6

A hundred thirty miles under a shrouded sun, they tacked southward into the winds that blew December across the ocean. Hungry for letters, Whittle found himself overtaken once more by melancholy, and fought against it, as he always did, by willing himself to hopeful thoughts:

Oh what I would not give to receive a letter from my darlings. I miss their letters more than I can express. God grant that we may soon meet, and then what a jolly time we shall have chatting together. Whenever I am a little downcast, I have but to think of the happiness in store for me when I get home. Any little melancholy is at once changed to joy. God hasten our freedom.

Any such meeting would be impossible on this course. Whittle’s ship was now below the tip of South Africa, but still well to the west of the Cape of Good Hope, and sailing directly away from his homeland. Moving into the far South Atlantic, Shenandoah was now almost equidistant from Africa, South America, and Antarctica. The temperatures of air and water were rising as the southern hemisphere tipped toward the sun, and the climate would adjust, and the growing seasons would reverse themselves, winter becoming spring. Exactly as the American South now hoped the fortunes of its beloved Confederacy would be reversed.

For Whittle, December would soon glow like June in these sub-equatorial latitudes. Sure enough, on the second day of the month, the sky abruptly brightened.

This has been as beautiful a day as I ever saw in my whole life. All day, we have had a nice warm sun, with a fine royal breeze. At first the wind was from such a direction that we could not hang on course, but the wind veered afterward.

Three hundred miles southeastward, as Whittle knew, and surrounded by savage seas, lay the islands of Tristan da Cunha. The five islands were discovered in 1506 by a Portuguese navigator who, after failing in his attempts to breach the waves and land on one of them, dubbed it after himself. Soon the whole archipelago bore his name. The first permanent settler, a Massachusetts man, arrived in 1810, renamed the group the Islands of Refreshment, and then drowned in a small boat that he’d foolishly taken out on these unrefreshing waters. In 1812 the British annexed the islands, restoring da Cunha’s name. (Individually, they were called Tristan, Nightingale, Middle, Stoltenhoff, and Inaccessible.) Jules Verne used them among his settings for In Search of the Castaways, and commented on the extraordinary ugliness of the settlers there.

Good-looking people were not uppermost in Conway Whittle’s mind. Prey was.

At, around, and about this Island is a great whaling ground, and the Island is their great resort, and I am a little disappointed that we have not caught a whaler or so. However, I suppose our time will come ere long.

The island group was also famous as a graveyard for sailing ships caught between its heaving, gale-blown waves and its rocks. By latitude it lay on the upper edges of the notorious “Roaring Forties” whose endless, global turbulence spawns the most dangerous wave conditions on the planet. Yet the area remained irresistible to whaling ships, given the bountiful pods of whales beneath the roiling surface. Thus it was irresistible to the hunters of the hunters, despite the hazards. Shenandoah turned her prow toward Tristan da Cunha. But not before a chronic shipboard predator, predictably, once again required Whittle’s attention.

“Today I was forced to punish one of our men very severely.” Thomas Hall had struck again—the same Thomas Hall who’d been forced to embrace his previous opponent around an iron stanchion, the same Hall accused of “Scandalous Conduct.” “He has given more trouble than any man in the ship.” Hall’s current offense had been to torment a Frenchman named Louis Rowe with language so humiliating that Rowe could not restrain himself from lashing back with his fists.

As he had with Hall the first time, Conway Whittle made this miscreant suffer, both physically and psychologically. Tradition held that both men involved in a fight be punished equally. “But here was a peculiar case where one (Hall) used such language to the other, that if I had heard it, and the man had not resented it at once by knocking him down, I would have punished him very severely. I therefore triced Hall up, and let Louis Rowe go.”

After two hours with his arms supporting his body above the deck, Whittle discovered that Thomas Hall required further reasoning. “I found that the devil had not left.” So he ordered the seaman to remain triced for eight hours more. Now Hall began to come around to Whittle’s way of thinking: “I found him as subdued as a lamb. He gave me his word that I would never have any more trouble with him.”

In his log, Conway Whittle reiterated what for him had become a kind of mantra—or an innately gentle man’s ongoing self-persuasion:

I hate to punish men but it must be done. You must either rule them or they will rule you. On a cruise of this kind particularly I consider discipline not only desirable but absolutely necessary to our very existence and when the men once see that you are determined and fair they will be better, happier and better contented.

