by Terry Smyth
Waddell: ‘Some officer, directing the pilot’s attention to our flag, asked him if he knew it. He replied he had never before seen it, but as the boats were gone after the Yankees, it might be Jeff Davis’s flag, for he had heard of a big war in America, and that in all the big battles the South had whipped the Yankees.
‘When I told him what we were, he said, “Well, well, I never thought I would live to see Jeff Davis’s flag.”.’3
Thomas Harrocke remarks to Waddell that the island’s five tribes are governed in their dealings not by the high principles of civilisation but by fear of violent retribution.
‘Is not that very much the case with white people?’ Waddell asks. ‘It strikes me that the white tribe has more educated scoundrels than the dark races. All the villainy the world is governed by originated with the white man, and he has perpetuated it by introducing it among the uncultivated and semi-barbarians all over the world.’4
He has no doubt as to where the blame lies for corrupting the Edens of the Pacific.
‘The missionaries and their followers who have visited these islands in their trading vessels have been detected in crime, and the islanders in many instances took revenge, and in return their thatched roof coverings would be burned by the crews of the vessels.’5
The American ships Edward Carey, the Hector and the Pearl, and the Hawaiian ship Harvest are boarded and claimed as prizes of the Confederate States of America. Their officers, stores, log books, charts and navigation instruments are taken to the Shenandoah.
Waddell then invites the King of Pohnpei, the Nahnmwarki, to the Shenandoah to inform him of the Confederates’ intentions and ensure their actions do not compromise the island’s neutrality – a matter that didn’t seem to bother him unduly in Melbourne.
The King arrives with a retinue of chiefs and escorted by a flotilla of canoes, and climbs the companion ladder to be greeted by the Captain and Lieutenant Whittle, in full dress uniform.
His body glistening with coconut oil, the king is wearing a wide belt and breechclout, beads around his neck and a clay pipe through one pierced ear. While plying him with Wolfe’s Aromatic Shiedam Schnapps – to which he takes quite a liking – Waddell, through Harrocke as interpreter, tells the King his version of the American Civil War or, as many a Southerner prefers to call it, the War of Northern Aggression.
‘I explained to him that the vessels in port belonged to our enemies who had been fighting us for years, killing our people, outraging our countrywomen, and destroying our homes, and that we were ordered to capture and destroy their vessels whenever and wherever found, and that if the laws of His Majesty would not be violated, the vessels in port would be confiscated, and as there was little in them which the Shenandoah required, their contents would be presented to His Majesty to make such use of as he considered proper, and when his tribe had taken all they desired from the ships, I would take them to sea and burn them.’
The king quickly consults his chiefs and replies, ‘We find nothing conflicting with our laws in what you say.’6
And he’s more than happy with a gift of 70 muskets and ammunition taken from the Harvest. The muskets, intended as trade goods, are old, rusty and, if fired, likely to do more harm to the shooter than to the target.
The royal tour of the Shenandoah having ended with satisfactory outcomes for all involved, the King, keen to repay the Southern hospitality, invites the Shenandoah officers to visit his residence.
While the officers are courting royalty, the crew – all given shore leave – are making the most of the island’s natural attractions: the beaches, bush and freshwater swimming holes, but mostly the women.
There is no record of men from the Shenandoah fraternising with the island women, but when sexual favours could be procured for a plug of tobacco, it would be naïve to assume they did not. And they could not help but notice, on entering port, large numbers of women on the decks of the whaling ships. Plainly, the women were not selling sea shells.
Some officers and men make their way four miles up the coast to the mysterious ruins of Nan Madol. An ancient city built on a coral reef by an unknown civilisation, its massive walls, of stones weighing up to 50 tons, were quarried on the other side of the island. Local legend has it that the city was built by twin sorcerers who levitated the huge stones with the help of a flying dragon.
The question of how the stones were transported and erected is unanswered in 1865, and will remain an archaeological conundrum into the 21st century, as well as prime fodder for fanciful theories about lost continents, giants and alien visitors.
