11

They had rolled into the deep tropics now, wending northward through the great constellations of Pacific islands clustered above and below the equator. Fiji lay somewhere to the east, Tonga and Samoa farther beyond; northward lay the Solomons, the Gilberts, and the Marshalls. Jagged landmasses large and small cluttered the ocean now, mounts formed by long-extinct volcanoes and accumulated centuries of bird droppings. Irvine Bulloch, bereft of reliable charts, called on all his instinctual skills as he twisted and turned Shenandoah’s course to keep her in deep water, clear of the treacherous fast currents and the many beautiful, deadly reefs submerged at the islands’ edges. It was another “world” indeed for most of the crew: an island world of whistling tree ducks and sandalwood trees, of bolo snakes and giant pigeons and huge clams and cloud forests, of orange doves and massive bats and stump-toed geckoes, of perfume trees and breadfruit trees and orchid trees, of curlews and godwits.

Of cannibals, or rumors of cannibals.

Yet it remained a world apart from the ship, its many venues of enchantment and danger separated by miles of sheet-metal ocean surface. More than seventy-five years into the future, mighty navies of a reunited America would deliver thousands of men onto the shores of these islands—islands named Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Eniwetok—to face an enemy far more lethal than cannibals, with the fate of the world in the balance.

The temperature climbed—wet heat washed with frequent squalls. “The thermometer was 92 in my room,” Whittle wrote. He sought out the tormented Waddell, who haunted the decks now, unable to return to his cabin for rest.

He has had the blues all day. He gives way too much in trouble to suit such service. He told me that he felt his having to be on deck so much was beginning to bear on his health and he felt himself breaking.

With no diagnostic insights available to him, Conway Whittle could not recognize Waddell’s paranoia for what it was. Yet he intuited that the captain was suddenly ready to talk to him; and in spite of his revulsion at Waddell’s symptoms, Whittle listened.

He takes an exaggerated view of his troubles which are far fewer than ours. He has not sufficient confidence in the ability of his officers, in which he is wrong, for I never saw a better set and one who trained so rapidly. He complains that with [Dabney Marian Scales, whose competence Waddell especially distrusted], he has to be on deck all the time…. He was so blue and melancholy that I pitied him and told him he was very much mistaken as to C’s qualification [Francis Thornton Chew, also on Waddell’s black list] and that I considered his being on deck unnecessary.

Waddell was in no condition to believe this. And so Conway Whittle, who only days earlier had written off the captain as irredeemable—“he has lost in me as good a friend as he ever had or will have”—reached out once again.

He insisted to the contrary and I volunteered to keep all of Scales’ watches with him in addition to my duties as Executive Officer, which God knows are far more trying than of any man I ever saw. My legitimate duties keep me on deck from 7 in the morning until 8 at night, and then to keep one of the watches (for Jack Grimball is sick) is very trying and will tell on me. But if one is to break it had better be me than him and I shall stand it as long as I can walk.

The young lieutenant thus committed himself to an open-ended stretch of sixteen-hour days on duty. With all Waddell’s faults, it seemed, Whittle protected him still.

Whittle’s compassion was tested immediately. On that very night, already exhausted, he joined Scales on the first watch. He would have to will himself awake and alert until midnight. The stakes, as he well knew, were life and death. Death, perhaps, by being eaten alive.

Surrounded as we are by rocks, islands and doubtful shoals, the navigation is intricate. There is in this connection another thought, not at all consoling. That is, if by misfortune we should run ashore and be wrecked, we would probably be thrown on the Fiji’s or New Hebrides and we might be eaten by cannibals. This would be a terrible fate.

He essayed a little gallows humor of the sort that even in his native South would one day draw a cringe:

I am decided that in such a case, I will cover myself all over with coal tar, turn my hair and I might pass as an inedible Negro. With this dark bright idea, I will say bon soir and bad luck to the Yanks.

