by Terry Smyth
Victoria’s defences would never include Doty’s submarine battery, however. It seems the inventive Captain Doty was not all he appeared to be. Henry Harrison Doty, alias Horace H. Doty, was not a captain, and had never served in the Confederate Navy, nor in the Chilean Navy, as he also claimed.
And Doty did not invent the submarine battery. It had in fact been developed by Confederate naval officers Matthew Maury and Hunter Davidson. Maury, a naval scientist and Confederate agent in England, had served on the Alabama and escaped with Captain Raphael Semmes when the raider was sunk off Cherbourg in 1864. Captain Davidson founded the Confederate Submarine Battery Service, and in 1864, in Newport News, Virginia, skippered the semi-submersible torpedo boat Squib, which damaged USS Minnesota.
In 1865, Doty joined a band of mercenaries led by the two ex-Confederates – and which included the American artist James McNeil Whistler – on an expedition to supply torpedos and other arms to Chile, then at war with Spain. Whistler travelled separately to Chile, on the same vessel as Doty’s wife, Astide.
Doty, paymaster on Davidson’s ship the Henrietta, learned all he knew of military matters from listening to Maury and Davidson during the voyage to Valparaiso, then under Spanish bombardment.
The expedition was a failure. The mercenaries failed to sink the Spanish fleet, and the Chileans reneged on the £60,000 bounty promised to them. The entrepreneurs returned to England empty-handed, with Davidson accusing Doty of defrauding him of £100, and Doty accusing Whistler of seducing his wife during the voyage to Valparaiso.
Whistler, who had again travelled separately, arrived at Waterloo Station to find Doty waiting for him. Doty loudly accused him of being a cad and a scoundrel, whereupon Whistler lashed out and struck him. Doty, bigger and stronger than the feisty but slightly built Whistler, hit back with force, and the artist fled. Doty later challenged Whistler to a duel over the honour of his wife – who, as it turned out, was not his wife at all – but then withdrew the challenge.
The matter was far from settled, however. When Doty continued to make libellous accusations against Whistler, most offensively as a member of Whistler’s gentlemen’s club in London, the artist sought support from Captain Davidson, who didn’t mince words:
‘The character of the man H.H. Doty (alias Captain Doty) who was known to me only as a contractor with a Chilean agent in London in 1865 and afterwards as a shipped seaman on board my ship the Henrietta, in which I took a torpedo expedition to Chile, is too revolting for me to dwell upon in detail. Surely, no Society in England can be long deceived by this villain (and the woman with whom he travels as his wife).
‘I have never known a more snake-like abject coward, and yet you say he belongs to a club in London! What kind of club can it be?’3
At ‘Redmoor’, his son’s plantation in Amelia County, Virginia, a household name throughout the South puts a gun to his head and blows his brains out.
A wealthy slaveholder and leading advocate for secession in the years leading up to the war, ‘Fire-Eater’ Edmund Ruffin had a passionate hatred for abolitionists, Yankees and federal government, not necessarily in that order. One of the colourful characters of the Old South, with flowing white locks and aristocratic bearing, Ruffin claimed to have fired the first shot of the war, at the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. He was 67 years old at the time.
On learning of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Ruffin decides life is no longer worth living. He goes upstairs to his study, taking with him a rifle and a forked stick, and pens the last entry in his diary:
‘I here declare my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule – to all political, social and business connection with the Yankees and to the Yankee race. Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living Southerner and bequeath them to every one yet to be born. May such sentiments be held universally in the outraged and downtrodden South, though in silence and stillness, until the now far-distant day shall arrive for just retribution for Yankee usurpation, oppression and atrocious outrages, and for deliverance and vengeance for the now ruined, sub jugated and enslaved Southern States.’
At this point, Ruffin is interrupted by news that there are visitors at the door. He entertains his guests, then, after they have left, returns to his study and writes, ‘And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will be near to my last breath, I here repeat, and would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule – to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.’4
That done, Edmund Ruffin wraps himself in a Confederate flag, puts the rifle muzzle in his mouth and uses the forked stick to pull the trigger. The percussion cap is detonated but fails to fire the rifle.
Hearing the noise, his daughter-in-law Jane alerts her husband, Edmund Junior, and they rush upstairs. But by the time they get to Ruffin’s room, he has reloaded and, using his toe to squeeze the trigger this time, fired the fatal shot.
In Galveston, Texas, two days after Edmund Ruffin decided life was not worth the candle, Union General Gordon Granger, whose forces have just occupied the city, is standing on the balcony of Ashton Villa, the stately Italianate villa of wealthy Texas businessman James Moreau Brown. The ornate mansion balcony is a fitting site for the historic announcement the general is about to make to the townsfolk gathered below.
It has been more than two years since the Emancipation Proclamation, yet slavery has endured in Texas, where there are at least a quarter of a million people still in bondage.
