Australian Confederates

by Terry Smyth

  The Shenandoah’s First Officer, charged with the task of disarming the ship, declares this day ‘the darkest day of my life’. Brooding in his cabin, pouring his despair into his journal, William Whittle writes that the Barracouta ‘brought us our death knell, a knell worse than death’. He continues:

  Our dear country has been overrun; our President captured; our armies and navy surrendered; our people subjugated. Oh, God, aid us to stand up under this, thy visitation.

  There is no doubting the truth of this news. We now have no country, no flag, no home. We have lost all but our honour and self-respect, and I hope our trust in God Almighty.

  Were men ever so situated? The Captain gave me an order to dismount and strike our battery, turn in all arms except the private arms, and disarm the vessel, as no more depredations, of course, upon the United States shipping will be done. We went sorrowfully to work making preparations but night coming on, we will await tomorrow to finish our work. Hoisted propeller and made all plain sail.

  I feel that were it not for my dear ones at home I would rather die than live. Nearly all our work in the Arctic must have been done after this terrible visitation, but God knows we were ignorant.

  When I think of my darlings at home, and all my dear ones, my heart bleeds in anguish.5

  A meeting of officers is called to discuss the best course to pursue, and each man offers an opinion. Some favour sailing to Melbourne; some to Valparaiso; others to New Zealand.

  The Captain reminds them it is his responsibility to preserve the honour of his men and of the flag. The right thing to do, he says, is to run for a European port. ‘A long gauntlet to run, to be sure, but why not succeed in baffling observation or pursuit? The enemy had gloated over his success and would, like a gorged serpent, lie down to rest.’6

  Denied the greater glory, Waddell now reaches for a lesser one. He will never surrender to a Yankee; he will outwit and outrun his pursuers, even if it means sailing around the world; he will have his page in history, come hell or high water.

  ‘I felt sure a search would be made for her in the North Pacific and that to run the ship south was important for all concerned,’ Waddell writes. ‘Some of the people expressed a desire that I should take the Shenandoah to Australia or New Zealand or any port rather than attempt to reach Europe.’7

  The notion of returning to Melbourne is attractive to some, but there is cause to wonder whether Australians would welcome losers as warmly as they had welcomed underdogs. Could the romance be rekindled? They will never know. The Captain’s mind is made up. The Shenandoah will run for England and surrender at a neutral port. He will pursue no other course; consider no alternative.

  The crew are now called to assemble aft. In a brief speech, the Captain gives them the bad news and tells them of his decision to sail to Liverpool. The men give three cheers, all return to their duties, and the ship’s prow is pointed to Cape Horn.

  According to some sources, the crew petition Waddell to sail for Sydney, which is the nearest British port. He agrees to do so, but after 24 hours heading for Australia changes course for Cape Horn, thence to England. Among his officers, opinion is divided on whether Cape Town or Liverpool is the safest choice, but by most accounts the consensus is to head for Liverpool.

  With her guns swung below decks and her ports sealed, the Shenandoah is once again a peacetime vessel, not that that would prevent any American man-of-war from cheerfully blowing her out of the water.

  At Glasgow Infirmary, in Scotland, English surgeon Joseph Lister, disturbed by the high death rate following surgery, tries a simple but radical new approach. A maverick among his contemporaries, he does not consider unwashed, blood-stained hands a badge of professional pride, and does not accept the prevailing theory that infection is caused by airborne germs and cannot be prevented.

  In August, after testing the antiseptic effects of carbolic acid – a derivative of coal tar – on surgical instruments, incisions and dressings, Lister applies a solution of carbolic acid to the leg wound of an 11-year-old boy run over by a cart. The wound does not become infected, and within six weeks the boy’s broken bones have mended.

  Sadly, the birth of sterile surgery has come too late for the American Civil War wounded. The more than 12,000 surgeons who served in the Union army treated some 400,000 wounded men – more than half of them for gunshot and artillery wounds – and performed more that 40,000 operations. On the Confederate side, far fewer surgeons treated about the same number of men. Injuries to limbs were common, and the only known way to prevent infection was amputation. Still, even for minor injuries, the most common cause of death of wounded soldiers was infection.

  An estimated three out of five wounded Union soldiers, and two out of three Confederate casualties, died of infectious diseases. It can only be guessed how many of those deaths might have been prevented by clean hands and a dash of carbolic.

