by Terry Smyth
Robbins had reason to believe that a man named Ross, who had since died, was actively engaged in recruiting sailors for the Confederate cruiser.
Could Ross have been the mysterious Mr Powell? Consul Adamson would never know. Frustrated at every turn by hostile witnesses, sealed lips and conveniently faulty memories, he reported having little luck in ‘obtaining legal evidence to establish what by common report I believe to be true’.
‘The dirty work was no doubt done by a low class of people, such as boarding house runners, ship chandlers, etc, etc, and between deaths and removals they have disappeared from the scene.
‘The repairs were made by people still living who refuse to testify. The active sympathy of high government officials was undoubtedly shown and exerted on behalf of the Shenandoah, but we cannot place an ex-governor, Chief Secretary or Crown Solicitor on the witness stand.’8
Then, just when it all seemed a monumental waste of time and effort, George Washington Robbins turned up with news that his foreman at the port knew the whereabouts of Shenandoah men who returned to Melbourne.
Adamson hurried to Sandridge, where he was told these men could be produced for ‘a consideration’. He promised to be generous, and, the following day, the foreman brought a former Shenandoah man to be interrogated, and said he would bring three more the next day.
The man sitting calmly across from the Consul was William Kenyon, formerly Private Kenyon, Confederate States Marine Corps. Speaking freely, Kenyon told Adamson that after hearing that the Shenandoah needed men, he and some others decided to enlist. He had heard, too, that the ship’s commander did not want to see them come on board, and that at 11pm on the night before the Shenandoah left port, he and six others rowed themselves out to the vessel. There was only one man on deck to meet them, and they immediately went below and hid in various parts of the ship. The next day, when the ship was six or seven miles outside Port Phillip Heads, he and 41 other men went on deck and enlisted in the Confederate service – a procedure that took several hours.
Kenyon told the Consul he served as a marine on the Shenandoah, and was involved in the capture of American vessels in the Pacific and Arctic oceans, and in the Okhotsk Sea.
Tantalisingly, Adamson noted that Kenyon had ‘a most startling recollection of the capture of a vessel called the Jireh Swift’. Just what that ‘startling recollection’ was, Adamson didn’t say, but it could well be that Kenyon mentioned being on the gun crew that fired the last shot of the war.
From Kenyon, the Consul learnt details of the surrender at Liverpool, and how the Australians and other British subjects among the ship’s company had escaped prosecution by passing themselves off as Southerners.
So far, so good, until: ‘After Kenyon had made his above statement in answer to my questions, I asked him to make the same in presence of a Notary Public. He agreed to do so and I hastened to call on my solicitor who agreed to verify the declaration.
‘I was not absent three minutes, but on my return Kenyon said he must first see another person before he would subscribe the deposition. All arguments were fruitless and he went away. Later on he returned and vacillated but would not come to positive terms. I then sent for the other men, but before they could be reached Kenyon had seen them, and, as it appears, persuaded them to place themselves in his hands in order to get a large sum from me for their evidence.’9
For whatever reason, the former Confederates did not come back to bargain and consequently didn’t get a penny, and the Consul didn’t get the evidence he needed. For the second time in his diplomatic career, Thomas Adamson Jnr was forced to lower the flag – albeit metaphorically this time.
At last, on 15 September 1872, exhausted by circuitous argument, the arbitrators of the Alabama Claims sharpened their pencils and figured out the bill. The total cost to Britain was $15.5 million, payable in gold, within one year. Thus, the Geneva Tribunal gave the Treaty of Washington its blessing.
A cartoon of the day, titled, ‘The apple of discord at the Geneva Tribunal’, shows the personification of England, John Bull, aiming a crossbow à la William Tell at Uncle Sam, who is standing in front of a tree, with an apple on his head. The apple is labelled ‘Alabama Claims’ and the arrow aimed at it is labelled ‘peaceful arbitration’. Looking on, seated on a platform are the top-hatted, sombre-faced tribunal members, and, safely behind a fence, the crowned heads of Europe. An insert in a corner of the cartoon shows the apple skewered by the arrow, and John Bull and Uncle Sam embracing – friends again.10
For Britain, however, friendship would not come cheap. The tribunal had put the blue pencil through the unreasonable – such as the claim that Britain’s aid to the rebel raiders prolonged the war by two years – and ticked the acceptable – namely, the damage done – thereby paring down the compensation claim from $2 billion to $15.5 million.