In a strong, clear voice, Granger, a fearless, outspoken New Yorker with an impressive tally of battle honours, proclaims General Orders Number Three:
‘The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labour. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts, and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.’4
Freed slaves in the restive crowd below the balcony stand silent in shock at first, then erupt in pure joy. This is more than emancipation – this is salvation, and the celebration of freedom on 19 June will become the black American Fourth of July. Henceforth, the anniversary of General Granger’s proclamation will be known as June teenth, marked throughout America with picnics, parades and prayers of thanksgiving.
The mansion from whence the good news was spread has a macabre legacy, however. Ashton Villa, which was used as a hospital for Confederate wounded during the war, is said to be haunted by the ghosts of rebel soldiers – lost souls for the lost cause.
That same day, 19 June, Confederate agent James Bulloch pens a letter to Captain Waddell, telling him of Lee’s surrender on 9 April and informing him that, since the surrender, the European powers have withdrawn belligerent rights to the Confederacy. Bulloch’s orders to Waddell are to immediately cease offensive operations. His first duty now is to take care of the men under his command and to discharge and pay off the crew as soon as it is safe to do so, enabling them to return to their homes.
Bulloch advises him that if he does not have enough money to pay the crew in full he should pay them as much as he can and give each man a promissory note to pay the balance from his own account in Liverpool.
The letter also relays the disturbing news that, under a recent proclamation by the President of the United States, Waddell and his fellow Southerners dare not return to America.
The Australians on the Shenandoah knew from the outset that going home to resume their lives would risk arrest and imprisonment. Now, for the Americans on board, a homecoming could mean the noose.
Back in May, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnston, offered ‘all persons who have, dire
ctly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion, except as hereinafter excepted, amnesty and pardon, with the restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves, and except in cases where legal proceedings, under the laws of the United States providing for the confiscation of property of persons engaged in rebellion, have been instituted; but upon this condition, nevertheless, that every such person shall take and subscribe the following oath.’
People seeking a pardon must swear to ‘henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the union of the States thereunder’ and to ‘faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves’.
And as if that isn’t enough for old Johnny Reb to swallow, those to whom no amnesty will be granted included ‘foreign agents of the pretended Confederate government’ – such as James Bulloch; ‘all who shall have been military or naval officers of said pretended Confederate government above the rank of colonel in the army or lieutenant in the navy’ – such as James Waddell; ‘all military and naval officers in the rebel service, who were educated by the government in the Military Academy at West Point or the United States Naval Academy’ – such as the Captain and most of the officers of the Shenandoah; and ‘all persons who have been engaged in the destruction of the commerce of the United States upon the high seas’ – such as the entire ship’s complement of the Shenandoah, from captain to cabin boy.5
Bulloch’s advice is to come to Europe and await further developments, but getting this vital news to the master of the Shenandoah is problematic. Bulloch sends copies of the letter to Britain’s Foreign Minister Earl Russell, who agrees to forward copies to all British colonial authorities and to consuls in Japan, China and Hawaii. The hope is that the news will reach Waddell at some port or from some ship, somewhere soon. It does not.
In Sydney, the assassination of Lincoln has sparked widespread demonstrations of grief, with memorial services, public meetings to share outrage and sympathy, an official letter of condolence from the city’s mayor to Mrs Lincoln, and even an undertaking by sorrowing citizens to wear mourning clothes for a month.
In Melbourne, US Consul William Blanchard lowers the consulate flag to half mast, and Yankee residents do likewise, but there is nothing like the public outpouring of grief seen in Sydney.
‘Mr Abraham Lincoln was far above the average of Federal statesmen in his earnestness against slavery,’ says The Geelong Advertiser in a backhanded compliment to the slain President, and continues:
… and for his diverse faults, they were more those of ignorance and vacillation in a man so suddenly invested with so tremendous an authority, than of inherent defect of character.
But while we regard the American Civil War as over, it would be idle to indulge in the belief that the Union is restored, or that the two parties who have been engaged in this death-struggle of four years, are now reconciled. The feelings which have been generated by this war are not likely to die with the surrender of General Lee or the flight of President Davis. The nation which has endured so much, and fought so heroically in the endeavour to free itself from Northern domination, will hardly consent to forget the past, even though it gives up its arms.
The rebellion has been crushed out, but something else has been destroyed besides the Confederacy – the old unity; the old bonds have been dissolved; the silver chord is loosened; the golden bowl is broken forever. It is impossible that Northerners and Southerners can ever be again fellow-citizens as once they were. Under the immediate pressure of their present calamities, the South maybe quiescent for a time, but to believe that the spirit of a nation is entirely annihilated, which has the fame of Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the memory of Richmond, of Charleston, of Gettysburg and Bull Run among its traditions, is to libel our kinsmen of the great Anglo-Saxon race.’6
More to the point, with the Shenandoah long gone, Melburnians are in need of new diversion; another novelty. And on 19 June they get one. A large male gorilla is now on display at the Museum of Natural and Applied Sciences, and curious citizens are queuing in their hundreds to visit the exhibit.
