by Terry Smyth
As the escaping whalers enter the ice field, the Shenandoah runs close and parallel to the ice to separate the ships, then, when about a mile away from the furthest ship, fires at her twice, forcing her to heave to. The other vessel, the Jirah Swift, with a strong wind behind her, makes good her escape and heads for the Siberian coast.
The captured whaler is the Sophia Thornton, out of New Bedford. Her master, Captain Moses Tucker, and her mates are taken aboard the Shenandoah, which then resumes the chase of the Jirah Swift, with the Milo sailing behind.
The New Bedford barque Jirah Swift is a fast ship with a skilful master, Thomas Williams, and in a good breeze it takes three hours to get within firing range of her.
Lieutenant Grimball barks the order for the gun crew to man one of the ship’s two Whitworths. There are five marines in the gun crew – Sergeant Canning, Corporal Alexander, and privates Kenyon, Reily and Brown – all Australian Confederates. They are preparing to fire a Whitworth 32-pounder. The first generation of modern artillery, this British-designed gun is state of the art – made of high-tensile steel rather than brittle iron, and loaded from the breech, not from the muzzle. Its 70mm-calibre barrel is rifled in a hexagonal design and it fires solid, hexagonal shot called ‘bolts’ that make a distinctive and eerie whistling sound when fired. Exceptionally accurate up to 9,000 metres, it’s ideal for firing across water. Unlike an explosive shell, a bolt from a Whitworth has a battering effect on a target, capable of shattering a ship’s hull and mowing down her crew with showers of splinters.
At Grimball’s command, the gun is ‘run out’ with tackles until the front of the gun carriage is hard up against the bulwark and the barrel is protruding from the gun port. With five full turns of the handles, one of the gun crew opens the screw-threaded breech, and another loads a bolt and a waxed cartridge of black powder, pieced to align with the touch-hole at the back of the gun. The breech is closed, and the ‘gun captain’ – who in this instance would be Sergeant Canning – takes aim at the target, using the sights, turning the elevating mechanism, and by removing a locking pin in the carriage to move the gun from side to side.
When sure he has the target in his sights, allowing for the roll and pitch of the ship, the gun captain raises his arm to signal all is ready.
Grimball yells, ‘Fire!’
Sergeant Canning ignites the powder with a fuse to the touch-hole; all jump aside to avoid the recoil and the flash from the touch-hole; the cannon booms, a shot whistles past the stern of the Jirah Swift and immediately brings her to heel.
The Shenandoah’s gun crew have the satisfaction of a shot well placed, and with the desired effect. They have done this many times before, though, so it’s a matter of no particular moment to them.
It will be many months yet before they learn that off the coast of Alaska on this day, Thursday, 22 June 1865, at 5.45pm, they fired the last shot of the American Civil War.
Chapter 18
‘An old grey-headed devil’
There have never before been such pirates. That is, pirates who don’t know they are pirates.
On the capture of the Jirah Swift, Captain Waddell notes, with frank admiration, ‘Captain Williams, who made every effort to save his barque, saw the folly of exposing the crew to a destructive fire and yielded to his misfortune with a manly and becoming dignity.’1
When Lieutenant Smith Lee, leading the boarding party, reaches the Jirah Swift, he finds Captain Williams and his crew already packed and ready to leave for the Shenandoah. Twenty minutes later, the Jirah Swift is on fire.
Williams tell Smith Lee he does not believe the war is over, although he feels certain the South will eventually surrender.
With all the prisoners now aboard, the Milo sets sail for San Francisco, and the Shenandoah heads off in search of more victims. Unbeknown to the Confederates, smoke from the burning Sophia Thornton and Jirah Swift is spotted by four ships a few miles away – an American whaler, a French vessel and two Hawaiian ships – all of which sail off to warn any American ships they encounter.
Meanwhile, when the Milo is out of sight of the Shenandoah, several of the prisoners on board, led by the captain of the Abigail, Ebenezer Nye, lower two whaleboats and set off through ice-bound seas, hoping to reach Cape Bering to warn the whalers there, a distance of about 200 miles (320km). Captain Nye, who has lost two ships to Confederate raiders, hopes to be third-time lucky, and this time Lady Luck is on his side. Two days later, the escapees are picked up by a Yankee whaler, the Mercury, make it safely to a friendly port and raise the alarm.