While that was a significant reduction, to put it into a modern perspective, $15.5 million in 1872 is the equivalent of about $300 million in 2015, which is hardly small change. And it’s surely no coincidence that 1872 was the year the United States overtook Britain as the global economic leader.
The Confederate raiders could never have guessed that laying a shot across a Yankee whaler’s bow would change the world. Yet, in some ways, that’s what happened. The Treaty of Washington, when ratified by the United States Senate, ended the risk of hostilities between America and the British Empire. Henceforth, the two powers would remain firm allies. The treaty also opened the door to the official recognition of Canada by the United States, and revised the laws of neutrality so that the Shenandoah saga might never be repeated.
There was but one matter that the British declared non-negotiable. Her Britannic Majesty’s commissioners, on the instruction of the Home Office, made it abundantly clear to the Americans that the use of the split infinitive would simply not be tolerated. They demanded that in the wording of the treaty, words must not be inserted between the preposition ‘to’ and a verb. On that seemingly small yet semantically seminal matter, the British were victorious.11
All the men of the Shenandoah had surrendered, but apparently no-one had told the ship. When Captain Freeman headed her down the Mersey, bound for New York, it seems the old rebel raider was determined never to enter a Yankee port, and that the Atlantic conspired with her.
On reaching the open sea, the Shenandoah’s propeller began vibrating so violently that it shook the entire vessel. Then, savage gales and huge seas mercilessly battered the ship until, low on fuel and after losing all her sails and at risk of foundering, Freeman had no choice but to limp back to Liverpool for repairs.
There she sat, unloved and unwanted, an embarrassment to Britain and a headache for America, until 22 March 1866, when she was put up for auction by the US Government.
The winning bid, of £15,750, was from an agent on behalf of the Sultan of Zanzibar. The famously hedonistic Sultan, Majid bin Said Al-Busaid, had amassed a vast fortune from the East African slave trade. He renamed the ship the Majidi, after himself, and had her refitted as his luxury private yacht. No expense was spared. It can only be assumed that what went on below decks of the Majidi was beyond the wildest dreams of the most sex-starved crewman on the Shenandoah.
In 1879, Sultan Majid died, and in April of that year, during the reign of his son Barghash bin Said – a reformer who outlawed the slave trade and modernised his country – the Majidi was wrecked by a hurricane. Salvaged by a British firm, she was taken to Bombay for repairs, and in July steamed out of Bombay headed for Zanzibar, never to be seen again.
Off Mozambique, a British warship, the Briton, picked up a boat with sailors who claimed to be the only survivors of the Majidi. Some said she foundered; some said she was scuttled.
The fate of the last Confederate raider would remain a mystery. What’s sure, though, is that the lucky ship’s luck finally ran out.
Chapter 26
The horse has bolted
Signs of changing times were appearing: some for b
etter; some for worse.
In March of 1868, taking action belatedly after years of tacitly supporting slave labour, the Queensland parliament voted to tighten the laws on blackbirding. Under the Polynesian Labourers Act, importers of Pacific Island labourers now had to be licensed, and pay a £500 bond, to be forfeited should there be proof that any islanders had been kidnapped. Employers were obliged to provide workers with a daily ration of bread or flour, beef or mutton, vegetables or rice, salt, soap and tobacco, and a yearly allocation of two shirts, two pairs of trousers, two blankets and a hat.
While the new laws marked the beginning of the end of slavery in Australia, they would be too often observed in the breach.
