by Terry Smyth
He tells the Society, ‘My attention has been directed to the case solely on account of the peculiar interest it seemed to possess as an example in that long list of feigned diseases, which form not the least part of that division of the study of medicine which I have had the honour of being appointed to teach in the Melbourne University.
‘I cannot but regard it as a very unusual example of feigned disease. Indeed, the apparent absence of motive on the part of the impostor somewhat complicates the case, and almost points to the possibility of its serving not only as an instance of disease-feigning but also a curious phase of monomania.’
After briefly describing the court case, the injuries observed by two physicians, and the reasons for the judgement, he tells the gentlemen of the Society – some of whom must be squirming in their seats by now, ‘Very properly, therefore, the case was dismissed, notwithstanding the very positive medical evidence tendered on the occasion, and which was, I am quite sure, given in perfectly good faith, and in the full belief that the symptoms as described were genuine.’
In other words, Neild, as delicately as possible, is telling his colleagues they’ve been fooled. In his opinion, Eugenio Gonzales is a consummate faker who, by long practice, has learnt how to deceive those who witness his supposed attacks of haemorrhage. Not only can he simulate haemoptysis (coughing up blood) but also loss of consciousness and collapse, and, for no apparent reason, he was willing to send three innocent people to the gallows.
To support his conclusion, Neild tenders a letter from Albert Read, the solicitor for Gonzales’s alleged attackers. And it’s a bombshell.
Read, dissatisfied with the jury’s reluctance to convict, and the light sentence imposed by a sympathetic judge, decided to dig deeper.
Aware that the Shenandoah was in port, he met with Confederate officers and crewmen who had served on the Alabama up to the time of its sinking. All of them declared no such man had ever been on board that ship. Read then pieced together Gonzales’s real story.
As a sailor on the ship Aurora, he arrived in Melbourne from America in November 1863, and was immediately taken to Melbourne Hospital for treatment of a back injury received when, during the voyage, he fell from the topsail yard of the ship onto the deck. On discharge from hospital he found work with a waterman named Antonio Losenlo, plying boats between suburban Footscray and Melbourne wharf.
Losenlo told Read that in the mornings he would often find Gonzales in a fit, foaming at the mouth and spitting blood, yet by breakfast time he would be fine. Gonzales did this so often that Losenlo was convinced he could throw a fit and haemorrhage at will. On other occasions he would be found with blood in his mouth and appear to be stone dead, but would come to after about an hour. Eventually, Losenlo told Gonzales he had had enough of his shamming, and sacked him.
Gonzales loafed around Footscray for a while, telling fortunes at the Ship Inn, but soon wore out his welcome by too often performing his haemorrhagic party trick. He crewed on a schooner but deserted after stealing money, then took the job as a farm hand for Robert McDougal.
The medical officer at Pentridge jail told Albert Read that even behind bars Gonzales was up to his old tricks, although he was now claiming to have been hit in the chest with a rock.
Read’s letter concluded, ‘Having given you the history of Gonzales, I leave you to judge of the value of his dying declaration, also of the medical evidence, showing with what great caution such evidence should be received, as well as how cautious medical gentlemen should be before giving such positive evidence that they could not be mistaken.’
On that cautionary note, Dr Neild’s presentation to the Medical Society of Victoria concludes. Whether it’s met by respectful applause or stony silence, we’ll never know. Given that James Neild, who is not only a doctor but a poet and something of a bohemian, is not popular with the old guard, who regard him as a maverick, the latter is more likely. One medico, at least, registers his appreciation, only to taint it with a racist comment of sweeping proportions.
