by Terry Smyth
For those among the crew entranced by the sight of towering bergs, the novelty soon wore off when they lurched too close for comfort.
Midshipman John Mason, away from home at Christmas for only the second time, lonely and feeling the cold seep into his bones, managed to look on the bright side. ‘I suppose we will find delightful weather in Australia,’ he wrote in his journal.19
On Christmas Eve, the wind whipped up to gale force, sheets of freezing rain and sleet came in torrents, blown sideways by the wall of wind, and white-capped waves washed over the decks. A terrifying whistling sound roared through the rigging, and suddenly there was no ocean, no sky. This was a white squall – a rare but fearsome thing and the cause of many a shipwreck. Some said white squalls could occur only in the tropics. Some said there was no such thing; that it was a myth, but sailors knew the truth of it.
Coming off watch, chilled to the core and wishing himself safe and sound in Dixie, Lieutenant Whittle warmed himself with thoughts of his beloved Pattie. He wrote in his journal, ‘Oh, how much would I not give now to be on shore, with our dear country at peace, and a certain little angel sitting by me as my wife. I would certainly be the happiest man in the world.’20
That night, the wind shifted to the west, and the weather grew even worse. Whittle ordered the canvas to be reduced to storm sails only, and for braces to be set on the starboard yardarms, allowing the ship to be able to sail at different angles to the wind. Still, it seemed the fate of the ship depended less on good seaman-ship than on the whims of the elements.
At midnight, as heavy seas slammed the Shenandoah from side to side, listing precariously to port, then to starboard, then to port again, men on deck hauling on the braces and manning the pumps clung desperately to lifelines. The ship plunged into deep troughs then surged upward to perch for one heart-stopping moment on the crest of a wave taller than the foreyard, before crashing down into the next trough.
Below decks, officers in the wardroom raised glasses to toast the season, while in the topgallant forecastle, sailors savoured the extra ration of grog allowed them. But while the men of the Shenandoah drank to peace on earth, the ocean showed no goodwill towards men. At about 6am on Christmas Day, a massive wave smashed through a skylight to flood the engine room, then the wardroom – where officers present leapt atop the furniture – then washed into the cabins. We can only guess what happened in the crew quarters, which were liable to sea spray even in the best of weather.
Like all long and narrow vessels, the Shenandoah had a tendency to roll deep, exacerbated by the large quantity of coal in her hold. And the higher the sea, the deeper the roll.
Waddell writes, ‘She rolled so heavily that sea after sea tumbled in over her railing and her preparations for freeing herself were so indifferent that water was several inches deep, flooding all the compartments on that deck.’21
In a Christmas miracle of sorts, the captain of the maintop, William West, was washed overboard, then picked up by another wave that dropped him back on deck unharmed.
Christmas dinner for the officers included goose, pork, potatoes, corned beef, mince pies and plum pudding, washed down with sherry. For the crew, dinner for the festive occasion came courtesy of the biggest pig in the pen.
‘A Christmas dinner had been prepared of the captured supplies,’ Waddell recalls, ‘but it was quite impossible to sit long enough to enjoy it, except under difficulties. Most of the dishes left the table for the deck, and notwithstanding the disappointment at the loss of a good dinner, there was still enough life among us left to record it as an incident in the sailor’s life.
‘Should I ever again make a trip to Australia, I would go very little south of the howling forties.’22
Master’s Mate Cornelius Hunt was more to the point: ‘My solemn advice to the world at large is, never go off the Cape of Good Hope in a cruiser to enjoy Christmas.’23
The Captain, who, like most on board, seemed determined to make the best of a bad situation, had only one complaint: ‘The decks were leaking dreadfully, and the bedding was more or less wet. A wet watch is uncomfortable enough, but to nod in a chair or be forced to turn in to a wet bed is even worse, as we found.’24
On 27 December, the Shenandoah reached the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha. The tall but tiny island, named for the 16th-century Portuguese explorer who discovered it, had been a British naval station during the Napoleonic Wars, and was still a British protectorate, but was now home to just seven families, farming beef cattle, sheep and poultry. The rebels found deep water on one side suitable for loading stores, but the water there was so choked with seaweed that it was difficult to get through, and risked clogging the propeller. They landed 26 prisoners, leaving them a three-month supply of provisions, and pressed on.