  It’s not long before the antipathy towards the Shenandoah is given a dollar value. On 7 August 1865, owners of the San Francisco whaler William C. Nye, captured and destroyed by the Confederates on 26 June, send the British Government a bill for US$280,212.50 – about $4 million in today’s money. The itemised account includes $35,000 for the vessel, $20,000 for the boats, whaling guns and other materials, $7,087.50 for the 150 barrels of whale oil aboard, $118,125 for the season’s catch that went down with the ship, and $100,000 worth of whalebone.

  The first of many such accounts to be presented, its authors see it as a legitimate claim against Britain and, by association, its Victorian colony for flouting international neutrality laws, but it is also motivated by a seething resentment of the British Empire’s unofficial yet transparently obvious support for the Confederacy. That support, whether real or imaginary, has reopened old wounds from the War of Independence; the ill feeling is apparent in repeated descriptions of the Shenandoah in the American press as the ‘English pirate’.

  In Dayton, Ohio, on 7 August – the same day Britain is slapped with the first Shenandoah bill – former slave Jourdan Anderson dictates a letter to his old master, Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson.

  The colonel – with his cotton plantation now struggling to survive in the post-war South – has written to Jourdan begging him to return to the plantation at Big Spring, Tennessee, to work for him as a free man. Jourdan had escaped with his wife Mandy and their three children in 1864, when Union soldiers raided the plantation.

  This is part of Jourdan’s reply:

  Sir, I got your letter and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can.

  I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

  Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living …

  I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy – the folks call her Mrs. Anderson – and the children – Milly, Jane, and Grundy – go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly.

  We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, ‘Them colored people were slaves’ down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again …

  Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us just
ly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for 32 years, and Mandy 20 years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680 …

  If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense …

  In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve – and die, if it come to that – than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

  Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

  From your old servant,

  Jourdon Anderson8

  It’s not known if the colonel ever wrote back, but it’s safe to assume he did not, and that Jourdan and Mandy Anderson never got the wages owed them for their years in bondage. They never returned to Big Spring plantation; they lived long and useful lives in Ohio, and raised 11 children.

  That same week, in Australia, Melbourne’s Argus publishes an editorial Colonel Anderson would surely have endorsed, but would have left Jourdan Anderson sadly shaking his head:

  It is evident that emancipating the slave is not so simple a measure as Mr Lincoln expected. The sudden gift of freedom to four millions of half-civilised men, who understand nothing of the principle involved in it, entails responsibilities that are not readily discharged.

  What is to become of them? Socially, the Negro will never be amalgamated with the white population. To all intents and purposes he is an inferior being, whose very conditions of existence imply the absence and the impossibility of an equal human status. In the face of all this, he is not only made socially free, but he clamours to be made politically enfranchised.

  Virtually, it means nothing less than the subjection of the whites to the dominion of the blacks, a contrast so violent that it would be comic if its consequences were not so terrible. Of course, it is not apprehended that the whites will become the hewers of wood and drawers of water for their former bondsmen, but it is pretty certain the black will not readily work for the white. Liberty, to him, is personal liberty, the liberty to do nothing, to indulge in his natural propensities of sloth, to get his salt pork and rum at other people’s expense, and practise polygamy and Obeah without interruption from his more fastidious fellow men – this is what emancipation conveys to his mind, and he will not be long in discovering that, whatever else may be the advantages of the franchise, it has this special attraction for him – that it spares him the necessity of working.9

  In Montevideo harbour to take on supplies, Captain Christopher Rogers of USS Iroquois learns that the Shenandoah is within striking distance. Without waiting to finish loading, Rogers weighs anchor and steams off in pursuit. The Shenandoah, although faster than the Iroquois, would be no match for its 50-pounder gun and four 32-pounders. Rogers hunts the Shenandoah through the Mediterranean, around South America and across the Pacific to Singapore, but always misses her by a few weeks.

  When the Iroquois gives up the chase and returns to America, the pursuit is taken up by the US Navy’s Pacific Squadron, under Rear Admiral George Pearson. The squadron, formed to protect the Arctic whaling fleet from Confederate raiders, is under orders to track down and destroy the Shenandoah at any cost, but none of Pearson’s six sloops-of-war ever catch a glimpse of her.

  Chapter 21

  Oh, Pattie!

  William Whittle is wallowing in sorrow. ‘When I think that all our privations, trials, loss of life and blood since the war have such an end, I scarce know what to think or do. We are certainly a pitiable people. To think of our poor country being overrun, and of our people subjugated, conquered and reduced to a state of slavery, which is worse than death.’1 Slavery is only a fate worse than death for white people, presumably.

  With his misery matched by rain and squalls, Whittle has taken to continuously rereading his letters from his beloved Pattie, and pleading with the Almighty.

