by Terry Smyth
His Worship gets the intended response – much polite tittering in the court, and a guffaw or two.
Turning to the prisoner, Call asks, ‘Have you no money or friends to provide for your defence?’
‘No, Your Worship. I have neither money nor friends.’
‘Has no-one been down to offer their services?’
‘No, sir.’
As if things aren’t looking dismal enough for Davidson, John Williams’ testimony is corroborated by three other Shenandoah deserters. The arresting officer, Constable Alexander Minto of the water police, swears that while being taken to the police station, Davidson told him he had sold everything he had to join the Shenandoah.
Asked if he has any questions for these witnesses, Davidson remains silent. That concludes the case for the prosecution and, after a half-hour adjournment, Davidson is called in to hear his fate.
Asked if he has anything to say, he insists he has never used the name Charley, and accuses the prosecution witnesses of perjury. The magistrate and justice are not convinced and commit him for trial in the Supreme Court the following month. Mackenzie and Walmsley are committed to stand trial with him, but Glover claims to be an American citizen and is discharged. Undeterred by his brush with the law, he rushes off to join the Shenandoah as a sailmaker.
The public finds much amusement in the apparently over-the-top persecution of James Davidson, and the satirical magazine Melbourne Punch is inspired to publish new words to the old Scottish Jacobite song ‘Wha Wadna Fecht for Charlie?’ (Who Would Not Fight for Charlie?)
Charlie took a drap o’ rum,
Charlie as a cook enlisted.
Charlie for the Shenandoah
Went to battle, single-fisted.
Wha wadna fight for Charlie?
Scullion midst improper grease,
Wha wadna capture Charlie
With some fifty-strong police?11
In fake letters to the editor, Punch also makes sport of the Confederates’ effect on the women of Melbourne:
‘“Oh! Mr Punch, I should so much like to go on board, and even be captured,” gushes “Angelina Gushington”.
“I have been in such a flutter ever since that darling Shenandoah has been here, and though I have been a dozen times to Melbourne on purpose, I cannot catch a glimpse of any of the officers.”’
And ‘Tabitha Singlelife’ simpers: ‘“I am in constant terror lest we should be murdered in our beds by those horrid American pirates. What can our stupid Government be thinking about to let such people come here? So nervous have I been that I have spent a small fortune in sal volatile [smelling salts].”’12
At the run-down boarding house at 125 Flinders Lane east, a man from nearby Carlton knocks at the door. The man’s name is George Kennedy, and he has come about the newspaper ad placed by a Mr Powell: ‘Wanted, two or three respectable young men to be generally useful to travel up to new country.’
The proprietor of the boarding house, a Mr Sigalsk, shows him in and introduces him to Mr Powell and another gentleman. Powell offers him a drink and, after some pleasantries, asks him if he knows how to operate big guns.
When Kennedy, who is a sergeant in the militia, answers yes, Powell tells him that the Shenandoah is in need of men of such experience, and, after plying him with more liquor, asks him to join the ship.
Kennedy agrees, and he, Powell, and the other man immediately set off for the docks. By the time they get there, however, Kennedy has sobered up enough to have second thoughts. He tells Powell he has changed his mind, and hurries off to report the incident to the police.
Kennedy tells his tale to a police sergeant then to a magistrate, adding that while he was with Powell, several other men arrived and accepted the offer, and that he believed these men were now aboard the Shenandoah.
The magistrate issues warrants for the arrest of Powell and his unnamed accomplice, but, curiously, there is no record of any arrests being made or even attempted. If the police did indeed bash at the door of 125 Flinders Lane east, which is doubtful, all they would have discovered about Mr Powell was that there was no such person.
Captain Waddell is sure the Victorians’ show of force is all bluster, and decides to call their bluff. He knows that all an attacking force need do is knock away the props supporting the ship on the slipway and the Shenandoah would fall crashing from the slip and be ruined. Yet that hasn’t happened, nor has it been threatened.
