by Terry Smyth
During intermission, a band plays ‘Dixie’, at which some among the audience begin to cheer and others to jeer. The Confederates, irritated by the Yankee sympathisers’ booing and hissing, and still smarting from the bar-room brawl, are inclined to get up and leave. However, it’s a triple bill tonight, so for the sake of propriety they sit through the remainder of the program – 18th-century melodrama The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, and the black comedy Robert Macaire – before beating a hasty retreat.
The officers return to their ship where Lieutenant Mason, for whom too much of a good thing is barely enough, immediately applies for further shore leave but is refused. Captain Waddell tells him he has already spent a day longer ashore than was allowed, and confines him aboard ship. Mason, who has several more assignations lined up, is not a happy midshipman.
Still, he gets a better reception on returning to duty than did gunner John Guy, who, after being refused shore leave, stole one of the ship’s boats and rowed off. Guy rowed back to the ship the next morning, pulled alongside, and was clambering up the ladder when Sailing Master Irvine Bulloch told him he could not come aboard because he was considered a deserter. When Guy refused to obey the order and continued to climb the ladder, Bulloch kicked him back into the boat.
While the men of the Shenandoah are making merry in Australia, the great drama being played out in America is nearing its climax. In Washington, the US Congress has passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. In Richmond, the Confederate Congress has appointed the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, as commander-in-chief of all Confederate forces. It is not so much a vote of confidence in Lee as a consensus that President Jefferson Davis – ailing both physically and mentally – is not up to the task.
The last Confederate port, at Wilmington, North Carolina, has fallen, cutting off supplies of food and war materiel to the people and armies of the South. In Richmond, the Confederate capital, sugar is selling for $10 a pound, coffee for $12 a pound and flour for $1,250 a barrel, and prices are set to soar even higher now that the Union blockade is a complete stranglehold. On the once grand plantations, most of the slaves have escaped or have been run off by the enemy, and the few who remain are selling for up to $6,000 – six times as much as before the war.
As General Sherman’s army sweeps northward from Savannah, Georgia, in an unrestrained orgy of arson and pillage – leaving desolation and destitution in its wake – representatives of North and South meet in the salon of a steamer in Hampton Roads to negotiate a truce. For the North, President Lincoln himself has come, along with Secretary of State Seward. For the South, President Davis is represented by Vice-President Andrew Stephens, accompanied by former US Supreme Court justice John Campbell.
The so-called peace conference is a failure. While the Southerners have come with the vain hope of a negotiated peace, Lincoln makes it plain that he will accept nothing less than unconditional surrender, with slavery abolished, as the terms of peace. With compromise out of the question, it’s back to the barricades.
Meanwhile in Melbourne, in a polite exchange of letters on more mundane matters, Customs Commissioner Francis asks Captain Waddell to provide a list of the immediate needs of his officers and crew. Waddell requests daily supplies of fresh meat, vegetables and bread, and stores of brandy, rum, champagne, port, sherry, beer, porter, molasses, lime juice and lightweight material for summer clothing for the men.
A diver’s inspection of the Shenandoah reveals that ‘the lining of the outer sternback is entirely gone and will have to be replaced’.17 ‘Sternback’ is not found in any glossary of nautical terms but is probably an outmoded term referring to the stern tube containing the propeller shaft, and associated bearings, in a hybrid sailer–steamer such as the Shenandoah.
The Shenandoah is towed across the bay by tug to Enoch Chambers’ slipway at Williamstown, so that her propeller shaft can be inspected and repaired. The work is expected to take about 10 days.
And still the sightseers keep coming, which inspires the slipway company to charge them sixpence each, with all the money raised going to local charities. Thinking along similar lines, Cornelius Hunt jokes, ‘Indeed, so great was the curiosity we excited, that had we been content to stay for six months in Melbourne, and charged an admission fee of one dollar to visitors, I believe we could have paid a large instalment upon the Confederate debt.’18
But there’s work to be done, and the decision is made to allow no more visitors on board. The sightseers crawling all over the decks are replaced by workmen caulking the decks with pitch and oakum. The heaviest stores and furnishings are hoisted into lighters hauled alongside, to lessen the load as much as possible before setting the ship upon the slip. And so the refit begins, with gangs of men working in shifts, day and night.