And if they were not? If, for instance, the punishment had political ramifications aboard the tiny nation that was the ship?

Hall’s being an Englishman, and Louis Rowe a Frenchman, punishing the former, might, with our English crew, produce a bad effect at first. But what I do in this way, I do with decision. And if they have any sense, they will acknowledge that I am right. However, it makes very little difference whether they do or not.

In this incremental, often personally repellent way—with each tricing, each de-rating, each use of the dreaded iron restraints, each carefully calibrated humiliation—William Conway Whittle built into the diverse crew of Shenandoah the moral value that, above all others, could save them from destruction, including self-destruction: a sense of unity. This strange, multilingual collection of strangers—men quite literally collected from vanquished ships—lacked the cohesion of common national purpose or, really, of any purpose whatsoever, beyond survival. Whittle knew, by instinct as well as experience, that only an unswervingly disciplined commitment to unity—as an absolute good, as synonymous with self-preservation and the preservation of one’s fellow crewmen—could guarantee that when the moment arrived for him to issue orders under harrowing and deadly circumstances, the men would obey him.

Gone, now, were any delusions that “our men are a fine set of fellows and I only wish I had more of them.” Gone, now, were Whittle’s earlier daydreams about winning the crew’s affections by firmness and kindness. No: “I consider discipline not only desirable but absolutely necessary to our very existence.” No overstatement here; no mere officer’s bombast. Whittle expected his men to acknowledge in all circumstances that he, and he alone, was right. “However, it makes very little difference whether they do or not.” As long, of course, as Whittle did not cross the subtly drawn line into tyranny.

The necessity for discipline seemed never to stop recurring in these early weeks of Shenandoah’s odyssey, as others joined the rogues’ gallery inhabited by the likes of Silvester and Hall. The ship now seemed almost to be infested with slackers, intriguers, petty thieves, brawlers, and devious and insolent men.

I had also to report Mr. Hunt [Cornelius E. Hunt, a fellow Virginian, and one of the three master’s mates] for neglect of duty. He has given me an immense amount of trouble in this way: he is either very careless or utterly worthless. I put him on extra watch, and when he thinks he can tend to his duty, I will try him again.

No sooner had Hunt been straightened out than a familiar name showed up on the miscreants’ list again:

Mr. Minor today reported Silvester for insolence to him. Upon examination I found the report correct and I triced the offender up and kept them there until he swore that he would never be guilty of the offence again.

Promises, promises.

“It is only by punishing,” Whittle ruminated in a thought that was almost Zen-like, “that I will ever cease to punish.”

And then things began to look better.

A bright omen on Friday, December 2:

Mr. O’Brien today finished scaling his boilers. They were very foul and very much in need of overhauling. I am very glad that they have finished, for I like at all times to be ready to run well.

By “run well,” Whittle was not celebrating efficiency; he was celebrating speed. Speed for overtaking merchantmen, but also for outrunning Yankee men-of-war. Shenandoah had thus far been lucky in that respect, as no enemy fighting ship had shown herself. But the threat was constant, and if the lightly armed raider were caught within range of Federal cannon, without her speed, agility, and steam, her next port of call would be the bottom of the ocean.

Shenandoah ran very well indeed on the following day, coursing 198 miles toward the sunrise, heeled over under strong northeasterly winds, then streaking for the east as the wind swung astern and drove them even faster. East, not south, but east. Toward the Indian Ocean, toward the Pacific.

Here commenced the Rebel’s epic eastward circuit, for here, at 15.29 degrees west, she set a course of east by south a quarter south, a course they would steer almost without interruption for nearly two months; one that would take the Confederate ship two-thirds of the way around the globe on roughly a straight line; a course punctuated by violent seas, and escapades and perils unimaginable.