We’ll never know what Australian Confederate Little Sam Crook might make of this stranger-than-fiction place, but it will make a hell of a yarn if ever he gets back home to Williamstown.
It’s a little after noon on Sunday 9 April 1865 when a tall, grey-haired man of aristocratic bearing, in an immaculate grey tunic and buckskin gauntlets, and riding a grey horse, crosses the creek on the road to Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
He pauses only to allow his horse, Traveller, to drink, then rides on to the McLean place, a neat if unremarkable red-brick house, with elm trees shading the lawn and roses by the front porch.
The tall man dismounts and enters the house, where he sits in the parlour and waits in silence.
About half an hour later, a short, dark-haired, plain-looking man in a mud-spattered blue jacket comes riding down the road. He dismounts, steps onto the porch and hurries inside to join the tall man in the parlour. They shake hands.
Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant have met once before, during the Mexican War, and Grant mentions this, perhaps to break the ice. ‘I have always remembered your appearance and I think I would have recognised you anywhere,’ he says.
Lee replies, ‘Yes, I know I met you on that occasion, and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked. But I have never been able to recall a single feature.’7
With what pass for pleasantries thus despatched, Lee asks Grant under what terms he would receive the surrender of his army. Grant repeats the terms he proposed in an earlier exchange of notes between the two, that ‘the officers and men surrender to be paroled and disqualified from taking up arms until properly exchanged, and all arms, ammunition and supplies to be delivered up as captured property’.8
Lee knows he has no choice but to accept. What is left of his Army of Northern Virginia is surrounded, and Richmond has fallen. ‘Those are the conditions I expected would be proposed,’ he says.9
Three hours later, after details have been discussed and small compromises reached, General Grant puts the terms in writing, and both men sign the document.
The two great adversaries shake hands and leave the house together. As Lee, his expression unreadable, mounts Traveller, the Union soldiers in McLean’s yard snap to attention.
One of the soldiers in the yard, 23-year-old Corporal Almer Montague, of the 1st Vermont Cavalry, a veteran of Gettysburg and the Shenandoah Valley campaign, is moved by the moment, and will later gather mementos of the historic event. In a letter to a friend, he writes:
‘I have a few things that I have picked up that I wish to send by Uncle Lewis this morning and have just time. In the first place, the book they are in I got Appomattox Court House. The blotter paper was in the County Register. The leaf from the locust tree grew in front of the court house. The other two that I pinned together I picked off the bushes hanging over the steps of the very house in which General Lee surrendered, and the piece of stick is from the railing in front of the same.’10
As Lee takes the reins, Grant steps forward and raises his hat; Lee returns the compliment and rides off down the road.
It is customary on such occasions that the commander of the defeated side surrenders his sword, but Robert E. Lee did not do so. Ulysses S. Grant could not bear to take it from him.
On Monday April 10, Australians are yet to learn of Lee’s surrender, but are relieved to read i
n their daily newspapers that the notorious bushranger Mad Dan Morgan has been shot and killed, ending a three-year rampage of cold-blooded murder, torture and arson.
After crossing the Murray River into Victoria, Morgan was raiding Peechalba Station, near Wangaratta, when a nursemaid raised the alarm. The station hands armed themselves, and when Morgan came out of the homestead he was shot in the back by stockman Paddy Quinlan, who had been hiding behind a tree.
Morgan, who had never given quarter to any of his victims, complained as he lay dying that it wasn’t a fair fight.
And in a letter to the editor in Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald, a reader helpfully suggests that police should use bloodhounds to hunt bushrangers, rather than employing Aboriginal trackers. He writes, ‘Any person who has looked over a newspaper published in the slave states of America will see advertisements of slave-hunters who will guarantee to find any runaway Negro with their dogs.’11
The Herald’s correspondent is not yet aware that American slave-hunters will no longer advertise their services; that those days are over; that they ended just yesterday.