The museum’s director, Professor Frederick McCoy, has described the old silverback, captured in central Africa, as ‘the largest example of the monster ape recorded’, with an expression ‘more one of contented jovial jollity than malignity’.7
McCoy, a renowned palaeontologist, is active in the environmentally disastrous Acclimatisation Society, which favours importing English songbirds and rabbits to bring a touch of the Mother Country to the Australian bush (see Chapter 27).
He is also a rabid opponent of Darwinism, and is promoting the gorilla exhibit as proof positive that there is no distant link between humans and apes. He invites the public to see for themselves ‘how infinitely remote the creature is from humanity, and how monstrous writers have exaggerated the points of resemblance when endeavouring to show that man is only one phase of the gradual transmutation of animals, which they assume may be brought about by external influences.’8
The professor’s views are mainstream at the moment, but time and the weight of scientific opinion will eventually make a monkey out of him.
‘Sail ho!’ Overnight, thick fog made the lookout’s job all but impossible, but a couple of hours ago he spotted whale blubber in the water – an encouraging sign. So far in these frigid climes, the Confederates’ only contact has been with Inuit hunters.
‘The Shenandoah was now north of the island of St Lawrence, under sail, with fires banked,’ Waddell recalls. ‘Several Esquimaux canoes with natives from the island visited us, and our crew struck up a brisk trade with them for furs and walrus tusks. It was interesting and curious, as we had no means of communication with them except through signs.’9
Fred McNulty’s recollection differs markedly from that of his captain. ‘They brought out walrus tusks and fur, which we declined to barter for. The cook, however, brought from the galley a slush bucket of odds and ends of grease and food, and our little stunted friends squatted upon the deck in silence, and dug deeply with their hands into the mixed viands. A pound of tallow candles to serve each as dessert, and when the king’s meal to an Esquimaux was at an end they departed with full hearts and stomachs.’10
Now, at last, on the morning of Wednesday 21 June, from the masthead has come the cry the Confederates have been waiting for. Two sails are in sight. The Shenandoah, flying a Russian flag, gives chase, lobs a warning shot, and both ships heave to. They are the whalers William Thompson and Euphrates, both out of New Bedford.
By mid-afternoon, the Euphrates has been plundered and set afire, and the boarding parties have begun to transfer stores from the William Thompson, when a third sail is spotted. Again, the Shenandoah gives chase, only to discover on coming close enough to hail the ship that she’s from a neutral country. She’s the whaler Robert L. Towns, out of Sydney. The whaler’s captain, Fred Barker, asks Waddell the name of his vessel, and Waddell, maintaining the Russian ruse, tells him she’s the ‘Petropauluski’, which means nothing in Russian and is probably the first thing that popped into his head.
Barker, a Yankee, is not taken in by the charade. He’s guessed the true identity of the vessel, not only because there is a burning ship in the distance, and another being raided, but because it so happens he was in Sydney when the Shenandoah was in Melbourne, and had read all about it in the papers. Giving nothing away, he sails north towards the Bering Strait to warn any Yankee ships he encounters that a Confederate raider is heading their way.
The master of the William Thompson, Captain Smith, is the bearer of bad news. Lieutenant Whittle records in his journal his reaction to learning of the assassination of President Lincoln and the attempt on the life of Secretary of State Seward: ‘I only fear that these attempts will be put to the credit of some Confederates, but I am certain that it was not done by anyone from our side.’11
He’s devastated by news th
at Charleston and Savannah have fallen, and, as a Virginian, is especially saddened to learn of the fall of Richmond. As for the report of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, he flatly refuses to believe it. ‘Lee may have left a portion of his force to protect the retreat of his army, and even he might have been taken with this position, but as to his surrender of his whole army, and of his treating with General Grant for peace I do not believe a single word. There is no doubting the Confederacy has received in prestige a heavy blow, but further I do not believe.’12
The next day, five vessels are sighted near a large body of ice. The Shenandoah, flying the Stars and Stripes, makes for them and, passing close under the stern of the nearest ship, the New Bedford whaler Milo, invites her master, Captain Hawes, to come aboard with his papers.
‘He complained,’ Waddell recalls, ‘and was surprised to learn the nationality of the steamer, and said he had heard of her being in Australia, but did not expect to see her in the Arctic Ocean.
‘I asked for news. He said the war was over. I then asked for documentary evidence. He had none, but believed the war was over. I replied that was not satisfactory, but that if he could produce any reliable evidence, I would receive it.’13
When Captain Hawes can offer no such evidence, Waddell tells him he is willing to ransom the Milo if he will sign a bond for $40,000, payable to the Confederate government after the war, and take on board all of the Shenandoah’s prisoners. The skipper agrees, and returns to his ship with instructions to send all his boats and his entire crew to the Shenandoah. This is a stratagem on Waddell’s part to prevent the Milo escaping while he pursues two other vessels that have realised something is amiss and are making a run for it.