by Terry Smyth
‘Captain Waddell, who arrived in command of the Pacific Mail steamer City of San Francisco, will not take her on her first trip to Sydney, via Honolulu, being threatened with arrest by the Hawaiian authorities on a charge of piracy, for the destruction of the Hawaiian barque Harvest during his operation against the Arctic sailing ship in the rebel steamer Shenandoah. Captain Lachlan will take his place temporarily pending arrangements to secure Waddell’s freedom from molestation by the Hawaiian authorities.’1
Weeks later, Australians excitedly awaiting the arrival of the first steamer built especially for the Sydney mail run learnt the reason for the delay. One newspaper reported:
‘In command of this magnificent vessel comes a gentleman who rendered himself somewhat notorious during the “late unpleasantness”, and whose record is not particularly satisfactory to ship owners and other interested parties in San Francisco.’
The report outlined the Hawaiian charge of piracy that caused Waddell to be stood down, then commented, ‘This must be a hard blow to Captain Waddell, as he naturally thought the consequences of the war had passed into history, and were likely to trouble him no more.
‘Many persons in Melbourne will recollect the visit of the Shenandoah in 1865, and the favourable impression made upon those with whom he came in contact, by her intellectual and gentlemanly commander.’2
But if Waddell was still thought of fondly in Australia, it’s hardly surprising that he had few friends in San Francisco, the city he had once planned to hold to ransom. His appointment as master of a new ship named for the city was met by fury and threats of violence. Old whalers howled for him to be lynched, and men burst into his hotel intent on shooting him.
A San Francisco correspondent, sparing no vitriol, reminded readers that Waddell, ‘while in charge of the cruiser Shenandoah, [was] the author of more destruction to Northern commerce than any other naval officer belonging to the South.
‘I believe, if my memory serves me, Waddell, while in command of the vessel named, was the hero of a little episode in the harbour of Melbourne.
‘While he was carrying fire and sword upon the high seas he burnt a Hawaiian vessel, in company with three flying American colours, for which act, it is urged, he is amenable to law as a pirate.
‘So the echoes of the old conflict, in one shape or another, are yet heard. It is said the Pacific Mail directors at New York make their selection of officers from ex-Confederates, for the purpose of conciliating the Democratic majority in the present Congress. They want a subsidy.’3
It was indeed true that Waddell had friends in Washington, among the Southern Democrats. Congress was soon to vote on the Reciprocity Treaty, a free-trade agreement between the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii that would boost the islands’ economy, in exchange for granting to the Americans land that would one day be Pearl Harbor naval base. Some 60 Congressmen threatened to vote against the treaty unless the Hawaiians dropped the charges against Waddell.
It worked. Waddell returned to the helm of the City of San Francisco and set out for Australia, arriving in Sydney on 4 May 1876.
Oh, how the mighty had fallen. In Sydney there were no welcoming crowds, no heaving bosoms, no nods and winks from the powers that be, as was the case in Melbourne not so long ago.
Some sources have claimed Waddell called into Melbourne on the mail run to Australia, where he was once again feted and fussed over, but that claim is incorrect. The Captain did not return to Melbourne, and had he done so he would have found it rather different from the vibrant city that had treated the Confederates to the time of their lives.
The roaring days were over, and the city’s golden glow, just beginning to fade in 1865, was gone. The gilt was peeling. Drovers pushed cattle down streets where, not so long ago, toffs and diggers busily went about the business of hopes and dreams. Many of the theatres in Bourke Street had been replaced by opium dens and gambling joints, and the fancy women in opulent bordellos by bedraggled street-walkers. The pimps and petty thieves had lost their flash but the hard men were harder, the shutters were up and the copper’s night-stick cracked with crazy rage.
Melbourne’s condition wasn’t terminal, merely a case of the post-goldrush blues. Australia’s jewel in the south would recover from this funk, and soon, but for the moment the aurelian gods had abandoned it, and it was feeling a little sorry for itself.