A certain Dr Black opines that the case confirms his own conclusions, gained while working in the West Indies, that ‘coloured races were constitutionally disposed to habits of dissimulation, feigned diseases in that colony being among the most constantly observed phenomena of medical practice’.3
Chapter 16
The way north
‘There were days not very long since when literary gentlemen wrote clever books about colonies, the right theory of colonisation, the sort of people that ought to colonise, and how they ought to be governed,’ sniffs The Times of London on 24 April 1865:
It was a great advance, so at least they thought, on the old material idea, of which, to say the truth, Robinson Crusoe was the leading type. But colonies, it is now very evident, will not be made by book, or by governments, or by societies, or by governors, or even by colonists themselves. Partly they take their own course; partly circumstances form them; those circumstances are sometimes so strong that you have little else to do but stand by at a respectful distance and see what comes of it.
The colony, first the province of Victoria, was founded in quiet times; it is named after Her Majesty, and the capital after her Prime Minister. It was hoped that a few hardy fellows would go there, breed sheep, send us tallow and wool, and earn enough to live comfortably and marry upon. That was only a few years ago, and Victoria has not had such a history as, we will say, Canada, but it has had some strange experiences. The fleece turned into a golden one, and, instead of a few shepherds and husbandman, Victoria has a population of near 700,000 pursuing every kind of trade, and, at the last date, carrying a protective tariff. But within those five and twenty years has come the demand for self-government, and Victoria is a virtually independent state. A little time since it was on the point of going to war with New South Wales, ostensibly on a question of duties, really for a ‘correction’ of the boundary line.
But now there has come a new question. All at once the Shenandoah makes its appearance in Port Phillip, carrying the papers, the chronometers, and some of the men of many Federal ships captured and sent to the bottom. The Flying Dutchman would not have been a more terrible visitor. There was no doubt about the ship or her history, for the crew let it all out, and were proud of their errand and their achievements, Melbourne of course was divided, but the Confederate cause is evidently tho more popular, and Captain Waddell became a ‘lion’ at the clubs and at parties.
We regret that the people of Melbourne should have displayed so much sympathy with a crew engaged in the destruction of ships coming upon errands of peace to their own distant ports.
Luckily for Victoria’s governor, Sir Charles Darling, Her Majesty’s Government does not share The Times’s air of despair of colonials behaving badly – not publicly, anyway.
If Governor Darling is anticipating a severe slap from Downing Street for his inept handing of the Shenandoah affair, he’s relieved to receive a despatch from British Secretary of State, Earl Russell, thrashing him with a feather.
His Lordship writes:
I have much pleasure in informing you that Her Majesty’s Government are of the opinion that, under the circumstances stated, you acted with propriety and discretion; and that there does not appear, at present, to be a necessity for any action on their part. With regard to your request that you may receive instructions as to the propriety of executing any warrant under the Foreign Enlistment Act on board a Confederate (public) ship of war, Her Majesty’s Government are of the opinion that, in the case of strong suspicion you ought to request the permission of the commander of the ship to execute the warrant, and that if this request be refused you ought not attempt to enforce the execution; but in this case the commander should be desired to leave the port as speedily as possible, and should be informed that he would not be re-admitted.1
In other words, we’ll forgive the cock-up, Charles, old chap, but do get it right next time.
In Irwin County, Georgia, on 10 May, Jefferson Davis is
captured. With the President is his wife Varina, their four children, a small force of cavalry and a few others. Taken by surprise in the early morning by Union cavalry, the Confederates surrender without a shot being fired.
A popular story soon doing the rounds is that Davis almost escaped when his wife persuaded the Union officer guarding their tent to let her mother fetch water from the creek. Permission was granted, and a person in a woman’s coat and black head shawl left the tent and was headed for the creek when another officer noticed that Mrs Davis’s ‘mother’ was wearing cavalry boots with spurs. He called on the ‘old lady’ to halt, and whipped off the shawl to reveal Jeff Davis. Another version of the tale has Davis making a break for it in a wig, bonnet and hoop skirt. The Northern press features cartoons depicting Davis fleeing in drag, and there is even a popular song titled ‘Jeff in Petticoats’.
A verse of the songs runs:
Our Union boys were on his track for many nights and days,
His palpitating heart it beat enough to burst his stays.
Oh what a dash he must have cut with form so tall and lean.
