by Terry Smyth
The total value of the vessels belonging to this port was $237,000, and the total insurance amounts to but $116,425. War policies had been cancelled and ceased by limitation, amounting to about $80,000. The Mutual Marine and Pacific Mutual offices had no war risks on any of the captured vessels.
There is much excitement among our merchants and at the insurance offices, and no more war risks will be taken on vessels cruising in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans until further advices are received.
A dispatch received by Messrs Swift & Allen from Captain Williams, of the barque Jireh Swift, dated San Francisco, 20th inst., states that his vessel was burned by the pirate off Cape Thaddens, 22nd June. She had taken four hundred barrels whale oil thus early in the season.
As panic spreads, headlines get bigger and bolder.
‘The pirate Shenandoah! She steers in the tracks of whalers, terrible havoc expected!’ screams New Bedford’s Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript on 25 July, followed on 1 August by ‘Destruction of whaleships by the pirate Shenandoah!’ then, on 22 August, by ‘The late destruction of whalers,’ and on 29 August by ‘Further destruction of whaleships.’
The New York Times takes up the cry with ‘The Pirate Shenandoah’, on 27 August.
And The Republican Standard, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, splashes with ‘The pirate Shenandoah still at work’ and ‘Wholesale piracy’ in its 31 August edition.
All fanning the flames, it could be said, yet there is genuine cause for alarm. The Shenandoah will destroy almost $900,000 worth of whaling ships and cargoes from New Bedford alone, a blow made all the more painful by the fact that most of the damage is done after the war is over.
In the end, of the 46 whalers captured and torched by the Shenandoah, the Alabama and other Confederate raiders, 25 are out of New Bedford. The damage to the whaling fleet will soar to $2 million, and the world’s whaling capital will never recover.
Back in 1861, when the Civil War seemed far away, New Bedford boasted a fleet of some 60 whaling ships, plying their lucrative trade in the Atlantic, the North and South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and Hudson Bay. Typically, a whaler returning with, say, 500 barrels of whale oil and 200 barrels of sperm oil could average more than $100,000 a season.
Then the raiders came. Within a year, several New England whaling ports had closed completely. Boston’s whaling fleet was reduced to only five ships, and Salem’s to just one. The danger was simply too great, and insurance premiums had skyrocketed. By 1863, the number of barrels of whale oil had dropped by half.
Still, New Bedford whalers continued the hunt. By 1864 they comprised almost two-thirds of the Yankee fleet and were keeping the industry alive – barely.
Not any more. Now that the wolf is on the fold, residents fear their city might soon be yet another abandoned port, like Nantucket. One resident, Leonard Ellis, writes, ‘Our idle wharves were fringed with dismantled ships. Cargoes of oil covered with seaweed were stowed in the sheds and along the river front, waiting for a satisfactory market that never came.’16
Small wonder, then, that in the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the name Waddell would henceforth be a dirty word.
Then again, it cuts both ways. Captain Waddell has a low opinion of whaling skippers. In his experience, ‘All the captains and masters were more or less under the influence of liquor, and some of them swore their sympathy for the South, while others spoke incoherently of cruiser fire and insurance. A drunken and brutal class of men, I found the whaling captains and masters of New England.’17
As the burning New Bedford fleet lights the sky, a scene of destruction Captain Waddell found so exhilarating, the Shenandoah heads northward, into dangerous waters once again, closing up fast with floes and icebergs, until the risk of being trapped in the Arctic Ocean, possibly for months, forces her to turn south. She reaches East Cape and open water just as a vast ice field is closing the strait.
It is perpetual daylight at these latitudes, but as the ship reaches St Lawrence Island, she is sailing blind in a black fog, and runs shuddering and shrieking into a massive ice floe. Blocked in the ice, the Shenandoah is in danger.
Sailors scramble to take in all the sail, then use grapnel anchors and lines to swing her away from the ice. After several hours of heaving and hauling, helped along by gentle steaming, the ship inches her way towards open water.
At entry on the ship’s log for 1 July reads, ‘At 1.30am, entered a field of heavy ice; honed everything back, furled all sail and got up steam; lowered a boat and ran out lines ahead; made fast to large cakes of ice, and commenced hauling through, turning engine over slowly, breasting off with spars; struck large masses of ice several times, but sustained no material injury. At 4.30 got out of ice.’18
The raider might be safely out of the ice at last, but it is not out of danger. Waddell is concerned that if enemy squadrons in the Pacific have learnt of the Shenandoah’s movements from the ransomed ships, they could easily blockade her and force her into battle. He is determined to avoid a fight, reasoning that even if the Shenandoah wins a battle, she would most likely sustain some damage and be forced to put into a port for repairs. He’s been there and done that, in Melbourne, and he has no wish to do it again.
‘We knew but too well the character of the neutrality of the first naval power of the earth to suppose that any government bordering on the Pacific coast would endanger its existence by receiving a Confederate cruiser for repairs and thus incur the displeasure of the worst government under the sun.’19
High-minded sentiments, some might say, from a man who played the British neutrality laws like a fiddle.