Whittle seemed to sense the impending rush toward destiny. On Saturday the third, he rejoiced in the crew’s success in securing the critical topgallant rigging—the outermost, uppermost sails—against heavy weather: men perched on wooden yardarms at heights equivalent to a twelve-story building, knotting and unknotting the ropes as the huge masts pitched them forward on terrifying downward arcs toward the bows, and then tried to launch them sideways into the ocean as they rolled from starboard to port and back. This was not work that men regularly performed at sea; it was done in the tranquillity of the docks. But the presence of dockside spies at London had made it too risky to draw attention with any conspicuous, and expensive, rerigging for a merchant ship. Further, more time spent in port meant less time in action. Little wonder that skeptical Waddell had doubted the undermanned, ill-fitted ship would be equal to her mission. Even Whittle had had his fears; and in fact the topriggings had remained a concern ever since Shenandoah’s hasty, disguised departure from the harbor and into open sea. But his bedrock optimism had carried the day, and now, topgallants secured, it was redeemed: “I can now with great joy say that we are ready for heavy weather…. I am greatly relieved.”

That evening the lieutenant, along with Waddell and some other officers, allowed themselves a rare interlude of celebration. They drank to “sweethearts and wives” with liquor furnished by the ship’s surgeon Charles Lining. Whittle’s thoughts drifted once again into the melancholy chambers of his mind.

Whenever this [toast] is proposed, I think how dear she is to me and I always invoke God’s blessing on my own dear Pattie. Oh how much do I want to see her. God speed our meeting.

As Shenandoah broke through the high waves of the Roaring Forties, however, Whittle’s thirst for conquest overtook all sentiment:

I have been longing all day for a Yankee but so far have been disappointed. We are now in the midst of a busy whaling grounds and I shall be very much disgruntled if tomorrow we have not better luck.

He had longed, in fact, for longer than a day; three weeks had now plodded past since Shenandoah last struck, weeks of maintenance, of disciplining truculent crewmen, of sprinting virtually without incident across an endless sea.

His thirst for action was soon to be slaked. As Sunday, December 4, dawned under fog and heavy clouds, Shenandoah found herself in a veritable crossroads of ships.

At an early hour we saw a large double-top sail yard ship, standing as we were, and very much ahead of us, and under all sail.

The freshly rigged high canvases had their first test:

We rapidly gained on him under topgallant sails, and hove to under his lee quarter.

Once again, exhilaration gave way to frustration: the stranger, like so many others from the accursed North, had switched flags. Whittle recorded it with irritation:

But we saw her name on the quarter, which was the Dia del Mario, showing a Sardinian flag. She looked so much like a Yankee, that we boarded…she had been a Yankee, but was transferred.”

Transferred from New York to Italian ownership, her papers showed. Once again the Confederates found themselves outmaneuvered by a piece of paper. Grimly, the boarding crew returned to the raider, but soon fresh prey appeared: not one, but two ships breaking through the fog—“one astern and one coming up aside the other to the leeward.” The ship behind looked very like a Yankee, “but it was so misty that we could not tell certainly.” The leeward ship was nearest, but something about its shape touched off an alarm bell in Whittle’s memory—a memory imprinted with fire-belching shapes at the Battle of New Orleans. He relayed his misgivings to Waddell, but found the brooding captain primed for attack. The two officers compromised: Shenandoah gave chase, but cautiously. Whittle’s caution probably saved the mission; the shape proved as menacing as it had seemed:

We kept away and made all plain sail then came up with her very rapidly and regarded her very closely. She looked so suspicious, that we decided not to go any nearer. This was a very wise conclusion, for if she was not a steam gunboat under sail, I never saw one. And she looked to me exactly like a Yankee steamer of war. We did not go so close as to endanger our safety, even had she chased us, as we had a splendid breeze and a smooth sea, and it would have taken a wonderful vessel to catch us.

At 10:00 a.m., the enemy steamer well out of range, Whittle and Waddell mustered the crew for the Sunday ritual, the reading of the articles of war. “The men in the grey looked as well as is possible with the color, but I can’t say much in its favor.”

Yet again, as with the November 20 inspection, Conway Whittle found himself casting a cold eye on his men’s dress grays. Perhaps gray was simply a disagreeable shade to him, or perhaps it preyed on deeper regions of his suggestible mind. Perhaps the foggy brush with the Yankee gunboat just hours earlier, a gray monster looming in the gray ocean, stood as another baleful foretokening. Waddell had ordered Shenandoah into a reckless contact with the enemy; only luck and adroit seamanship had spared all hands. Where would the captain’s whims catapult them the next time?