Captain Waddell is seldom seen soaking up the city’s hospitality with his officers. Perhaps mindful of the fate of the Florida – captured while her master was ashore – he sticks close by his ship. He has serious concerns about her safety, and complains to Melbourne’s Superintendent of Police, Thomas Lyttleton, that agents of US Consul Blanchard have threatened to blow it up while in port. He requests police protection for the Shenandoah, and Lyttleton com-plies by ordering the water police to keep an eye on it.
Waddell also claims Blanchard’s agents have induced several members of his crew to desert, presumably by offering men bribes to jump ship. And he’s less than impressed with a certain customs official who ‘did not have sufficient intelligence to recognise the distinction between a national and piratical vessel, who, for many days kept watch over the Shenandoah with his assistants, under disguise of friendly visits to her officers’.19
Waddell says he explained the difference to the customs officer, who troubled him no further. Apparently, the difference between a warship and a pirate ship – a distinction legal authorities in Australia, Britain and the United States consider blurry, to say the least – is perfectly clear in Waddell’s mind.
The Captain’s mood is darkening. He suspects there are forces at work here that will stop at nothing to derail his mission and destroy his ship. And although he’ll never receive confirmation, he’s absolutely right.
Wary of undue attention from Yankee agents and sympathisers, Waddell orders that three sentries must be posted aboard ship at all times, directed to hail three times any vessel that comes too close, then, if no satisfactory reply is received, to open fire on her. This does not happen, but the Confederates remain blissfully unaware how close they come to destruction.
When the Shenandoah was still at Sandridge, before being towed across the bay to the Williamstown slipway, anchored nearby was a Yankee merchantman, the Mustang, out of New York. The captain and crew of the Mustang, which had arrived in Melbourne a month earlier, were incensed by the presence of the rebel raider in port, and hatched a plot to blow her to smithereens. The Yankee ship’s master, Captain Sears, arranged with local collaborators for a bomb to be made. The device contained 250 pounds (115kg) of gunpowder and was designed to be detonated by a cocked revolver with a line attached to the trigger. The aim was to blow a large hole in the Shenandoah’s hull and send her to the bottom of Hobson’s Bay.
One night, dark figures boarded a boat from the Mustang, rowed silently to where the Shenandoah lay at anchor and pulled alongside. After attaching the bomb to the raider’s hull, the saboteurs rowed a safe distance away and tugged on the line.
Nothing happened.
Chapter 9
Buttons and beaux
There’s a fair chance that somewhere in Victoria, perhaps in an old box of keepsakes, is an heirloom passed down from a great-great-grandmother or distant aunt. This old curiosity is a gilt button bearing the emblem of an anchor and two crossed cannons, above the initials C.S.N. And oh, if that button could speak, what a tale it could tell.
As repairs to the Shenandoah continue at Williamstown, life on the slips is somewhat tedious after the mad social whirl of the previous week. Lieute
nant Mason, permitted shore leave again, heads for the city to indulge in whatever is going by way of diversion. But it’s a Sunday, and all Melbourne has to offer is attendance at church. At St Peter’s Church of England, near Parliament House, he and Lieutenant ‘Dab’ Scales are shown to a pew by two young women. The women are polite and friendly but decidedly plain, and the rebels sit bored and restless for more than an hour, suffering a mind-numbing sermon and the stares of a congregation apparently amazed to see pirates in the house of God. After the final Amen, they seek sanctuary in the Albion Hotel, where they find Assistant Surgeon Fred McNulty propping up the bar. Unlike his fellow officers, McNulty has sought solace not in the Holy Spirit but in spirituous liquor. After a bottle or two of ‘very nice colonial wine’, the trio retires to an upstairs parlour to smoke cigars. Writes Mason:
Whilst we were chatting quietly in the sitting room, who should make his appearance but the Steward of the Delphine [captured on 29 December], a Yankee-looking fellow, who hails from Missouri and claims to be a good Southerner, but at the same time he wanted to be paroled, which our captain very properly refused to do. He walked into the room dressed in shiny slop clothes [loose-fitting sailors’ clothing], accompanied by an individual of the same stamp, apparently. The blackguard spoke to us with as much freedom as if we were old friends of his.