Chapter 19
All pirates now
In the scramble to be – or be seen to be – on the winning side, British public opinion turns against the Shenandoah. The former Confederate raider is now perceived as a pirate ship and her captain and crew as buccaneers. The press calls on British warships that cross her path to treat her as they would any pirate, and blow her out of the water.
Unbeknown to the men of the Shenandoah, their actions having been authorised by a country that no longer exists, the Stainless Banner offers them no more protection than the Jolly Roger.
It has been more than a century since the end of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, in the Caribbean; the age of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. And it’s a decade since the British Navy all but eradicated piracy from the Atlantic and along the Barbary Coast of North Africa. Nevertheless, fear and loathing of marauding buccaneers are ingrained in the psyche of a maritime nation. For Britons, the pirate remains a bogey – still out there somewhere on the high seas, priming his pistol, honing his cutlass, ready to strike.
The United States Navy, too, has had considerable success in stamping out piracy, particularly on the Barbary Coast, as well as river piracy. In the 1860s, and for many years after the Civil War, Americans in the Northern states will equate piracy with the Confederate raiders. Such is the depth of this enmity that in 1872, when the Captain Kidd of his day – the notorious American pirate and blackbirder Bully Hayes – returns to the United States, he is condemned by The San Francisco Bulletin as ‘a vile and brutal miscreant who should be hanged on the same gallows with Alabama Semmes and Shenandoah Waddell’.1
In Australia, where Bully Hayes is equally as infamous, and the names Waddell and Semmes as familiar, piracy, in earlier days, mostly meant ‘piratical seizure’ of ships by escaping convicts. Since the establishment of the first European settlement, in Sydney in 1788, at least one ship a year had been stolen by desperate men and women.
Piratical escapes were most common in Hobart, Tasmania, and Newcastle, north of Sydney. In Newcastle, despite strict regulations on arrivals and departures, and sentries guarding the wharves, convicts successfully made off with vessels ranging from pilot boats to schooners, none of which was ever heard of again.2
The last person hanged for piracy in Australia – and possibly in the British Empire – was James Camm, executed in Ho
bart in 1832 for his part in the seizure of the brig Cyprus in Recherche Bay. The previous year, at London’s Execution Dock, two of Camm’s fellow escapees became the last people in Britain to be sent to the gallows for piracy.
In America, the last person hanged for piracy was Albert Hicks, in 1860. Hicks, a sailor, murdered the skipper and two crew members of the sloop A.E. Johnston, while at sea out of New York, took all the money on board and escaped in a yawl. Convicted of piracy and triple murder, he was hanged on Bedloe’s Island – now Liberty Island – in New York Bay, as an estimated 10,000 people watched from boats. It was a gala occasion.
On the morning of 1 July 1865, a motley force of some 300 Confederate soldiers, deserters, misfits and adventurers splash across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Known as the Iron Brigade – a Missouri cavalry division with a reputation for brutality – the exiles are led by General Jo Shelby, who refused to surrender after Appomattox and has fled south of the border rather than live under the Yankee yoke.
The Iron Brigade is leaving one civil war for another. Mexico is occupied by French troops of Napoleon III, with an Austrian puppet emperor, Maximilian, on the throne, at war with the republican forces of Benito Juarez, the unseated president. It is Shelby’s intention to offer the services of his brigade to both sides, and accept the best offer.
Privately, he has a grander plan – to take command of the winning army and then the government, and establish a new Confederacy on the ruins of the Mexican Empire.
After planting the Stars and Bars in Mexican soil, the Iron Brigade rides south towards Monterey. A hot reception awaits them.
Ploughing through the North Pacific in fine weather again, and no longer dreading the call of ‘Ice ahead!’ Captain Waddell hatches his most daring plan. ‘It was the 5th of July when the Aleutian Islands were lost to view and the craft made for the parallel where west winds would hasten her over to the coast of California, for I had matured plans for entering the harbour of San Francisco and laying that city under contribution.
‘The newspapers which were captured gave intelligence of the disposition of the American naval vessels and I was not unfamiliar with their commanding officers or their sagacity.’3
Waddell’s plan to capture an entire city seems outrageous yet is achievable. There is only one Yankee warship in the port of San Francisco – an ironclad under the command of Captain Charles McDougal, an old shipmate of Waddell’s. They served together on the Saginaw, which Waddell dismisses as barely seaworthy, and he remembers McDougal as being ‘fond of his ease’, and no match for any officer of the Shenandoah.
He plans to enter the port at night to ram and board the ironclad, make Captain McDougal and his crew his prisoners, then, come daylight, train all guns on the city. San Francisco would be his without firing a shot or taking a life. It is bold but beautifully simple, and Waddell is sure it could work.
But as the Shenandoah nears the California coast, he has second thoughts, reasoning that perhaps it would be wise to check with a ship recently out of San Francisco before steaming into port at full speed ahead with a rebel yell.
At a public meeting in Brisbane, Queensland cotton growers and merchants attempt to drum up support for a petition calling on the colonial government to avert what they insist is an impending disaster. Queensland’s fledgling cotton industry, they claim, is at risk of total annihilation as a result of the end of the American war.