And what of the vessel that had not been pursued? What fate might she have held? Whittle remained silent on the question of this second ship. In his log, he abruptly shifted the subject:

The breeze after muster was a little fresher, and…we had a fine chance to judge of our speed when by the wind. We were close to the wind with royals set and she went hour after hour 10 knots. I think that she is doing remarkably well and I never was in a vessel which could compare to her. We pass everything which comes near us and that too generally under reduced sail.

At 11:00 a.m., through the spray of furious breakers, a hulking godhead of the sea loomed into view across the port beam: Inaccessible Island. Soon after that, Tristan da Cunha itself materialized.

Perhaps his gleeful preoccupation with what happened later on that day deterred Conway Whittle from expanding, in his log, on the visual impact of that sighting. After more than twenty days and thousands of sea miles without landfall, the dominating prospect of those great primitive shards (who else could survive there except denizens of elemental ugliness?) must have filled all Shenandoah’s crewmen with awe. Sailors across the centuries have exclaimed over them, yet Whittle’s log bears no mention of his reaction to the islands. He was otherwise preoccupied.

A long afternoon set in, Shenandoah pitched by the wind and waves as she prowled the vicinity for prey. A heavy mist descended toward evening. And then, the day all but gone, Whittle’s longing was gratified.

About five o’clock the man at the wheel saw a sail on the lee (starboard) beam, and we kept away from her. We soon made her to be a bark under single reef topsails, and we continued that she was a whaler, and if a whaler, a Yankee.

A cautious forty-five minutes ensued, and then,

we came down upon the sail, and all doubt was removed, as we found her to be under double reefed topsails and actually engaged in “trying out” as they call it, that is, boiling out the oil. We ran up the English flag and after some little delay she ran up the Yankee flag. This gave us great joy….

With the Confederate colors now fluttering merrily above them, Whittle and Waddell sent a boarding party to the prize; they soon returned with the captain and mate.

We held our meeting, and I put Captain Charles Worth on oath and we took his deposition, and found his vessel to be the barque Edward of New Bedford on a whaling cruise. He had on yesterday caught a whale, and they had just finished cutting him up and commenced trying. His vessel is very old, but she is a good prize, and we will lay by her and get all her beef, pork and breads.

We of course condemned her and sent the Captain and his Mate back to bring off their personal effects. We made all preparation to stay by her all night. Placed Mr. Bulloch and Mr. Minor with the prize crew to take charge of her. We brought on board Capt. Worth, three mates, and twenty-two sailors as prisoners. These with our three from the “Stacey” make twenty-nine. This is too many to have at one time. We paroled the Captain [allowing him the freedom of the ship], and confined all the others for safety.

Too many indeed. Most of the new arrivals were sullen Portuguese; they spoke little or no English, and they appeared, to Whittle’s eyes, highly untrustworthy characters. Even in irons, they would disrupt the raider’s closely calibrated shipboard rhythms. They required space, feeding, watering, some degree of personal maintenance. Nor did manacles always guarantee an absence of menace. To that extent, the captives exerted some captive force of their own.

It was a problem for another day. Just now, in the afterglow of Shenandoah’s drought-ending conquest, Conway Whittle’s natural exuberance rose to the fore: his log entries that evening included an observation that one might not have expected him to concede even under threat of tricing: “The Captain is the most manly looking Yankee I have ever seen.”

The Edward presented a little captive power of her own. Foggy night was drawing on; the stripping of her would have to wait until the bright light of morning. The Shenandoah men would somehow have to keep track of the whaler, make sure she remained in the vicinity. Whittle had decided to outfit her with a skeleton crew, and assigned his nonpareil navigator, Irvine S. Bulloch, to board the prize, along with John Minor and a few others. It would be their job to keep the Edward nearby during the fogbound night. If anyone could steer a ship in near-blind conditions, it was the gifted Georgian. Certainly Whittle was untroubled by doubt:

Tonight we have heavy surf and fog. But Bulloch has such directions and lights, that there is no danger of us getting out of sight.

Daybreak revealed that Edward and Shenandoah had indeed drifted a distance from each other, but the raider lost little time drawing near again. The Confederates lowered a large boat and commenced the happy task of shifting the whaler’s huge stores to the conquering vessel. The men soon discovered that their prize carried five “perfectly new” longboats of her own, including two that Whittle especially admired. “I shall induce the Captain to keep both of them as they will be excellent for boarding in heavy weather.” He had plans for the remaining three as well, “for what reason tomorrow will develop.”