Just fancy now the ‘What is it? Dressed up in crinoline!’
The chorus goes:
Oh Jeffry D,
You flow’r of chivalree.
Oh royal Jeffry D,
Your empire’s but a tin-clad skirt,
Oh charming Jeffry D.2
However, eye-witnesses on both sides refute the story. Among the most persuasive is an account by Davis’s free-born African-American coachman and courier, James H. Jones, and another by one of the Union cavalrymen who arrested Davis. The soldier’s account, as published in several newspapers and historical journals, tells us, ‘Besides the suit of men’s clothing worn by Mr Davis, he had on when captured Mrs Davis’s large waterproof dress or robe thrown over his own fine grey suit, and a blanket shawl thrown over his head and shoulders.
‘The story of the “hoop skirt, sun bonnet and calico wrapper” had no real existence and was started in the febrile brains of the reporters and illustrated papers of that day. That was a perilous moment for Mr Davis. He had the right to try to escape in any disguise he could use.’3
The way north finds fair winds and fine weather until the Shenandoah crosses the 43rd parallel. From then on, the weather grows increasingly cold and the winds turn fickle. Old hands feel it in their bones that something wicked this way comes, and, sure enough, from out of the north-east looms a vast black cloud, whipping the lazy rollers below into a boiling cauldron.
Waddell vividly describes the storm: ‘So close did it rest upon the surface of the water that it seemed determined to overwhelm the ship, and there came in it so terrible and violent a wind that the Shenandoah was thrown on her side, and she bounced away as if in fight, like the stag from his lair, had started her.
‘Squall after squall struck her, flash after flash surrounded her, and the thunder rolled in her wake. It was the typhoon. The ocean was as white as the snow as foamed with rage. A new close-reefed topsail was blown into shreds, and the voice of man was inaudible amid this awful convolution of nature.’4
Mercifully, the storm passes quickly and the ship, which had been forced westward by the gale, resumes its passage north. Two days on, though, another big blow pushes her off course for a while, but when she finally makes it across the 45th parallel the weather is colder but more settled. All hands breathe a sign of relief.
On 20 May, they sight the snow-covered Kuril Islands, and the next sail into the Sea of Okhotsk and run along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the Russian far east, on the lookout for whalers.
There are no whalers in sight yet, but nature treats all on deck to spectacular displays of Arctic magic – beautiful mirages of such clarity that a snow-clad peak some 70 miles (113km) away appears much closer, and to have an identical but inverted image above it, peak touching peak, as if the sky were a mirror reflecting the earth below.
The magic spell is soon broken. On 27 May, as a thick fog clears, they find themselves in a field of ice stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see. The ice is at least five feet (1.5m) thick on the port side, and on the starboard side it rises to the height of the sails – lying stiff as boards across the masts, frozen from the drizzling rain of the previous night.
The ice floe is moving, slowly, with the ship caught in its grip. Fred McNulty recalls, ‘It grated against the frail timbers that now only stood between us and death, as if envious that its realms had been invaded, and wanting to reach with its cold grasp the intruder.
‘Lips unused to prayer now sent up a supplication. Added to all, as if to mock our miseries, a group of walruses climbed clumsily out of the sea and began disporting themselves so near that we could almost touch them.
‘Gradually, as hope began to sink, the sun slowly came upon the scene. Though low in the north, it brought hope and warmth. The long, cold northern day that knows no sunset was upon us with its low, mocking noon. The sails began to lose their ridged bend, the ice loosened and we forged ahead. Then, lowering our propeller in the wake thus made, we pushed sternwise out of the terrible ice floe.’5
Two days on, while skirting an ice floe, they spot a ship heading straight for them. She’s the Abigail, a whaler out of New Bedford, and she has mistaken the raider for a Russian supply ship en route to the port of Okhotsk.
