Mittie spent her days on deck, wrapped up happily in a chair, enjoying the view and the salt tang of the air, chatting, reading (a popular romance called The Heir of Redclyffe), writing long letters to Anna, and keeping a weather eye on Teedie, who alone of her four refused to have anything to do with the other children on board. Elliott, as she told Anna, had quickly become the leader of the children’s sports and played with the Winthrop children nearly all day.
The ship suited her perfectly. The air on deck was a bit sharper than she wished and the grand salon was invariably overheated, but she had grown to feel quite at home.
Six days out, as they entered the Gulf Stream, the weather turned warmer and Teedie at last found a friend. “I made the acquaintance of Mr. St. John, a most interesting gentleman from the West Indies,” he wrote that night. “We had a long talk in the cabin after supper.”
Mr. St. John—Thomas B. St. John, according to the passenger list—was traveling alone for his health and appeared to know no one. His name was pronounced “Singen,” Mittie explained to Anna. He was a “quaint little well of knowledge” who suffered from heart trouble and spoke barely above a whisper, but whose interest in the natural sciences “fills Teedie’s heart with delight.” Teedie had introduced him very formally. “Mama, have you conversed with Mr. St. John?” he asked, as she put down her book. “I feel so tenderly to Teedie,” she told Anna.
The afternoon of Friday, May 21, they were steaming through the smooth bottle-green waters of the Irish Sea, the coast of Wales on the starboard. By turns with a telescope, they picked out windmills and farmhouses along shore, then, with much excitement, the suspension bridge at Holyhead. By nightfall, having crossed some three thousand miles of ocean in nine days, they entered the Mersey at Liverpool.
It was one wild scene of commotion [said Mittie of their arrival]. Passengers all ready, luggage heaped up, children fretting (not mine) . . . Custom House officers busy examining the trunks . . . all done by the aid of lamps . . . Finally a tender neared us on each side. . . . Thee suddenly said here they are, Irvine and brother Jimmie. Imagine our excitement! One gentleman would stay with the trunks thusly. Thee would find a trunk, Irvine sit on it until another was found. . . .
One person only seemed oblivious to what was happening. Teedie sat off to himself in the salon, reading a book. “Strange child!” his mother mused. She must wake him up to the world, “and make him observe.”
She herself seems to have missed nothing, her own considerable powers of observation plainly heightened by an unbound delight in being where she was and who she was.
The first several days with her brothers were filled with breathless talk and laughter. It had been eight years since she had seen Captain James Bulloch, and her one brief meeting with Irvine in that time had been under such strained circumstances that it seemed more like something they had imagined. A year or so after the war he had returned to New York illegally under an assumed name, working his way across on a sailing ship in order to see Mittie and Anna for all of an hour. They had been told nothing of the plan. An unsigned note in the morning mail said merely that at three on Thursday a young man “of interest” would be in the mall at Central Park, standing beneath the third tree on the left, a red handkerchief about his neck. They did as directed and when the hour was up he left for his ship and the return voyage to Liverpool.
Now, at twenty-seven, Irvine was a lanky, clean-shaven, altogether proper southern expatriate and Liverpool businessman who, Theodore observed, smoked his pipe as if it were the serious duty of his life. At the moment, he was also much in love with the daughter of an American couple living in Liverpool, Ella Sears.
Irvine, Ella, Mr. and Mrs. Sears, “brother Jimmie,” his small children, and his wife, Hattie (Harriott Cross Foster, whom he had married before the war), converged on the hotel the first morning, Hattie hugging and kissing Mittie and crying profusely. After that there were drives in a varnished landau through Liverpool’s Princess Park and a longer excursion to the suburbs down country roads with hawthorn hedges in bloom. Mittie picked her first primrose and cowslip. (”You have no idea of my enthusiasm,” she told Anna. “You know every poet from Shakespeare mentions ‘sweet cowslip and primrose.’”) Another day, May 24, they went to brother Jimmie’s home at Waterloo, twenty minutes by train, where the children played on the beach and at dinner the “grown people” toasted the Queen’s birthday (Victoria had turned fifty) and sang and danced until time to catch the last train back to Liverpool.