On the morning of Friday 23 June, the brigantine Susan Abigail, a trader out of San Francisco, falls prey to the black raider. The Confederates help themselves to the weapons, calico, twine and other goods intended to be traded with the Inuit for furs.
San Francisco newspapers on board tell of the removal of the Confederate Government to Danville after the fall of Richmond, and President Jefferson Davis’s proclamation that the South would not give up the fight.
Waddell claims the news includes a report that the better part of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia have joined with General Joe Johnston’s forces in North Carolina, ‘where an indecisive battle had been fought with General Sherman’.2 If such a report exists, it is entirely without foundation.
Waddell further claims the Susan Abigail’s master, Captain Redfield, tells him, ‘Opinion is divided as to the ultimate result of the war. For the present, the North has the advantage, but how it will all end no-one can know, and as to the newspapers, they are not reliable.’3
The Susan Abigail is set ablaze, and two of her crew join the Shenandoah, which Waddell interprets as proof they do not believe the war is over. ‘They were not pressed to ship, but sought service under our flag,’ he writes.4
Lieutenant Whittle’s take on the news from America is not quite in accord with his captain’s version. He notes in his journal: ‘The vessel which we captured today is one of the latest arrivals from San Francisco and brings the confirmation of the assassination of Lincoln, fall of Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, Richmond and the surrender of General Lee with 16,000 men. The news, if true, is very bad, but there’s life in the old land yet. Let us live with a hope. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Oh let us trust in him.’5
That same day, in the Choctaw Indian Territory, Oklahoma, the last active rebel army unit, the Cherokee Mounted Rifles, commanded by Cherokee chief and Confederate general Stand Watie, rides into Fort Towson to surrender.
Watie’s battalion of Cherokee, Seminole, Creek and Osage warriors has won a reputation as a brave and formidable force in the west, but after fighting on for 75 days after Lee’s surrender in the east, Watie has accepted that continued resistance is futile, and is the last rebel general to lay down his arms.
There is now only one Confederate combat unit still active – the Shenandoah.
The tally is rising fast. On 22 June the General Williams, out of New London, is captured and burned, and on the following day six New England whalers are captured – the William C. Nye, the Nimrod, the Catherine, the Isabella, the Gypsy, and the General Pike. All are burned except the General Pike.
Waddell: ‘The General Pike lost her master, and the mate was in charge of her, who asked as a special favour to be allowed to ransom her. He said, “If you ransom the Pike, her owner will think me so fortunate in saving her that it will give me a claim on them for the command.”
‘All the prisoners were sent to the General Pike, and she was given a certificate for San Francisco.’6
Next morning finds the Shenandoah under sail with a head wind, and the sails of escaping ships in sight. Keeping her distance so as not to raise suspicion, she follows them.
Fred McNulty describes what happens next as ‘our greatest day’s work – perhaps the greatest destruction ever served upon an enemy in a single day by one ship’.7
In a thick fog, on the morning of 28 June, something suddenly sweeps across the Shenandoah’s bows, and the men on deck can just make ou
t the outline of a ship. In the fog, she almost collided with the raider.
The fog lifts to reveal not one but 11 ships lying at anchor in a wide bay. The bay is East Cape Bay – now Cape Dezhnev – on the Russian coast, and the ships are all Yankee whalers – the Favorite, the James Murray, the Brunswick, the Congress, the Nile, the Congress, the Hillman, the Isaac Howland, the Nassau, the Martha 2nd, and the Covington. And all of them are sitting ducks.
The Shenandoah steams into the bay, flying an American flag, whereupon all 11 ships do likewise. Fred McNulty tells us, ‘Soon the work of demand, surrender, debarkation and conflagration began. Two were saved and bonded to take home the other crews. Then followed the torch and auger. Never before had these latitudes beheld such a dread scene of devastation as this, as ship after ship went up in flames.