As for the guns trained on the ship: ‘An officer came to the men on duty at the Williamstown battery, but as high ground intervened, the guns were of no use, as they did not command the government slip, nor were the guns at the pier put in use, which commanded that spot, why, I never learned.
‘Stories were told to the effect that one of the government gun rafts was moved near to overawe any possible demonstration of strength by the Shenandoah. Why, the vessel lay on the slip as helpless as the Victorian Government could possibly desire.
‘In the full belief that the ship would not be detained, I gave orders for her launch, and the tug Black Eagle was engaged for the purpose of being in readiness and near to. The manager of the slip explained he could not launch the ship, that he acted by order of the Government; whereupon I stated in a communication to the Government that a refusal to permit the launch of the ship amounted to her seizure, and I respectfully begged to be informed if such was known to his Excellency the Governor and met with his approval.’13
Waddell sends Lieutenant Grimball ashore to deliver this message and tells him not to return without an answer. He is gambling on Darling being too weak-willed to take the blame should Waddell make good his threat to ‘regard officers and men as prisoners of the British Government, to haul down the flag, and proceed with my command to London by the next mail boat’.14
The gamble pays off. Within hours, Darling issues the following proclamation: ‘The suspension of the permission given to Her Majesty’s subjects to aid in the necessary repairs and supplies of the ship Shenandoah, dated the 14th instant, is relieved, in so far as launching the said vessel is concerned, which may be proceeded with accordingly.’15
On Saturday afternoon, 18 February, at high tide, the Black Eagle tows the Shenandoah off the dry dock at Williamstown and back across Hobson’s Bay to Sandridge. As the tug nudges her out, a crowd gathers on the Williamstown wharf to see her off with waves and cheers.
Before anchoring at Sandridge, the Shenandoah is hauled alongside the merchantman John Frazer, out of Liverpool, to load 250 tons of coal, added to the 400 tons already on board. The presence in port of the John Frazer is no lucky coincidence but had been pre-arranged by James Bulloch – information Captain Waddell kept to himself.
As loading proceeds, the ship is vulnerable to attack, as she was in dry dock. So, should any Yankees in port or the Victorian authorities try to stop her leaving, all guns are loaded and ready to fire.
In the great game, the cards have not been kind to the colonial governor and the American consul, but for the Confederate commander it’s a lay-down misère.
The memoirs of John Gurner, the son of Henry Gurner, Victoria’s Crown Solicitor at the time of the Shenandoah’s visit, provide an insight into the prevalent attitudes of the day. After describing the arrival of the Confederate raider and its commander, ‘a somewhat truculent officer who appeared to be a believer in bluster and bounce’, Gurner continues:
As between the combatants, there were in Victoria, as in England, a large number of sympathisers with the Confederate cause; and also, at the outset, a belief that they would succeed, as probably they would have done, owing to the military skill of their generals and their enthusiasm for their cause, but for the determination of President Lincoln and the fact that the prolongation of the contest enabled the wealth and the numbers of the North to prevail.
It is not uncommon to assume that the War of Secession in the United States was one for and against slavery, but slavery was only one of a number of causes leading to the war. It was not the
direct, nor the ostensible cause, but it obtained the principal place on President Lincoln’s Proclamation of September, 1862, freeing the slaves if the Southern states had not returned to their allegiance by the 1st January following.
Examining the history and constitution of the United States, there is much to be said in support of the legal and constitutional right of the Southern states to secede, and as regards their moral right to do so, there can be no question that it was as good as that exercised some 85 years before by those British colonies which seceded from Great Britain to form the United States of North America. But for many years after the war the mere suggestion of this in the United States in conversation would often cause a furious outburst of unreasonable passion.16
John Gurner’s recollections include events of the night of 17 February 1865 – the night before the Shenandoah left port.