James and Irvine Bulloch had established themselves in the cotton business in Liverpool and managed to survive as well as they did largely through the contacts James had made during the war. Of the two, James was plainly the leader, a big, vital man with a military bearing and resplendent muttonchop whiskers. No English colonel looked more like an English colonel. As the young captain of a U.S. mail steamer before the war, he had impressed Richard Henry Dana as the model American officer—in his book To Cuba and Back, Dana told what a pleasure it was to stroll the deck with a man of such good cheer and obvious ability—and now in middle age he was said to be the personification of Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome, the beloved ultimate gentleman of Victorian prose. He was kindly, reserved, rarely talked about himself or of his former exploits, which, as it happens, were again very much in the news. The Roosevelts had arrived—his little New York nieces and nephews were casting their eyes upon him for the first time—just as his former creation, the Alabama, had become a headline issue once again on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Alabama Claims, claims against Britain for damages done by the Confederate raider—his ship—had been made a thundering cause in Washington by the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Britain’s involvement with the Alabama had doubled the length of the war, Sumner claimed, and the damages therefore might exceed $100 million. (In fact, in her two years at sea the Alabama had destroyed fifty-eight commercial vessels valued at $6,547,000.) “When civilization was fighting a last battle with slavery,” Sumner declared in a famous speech, “England gave her name, her influence, her material resources to the wicked cause. ...” Popular opinion in the United States was strongly behind him. The speech had roused a response in the Congress and the country of a kind that set the British back on their heels. Cartoons in the British press at the time the Roosevelts arrived portrayed an American brigand, his belt full of revolvers and knives, calculating how much he might make John Bull pay. Publications normally friendly to the United States—The Spectator, The Pall Mall Gazette, the London Daily News—denounced Sumner and his claims and said the whole nation “would go to war twenty times over” rather than accept such a national humiliation.
The crux of the issue was the degree to which the government had knowingly participated in the creation of the Alabama and under what circumstances the ship had escaped from Liverpool to begin her reign of destruction—in other words, to what extent had James D. Bulloch been aided and abetted in his efforts. If ever there was a central character to a drama it was he, he being the one man who knew all that happened and why, and had this been another, later day, he would have been made a newspaper and television sensation, an international somebody, overnight. As it was, the arrival of his sister and her family remained the sole disruption in the sedate life he had fashioned in exile, and his treasured privacy survived intact.
To the Roosevelt children, he and Irvine were almost mythical in stature. Here were two of the heroic figures from Mittie’s stories, the real thing at last. Had some marvelous heroes from one of their books materialized before their eyes, the effect would not have been much greater. And most obviously stirred was Teedie, whose hunger for adventure in any printed or spoken form was insatiable and whose private musings on large matters of historic consequence were sometimes so out of proportion with his physical size and age as to be strangely amusing. (”Father,” he would ask apropos of nothing a little later on in the trip, “did Texas wish to
annex itself to the United States?”)
“It was from the heroes of my favorite stories,” he would explain as a grown man, “from hearing of the feats performed by my southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father [that] I felt great admiration for men who were fearless . . . and I had a great desire to be like them.” To a crowd gathered in his honor at Roswell, he would one day tell in detail how his Uncle Irvine Bulloch had stuck to his post to the last as the guns of the United States corvette Kearsarge raked the Alabama. When the Alabama went down off Cherbourg, Irvine was among those survivors rescued by the British yacht Deerhound, and afterward he served on the raider Shenandoah, preying on whalers in the Bering Strait.
James Bulloch’s story was larger, more important, more the stuff of fiction. His influence on the boy was to be considerable.