Sydney didn’t lay out the good silverware for the old rebel, nor would Waddell have expected it to. Nevertheless, the day after the ship’s arrival, an open letter to Captain Waddell appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, signed by 31 passengers on the City of San Francisco.
‘We, the undersigned passengers beg you to accept our acknowledgements of the skill, vigilance and admirable discipline with which the ship was commanded by you during the voyage from San Francisco to the English colonies, and at the same time we desire to express our sense of obligation to your unvarying courtesy and attention, and that of your officers, which have added much to the pleasure of our passage.’4
Had the bluff old seadog discovered his softer side at last? Well, maybe. He could always turn on the Southern charm if the need arose.
Of the 30 days Waddell spent in Sydney on his second and last visit to Australia, nothing is known. There were no published notices of his attendance at dinners, soirees or such events. We can only assume he passed the time quietly – perhaps his health was troubling him again – and when he departed for San Francisco, the only record of his leaving was a few words in the ‘Clearances’ column of The Sydney Morning Herald shipping news for 2 June. It read, ‘City of San Francisco, steamer, 3,000 tons. Waddell, for San Francisco.’
There would be no glowing testimonial from Waddell’s passengers on the City of San Francisco’s 1877 run from San Francisco to Panama. Off the coast of Mexico, on 18 May, at 9.18am, on calm seas and under a clear blue sky, she struck an uncharted rock and sank.
No lives were lost. All 101 passengers were evacuated from the sinking vessel onto a Mexican gunboat and taken to Acapulco, thence to Costa Rica for passage back to San Francisco. It was hardly the ideal holiday cruise itinerary, and although passengers were left damp and disappointed, and news of the disaster sparked a fall in stocks in Pacific Mail, most interested parties blamed the rogue rock rather than the ex-rebel skipper. Waddell was exonerated by an official inquiry, and remained with the company for a few more years, albeit in an on-shore role.
In 1878, tension between Britain and Russia over Russia’s expanding influence in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean reached breaking point. London, seeing Russia’s actions as a threat to British interests, warned Moscow that further expansion would incur the wrath of the Empire.
In February, when the Czar thumbed his nose at the warning, and continued to move his troops westward towards Constantinople, the British fleet set sail for Mediterranean waters. War seemed inevitable.
In America, meanwhile, a fanciful tale was spreading. So the story went, a plot had been uncovered to fit out a privateer to prey on British merchantmen should hostilities break out between Britain and Russia. And the commander of the privateer was to be none other than the former master of the rebel raider Shenandoah, Captain James Waddell.5
As it turned out, no shots would be fired across the bows of British ships by Waddell or anyone else. In May, war was averted when Britain and Russia settled their differences.
By 1878, it was apparent that American shipping had not yet recovered from the ravages of Confederate raiders during the Civil War, and the consequent transfer of ownership from American to foreign owners.
However, long-term studies had concluded that although the raiders were widely held responsible by the public and in the press, they were not entirely to blame. The Vernon Pioneer explained: ‘It will surprise many to learn that although these causes accelerated the decline in our ocean carrying trade, they did not produce it. The transfer of the trade from America to foreign bottoms had been going on for many years before
1861, and the process was so steady and uniform that even if there had been no war between the North and South the ultimate result would not have been very different from what it is now.’
Citing new research, the paper took to task Senator Blaine, of Maine, for claiming the decline in the maritime economy was entirely due to the rebel raiders.
Everything else has gained renewed growth since 1864, why has not the shipping? If the causes assigned by the Maine Senator are the true causes, why does the decline continue 13 years after the causes themselves have ceased to exist? It is 20 years since the panic and prostration of 1857, and it is 13 years since the Confederate cruisers swept the high seas – and in this time the trouble, instead of growing lighter, has grown heavier.