‘We had been ordered to wipe out the whaling marine of the enemy; and now, after the government that had so ordered had been itself destroyed, we, unwittingly, were dealing the enemy our hardest blows – not our enemy, if we knew the facts, and we were making of ourselves the enemy of mankind.’8
Waddell writes:
We had heard of the whale ship James Murray off the island of Ascension, and after reaching the Bering Sea had heard again of her and also of the death of her master, whose widow and two little children were on board.
While our boats were being armed preparatory to taking possession of the prizes, a boat from the whale ship Brunswick came to the steamer, and the mate in charge of the boat, ignorant of our true nationality, represented that the Brunswick had struck a piece of ice a few hours before which left a hole in her starboard bow 20 inches below the water line, and asked for assistance.
To their application we replied, “We are very busy now, but in a little while we will attend to you.”
The mate thanked us, and he was asked which of the vessels was the James Murray. He pointed her out. The Brunswick laid on her side, her casks of oil floating her well up, and her master, seeing his vessel a hopeless wreck, had offered his oil to any one purchaser among the masters of the other vessels at 20 cents per gallon.9
The Shenandoah, now in position to threaten the whaling fleet with her guns, hoists the Stainless Banner, and armed boats are launched to board the ships and bring their masters and papers to the Shenandoah.
‘The American flags were hauled down instantly,’ says Waddell.’10
All but one, that is. On the whaler Favorite, Old Glory still flaps in defiance.
Thomas Young, an old salt in his mid-sixties, is master of the Favorite, out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, with a cargo of 500 barrels of whale oil and 3,300 pounds of ivory. He watches with rising anger as the rest of the fleet – chased and boarded by the Shenandoah, give up without a fight.
Seeing a boat shove off from the Shenandoah and make for his ship, he arms himself with a pistol and an old blunderbuss – a short, muzzle-loading firearm used for shooting whales – and climbs onto the cabin roof. When the raider’s boat comes close, he aims the blunderbuss at the head of the officer in charge of the boarding party and yells, ‘Stand off!’
The rebel officer at first laughs off the threat as a joke; an empty gesture. Then, noting the determined look on the old skipper’s face and the unwavering aim of his blunderbuss, he orders his men to turn and row back to the Shenandoah with all speed.
On the Favorite, Captain Young’s officers and crew are quaking with fear, expecting the next few minutes will bring the flash and thunder of a broadside from the Shenandoah’s guns. Desperate to prevent a bloodbath, they beg him to surrender, but Young is resolute. He’d be happy to die, he tells them, if he could take the commander of the privateer with him. Realising further argument is useless, Young’s officers somehow remove his ammunition and the percussion caps for his pistol without him noticing, then they and the entire crew lower boats and abandon ship, leaving their captain to face the wrath of the raider alone.
Young knows only too well what shot and shell can do, having run a Union supply ship up the Potomac early in the war, dodging Confederate shore batteries all the way – a very risky business. Still, he stands his ground.
‘Besides,’ he tells himself, ‘I have only four or five years to live anyway, and I might as well die now as any time, especially as all I have got is invested in my vessel, and if I lose that I will have to go home penniless and die a pauper.’
From the Shenandoah, Young hears the cry, ‘Fire, but fire low!’ Nothing happens. Waddell gave the order to fire but had immediately countermanded it on noticing that one of his boats was in range.
Soon, the boarding party comes alongside for a second time, and the rebel officer calls on Captain Young to strike his colours.
‘I’ll see you damned first!’ Young snaps.
‘If you don’t do it, I’ll shoot you!’ says the Confederate, aiming his pistol at the captain.
‘Shoot and be damned!’ shouts the captain, raising his weapon. He squeezes the trigger. Click.
‘Goddammit!’ Realising his gun is unloaded, he has no option but to surrender, and is taken to the Shenandoah, clapped in irons and imprisoned in the topgallant forecastle.11
No accounts of this incident identify the Confederate officer involved in the standoff with Captain Young. However, given that this officer threatens to gag the captain unless he cooperates, it’s likely to have been William Whittle.
Four hours after being taken prisoner, Young is bundled on board the Nile, to be sent to San Francisco. There, he will claim Waddell called him an ‘old grey-headed devil’ and refused to send him to Honolulu with the other bonded vessel, the James Murray, because ‘he wasn’t fit company for ladies’.