As soon as I saw that he was decidedly inclined to be communicative in spite of the cold reception we gave him, I walked up to the window and commenced reading the signs on the other side of the street with the greatest possible diligence, and Mr Yankee did not venture to accost me. But Scales and McNulty, who kept their seats, were not so fortunate, for they had the pleasure of being introduced to this fellow’s companion, and it was only after some skilful manoeuvring and very broad hints that they succeeded in getting rid of them.1
Mercifully, just as it seems the Confederates’ colonial honeymoon might be over, a deputation from the gold-mining town of Ballarat arrives to invite the ship’s officers to a ball to be held in their honour. The event is being organised by William Eaves, a grains trader, and E.J. Brayton, the agent for Cobb & Co coaches. Americans of Southern persuasion, both are now prominent citizens of Ballarat.
The Ballarat press enthuses, ‘The Confederate cause is certainly in the ascendant just now, if it never was before, and as it seems to have the suffrages of the fair sex – some of the Melbourne ladies wear the Confederate button – it is not to be wondered at that the men follow in the wake.
‘The Ballarat ball to the officers is expected to be a grand affair. In addition to the leading citizens of Ballarat, many of the notabilities of Melbourne will be invited to meet the officers.’2
Six officers not on duty – Hunt, Grimball, Bulloch, Lining, Scales and Smith, are granted the Captain’s permission to attend. In the early evening of Thursday 9 February, dressed in their best, they board a train for the two-hour trip to Ballarat. Sharing their carriage is an officer of the Victorian militia, an elderly Chinese man and an American who is a Southerner but supports the North. During the journey, the militiaman and the American pass the time by baiting and abusing the old Chinese man, much to the Confederates’ amusement.
Australians and Americans share a fear and loathing of the Chinese, an antipathy born on the goldfields in both countries when Chinese arrived in large numbers; and in both countries is expressed in official discrimination, and unofficially by persecution and murder.
In New South Wales, when the gold rush began, the press accused Chinese diggers of unspecified ‘unnatural crimes’.3 The Victorian press condemned them as ‘a social evil that would contaminate and degrade the superior European race’.4 The widespread perception among white miners is that their Anglo-Saxon Eldorado is being overrun by ‘Celestials’ – so called because China is known as the Celestial Empire, its emperor styling himself the Son of Heaven.
In Australia, the general public has come to share this perception, whipped up by the colonial authorities into yet another invasion scare. In Victoria, an 1855 parliamentary inquiry into conditions on the goldfields stated, ‘The question of the influx of such large numbers of a pagan and inferior race is a very serious one, and comprises an unpleasant possibility of the future, that a comparative handful of colonists may be buried in a countless throng of Chinamen.’5
White miners soon came to realise that violence against the Chinese would go unpunished. You could bash them, drive them from their claims, burn down their camps, even kill them, and officialdom would either turn a blind eye or give you a nod and a wink. ‘You must have killed a Chinaman,’ becomes a common Australian expression, meaning that it’s not murder, merely bad luck.
When, in 1860, gold is discovered at Lambing Flat, in New South Wales, by an African-American known as Alexander the Yankee, European and Chinese diggers flock to the district. By December of that year, two Chinese miners had been killed, and 10 wounded. Others suffered the shame of having their ‘queues’, or ‘pigtails’, cut off. Wearing their hair in a long plait identified Chinese men as subjects of the Manchu Emperor, and signified manhood and dignity.