We have not even begun to regain our lost supremacy on the seas. The statistics to which we allude prove conclusively that the steady decline of our ocean-carrying trade from 1826 to the present time must be due to other causes than our Civil War, and that even the lighter tariff of the years that preceded the war had no perceptible effect in checking the downward progress. As the skill of our American shipwrights has never been called in question, or their ability to build as stout and as fleet ships and at as little cost as the ship builder of any other nation, it is obvious that the loss of our carrying trade cannot be attributed to heavier cost of vessels or to defective workmanship. The causes of the decay of the American mercantile marine must therefore be looked for elsewhere.6
The fault, according to The Vernon Pioneer, lay principally with the English, who, to achieve faster passages and justify higher charges, had abandoned sail for steam and iron for wood, and with America’s own shipowners, who somehow failed to notice that times were changing. As a result, America’s fleet of mostly wooden sailing ships simply could not compete.
After all the years of border disputes between New South Wales and Victoria, an unstoppable invasion force finally crossed the Murray River. In March 1879, a plague of rabbits, which had thus far been confined to the Victorian side of the border, hopped into New South Wales, on the way to becoming the worst environmental pest in Australian history, spreading faster than any introduced mammal ever, anywhere in the world.
And it was all the fault of one Victorian farmer. Thomas Austin, an English gentleman who had been fond of a spot of rabbit shooting back in the Old Country, was disappointed to discover on migrating to Victoria that, while there were plenty of native animals to massacre, there were no rabbits.
Austin was a member of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, a group of homesick Britons dedicated to populating the colony with familiar species to blow away. In 1859, he arranged for a nephew in England to send out 72 partridges, some sparrows, thrushes and blackbirds, five hares and 12 rabbits to his property, Barwon Park, near Winchelsea, in southern Victoria, as game for shooting parties.
Austin’s dozen rabbits bred like the proverbial, and although he tried to contain them, they soon escaped into the wild. There would have been enough predators on his property to keep the rabbit numbers in check, but Austin and his friends had killed them all. Five years on, 14,000 rabbits had been shot on Austin’s property alone, with millions more to come beyond its boundaries as they began nibbling and burrowing their way across the continent.
Still, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. As far as Thomas Austin was concerned, ‘The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.’7
Chapter 28
Requiem for a lost cause
The world would last hear of James Iredell Waddell’s exploits – with equal measures of irony and empathy – as the master of a sloop on Chesapeake Bay, chasing oyster pirates.
After the Civil War, Chesapeake Bay in the state of Virginia supplied half of the world’s oyster harvest. New Englanders, whose oyster beds had been exhausted, took to poaching from Virginian oyster beds, incensing the watermen with legitimate claims on the crop. There had been violent clashes until the Virginia authorities, deciding there has been too much blood in the water, banned dredging for oysters.
When the poaching continued unabated, Virginia’s governor, William Cameron, moved to take on the oyster pirates, whose vessels were now armed. His determination gave birth to the State Fisheries Force, popularly known as the Oyster Navy. The fleet consisted of a mere handful of vessels, but the man appointed its commander was the formidable old rebel James Iredell Waddell.
In 1884, two weeks after his appointment, at the mouth of the Honga River, on the eastern side of the Chesapeake, Captain Waddell ran the sloop Leila into the midst of a pirate fleet and opened fire. In less than a quarter of an hour, one pirate ship was sunk, three had run ashore, three were captured and the rest had fled. It was the beginning of the end for the Chesapeake oyster pirates. Maryland’s Natural Resources Police, the oldest conservation law enforcement agency in America, celebrates Waddell’s 1884 victory as its foundation day.
It’s no stretch of the imagination to picture the old commander of the famous Shenandoah, watching the fleeing pirates from the humble quarterdeck of the Leila, smiling with nostalgic pride and thinking out loud, ‘Well, sir, it takes one to know one.’
That was the Captain’s last hurrah. There would be no more battles, no more controversies, no more causes, just or unjust, won or lost, for this son of North Carolina.