It proved lucky for the Confederates that their stay on the island was brief. Only 12 hours after they left the harbour, the Yankee man-of-war Iroquois arrived. The Iroquois took the marooned prisoners aboard, weighed anchor and, unaware that the Shenandoah was headed for Melbourne, steamed off for Cape Town – which the Yankees knew to have been a favourite port of the Alabama – hoping the Shenandoah might be bound there too.
Two days later, in calm weather, the Confederates sighted the island of St Paul rising out of the sea. Anchoring outside the island’s harbour, a party went ashore to explore. Among them was Fred McNulty, who noted, ‘Entering its basin in a yawl, we found that the waters must be over an extinct crater, as they were hot enough to boil penguin eggs. These birds rose like clouds before us.’25
Flying penguins? Had McNulty made the ornithological discovery of the century?
He continues: ‘Here we found, to our surprise, three Frenchmen. They were employed curing fish, while their vessel was off for another catch. Besides their rude quarters, we were taken to the residence of the owner of the island, who lived in France, and were astonished to find here, far from all the world, apartments displaying all that luxury, wealth and culture suggested, including a library of nearly 1,000 volumes. No bolt or key unlocked this; it was all open as the Garden of Eden to our first parents. On our departure the hospitable Frenchmen presented us with a supply of cured fish and half a barrel of penguin eggs.’26
On 29 December, with the wind still howling and the ship buffeted by a cross-sea, the Shenandoah spied her eighth and last victim before arriving in Melbourne. She was the American barque Delphine, out of Bangor, Maine, bound for Akyab, Arabia, to load a cargo of rice for the Union armies. The Confederates put a shot across her bows and set about their dread business. By now, they had it down to a fine art.
The captain of the Delphine, William Nichols, when told his vessel was a prize of the Confederacy and would be burnt, begged Waddell to spare the ship, claiming his wife, Lillias, was too ill to be transferred to the Shenandoah in such rough seas. ‘It may cause the death of my wife to remove her,’ he told Waddell, ‘The report of the gun has made her very ill.’27
Waddell was not convinced. He sent his surgeon, Charles Lining, to examine the lady, and when Lining pronounced her fit to be transferred, Waddell told Captain Nichols that while he regretted causing his wife such inconvenience, she would be in no danger. He assures him that the boat sent to fetch the ladies has six good oarsmen who would bring them safely to the Shenandoah.
Captain Nichols knew it was useless to object further, and soon the boat returned with the unsinkable Mrs Nichols, her young son Phineas, her maid, and as many of her possessions as the boat could carry, including a canary in a cage. The sea being rough, a bosun’s chair was lowered to the boat from the yardarm, and Mrs Nichols confidently climbed on and ordered the men to hoist away.
Cornelius Hunt quipped, ‘If a bandbox containing her best bonnet had been added to her baggage, it would have been complete.’28
Fred McNulty declared Lillias Nichols ‘as plump and healthy a specimen of the sex as the Pine Tree State [Maine] ever produced.
‘Laughing heartily, when asked if she were
ill, she said “No.” She was a brave, cultivated woman, and I was real sorry the ruse failed, as I wanted to see the ship spared.’29
When safely aboard the Shenandoah, the lady berated her husband for failing to save his ship, then sought out the Confederate commander. Waddell recounts, ‘When in the act of leaving my cabin, into which they were invited, Mrs Nichols asked in a stentorian voice if I was captain, what I intended to do with them, and where would they be landed.
‘“On St Paul [Island], madam, if you like.”
‘“Oh, no, never. I would rather remain with you.”
‘I was surprised to see in the sick lady a tall, finely proportioned woman of twenty-six years, in robust health, evidently possessing a will and voice of her own.’30
Lillias Nichols was pretty, elegant, and an incorrigible flirt. As a prisoner on the Shenandoah, she would spend much of her time in the wardroom chatting and playing checkers and backgammon with the officers, who were clearly charmed by her. It seems the commander was rather taken with her, too, and in the days to come the two would often seek each other’s company.