At about six o’clock that evening, his father Henry – who as Crown Solicitor would later share the blame for the failure to seize the Shenandoah, which cost Her Majesty’s Government a fortune in compensation – was returning to his office from the Melbourne Club – which was directly across the street – when he ran into the US Consul, William Blanchard, his Vice-Consul, Samuel Lord, and a man named Forbes.
Forbes had just told Blanchard that a number of men at Sandridge were about to board a barque called the Maria Ross, which would take them out to sea to rendezvous with the Shenandoah. The men, all British subjects, would then transfer to the Shenandoah and join the Confederate service.
When Blanchard curtly demanded that Henry Gurner take Forbes’s deposition immediately; that there wasn’t a moment to lose, Gurner calmly told him that taking a deposition was a job for a magistrate, not a solicitor, even a Crown Solicitor. And besides, he was going home for dinner and didn’t want to miss his train. Gurner bade them goodnight and sauntered away, leaving the consul incandescent with rage.
Blanchard, Lord and Forbes rushed off to report the urgent matter to, in succession: the Chief of Police, Captain Standish; Attorney-General Higinbotham, who told them to provide him with an affidavit; Chief Detective Nicholson, who said he couldn’t act without a warrant; Metropolitan Police Magistrate Sturt, who told them he couldn’t proceed on Forbes’s uncorroborated evidence and suggested they try the Police Magistrate at Williamstown, who might be able to get corroborative evidence from the Water Police. Or not.
Blanchard and Lord were champing at the bit to set off for Williamstown, but Forbes, for reasons known only to himself, refused to go. In desperation, Blanchard took Forbes’s deposition himself and sent Lord running back to the Attorney-General’s office only to find he’d left for the day.
So had the Maria Ross. She had sailed at 5pm, an hour before the Consul accosted the Crown Solicitor. Blanchard finally managed to get the Maria Ross intercepted and searched before she reached the Heads, but there were no Confederate recruits on board. The ship was on her way to Portland to pick up a mob of sheep.
Chapter 11
A sailor’s farewell
God’s in his heaven, the captain is on the quarterdeck, and, to the whistle of the boatswain’s pipe and the clanking of the windlass, the anchors are heaved onto the bow. It’s eight o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning, 19 February 1865, and the Shenandoah is set to steam out towards the heads of Port Phillip Bay.
‘Soon we were on the bright blue sea, standing away from the land to the westward,’ Waddell writes. ‘The pilot left us with his farewell and good wishes, but it was not like the farewell we exchanged with friends who from the ship’s side, return to our own dear native shore with letters and last words of affectionate greeting to those we leave behind.’1
Cornelius Hunt describes the Australian sojourn as being like ‘one continuous fete’, but he suspects the incentive for some of the hospitality offered was purely financial: ‘Every place of public amusement was not only open to us, but our presence was earnestly solicited by the managers thereof, probably because we were curiosities, and drew well.’
As for the price of fame: ‘Balls, soirees and receptions followed in such rapid succession that the memory of one was lost in another, and, in brief, we were so persistently lionised that we were in serious danger of becoming vain, and taking the glory to ourselves instead of placing it to the credit of the cause for which we laboured.’2
As night falls, the raider is under sail and her captain is moved to wax poetic on the soft moonlight, the frosty air and:
The stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight.3
Waddell’s orders, on departing Melbourne, are to head for the New Zealand whaling grounds, then continue north through the New Hebrides islands – now Vanuatu – to the Caroline Islands – a hunting ground for sperm whales – then on to intercept the North Pacific whaling ships bound for Hawaii to unload their catch; thence to the Arctic Ocean, where the harpooned harvest of New England whalers is a global industry, worth a sizable chunk of the Yankee dollar.
Whale oil is in high demand worldwide, especially for home and street lighting, and for lubricating machinery, but also provides ingredients in soap, paint and varnish. Baleen – the sheets of keratin through which baleen whales filter food – is used for buggy whips, fishing rods, hoop dresses, collar stays, typewriter springs, toys and ‘whalebone’ corsets. The teeth of toothed whales such as sperm whales and beluga whales are a popular alternative to ivory for piano keys, chess pieces and the handles of walking sticks. Spermaceti, a white, waxy substance produced by the sperm whale, makes almost smokeless candles that burn with a bright, clear flame, and is also used in the manufacture of cosmetics and ointments.
