough supplies to operate in remote areas for extended periods, and be equipped with a plant for condensing steam into drinking water. She would need to be a fully rigged ship, fast and manoeuvrable under sail but also have auxiliary steam power to keep her moving when the wind fails, and to get her out of trouble in a hurry. So as not to impede her when under sail, she must have a retractable propeller. And she must have sufficient strength and deck space for armaments.
As the perfect ship for the enterprise, the Sea King, steamed out of Liverpool, supposedly on a routine trip to Bombay with a cargo of coal, Dudley’s agents, watching through telescopes, spied nothing suspicious on deck – no gun mountings, teak planking or iron cladding, just the fittings of a typical merchantman.
That evening, 27 men separately made their way through cold and misty streets to Princess Dock, Liverpool. All were commissioned officers and petty officers of the Confederate Navy, recruited by Bulloch and smuggled into England weeks before. Some knew each other, having served on the Alabama or on other ships during or before the war, but all stayed silent, pretending to be strangers.
One of the men, Cornelius Hunt, later recalled, ‘It was curious, too, as I plodded my solitary way down the wet, slippery st
reet, to see men accoutred like myself, and bound as I well knew upon the same mission, without venturing to exchange with them a word of greeting, but the injunctions of secrecy were peremptory and too much was at stake for orders to be lightly disregarded.’14
An hour earlier, at the hotels, boarding houses and apartments where they had been staying, keeping as low a profile as possible, a Confederate agent had passed on orders to go immediately to the dock. None of them had been told why, but all knew the waiting and wondering was about to end.
Among the officers waiting on the dock were bona fide Southern aristocrats.
Lieutenant Sydney Smith Lee Jnr, 28, born and bred on a grand Virginia plantation, was the second son of Confederate Navy Commander Sydney Smith Lee, the nephew of Commanding General Robert E. Lee and the grandson of Revolutionary War hero Henry ‘Light Horse Harry’ Lee.
His elder brother Fitzhugh Lee was a Confederate Army general. Of his younger brothers, John Mason Lee was an army major (who would be with his uncle Robert at the surrender at Appomattox); Henry Carter Lee was adjutant-general to Confederate cavalry General Williams Carter Wickham; and Daniel Murray Lee was a captain on his brother Fitzhugh’s staff.
Another Virginian, Midshipman John Mason, was a great-nephew of Founding Father George Mason. Known as the Father of the United States Bill of Rights, George Mason was one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia (along with George Washington) yet publicly condemned the institution as immoral.
Midshipman Mason, related by marriage to Robert E. Lee, was a cousin of James Mason, one of the two Confederate envoys captured in the 1861 Trent Affair, which almost sparked war between the United States and Britain (see Chapter 12).
Lower on the social ladder but no less the Southern gentleman, First Lieutenant Francis Thornton Chew, 24, a descendant of George Washington, was born in Tennessee and raised in Missouri. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, he joined the US Navy in 1859 and, on the outbreak of war, resigned his commission and joined the Confederate Navy as an acting midshipman. Chew, who had previously only served on river gunboats, had never been to sea before joining the Shenandoah.
Before the war, Paymaster William Breedlove Smith, of Louisiana, was a lawyer with the firm of Thomas J. Semmes, a cousin to Captain Raphael Semmes. After joining the Confederate Navy on the outbreak of war in 1861, Smith served firstly on CSS Sumter, then as captain’s clerk under Raphael Semmes on the Alabama from 1863 until her sinking in 1864. He was then ordered to the Shenandoah.
Second Lieutenant Dabney ‘Dab’ Minor Scales, 24, was born in Virginia but raised in Mississippi. A midshipman in the US Navy, he resigned in 1861 when Mississippi seceded from the Union, and was granted a commission with the same rank in the Confederate Navy. Before joining the Shenandoah, Scales served on several Confederate warships, including the Savannah, the Charleston and the Arkansas.
First Lieutenant John Grimball, 25, of Charleston, South Carolina, was a graduate of the US Naval Academy. He was a midshipman when his state seceded, and resigned to join the Confederate Navy, with the same rank. Before joining the Shenandoah, he served on the Arkansas and the Baltic.
The officers and men gathered on Princess Dock boarded a waiting tug that took them to the cargo steamer Laurel, where they were hustled aboard to find the man who would be their commander, James Waddell, waiting for them.
The man appointed the Shenandoah’s Executive Officer, William Conway Whittle Jnr, was not among them. James Bulloch had other plans for him.
Whittle, of Norfolk, Virginia, was 25 years old. The son of a Confederate Navy Commodore, he enjoyed a privileged childhood at ‘The Anchorage’ – the Whittles’ stately home in Buchanan, Virginia – and was a devout, Bible-quoting Episcopalian.
Whittle joined the United States Navy as a midshipman in 1854, and in 1861 resigned to join the Confederate Navy. He served on York River shore batteries and on CSS Nashville, and in 1862, after being promoted to First Lieutenant, on CSS Louisiana. Captured in April of that year, at the fall of New Orleans, Whittle was imprisoned at Fort Warren, in Boston harbour. Four months later, after being released in a prisoner exchange, he served on the Richmond Station, then on CSS Chattahoochee, before being sent to England in 1863, where the following year he was appointed Executive Officer of the Shenandoah.