When the Stainless Banner goes up and a shot splashes across her bows, the Abigail puts up no resistance and is duly boarded, looted and burnt. Her master, Ebenezer Nye, might well be the unluckiest skipper afloat, having previously lost a ship to the Alabama. When he and his mates are taken aboard the Shenandoah as prisoners, one of them turns to him in disgust and says, ‘You are more fortunate in picking up Confederate cruisers than whales! I will never again go with you, for if there is a cruiser out there, you will find it.’6
Captain Nye tells the Confederates the war is over, but since he can offer no proof, they don’t believe him. Twelve of the Abigail’s crew don’t believe him either – or don’t care – and enlist on the Shenandoah.
The booty from the Abigail includes 20 barrels of whisky, and the prize crew proceed to get roaring drunk. One sailor, Australian Confederate Thomas Swanton, gets so drunk he is ordered back to the Shenandoah, but when bundled into a boat jumps overboard. Lieutenant Chew reports, ‘The water was below the freezing point and the cold bath did him much good. Had to lash him in the boat.’7
The rest of the revellers incur the wrath of Lieutenant Whittle, who notes in his journal, ‘We brought off a great deal of liquor and many of our men and two officers got drunk. Put all in irons, gagged and triced up, right and left.
‘I am determined that they shall not repeat it.’
One man did. The next day, Whittle writes, ‘Put Mr Lynch [2nd carpenter] in irons for again being drunk. He being very insolent to me, I gagged him.’8
Chapter 17
The last shot
In 20 days, the Shenandoah has run from tropical heat to biting cold. As she labours through yet another gale, the mercury falls to several degrees below zero, and the pack ice is growing thicker.
The ship is in danger of being crushed when a lookout spots a passage through the ice, with open water beyond. She enters the passage under close and reefed sail, and in a short time is in water as calm as a mill pond while, on the weather side of the floe, massive chunks of ice are breaking off, throwing up sheets of water 20 feet (6m) high.
She’s not out of danger yet. Now, she’s sailing through rain and sleet which instantly freezes, encrusting the sails, braces, blocks, yards and all the running rigging in thick ice.
As the weather eases, the Captain knows what must be done, yet he pauses before giving the order, entranced by what he sees – more Arctic magic.
‘The gale had passed over, and it was calm, the clouds were exhausted, the rosy tint of morn opened upon a scene of enchantment, and the sunlight burst upon us, the flash and sparkle from truck to deck, from bowsprit to top
sail, awakened exclamations of enthusiastic delight over the fair ship.
‘The disposition was evidently not to disturb, but leave to enjoyment the crystal mantle of the Shenandoah. Finally, the crew was sent aloft with billets of wood to dislodge the ice and free the running rigging. The large icicles falling from aloft rendered the deck dangerous to move upon, and it soon became covered with clear, beautiful ice, which was removed to the tanks, casks, and every vessel capable of receiving it.’1
Westward is a white world of ice; no fit place for hunter or quarry. The Shenandoah changes course for the North Pacific, and on the afternoon of 16 June enters the Bering Sea.
The hunt is on.
Amid the scramble to boost Melbourne’s defences in the wake of the Shenandoah, the Victorian Government is considering an exciting new invention by Captain Horace H. Doty, late of the Confederate States Navy. As The Argus puts it, ‘The Civil War in the United States, as might be expected from the inventive genius of the American people, has been prolific of improvements in the art of warfare.’2
Captain Doty’s ingenious invention is an advanced design of ‘submarine battery’ – an explosive shell attached to the end of a long bar protruding from the prow of a semi-submerged vessel. During the Civil War, submarine batteries, or ‘spar torpedoes’, had been used with effect by the Confederate Navy. The term ‘torpedo’ in those days, applied to explosive shells. The self-propelled torpedo had not yet been invented.
In Captain Doty’s improved device, when the shell strikes an enemy ship, wires in the bar, connected to a battery, make a circuit, which detonates the shell. It’s said that a fast vessel armed with such a device could easily despatch several heavily armed frigates. Adding to its appeal, the device is simple, economical, safe, and can be used in the roughest seas and on the darkest night.