As his ship burns to the waterline and disappears beneath the waves, Captain Young watches his entire life savings go down with it. To rub salt into the wound, the Confederates also relieve him of a library of some 200 books, $120 in cash, a gold watch and even his shirt studs.12
Captain Waddell’s only comment on the incident is that ‘seeing someone on her deck with a gun, an officer was sent to capture her and send her master to the Shenandoah. That vessel was the bark Favorite, of New Haven, and her master was drunk from too free a use of intoxicating liquor.’13
Waddell was wrong about the ship’s home port – the Favorite was out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, not New Haven, Connecticut – but he might well have been right about her skipper’s level of sobriety.
All the ships are set alight except for the Milo and the James Murray, which are ransomed. And Waddell sends a message to the widow of the late captain of the James Murray, whose body has been pickled in whisky, informing her that she and her children are under the protection of the Shenandoah, assuring her no harm will come to her or to the vessel because Southerners do not make war on women and children. Nor, it seems, on pickled skippers.
To support his contention that he is as yet unaware the war is over, Captain Waddell argues that of the 336 crewmen of the captured ships, the nine who enlisted – ‘all intelligent soldiers, men who had been taught to respect military authority and who knew how to uses the Enfield rifle’ – were not the sort of men who would join a lost cause.
‘The enlistment of those men in the Confederate service is evidence that if they had heard any report of the military failure of the South, they considered it so unreliable as not to hinder their seeking service in the Shenandoah.’14
As the ships burn, he paints a vivid picture: ‘An occasional explosion on board some of the burning vessels betrayed the presence of gunpowder or other combustible matter. A liquid flame now and then pursued an inflammable substance which had escaped from the sides to the water, and the horizon was illuminated with a fiery glare presenting a picture of indescribable grandeur, while the water was covered in black smoke mingled with flakes of fire.’15
Most of the ships destroyed hail from New Bedford, Massachusetts, known as the whaling capital of the world. New Bedford is also a haven for fugitive slaves, and has been since well be
fore the war. The town has a thriving African-American community, raised the first black regiment of the war, and counts among its favourite sons the abolition movement leader Frederick Douglass, who in 1838, as a runaway slave, found freedom and tolerance there.
For all that, though, whaling is New Bedford’s life blood, and when news arrives of the rebel raider’s decimation of its fleet, the citizens are aghast.
Not everyone is caught unawares. One prominent New Bedford firm has been tipped off by a New York merchant that the raider is on the prowl, on the proviso that the firm does not warn the fleet. The merchants are hoping the damage done by the Shenandoah will inflate the price of whale oil. It does, but not for long.
The whalers of New Bedford have been wary of the Shenandoah since January when The Standard newspaper reported the raider’s arrival in Melbourne. From now on, The Standard and other publications will cover the ship’s movements – or possible movement – almost daily, as the toll of captures and burnings mounts.
On 31 July, The Standard reports:
This is a more severe blow than New Bedford has experienced since the British invasion and destruction of the shipping and business part of the town in 1778. It took many years for the place to recover from the effects of that wanton raid, and now, our city being on the decline, this second act of British vandalism is doubly severe.
We may reasonably expect, however, that the present season will see the last of such piratical disasters to the whaling business, and our merchants, by exhibiting a renewed spirit of enterprise, may do much to retrieve the past. Let the full number of vessels be immediately fitted for the fishery, and we may confidently trust that before they arrive on the cruising grounds the pirate will be among the things that were. In consequence of the news, whale oil is going up, and this should be an additional incentive to embark in the business.
Some month ago, a communication was addressed by Messrs. Williams & Haven, of New London, in behalf of the Pacific whaling interests, to the Navy Department, setting forth the danger of the fleet being attacked by the Shenandoah, and answer was received that several naval vessels were then in the Pacific Ocean, and others on their way to join the squadron, and no danger need be apprehended. Many war risks have been cancelled by the owners of vessels on this assurance of safety. Still, there is no available force now at hand to cope with the pirate. The present wholesale destruction of vessels will doubtless incite the Government to do as much as to lock the door now that the horse has been stolen, and we have confidence that the Pacific will in a few months swarm with our cruisers and the pirates will either be driven from the seas or run up at the yard-arm.