In a Sydney court, in March 1868, the famed and flamboyant Victorian advocate Butler Cole Aspinall, defender of the Eureka rebels and the Shenandoah’s Charley, was embroiled in the most difficult case of his career. His client was Henry James O’Farrell, 35, an Irish-born Australian from Ballarat, on trial for his life for the attempted assassination of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and second in line to the British throne.
On 12 March, the 23-year-old Prince, the first member of British royalty to tour Australia, was on his second trip to Sydney after visiting Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne, where he was the biggest sensation since the Shenandoah. At a picnic in the harbour-side suburb of Clontarf, to raise money for Sydney Sailors’ Home, Albert was presenting a donation to the charity when O’Farrell walked up behind him and shot him in the back.
William Vial, a coachbuilder, wrestled with O’Farrell and tried to turn the gun on him but shot a bystander instead. The crowd, assuming Vial was the assassin, began savagely beating him, then, realising they had the wrong man, took to bashing O’Farrell and screaming for him to be lynched. Someone found a rope and the angry mob was about to string O’Farrell up from a tree when the police waded in and managed to get him safely aboard a steamer, bruised and bleeding but alive.
He told one of the police, ‘I don’t care for death. I’m sorry I missed my aim. I made a bloody mess of it.’ He then claimed to be a Fenian and called out, ‘God save Ireland!’1 O’Farrell, a chronic alcoholic with a history of mental illness, and recently released from an asylum, later denied being an Irish rebel from the Fenian Brotherhood.
The Prince’s wound, just to the right of the spine, was serious but not fatal, and within a few weeks he had made an almost complete recovery.
In court, Aspinall sought to have his client found not guilty on the grounds of mental illness. But with the public, politicians and press baying for blood, he didn’t have a prayer. O’Farrell was sentenced to death, and, despite a plea for clemency by the Prince himself, went to the gallows at Darlinghurst Jail on 21 April.
Outside the jail, where a large crowd waited to celebrate the moment, at 9pm, when the would-be assassin was launched into oblivion, police and soldiers were posted in expectation of a Fenian attack that didn’t come. Inside the jail, politicians and invited guests from the city’s elite were seated comfortably to observe the execution. The condemned man, calm but silent, mounted the scaffold and shook hands with a priest. The hangman pulled a lever, and, at nine minutes past nine, a doctor declared that it was officially all over for Henry O’Farrell.
It wasn’t all over for the public, however. It fact, reaction to the shooting was just the beginning. Sweeping across the land like a dust storm came a wave of mass hysteria. At public demonstrations, thousands wept and wailed for grief and guilt, loudly reaffirming blood-ties to the Motherland and bemoaning the awful shame that such an outrage should have happened in a land so loyal to the royal.
And with the shame came blame. Persecution of the Irish, particularly but not exclusively Catholic Irish, ran rampant. Whipped up by the press and politicians – and despite clear evidence that O’Farrell was no Fenian but was simply mad – sectarian division and mistrust became part of the social fabric, and would remain so for a century or more.
Amid this orgy of cringing and breast-beating, hospitals, public buildings, streets, ships, bridges, parks and countless baby boys throughout Australia were named after Prince Alfred. And in New South Wales, the scene of the crime, the penitent government proclaimed 28 April ‘a day for general thanksgiving to Almighty God for His great mercy in preserving the life of His Royal Highness from the hand of the assassin, Henry James O’Farrell, at Clontarf, on the 12th ultimo, and in restoring to him his wanted health and strength’.2
On Christmas Day 1868, in the cause of securing ‘permanent peace, order, and prosperity throughout the land, and fully restore confidence and fraternal feelings among the whole people’, the President of the United States granted a complete amnesty to all former Confederates.
‘Now, therefore, be it known that I, Andrew Johnston, President of the United States, do hereby proclaim and declare unconditionally and without reservation, to all and to every person who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion a full pardon and amnesty for the offence of treason against the United States or of adhering to their enemies during the late civil war, with restoration of all rights, privileges, and immunities under the Constitution and the laws which have been made in pursuance thereof.’3
There were no exceptions, no catches, no oaths to swear, no fine print. At last, all the rebels could go home. Many had already done so, but now the way was clear for the return of America’s pirate enemy number one – James Iredell Waddell.