At his home in Annapolis, Maryland, on 16 March 1886, with his wife Anne by his side, James Iredell Waddell died. He was 62 years old.
On the day of his funeral, the Maryland legislature suspended proceedings as a mark of respect, and the pallbearers included former shipmates from the Shenandoah. Each year since, on the anniversary of Waddell’s death, the Maryland division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy assemble at his grave-side in Old St Anne’s Cemetery, Annapolis, to commemorate Confederate Navy Day.
In 2015, on the website findagrave.com, comments included this from an Australian: ‘Whilst you did not know my relatives in Melbourne, my great-great-grandfather met you and your crew. May you rest in peace in the arms of the Lord.’
William Kenyon, Australian Confederate, died of heart failure at his home in Sandridge, on 14 November 1915. He was 71 years old.
On the day he died, across the world, on a ridge above a hitherto unremarkable Turkish beach, four of his fellow Victorians lay dead in the dust. Trooper William Hall of the 4th Light Horse, a 22-year-old Greenvale farmer, had been killed defending the precarious position called Ryrie’s Post. Not far from him lay the bodies of 21-year-old Private Harry Hardy of the 24th Infantry Battalion, a farm hand from Abbotsford; Private George Rushton, 27, also of the 24th Battalion, a Melbourne electrician; and Private Charles Harris, 21, of the 21st Infantry Battalion, a labourer from Murchison.
These young men were four of the eight Australians killed on the heights at Gallipoli that day – the day after Lord Kitchener, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, arrived on the beach below in a small boat to survey the Australian positions. He told the men gathered around him, ‘The King has asked me to tell you how splendidly he thinks you have done. You have done splendidly, better, even, than I thought you would.’1
Two hours later, Kitchener stepped back aboard his little boat and left, having satisfied himself the campaign was lost, and recommended that Gallipoli be evacuated.
A sideshow of the Great War, some would call Gallipoli. Still, a legend had been born there that would prevail, and while those young men lying dead on that ridge would be forever remembered by Australians, William Kenyon and his lost cause had already been forgotten.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my old friend Paul O’Brien – not only a great artist but the possessor of a keen eye for the arcane – who set me on the trail of Australians who fought in the American Civil War.
That trail would have been all but impossible to follow had it not been for the invaluable resources of the Museum of the Confederacy, the State Library of
New South Wales, the State Library of Victoria, the Trove collection of the National Library of Australia, the US National Archives, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, the Australian National Maritime Museum, and the Civil War Round Table.
My thanks to Steve Ramsey for his expert advice on all things nautical; to Carol Felone, for granting me permission to quote from a letter by her great-grandfather Almer Montague, a Union soldier who witnessed the surrender of Lee at Appomattox; to my publisher Alison Urquhart for her vision and support; to my excellent editor Anne Reilly, a writer’s dream; to Leigh Goodall for his dedication to keeping history alive; and with particular gratitude to Barry Crompton, the very model of an historical researcher.
Afterword
In 2015, the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, and of the visit of the CSS Shenandoah to Australia, historians and Civil War researchers in Victoria marked the occasion with events intended to raise awareness of this little-known link between the two countries.
No-one in Australia knows the Shenandoah story better than Civil War researcher and event organiser Barry Crompton. As secretary of the Melbourne branch of the Civil War Round Table – a movement formed in Chicago in the 1940s to study and debate the American war – he has dedicated some 30 years of his life to sifting fact from fiction, and putting flesh on bare bones of history.
Asked why he studies the American Civil War, he’ll tell you it was, at the same time, the last classical war and the first modern war – fought with old-fashioned musket and newfangled rifle, with frontal charges and in trenches. It brought the world the telegraph; rail networks; ironclads; submarines; the Gatling gun; advances in medicine, manufacturing and photography; prisoner-of-war camps; and the International Red Cross. It was also the first war in which, courtesy of an improved and cheaper postal system, letters sent home to loved ones left us a unique and valuable archive of the thoughts and feelings of the common soldier and sailor.