  ‘To know how I feel would give anyone the blues. How my position is altered: no country; no home; no profession, and alas, to think the fondest wish of my heart, i.e., to marry, must be abandoned. Oh my darling Pattie, how can I give thee up? God grant me support!’2

  The Confederates have no way of knowing for sure, although they might easily have guessed, that one of the ships they bonded rather than burned had by now alerted Washington of their movements. The realisation is dawning that, to avoid capture, the Shenandoah will have to sail around the world without touching land, while being hunted all the way.

  From the outset, they frequently sight ships, and will continue to do so. Some ships that spot them send up signals, but the Shenandoah does not reply. She is a ghost ship now, or desires to be. All on board are counting the closing miles and are fixed on the same objective – getting to the other side of the world as soon as possible; and arriving there safe and sound.

  Setting course for her final destination, the ship is continually under sail because she has only seven days’ supply of coal, which is kept in reserve for when steam will be most needed, such as when rounding the Horn.

  Once Confederates, they are wanderers now, cast upon the seas of a world that changed without them noticing, and has turned against them.

  McNulty laments that they can’t even expect to make money from the venture, ‘which usually follows successful privateering’. Still, unlike the inconsolable first officer, he’s philosophical about the way things have turned out:

  We had sailed against the flag of the United States, not to plunder its citizens but to destroy its commerce. We were imbued with no grasping thoughts of wealth. The success of our cause was what we had sailed for, and now that we had no cause we were poor indeed.

  What we had done was all under the open mandate of honourable warfare, recognised as such by the oldest and most powerful of the maritime and naval nations, when she declared we were belligerents, thus recognising that the flag we bore was a national flag.

  But, on the other hand, we knew the United States had never recognised the Southern States to be in secession, and, inasmuch as we were unsuccessful, we could hardly know what to expect. But the vastness of the movement, greater in extent and completion than anything in history, embodying within itself millions of men who had sprung full armed and as in one step to war, was beyond the pale of international or of national precedent.3

  After passing east of Cape Horn on 16 September, the mood on the Shenandoah is made gloomier still by howling gales, looming icebergs and cold, moonless nights. Waddell recalls, ‘The struggles of our ship were but typical of the struggles that filled our breasts upon learning that we were alone on that friendless deep without a home or country, our little crew all that were left of the thousands who had sworn to defend that country or die with her, and there were moments when we would have deemed that a friendly gale which would have buried our sorrowful hearts and the beautiful Shenandoah in those dark waters.’4

  He fancies that the ship shares their despair, and no longer moves as swiftly as she used to.

  Again, he is requested to put in to Cape Town, and again he refuses, keeping well to the east and keeping a polite distance from any sail to avoid being recognised.

  ‘Bloody Bill’ Anderson will once again live up to his nickname today. It is nine o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 27 September, as he a
nd his band of Missouri guerrillas, disguised in Yankee uniforms, ride into Centralia, Missouri, to cut the railroad.

  William T. Anderson, a sadist, killer and rapist, leads about 80 irregulars who target Union soldiers and loyalists in Missouri and neighbouring states, and are notorious for their brutality. While Bloody Bill claims to fight for the Confederacy, he once told Charles Strieby, a neighbour he was trying to recruit, ‘I don’t care any more than you for the South, Strieby, but there is a lot of money in this [bushwacking] business.’5

  On 21 August 1863, guerrilla bands led by Anderson, George Todd and William Quantrill descended on the town of Lawrence, Kansas, where they murdered more than 150 unarmed men and boys. It was the bloodiest civilian massacre of the war.

  The New York Times declared, ‘Missouri is today more dangerously disturbed, if not more dangerously disloyal, than Mississippi. More contempt for the army and for the government is daily poured forth there – more turbulence in talk and in action is indulged in – and human life is less safe than anywhere else within all the military lines of the United States. In this latter respect, the condition of Missouri is fearful. Not a day passes that does not chronicle house-burnings and murders.’6

  In Centralia, Bloody Bill and his band terrorise the townsfolk and loot the town before blocking the rail line.

  An approaching train, spotting the blocked line, slams on the brakes, but by the time the engineer realises the men in blue uniforms are not Union troops it’s too late, and the guerrillas have boarded. The train’s 125 passengers include 23 Union soldiers headed home on leave. At gunpoint, Anderson orders the soldiers to strip off their uniforms, after which, he and his men casually gun down the unarmed soldiers, then mutilate the bodies. They set fire to the train and the rail depot, then ride away.