His original mission, as defined in orders from Jefferson Davis, had been to build “with the quickest possible dispatch” six steam vessels in England, for which the Confederate Congress appropriated a total of a million dollars. He had arrived in Liverpool in June 1861, and the first ship, Florida, was ready in less than a year. Then followed the Alabama, originally known as No. 290, because she was the two hundred ninetieth ship built at the Laird yards in Liverpool. Launching of the Florida had greatly alarmed the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, so everything concerning No. 290 had to be done under secrecy and with unstinting sensitivity on Bulloch’s part to the British laws that forbade the building of warships for belligerents. “I cannot exaggerate, sir, the caution and tact required to get a ship to sea with even the external appearance of a man-of-war,” he wrote to James M. Mason, the Confederate diplomatic agent in London. No. 290, furthermore, was to be no ordinary ship and he expected to be given her command.
He had designed her specifically as a commerce raider, rather than for combat with other warships—900 tons, 230 feet in length, and drawing, when provisioned and coaled, all of 15 feet. Rigged as a barkentine, she carried large fore and aft sails and handled as well under sail as under steam—as most such vessels did not—because he had devised a means whereby, in a matter of minutes, the propeller could be detached and lifted high enough out of the water not to slow her down. Top speed was to be about thirteen knots. John Laird, the builder, thought her the finest cruiser of her class in the world.
The plan was for the ship to leave Liverpool as an innocent-looking merchantman, to be armed later in the Azores. He picked the island of Terceira as the rendezvous, secretly arranged for the purchase of armaments and stores, and had these sent by another ship, again devising detailed instructions for every necessary step. All in all it was a brilliant performance and things were falling together nicely, until Charles Francis Adams, supplied by his own agent in Liverpool, presented the British government with proof of what was afoot. The situation could have gone either way, but the Queen’s Advocate went insane at this juncture; the documents supplied by Adams sat untouched for five crucial days, and Bulloch, determined to get the ship out of British waters, took her to sea himself, “very unexpectedly.” Only by the narrowest margin did he bring it off. He arranged for a British crew, and on the morning of July 29,1862, the still incomplete No. 290 started down the Mersey draped in bright bunting and carrying a large party of fashionable ladies and gentlemen who had been invited for a short trial run and a picnic lunch. Several customs officials were also aboard to see that “no international wrong” was perpetrated. But about noon, a tug came alongside, the guests were put off, and No. 290 sailed away—north through the Irish Sea—never to return. Bulloch had himself put ashore on the north coast of Ireland and made his way back to Liverpool. Three weeks later he was in the Azores seeing to final preparations before turning the ship over to Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate Navy, his superiors at home having decided his services on land were invaluable.
That he failed in a later attempt to build two ironclad rams at the Laird yards—ships which, in the long run, would have done far greater damage to the Union cause than did the Alabama—was due to the grim, unequivocal declaration by Charles Francis Adams to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell that should the rams leave Liverpool, it would mean war.
Teedie’s allegiance to the Union side—to his father’s side—remained as passionate as always. Passing through Liverpool some months earlier, Jefferson Davis had enrolled his son in the same school at Waterloo attended by Teedie’s cousin, and when Teedie and Ellie ran into the Davis boy during a visit to the school, “sharp words ensued,” as Teedie reported proudly in his diary. But there could be no stigma surrounding James Bulloch, not ever. As an adult, Teedie would remember Uncle Jimmie as a “blessed” figure, “as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived . . . one of the best men I have ever known.” An important bond grew between them—important to each and to the writing of naval history—and this Liverpool visit of 1869 marked the beginning. It would be his very pro-Union nephew, ultimately, who persuaded James Bulloch to write the book only he could write, setting forth his part in the war and all he knew concerning the Alabama. (Called The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, it appeared in two volumes in 1883.) And James Bulloch, in turn, would provide invaluable assistance to his nephew’s own first effort as a historian, a study of the naval side of the War of 1812—all this taking place years after the Alabama Claims had been settled, the issue laid to rest.
The Roosevelts left Liverpool by train June 2, their party now increased to eight with the addition of a newly hired valet by name of Noel Paovitch. They were bound for the Lake Country and to Scotland, heading north, their first stop at Furness Abbey, the magnificent ruin of a monastery founded in the twelfth century in what had been the wilds of Icelandic-speaking Furness. It was a stop of only a night and a day and much that they were to see afterward was to be still grander in scale and more evocative in spirit, but the abbey was their maiden encounter with Europe’s truly ancient past. They were on their own as tourists for the first time.