Lieutenant Whittle’s fiancée Elizabeth ‘Pattie’ Page was from an old Virginia family, related by marriage to Robert E. Lee. Her family, like the Whittles, had a longstanding connection with the Episcopalian church. It seems the upper strata of Southern society moved in tight, concentric circles.
James Bulloch had taken every precaution – down to the smallest detail – to preserve secrecy. After all, the success of the mission depended on it. His orders to William Whittle were to catch a 5pm train to London on 6 October, go to Wood’s Hotel in High Holborn and book a room under the name W.C. Brown.
The next morning, at 11am precisely, he was to go to the hotel restaurant and take a seat in a prominent position, with a white handkerchief poking through the buttonhole of his coat, and a newspaper in his hands. A man would approach him and ask if his name was Brown. He would reply that it was, then accompany the man to his room, and hand him a letter of introduction from Bulloch. The man, a Confederate agent, would then arrange for him to meet with Captain Corbett, master of the Sea King, to devise a way of smuggling him aboard.
Early on 7 October, Whittle and the agent made their way to the docks where Whittle, ‘at an unsuspicious distance viewed the ship, and later, at a safe rendezvous, was introduced to her captain, Corbett’.15
Bulloch had instructed Whittle to tell Captain Corbett that ‘I desire him to carry you to Madeira, and explain how he is to communicate with the Laurel. It is important that the Sea King should not be reported, and you will request Captain Corbett not to exchange signals with passing ships or at any rate not to show his number.
‘When you reach Madeira and the Laurel joins company, you will report to Lieutenant-Commanding Waddell, and thereafter act under his instructions.’16
Bulloch had also sent orders to James Waddell, informing him: ‘You will sail from this port [Liverpool] on Saturday, the 8th instant, in the screw-steamer Laurel, under the command of First Lieutenant J.F. Ramsay, taking with you all the officers detailed for your command except First Lieutenant Whittle, who will take passage in the ship with Captain Corbett, with the view of learning her qualities and devising the best and speediest manner of making such alterations and additions in her internal arrangements as may be necessary, and to observe the character and disposition of her crew.’17
Lieutenant Whittle recalls, ‘On the early morn of 8 October, 1864, I crawled over her side, at the forerigging, and the ship in a few moments left the dock and went down the Thames. To everybody on board except Captain Corbett, who was in our confidence, I was Mr Brown, a super-cargo, representing the owners of the coal with which she was laden. We were fully instructed to proceed to Madeira, where we were to call, a fact only known on board to Captain Corbett and myself, and not to exchange signals with passing Captain Corbett’s assistance, I possessed myself of much information that served a good purpose afterwards. No-one on board suspected anything out of the usual course.’18
That same day, the Laurel slipped her lines and pointed seaward. To Yankee eyes, she seemed, like the Sea King, to be just another merchantman, her only visible ordnance being the two 12-pounder signal guns carried by all merchant ships. But hidden between her decks were four eight-inch smooth-bore guns, and two rifled Whitworth 32-pounder guns, with ammunition and other equipment necessary to refit a merchantman as a man-of-war.
The officers’ baggage had already been taken aboard in boxes, each marked with a diamond and a number known to each man, and, on boarding, each was given a receipt, in a fictitious name, for £32 for passage to Havana.
Cornelius Hunt’s fake receipt read, ‘Received from Mr Elias Smith, thirty-two pounds, for his passage in the cabin of Steamer La
urel, from this port to Havana.’ Signed ‘Henry Lafone.’19
Of course, the ship wasn’t really going to Havana. Both the Laurel and the Sea King were bound for Madeira, to rendezvous 11 days later. There, in the lee of a barren island, the Laurel would transfer its cargo to the Sea King, and the Sea King would be reborn as the Shenandoah.
Chapter 7
First prize
As the Sea King rode at anchor on a smooth sea in a light breeze, with the Laurel lashed alongside, Captain Waddell’s officers assembled on deck.
Joining lieutenants Whittle, Grimball, Chew, Scales and Smith Lee, Paymaster Breedlove Smith and Midshipman Mason were Master’s Mate Cornelius Hunt, Surgeon Charles Lining, Assistant Surgeon Fred McNulty and Sailing Master Irvine Bulloch, younger brother of James Bulloch and former sailing master on the Alabama. Other Alabama veterans reunited were master’s mate John Minor, sailmaker Henry Alcott, boatswain George Harwood and chief engineer Matthew O’Brien.
The Union Jack was hauled down and the Stainless Banner hoisted, marking the commissioning of the vessel as a ship of the Confederate States Navy, renamed CSS Shenandoah. The recommissioning relieved the fears of superstitious sailors, who believe it is bad luck to rename a ship without an official ceremony. The traditional alternative is to write the original name on a piece of paper, fold the paper and place it in a wooden box. The box is then burnt, and the ashes thrown into the sea on an outgoing tide.
It took 13 hours of hard labour to haul coal, water and other supplies across from the Laurel, along with the cannons, muskets, pistols, powder and shot.
‘All was confusion and chaos,’ Lieutenant Whittle tells us. ‘Everything had to be unpacked and stored for safety. No gun mounted, no breeching or tackle bolts driven, no portholes cut [for the guns], no magazine for powder or shell room for shells provided. All was hurriedly transferred and in a lumbering, confused mass was on board. Every particle of work, of bringing order out of chaos and providing for efficiently putting in a condition for service, and of converting this ship into an armed cruiser at sea, admits wind and storm, if encountered, stared us in the face.’1