Provoking comments regarding horses and stable doors, the British Parliament passed a new Foreign Enlistment Act, replacing the Act of 1819, with tighter provisions ‘to prevent the enlisting or engagement of Her Majesty’s subjects to serve in Foreign Service, and the building, fitting out, or equipping in Her Majesty’s Dominions vessels for warlike purposes without Her Majesty’s licence’.4
The new Act, said London’s Spectator, ‘greatly improves the old Act, but we doubt whether it is even yet stringent enough. It enables the Government to prohibit the building as well as the escape of Alabamas, but it compels the Admiralty to release them on receipt of a bond that they are not to be employed for any illegal work. In the case of any rich Power wanting ships, would that amount to anything more than an increase in the price?
‘Again, the Government is not invested with power to seize contraband of war, but, at present, only warns dealers by proclamation that if caught it may be confiscated – an absurdity when it only has to be carried across the Channel.’5
Still, there was no cause for alarm. Any would-be enemy raider would now have to contend with the Royal Navy’s new self-propelled torpedo.
The explorer William Gosse, while trekking westward from Alice Springs telegraph station, on a expedition through central Australia, in July 1873, headed towards what he first assumed to be a hill, only to find it was a huge rock, two miles (3.2km) long and 1,000 feet (305m) high, rising out of the desert. Gosse and Kamran – one of three Afghan cameleers in his party – climbed to the top, and Gosse declared the rock a natural wonder.
A rival explorer, Ernest Giles, had set out for the landmark at the same time as Gosse, vying with him to be the first to get there. But when Gosse reached it first, he had the honour of naming it. As naming discoveries after one’s self was simply not the done thing, he didn’t name it Gosse Rock, and Kamran Rock was quite out of the question. In the time-honoured British tradition of naming unforgettable places after forgettable people, he called it Ayers’ Rock, after the South Australian Premier and mining magnate Henry Ayers.
Ayers’ main claim to fame came in the nick of time. Three days later, he was voted out of office. Had Gosse reached the rock on 22 July instead, it might have been named Blyth Rock, after incoming Premier Arthur Blyth.
Of course, the rock already had a name. The local Anangu people called it Uluru, but William Gosse didn’t bother to ask them. Perhaps he thought they hadn’t noticed it.
From the beach at Drummond Island, on 24 October 1873, a fleet of canoes set out to welcom
e home survivors of the 1871 Carl massacre, in which 70 men kidnapped from the Pacific island, in the remote Gilbert group, were murdered by the infamous Australian blackbirder James Murray.
The 27 men, who sailed home on the Alacrity after working on Fiji plantations for two years without pay, were at last gazing at familiar sands, with the sounds of greeting from family and friends bouncing across the water. Their employers, claiming they had broken their three-year contract by leaving Fiji after two years, paid them out with just £12 in goods between all 27 of them. The traders who shipped them home had taken their cut, and each islander would step ashore with only a knife, a pipe and a plug of tobacco to his name.
A few weeks earlier, a blackbirding ship for Queensland plantations, the schooner Jason, sailed into Hervey Bay after ‘recruiting’ 96 Kanakas, 10 of whom died on the way, and another after the ship anchored.
The skipper of the Jason, James Taylor, insisted the men were treated well and that when they took ill he did all that could possibly have been done for them. A Queensland Government agent, John Stewart, who accompanied the blackbirders to ensure all their dealings complied with the Polynesian Labourers Act, agreed. A 30 per cent mortality rate was, well, just one of those things.
Chapter 27
The blame game
Although Captain Waddell was safe from prosecution under the general amnesty of 1868, due to his recurring poor health, he and Anne did not return to America until 1875, when he was hired by the Pacific Mail Line to take its new steamer, City of San Francisco, on its maiden voyage to Sydney.
Back home in America, to his dismay, Waddell made the papers again. When The New York Times reported on 2 December that his ship was set to sail without him, it seemed his piratical past had caught up with him.