All hands worked rapidly—or as rapidly as the roiling waters permitted. Whittle and Waddell sensed that another dangerous Yankee might well be at large not too many miles away—specifically, the second ship from the previous day’s encounter, the one left behind when Shenandoah flirted with the leeward man-of-war. Should Shenandoah be trapped, or surprised while offloading her prize, she would not stand a chance against the Yankee guns. Taking a calculated risk, Whittle threw the Portuguese prisoners into the task of shifting the goods. Still, given the pitching waves, the hazardous labor consumed the entire day—as the two ships covered a leisurely eighty-one miles to the east-southeast, away from Tristan da Cunha—and even then the task was far from finished. Again, Bulloch, Minor, and a few others pulled the lonely assignment of keeping the now-cavernous whaler under control.

Back to the arduous work before daybreak the next morning. The conditions were perfect now: a heavy mist that camouflaged the raider from any enemy telescope, and glassy seas that had grown atypically smooth. The two ships had slowed to a parallel crawl; they would make only twenty miles on this day, and the risk of deadly surprise remained high. Still, Whittle and Waddell could not pass up the chance to stock Shenandoah’s larders with excellent food. Whittle had ordered the steam boiler fired up, so as to act at once on any need for sudden movement. The boiler, now on standby, was the ever-reliable ticket from “fast” to “faster still.” But it took some time to deliver a full head of steam. The normally prudent Whittle had come to take this piece of technology almost for granted—as an intrinsic element of Shenandoah’s design. He was just days from a jarring lesson in the limits of that assumption.

In the midst of the morning’s work, yet another tantalizing stranger showed her distant contours through the fog: a large, five-topsail ship. Greedily, Whittle and Waddell broke off the transferring from Edward—longboats filled with booty suddenly left idle between the ships—and gave chase. Fog soon enveloped the quarry, and Shenandoah groped about, shifting this way and that, hoping for good luck. When the clipper finally did reemerge, she answered the raider’s decoy-colors with the Union Jack. Disappointed, the Confederates returned to their prize. Bulloch and his men had been efficient in their absence; they’d loaded all the remaining plunder into the longboats, and the harvesting was soon finished. The yield was spectacular, and Shenandoah’s men were virtually assured of full bellies for a good stretch of the mission: 50 barrels of beef, 49 of pork, 46 of flour, 6,000 pounds of bread, 600 of coffee, 400 of butter, a barrel of hams, a barrel of pickles, and two barrels of black fish oil. The non-edibles included a large quantity of manila rope, 1,200 pounds of soap, and two half-barrels of sand.

Now anyone who would not be content with this is very unreasonable. We have more than enough provisions to last our cruise.

Now came the moment of flaming judgment: the ceremony that invested Shenandoah’s mission with a biblical aura—and the spectacle that always evoked the boy in Conway Whittle, and unified that boy with the steely avenging angel of the South.

Bulloch, Mr. Minor, Mr. Harwood and I set her on fire fore and aft. She was so old that we were careful to do our work well and I am sure she will never go on another trip. She will burn well when warmed up.

That was the boy speaking. As the torched brew of whale oil, tar, and fatwood, laced with kerosene paint and turpentine, began its work, sending needles of orange flame skyward under growing plumes of thick black smoke, the steely angel’s voice took over.

Our burning prize is distinctly in sight, and I have rarely seen anything which is more beautifully grand than a ship burning at sea. To see the rigging on fire, after it gets burnt in two and the burning ends swinging as the vessel rolls—oh it is a grand sight.

And then Shenandoah reversed her course and stood back toward Tristan da Cunha.

Whittle’s plan was brutally simple: he would deposit the twenty-eight prisoners on the island and leave them there. What effect they might have on the small population—about thirty-five fishing and cattle-farming people, sorted into seven families—was not his concern. Keeping the captives on board was unthinkable. They could not be allowed the freedom of the ship, and the alternative was what they now experienced, immobilized in close-packed rows behind iron bars secured by eyebolts, a condition that offended decency. Whittle and Waddell had extended only token invitations to these men to “ship”; they looked palpably hostile, and their numbers threatened a bloodily effective mutiny.

Besides, as Whittle noted in his log, the island group had been discovered by a Portuguese. In a sense, he was returning these men home.