Peace, say the cotton producers, is bad for business. The likelihood of renewed competition from America, compounded by the withdrawal of the government subsidy, threatens to decimate the profits of Queensland producers accustomed to being able to charge extravagant prices for their product.
The colony’s cotton barons are concerned that even allowing for cotton destroyed during the war, there may well be a considerable stockpile in the South – enough to flood the market and send the price of a bale plummeting. In a twist of logic that suggests the Thirteenth Amendment has no more force in law than, say, a draft business plan, the cotton producers warn that although the North professed to abhor slavery during the war, it will now find that slave-grown cotton makes good commercial sense – too good to resist. Unable to compete, even with a cheap labour force of Kanaka field hands kidnapped by blackbirders, they predict that Queensland’s flourishing cotton fields will soon lie abandoned, choked with weeds. The cotton barons call on the colonial government to increase the bounty and postpone its withdrawal for three years. Otherwise, like Hanrahan in John O’Brien’s famous poem, they’ll ‘all be rooned’. They win few hearts and minds, however, by clamouring for protection at the first sign of free competition after years of shamelessly exploiting the cotton famine. They don’t get their wish, and, within a few years, a return to the lower, pre-US Civil War prices, helped along by floods and the boll weevil, will send Queensland’s King Cotton to his grave.
And in the fields where he reigned supreme for those few short years, the Kanakas who picked the cotton will be slashing sugar cane.
Chapter 20
The darkest day
In America, with the guns of the North and South now silent, the war-weary, reunified nation is looking westward. It’s a cultural shift born of Manifest Destiny and nurtured by gold fever. America has discovered the Wild West – an enduring fascination that arguably begins at 6pm on Friday 21 July 1865, in the town square of Springfield, Missouri, scene of the first recorded Western showdown.
On the street, two men face each other. One is former Union soldier, lawman and luckless gambler James Butler Hickok, better known as ‘Wild Bill’. The other is Hickok’s erstwhile best friend, Davis Tutt. A falling-out over a woman has poisoned their friendship, and so it has come to this – a new kind of gunfight; the first quick-draw duel.
When the opponents are 75 yards (68.5m) apart, Tutt draws first but Hickok draws faster. Tutt misses but Hickok does not. Shot through the heart, Tutt cries out, ‘Boys, I’m killed!’ then falls to the ground dead. With blood in the dust of a Missouri street, the Civil War is yesterday’s news.
A legend in his own lifetime, Wild Bill Hickok will go on to kill 36 men before being shot in the back by Jack McCall, a drunken, down-on-his-luck gold miner, while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876.
‘A sail!’ For the men of the Shenandoah, the moment the Barracouta hove into view is the stuff of nightmares. An entry in the ship’s log for Wednesday 2 August, by Lieutenant Dabney Scales, officer of the watch, reports, ‘Having received by the British barque Barracouta the sad intelligence of the overthrow of the Confederate Government, all attempts to destroy the shipping or property of the United States will cease from this date, in accordance with which the First Lieutenant Wm. C. Whittle Jnr. received an order from the commander to strike below the battery and disarm the ship and crew.’1
It had been shaping up to be a perfect day. The ship was gliding gently along in a light breeze, moving parallel to but a safe distance from the California coast, when at 12.30pm she sighted and gave chase to a barque that turned out to be a British ship, 13 days out of San Francisco, bound for Liverpool. The Confederates boarded the Barracouta, and, this time, what they learnt was undeniable.
After checking the ship’s papers and satisfying himself that she was British, the boarding office, Sailing Master Irvine Bulloch, asked the captain for news of the war.
‘What war?’ the captain asked.
‘The war between the United States and Confederate States,’ Bulloch replied.’
‘Why, the war has been over since April,’ said the captain.2
Recent San Francisco newspapers on board confirm Bulloch’s worst fears. All Confederate forces have surrendered, Davis has been captured and the entire government has collapsed. The cause is lost.
He returns to his shipmates with this melancholy news, and with a warning from the Barracouta’s captain that Federal cruisers are hunting for them everywhere, intent on hanging them all from the yardarm.
‘We knew the inte
nsity of feelings engendered by the war, and particularly in the hearts of our foes towards us,’ says Whittle. ‘We knew that every effort would be made for our capture, and we felt that if we fell into the enemy’s hands we could not hope, fired as their hearts were, for a fair trial or judgement, and the testimony of the whalers, whose property we had destroyed, would all be against us.
‘Even during the war we had been opprobriously called pirates, and we felt that if captured we would be summarily dealt with as such.’3
Captain Waddell is desolate. ‘My life has been checkered from the dawn of my naval career and I had believed myself schooled to every sort of disappointment, but the dreadful issue of that sanguinary struggle was the bitterest blow, because unexpected, I had yet encountered. It cast a gloom over the whole ship and did occupy my thoughts.’4
He will later state that had the Barracouta been a Yankee vessel, he would have sunk her regardless of the news she carried. His justification is his belief that the Washington Government was disseminating false reports, making it impossible to believe the newspapers. Where and how he learnt this, he doesn’t say. Nor does he explain why a San Francisco newspaper on a British ship is believable, while a San Francisco newspaper on an American ship, namely the Susan Abigail, was not.