On the Shenandoah, Captain Waddell calls a meeting with the skippers of the captured whalers. Three of the four can offer no legal reason why their ships might be spared, but the master of the Harvest, John Eldridge, protests that his ship should not be confiscated because it is not an American but a Hawaiian vessel. He tells Waddell his ship was originally American, out of New Bedford, but had since been sold to interests in Honolulu. However, Captain Eldridge cannot produce a bill of sale to prove his claim, and Waddell doesn’t believe him. Convinced the Harvest is under false colours, he orders that Eldridge and his officers be taken prisoner, and for the Harvest, along with the three other ships, to be set afire. It’s a mistake, and one that will come back to haunt him.
Their whalers’ crews, 130 men in total and mostly Hawaiians, are put ashore and, it’s noted, are treated kindly by the islanders.
The four whalers are reckoned to be worth a total of almost $118,000 in prize money, but for Waddell the far greater prizes are captured charts of whaling grounds.
‘With such charts in my possession, I not only held a key to the navigation of all the Pacific islands, the Okhotsk and Bering seas, and the Arctic Ocean, but the most probable localities for finding the great Arctic whaling fleet of New England, without a tiresome search.’12
On 12 April, Waddell and his officers go ashore to keep their appointment with the King. The royal residence is nothing fancy, just a one-room dwelling built of interlaced cane and roofed with coconut leaves, but in a pleasant riverside location where the fishing is good.
Inside, the Confederates – with Harrocke in tow to interpret – find the King seated on a woven mat with his queen beside him. The King invites them to sit – the seats are two wooden chairs, a box and a trunk – and immediately asks when they expect to leave and if they intend to kill their prisoners, which he considers the right thing to do. It seems he’s not much of a one for small talk.
Waddell tells him he intends to set sail the following day, and that the prisoners would not be harmed. ‘In civilised warfare,’ he explains, ‘men destroyed those in armed resistance and paroled the unarmed.’
‘But war cannot be considered civilised,’ the King replies, ‘and those who make war on an unoffending people are a bad people and do not deserve to live.’13
Waddell impresses upon the King that when he gets home he will be sure to tell President Davis of his kind hospitality and the respect shown to the Confederate flag.
The King says, ‘Tell Jeff Davis he is my brother and a big warrior; that we are very poor, but that our tribes are friends. If he will send your steamer for me, I will visit him in his country.’14
With that, he presents Waddell with two dead chickens and some coconuts to deliver to the President of the Confederate States of America with his kind regards.
The next morning, with the crew all present and correct, and almost all of them sporting tender new tattoos, courtesy of islander artists, the Shenandoah weighs anchor and steams out to sea, bidding farewell to the tiny island kingdom of Pohnpei – the only country on Earth to officially recognise the Confederacy as a sovereign nation.
Fred McNulty notes, ‘After staying at Ascension Island 11 days, we hove our anchor and started for the coast of Japan. As we neared the coast, thousands of robins came on deck, and, falling exhausted from the rigging, were picked up in buckets full, and proved a great change from salt horse.’
He adds, ‘Great events were going on then at home, but we were oblivious of their occurrence.’15
Jefferson Davis will never receive the chickens and coconuts from his Pacific Island admirer. What he does receive, on the same day the Shenandoah departs Pohnpei, is a letter from General Lee that begins, ‘It is with pain that I announce to Your Excellency the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.’16
Davis, in poor health and increasingly out of touch with reality, refuses to accept that Lee’s surrender means the cause is lost. In his addled mind, he is the embodiment of the cause, and as long as he is at the helm the Confederacy will prevail. He clings to this belief even knowing that rebel soldiers, many of them sick, starving and emaciated, are limping into Union lines in their thousands, throwing down their arms in exchange for tinned beef and hardtack.