Anchoring Shenandoah a safe distance from the shore, Whittle now put his plan for the three remaining longboats into play. His officers and crewmen herded the Portuguese into them—their luggage thoughtfully included—and gave them a good strong shove toward the shore. Whittle was not indifferent to the captured men’s plight:

I must say I pity the poor devils, going to an island at least a thousand miles from any land, and with no chance of getting off until some vessel stops there. And this chance, ever so remote, that they may be here a year.

He added a thought that may have hinted at certain wistfulness, even envy, beneath his pity. Perhaps an idyllic sort of peace beckoned these fellows from the steep, grassy mountains, a universe away from cannonfire and chains and the constant prospect of watery death: “However, if I come here two years hence, I shall confidently expect to find some of them still here.”

Any such reveries were abruptly brushed away by reality, in the form of a shore boat that approached Shenandoah just as the captured Portuguese set off. Its lone occupant, paddling vigorously, tied up to the raider, heaved himself on deck, and commenced a sales pitch touting the island’s goods: cattle, sheep, chickens, milk, butter, eggs. He neglected to give a name, but announced in a clenched Yankee accent that he hailed from New London, Connecticut. He opened up a glimpse of how Tristan da Cunha society worked.

We tried to arrange the prices, but he said he could not do it. It was not his turn. It seems, he told us, that there are 7 families on the island, and that they take regular turns in selling and trading. He said he would go off and bring off whose turn it was. We told him that we would exchange flour, at $8 per barrel, for beef at 18 cents. This is paying dearly for our whistle, but that makes little matter.

Learning that this Connecticut Yankee had lived on the island for fifteen years, Whittle indulged a little private sarcasm.

He is the only Yankee here. One would very naturally suppose, that if there was any place in the world where a Yankee would not be found it would be such a place as this.

And he could not resist adding that the Yankee “has evidently had enough to eat.”

As the emissary’s launch bobbed back toward the shoreline village—about ten stone houses—Whittle considered the man. A shrewd operator, the young lieutenant speculated:

I would willingly bet that this fellow not only has more money than any of the rest, but that he is a leading man among them.

His judgment proved correct. Returning to the ship several hours later, the fellow now commanded one of the whaleboats the prisoners had used. He brought with him a kind of negotiating committee whose spokesman was a Dutchman named Peter Green. Green had been rooted on Tristan da Cunha about twenty-five years, but this had not dulled his own shrewdness. He understandably professed to be appalled at the prospect of twenty-eight hardened seamen suddenly set loose on his island, whose population of thirty-five consisted mostly of women.

He said to the Captain, in the way of a protest, that there was not provision enough upon the island to last the prisoners we landed until a vessel would probably take them off, and urged the absolute propriety of taking them back or sending provisions to serve them.

Green coupled this complaint with some subtle apple-polishing. The absence of Yankee whaling ships in the area? The Shenandoah raiders had themselves to thank for that. Before the war, it was common to count as many as seventy whalers in sight at a time. Now it was rare to spot a single one. The flattery worked. “It is wonderful that even here in this remote island, away entirely from our country, that people feel the effect of the war in our country,” Whittle wrote. “This proves to us our importance.”

But when Peter Green tried to push his sweet-talking a step further, into the area of intelligence-gathering, Conway Whittle came instantly alert:

Old Peter Green said to me, “Well, Sir, I see you are poorly off for men.” “No,” I said at once, “we work with quarter-watches.” It was a fib, but it was a fib for the Cause.

Any rumor that Shenandoah remained undermanned, and therefore vulnerable, could motivate a focused search-and-destroy mission by the U.S. Navy, and required suppression at the outset.

Whittle and Waddell recognized the fairness of the islanders’ basic complaint—the likely disruptions posed by the prisoners—and offloaded rations good for several months. Perhaps the two officers were assuaging their consciences as well. Green had explained to them the islanders’ methods for preserving law and order:

If anyone did anything outraging the public, there was a meeting, and he was denounced as a dog.

For men accustomed to floggings and hanging by their wrists, this system could be imagined as unpersuasive.

As Shenandoah’s crew set her sails, triced up her propeller, and slipped away from Tristan da Cunha into open sea, James Waddell and Conway Whittle allowed themselves to swell a little over the news of their renown, as imparted by Peter Green. They’d become celebrities, of a sort.

Now if they could only find a way to turn the war around.