An officer and a few men remained on the Delphine to set her afire. The sea was heaving and night was falling as the first flames flicked from the companionway, then rapidly spread throughout the vessel, bursting from doors, windows and hatchways, then licking at the spars until the yards, sails and halyards were ablaze and the sea around the ship had a lurid glow. Captain Nichols, pacing the deck and watching his ship destroyed, was a pitiable sight. A part-owner of the vessel, he was forced to witness a lifetime of wealth and work go up in smoke.
Lieutenant Chew, in a clumsy attempt to relieve Captain Nichols’ distress, suggested he consider how small things can have big consequences. If, for example, at daylight he had altered course by just a quarter of a point, the Shenandoah would not have caught sight of the Delphine and he would not be standing there now, watching her sink. Nichols, unsurprisingly, found no comfort in that. Tersely, he replied, ‘That shows how darned little you know about it, for this morning at daylight I just did changed my course by a quarter of a point, and that’s what fetched me here!’31
So entranced were the Confederates by what Hunt called ‘a holocaust to the God of War’,32 they failed to notice that the men sent to torch the Delphine had not yet returned. When they realised the men were missing, concerns were raised that in the heavy seas the boat might have been swamped on its way back. Even in the glow of the burning ship, the Shenandoah’s watch could find no sign of it.
Lanterns were run up the rigging so the men could find their ship, and all eyes on deck scanned the dark ocean until, after what seemed an eternity, someone spotted them – rising on the crest of a massive wave.
A voice called, ‘Ahoy there! Throw us a line!’ A rope cast through the spray reached its mark, and there were whoops of joy and sighs of relief all round. Trouble continued to follow the Shenandoah, but she was still a lucky ship.
Captain Nichols eventually admitted to Waddell that he had lied about his wife’s illness. It was a deceit intended to save his ship; a desperate attempt he hoped a fellow captain would understand. Waddell did indeed understand, and appreciated Nichols’ frank confession. What he would not appreciate, on arriving in Melbourne, was discovering that Lillias Nichols’ coquettish attentions had been a greater deceit.
On New Year’s Day 1865, Cornelius Hunt was just about to be relieved from watch when the ship’s bell struck 12. He recalls, ‘The weather was fine, with a light, variable wind blowing, and the stars threw their silver shimmer over the quiet water. Everyone on board, save the officers of the deck, the quartermaster, the lookout, and the man at the wheel, were wrapped in slumber.
‘Many thousand miles from home and friends, with the broad Atlantic all around us, and our adventurous career just begun, we did not forget the day, and at eight o’clock in the morning we unfurled our banner to the breeze, and there at our peak it waved, the emblem of a young nation which for four years had struggled, God only knows with what self-denying patience and resolution, for liberty.’33
Chapter 8
The grey and the good
William Blanchard, the US Consul in Melbourne, is fit to be tied as he stomps into his office on the corner of Little Collins St and Chancery Lane. It’s the morning of 26 January 1865, and the arrival yesterday of an enemy cruiser, and the rapturous welcome the rebels received, sent his blood pressure soaring and gave him a restless night. He’s still in a foul mood this morning, but his mood’s about to improve – for a while, anyway.
Blanchard is surprised to find a dozen people in his office, waiting to see him. They are Captain William Nichols and his wife Lillias, their son Phineas and their maid, two officers and six crewmen, all taken prisoner by the Shenandoah in December after the capture of the Delphine.
Blanchard begins taking depositions from the former prisoners, who tell him they had been released the previous day, as soon as the ship arrived.
Captain Nichols doesn’t have a lot to say. He tells the consul he’s constrained by the oath he took, on signing his parole, not to reveal any information that could disadvantage the raider or the Confederate cause, such as details of the ship’s armaments.