Jeff Davis is on the run. The Yankees have overrun his capital, and he is reduced to holding Cabinet meetings in a boxcar in a railway siding in Greensboro, North Carolina. Still, on 15 April he proclaims, ‘I believe we can whip the enemy yet, if the people will turn out.’17
Davis doesn’t know it yet but Abraham Lincoln, shot by an assassin the night before, died in the early hours of that same day. The assassination will harden Northern hearts and make reconciliation all the more difficult. And while the Confederacy continues to be led by a deluded, fugitive president, presiding over chaos, the war will not formally be over.
Chapter 15
The curious case of Eugenio Gonzales
How had it come to this? There had been a large show of public sympathy for the plight of Eugenio Gonzales. Hearts went out to this young man of African-American and Hispanic heritage who had served on the Confederate raider Alabama, and was wounded during the ill-fated battle with USS Kearsarge, in 1864. Since coming to Australia he had worked hard as a farm labourer and lived a quiet and respectable life, only to be savagely attacked to cries of ‘Kill the black nigger!’, and left for dead.
Yet here he is, on 20 April 1865, in the dock of a Victorian court, sentenced to 12 months’ jail, with hard labour, for perjury.
Gonzales, 18, has been found guilty of falsely accusing Duncan McIntyre and his niece and nephew, Grace and John Sinclair, aged 12 and 15, of attempted murder. On 6 February, Gonzales told Flemington Police Court, ‘I am in the employ of Mr Robert McDougal, of Essendon. On Saturday, 21 January I found a bull belonging to Mrs Sinclair on Mr McDougal’s land. I was taking it to the house [to impound the animal], when Mr McIntyre came to take the bull from me. We had a fight, he struck me and knocked me down. The boy, John Sinclair, was at the fence, and called out, “Kill the black nigger!” McIntyre then called to the girl, Grace Sinclair, to bring a stone. She did so, and struck me on the back with it. I fell down, as dead.’1
Gonzales told the court he had been wounded in both legs during the battle between the Alabama and the Kearsarge, and came to Australia about nine months afterwards, on the El Dorado. It was not uncommon for free African-Americans to serve in the Confederate States Navy. Confederate naval regulations allowed a ship’s captain a ratio of one black seaman to five white seamen.
A doctor who examined Gonzales shortly after the assault testified that he found him unconscious, bleeding from the mouth, and his back swollen from a recent blow. He had no discernible pulse, his eyes did not react to light, his extremities were cold, his lungs were congested and his teeth were clenched. In the doctor’s opinion, he was close to death.
Anoth
er doctor gave similar evidence, agreeing that Eugenio Gonzales was dying as the result of severe injuries. Yet by some miracle he had recovered.
It might have seemed an open and shut case until the defence provided alibis for each of the defendants. Witnesses testified that, at the time of the alleged assault, Duncan McIntyre was in Melbourne, Grace Sinclair was fishing in a distant creek with her mother, and John Sinclair was away delivering produce all that day.
The case was dismissed, and Gonzales was indicted for perjury. At his trial, the alibis were repeated, with additional and persuasive detail, and the judge refused to allow as evidence a deathbed declaration by Gonzales because he had not died. The defence protested that it was unlikely a man anticipating death would perjure himself by swearing to a declaration that could send three people to the gallows, but the bench remained unmoved.
So here stands Eugenio Gonzales, found guilty as charged. However, the jury has recommended a lenient sentence, and the judge, in handing down 12 months – the maximum is 15 years – has accepted the jury’s recommendation as ‘tantamount to an expression of belief that Gonzales had been assaulted as he described, but that he had been guilty of overstating his convictions as to the identity of the persons who made the attack upon him’.2
Gonzales is taken down to the cells, there to await the wagon to transport him to Pentridge jail to do his time. However, his story doesn’t end there. Observing the case with a keen and clinical eye was an eminent pathologist, Dr James Neild. An expert in forensic medicine, Dr Neild sees evidence of something the court did not see. His curiosity piqued, he sets out to investigate, and in August presents his remarkable findings to the Medical Society of Victoria, in a paper entitled ‘On a Case of Feigned Haemoptysis and Collapse’.