Attacks and other depredations continued on the goldfields, culminating in 1861 in the notorious Lambing Flat Riot, the worst incident of civil disorder in Australian history. Carrying a perversion of the Eureka flag – a banner bearing the Southern Cross with the inscription ‘Roll up – No Chinese’, a mob of up to 3,000 whites invaded the Chinese diggings, assaulting the diggers, burning and looting. An eyewitness reported seeing ‘one man who returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done. I also saw one tail, with part of the scalp, the size of a man’s hand attached, that had been literally cut from some unfortunate creature.’6
Police sent in to restore order were attacked at night by a force of about 1,000 miners, who retreated only after a fire-fight and a mounted charge by troopers wielding sabres.
In the aftermath, the ringleaders of the riot were arrested and jailed, and the Chinese returned to the diggings, but the bad blood remained.
By 1865, even though most of the Chinese miners have returned to China – as they had always intended to do – the irrational fear and loathing of ‘Celestials’ remains undiminished. In time, the ugly seed planted in the colonial goldfields will germinate into the racist imperative of a new nation. It will be called the Immigration Restriction Act, better known as the White Australia Policy.
At Ballarat, the Confederates are met by well-wishers and escorted to Craig’s Hotel. It seems the whole town has turned out to greet them, and on a triumphal arch across the main street, flowers spell out ‘Welcome to Ballarat’.
The following day’s agenda begins with a tour of the Black Hill Quartz Mining Company’s operation, followed by a 420-foot (130m) descent into a shaft of the Band of Hope mine. Surgeon Lining’s journal entry reads:
It was a horrid sensation that of going down, and certain death if any accident had happened, for if the fall had not killed us, the chain falling on us certainly would. After we had gone a certain distance, suddenly a flood of water came in upon us, putting out the cigars of the smokers and wetting us more or less.
On getting to the main shaft they put us into small cars and trolled us about a thousand feet or more when we came to another shaft which went upwards, and we were in the bed of an ancient river and consequently where the gold was found. We followed this gallery to where they were digging and I myself dug a little to see if I could find a nugget, but was unsuccessful, only seeing a few sparkling pieces of sand, which they told me was gold. At this spot the air was so bad that we could hardly keep our candles lit, and our breathing was a little oppressed, not as much so as I expected. There was a curious smell they said was the foul air.
Altogether it was a most interesting visit and one I would not have missed for a great deal, but I should never go down another shaft – we suffered a good deal from the heat.
Later that evening, back at his hotel, Lining has a tight squeeze
of another kind. ‘The ball was to commence at 10pm. For, I think, this first time in my life, I was the last dressed and they had to wait for me, all owing to the button holes of my waistcoat being too small.’
Buttoned up at last, he goes downstairs to find he and his comrades are expected to escort ‘three to four rather old ladies’ to the ball.7
Lining’s evening is set to improve considerably, however.
Tripping the light fantastic at Craig’s Hotel tonight are braces of middle-aged misters and missuses, but, happily, a surfeit of misses. As usual, the Confederates are spoilt for choice.
Preparing for a ball in the Victorian Age is an organisational challenge, and there are strict rules to follow. Interested parties meet to choose a Committee of Arrangements, tasked with securing a venue, booking an orchestra, sending out invitations and providing refreshments. Etiquette dictates that food and drink must never be served in the ballroom, so a separate refreshment room offers guests tea and coffee, biscuits, cakes, ices, cracker-bonbons, cold tongue and sandwiches.
Ladies dressing for a ball must select the design and colour of their attire according to marital status and the dictates of propriety. For a married woman, a white or lightly tinted silk dress in a shimmering pattern is suitable, trimmed with tulle and flowers. Unmarried women are similarly obliged to select light materials for their gowns, although in fabrics other than silk, but with a wider choice of colours – light blue, maize or apple green for blondes; richer colours for brunettes and redheads. In the hair, single flowers, wreaths or small feathers are acceptable – although a tall woman should avoid any head-dress that might make her appear taller than the gentleman dancing with her. Jewellery should be minimal; one bracelet is quite enough, since one does not wish to appear gaudy or common.