Lillias Nichols, on the other hand, is more than happy to spill the beans. If her mood had genuinely mellowed while a captive of the Confederacy – which is doubtful – it changed for the worse when boarding the boat to take the Nichols family and their luggage ashore. Lieutenant Whittle noticed among Lillias’ possessions taken from the Delphine a copy of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin – a bestseller worldwide but loathed in the South. Whittle grabbed the book and tossed it overboard. Outraged, Lillias cried out that she hoped the Shenandoah would be set afire some day soon.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin wasn’t the only book belonging to Lillias Nichols that fell into enemy hands. In August 1943, on reading a newspaper article on the visit of the Shenandoah, Ada Wheeler, of St Kilda, wrote to the paper that she had in her possession two old leather-bound volumes of the works of the 18th-century English novelist Henry Fielding. The books had been presented to her father, and an inscription in the flyleaf read, ‘D.D. Wheeler, from I.S. Bulloch, CSS Shenandoah. Taken from the Yankee barque Delphine, captured by the above ship on Dec 29, 1864.’
At the consulate, Lillias tells Blanchard everything she knows about the Shenandoah, above and below decks; her Whitworth guns and other armaments, her 79 officers and crew, and most particularly her opinion of the ship’s bluff, recalcitrant captain.
From Lillias and from the six crewmen, Blanchard learns of the raider’s strengths, but, more importantly, her major weakness – because it’s unsafe for all the guns on one side to be fired at the same time, the ship cannot fire a broadside.
‘Never was a courtesy more completely thrown away upon an enemy,’ says Master’s Mate Cornelius Hunt of Captain and Lillias Nichols, apparently surprised that someone whose ship you had looted and sunk might take it personally.
‘They not only utterly failed to appreciate, in any degree, the manner in which they were treated while they were with us, but indulged in the most scandalous romance at our expense after they got on shore. This was all well enough no doubt, but if our friend of the Delphine had fallen into our hands a second time, we, knowing the reputation he had given us, would have taught him by experience ere we parted company, something of the dark side of the picture which a prisoner of war has occasion to inspect.’1
Mindful that a mail ship is leaving for England that day, Blanchard dashes off a letter to Ambassador Adams in London, informing him that the former Sea King, reborn as a Confederate cruiser, is in port, flagrantly flouting neutrality laws. He makes a copy for the US Consulate in Hong Kong, adding a suggestion that the consul request that one of the US Navy warships there be despatched to Melbourne posthaste, to catch the Confederates unaware.
While Blanchard is still scribbling, a note is delivered from the colony’s Commissioner of Customs, James Fr
ancis, belatedly informing him that the master of the Shenandoah has asked permission to land prisoners – the Nichols and others from the Delphine – in the port. Waddell will later claim the prisoners ‘left the ship without my knowledge in shore boats soon after my arrival in this port’.2
Francis wants to know if the consul will take care of the prisoners. Indeed he will. They have spent the day loudly blowing the whistle on Waddell, and this is music to Blanchard’s ears.
He pens another letter, to Governor Darling this time, outlaying the testimony of Captain Nichols, Lillias and the six singing sailors. He argues that because the former British merchantman has not been naturalised by entering a Confederate port, the vessel is legally stateless and therefore not entitled to assistance in a neutral port. In other words, the Shenandoah is a pirate ship and should be seized as such.
‘Here was a dilemma for the Governor,’ McNulty writes. ‘The United States consul was demanding of him that we be ordered out of the harbour, and we, as recognised belligerents, were demanding to stay. He “darst” and he “darsn’t” as the gamins [street urchins] say.’3
Too bad for Blanchard, though; the Governor has already granted Waddell permission to land his prisoners and to repair and resupply his ship.
Blanchard is enraged and frustrated by Governor Darling’s decision but probably not surprised. Sir Charles Henry Darling is the personification of the maxim that it’s not what you know but who you know. While neither the first nor the last gormless English aristocrat to be appointed governor of a British colony, he is nonetheless a classic example of the triumph of nepotism over merit. His qualifications for the job include having been assistant private secretary to his uncle Sir Ralph Darling – a heartless tyrant and history’s most hated governor of New South Wales – and having served without distinction as governor of Newfoundland, then of Jamaica, thanks to family connections with Lord Thomas Elgin – famed for stealing shiploads of ancient statues from Greece, notably the Parthenon’s Marbles that to this day bear his name.