From New England whaling ports such as Nantucket and New Bedford, whaling ships set out for their hunting grounds to meet a demand which – in the 1860s – has reached its peak. The Yankee whalers don’t know it yet, but a cruiser from Dixie is headed their way, steaming fast from Australia – where, coincidentally, some of the earliest American visitors were New England whalers, and where the whaling industry was founded in Sydney by a Massachusetts whaler, Captain Eber Bunker.
The cruiser Shenandoah, when it finds the fleet, intends to capture and destroy ships, ruin lives and blow a huge hole in the United States economy.
Although the depredations of the Shenandoah will all but cripple the New England whaling industry, the eventual demise of the industry was made inevitable a decade earlier, when a Canadian doctor and geologist named Abraham Gesner invented a product refined from shale oil or bitumen. The product was a liquid fuel that was cheaper and burned more efficiently than whale oil. Gesner, whose invention marked the beginning of the world’s oil industry, named the product ‘Kerosene’.
Washington has been following events in Melbourne with interest. US Consul Blanchard has kept Secretary of State Seward abreast of developments, and Seward, a committed abolitionist, shares the consul’s surprise at the apparent widespread sympathy in Australia for the pro-slavery Confederacy.
Blanchard tells Seward that the fact that the Shenandoah is actually the British merchantman Sea King is proof that London is collaborating with the rebels.
‘Instead of being assisted by the authorities,’ he writes, ‘I was only baffled and taught how certain proceedings could not be instituted.’4
The Shenandoah has left Australia amid rumours that Federal cruisers will be waiting to attack her.
Waddell is unimpressed. ‘We felt no anxiety about Federal cruisers,’ he writes, ‘for we foresaw that they would in all probability be as unsuccessful in finding the Shenandoah as they had been in the search for the Alabama.’
Word reaches Melbourne that the Yankee warship Iroquois is hunting the Shenandoah off the Australian coast. But when the ship steams into Port Phillip Bay it turns out to be the paddle-wheeler New Zealand.
Another rumour doing the rounds almost as soon as the Shenandoah passes through the heads and fades into the mist, is that Captain Raphael Semm
es, of Alabama fame, came aboard, under an alias, at 2am on the day she sailed.
Once again, Semmes is said to be in two places at once. In fact, he is in Richmond, Virginia, having just been promoted to Rear Admiral. After the sinking of the Alabama, he made his way home from England by way of Cuba.
Newspapers relay a rumour that the Shenandoah captured and burnt a Yankee ship just 12 miles (20km) outside Port Phillip Heads after leaving Melbourne: ‘She was subsequently reported at one time to be laying under King’s Island, in Bass’ Straits, and at another time to be cruising under canvas off Wilson’s Promontory. Woe betide all Yankees going to or coming from the Port of Melbourne whilst she is about.’5
In truth, since departing Melbourne, the Shenandoah will not see another sail, let alone sink another ship, until April.
April Fools’ Day, to be exact.
There are tears of joy as the 55th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry marches into Charleston, South Carolina. Tears of joy not only among the hundreds of African-Americans lining the streets, cheering, singing and shaking the hands of passing soldiers, but tears of joy among the soldiers themselves.
All are aware that today, 21 February 1865, is an historic day. The fall of Charleston – the original Confederate capital and the birthplace of secession – is a symbolic event, but it’s more than that. The first Union force to occupy the city, the 55th Massachusetts, is a black regiment, and is soon joined by the men of other black regiments, some of whom had been slaves in Charleston.
The Union troops are drawn to a particular address, Ryan’s Mart, at 6 Chalmers Street – the last slave auction house in South Carolina.