A tremendous complex covering some sixty-five acres, the abbey was set in a hidden valley named Bekangesgill in Icelandic, or the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade, “from the deadly herb,” Mittie explained excitedly to Anna, “which with henbane grows here . . . two flourishing specimens of the former in one of the curved archways.” Once a remote empire unto itself, the abbey and its way of life had survived unchallenged for centuries. The buildings were of red sandstone—a monumental church, cloisters, quarters for the lay brothers and novices, the abbot’s private chapel, an infirmary, offices, school—and these with gardens and orchards and cemetery, as well as a modern hotel, were all contained within a great encircling wall. The end had come with Henry VIII and his break with Rome. The abbey was abandoned, roofs caved in, gates, windows, anything salvageable had been carted off long since. But the remaining shells of buildings were awesome. Among connoisseurs of ruins, of whom there were a great many in that Victorian day, they were considered among the choicest of all. What had been the floor of the abbey was now vivid green turf speckled with bluebells and buttercups and there were as yet no restrictions as to where one could walk or climb; everything was open to all comers and for children, a glorious playground.
The light of day was nearly gone when the Roosevelts arrived and a fine rain was falling, blotting out all but the barest outlines. It was only the next morning that the scale and power of the place burst upon them. The sun was shining, the day spectacular, with a few foamy clouds trailing overhead in a soft blue sky. The family was up and dressed by six and following breakfast set off with guidebooks in hand. The three small children, seeing the sweep of green turf, raced ahead, through archways, up broken staircases, then up a spiral stairway to the belfry, then to the top of what had been a water tower, where they “saw it all.” “When we three were on the belfry,” wrote Mittie, recounting for Anna the somewhat more sedate route she had taken with Theodore and Bamie, “on the opposite side were the three children peeping through o
ne of the . . . lancet windows. . . . We beckoned to them and in a trice they all raced down, up the nave of the church and mounted the belfry steps. As I write . . . the children are climbing over the ’Porter’s Lodge’ (ruin). . . . It would be impossible to tell you all. . . .”
In the chancel, immediately in front of the high altar base, they stood before the stone effigy of a crusader, thought to be William de Lancaster, eighth Baron of Kendal, who died in 1246. By the way the moss had grown, the figure’s stone limbs and sword were perfectly delineated. From the cracked stone helmet of another effigy Mittie picked a dandelion. Thrilled by the whole romantic spell of the place she found herself “gazing at the wide open windows and thinking how the glorious light must have streamed through . . . over the high altar [and] down upon the monks as they sang their solemn chants or the moonbeams when at their midnight devotions.”
Her health was already improved, she told her sister. She had to watch what she ate, but could depict herself overall as “intensely interested and much freckled.”
We leave here at 5 PM for Windermere, where Noel and our baggage await us. . . . Thee and I wish for you incessantly. How you would appreciate it all. . . . I hurry to the close of this letter because I see Thee’s coattails flitting around the ruined Abbey and he shall not know more than I do about it.
In the days that followed, as they cruised Lake Windermere and went on by train to Edinburgh, the weather held clear and fair. Mittie wished only that there were more time. Scotland was both a return to the ancestral home of the Bullochs and a literary pilgrimage to the world of Sir Walter Scott, who, with his love of the legendary and valorous, his openair healthiness, his strong sense of the interlocking of human lives, appealed powerfully to the romantic Mittie. They saw Abbotsford, the sprawling stone mansion where Scott had lived like some feudal laird (”saw his clothes, . . . petrified things and armor and curiosities,” wrote Teedie), traveled to Dryburgh to pay homage at Scott’s tomb. In the Trossachs, the setting of Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake, Mittie felt “as though we were on magic ground.” One fine morning they hiked beside Loch Katrine, as Theodore marched along reading the poem aloud. “Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!”
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