Eighty miles on Thursday, March 16, zigging and zagging through the opaque shapes in the solitary sea. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit, the wind baffling: now from the north, now west, now north, then east. Monotony. Monotony and exhaustion and hot sun and then rain. And monotony. And exhaustion. On Thursday, March 16, Whittle, bleary-eyed from days of double duty that had reduced his sleep to five hours a night, scrawled wearily in his log, “Oh for a cot in some vast wilderness.”

A fascinating choice, that line: a slight paraphrase of a stanza from a 1782 poem by William Cowper (who’d yearned for a full “lodge,” not just a sailorly “cot”). The stanza probably expressed the wishes of most hands on the ship:

…Some boundless contiguity of shade,

Where rumor of oppression and deceit,

Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more.

It is unclear just how familiar Conway Whittle was with Cowper’s works—whether, for example, he knew that the poem from which he’d drawn the line was called “Charity,” and was a centerpiece of the British poet’s vast “Anti-Slavery” cycle of verse. Cowper wrote the cycle after forming a friendship with John Newton, the British curate who had commanded a slave ship until 1748. After a violent storm off the African coast threatened Newton’s ship with disaster, he’d called out to God. His ship survived the storm, he became a passionate Christian, and, in the 1760s, composed the words for what became the enduring hymn to redemption and brotherhood, “Amazing Grace.”

Cowper’s “Charity” concludes:

But slavery!—Virtue dreads it as her grave:

Patience itself is meanness in a slave;

Or, if the will and sovereignty of God

Bid suffer it a while, and kiss the rod,

Wait for the dawning of a brighter day,

And snap the chain the moment when you may.

Nature imprints upon whate’er we see,

That has a heart and life in it, Be free!

Perhaps, indeed, the world wasn’t so far away after all.

Monotony, Oh! Monotony. No Yanks in sight! No sails in sight! No anything in sight!

A shadow more brooding than Cowper’s had overtaken Whittle: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, with his primal wail, “Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea…”

Charles Lining had joined Grimball now with a disabling attack of damaged eyes; Lining, the surgeon. Squalls formed up, and rain lashed Shenandoah in torrents—“I never saw such rain”—and headwinds slowed her progress to a crawl. And always the invisible reefs threatened, and the cannibals waiting on the shores beyond them. No albatross was needed to underscore this ship’s plight.

Whittle, exhausted, ransacked his mind for activity, structure, hope—for anything to keep alive a sense of purpose in the restive crew. “Today we had a short drill. The men did very well. They are a good set.”

He resolutely found restoration in the smallest things, the most ordinary pleasures. “This morning I got up at 4 o’clock to keep the morning watch with S,” he wrote on March 18. “I must say I did feel very tired, but after a nice cup of coffee, I felt very much refreshed.” He found glum humor in his own battered faith. “Oh! the dull monotony of being at sea in such a cruise and not to see a single sail. When I first got up, I, the prophet scholar, said we would have one today. But the same unbroken monotony reigns.”

Sunday, March 19: inspection at quarters. “All feel better, cheerfully passing the time.” Yet—“Had to trice up James Fegan, able bodied seaman, for refusing to obey the Master at Arms. This is his first offense and I will nip it in the bud.”

Thoughts of Pattie. Her letters.

Another tricing on Tuesday, of a fireman, for insolence—again, toward the master-at-arms. Exhaustion was turning him physically ill, “but I will soon rally.” On the evening of March 20, a view of what the young lieutenant wistfully called “the Southerner’s Cross” hung in the heavens, as if to rebuke the discord below. “All is beautiful,” he managed to write.

A hundred degrees in the shade the next day, Shenandoah laboring under steam at eight knots. Eighteen degrees hotter in the sun. And hellishly hotter still belowdecks, where the coal heavers, in an almost unimaginably brutish ballet, shoveled the relentlessly heavy, glistening black coal into the open mouths of the steam engine’s fireboxes.

And as ever, Whittle faced a kind of starvation for news of the far-off world.

Oh! if I could know that all was well with those dear to me. In God’s hands I leave them.

Sleeplessness now ravaged him; he savored the occasional small respite.

After the morning watch I felt tired until between 12 and 1, while the men were at dinner, I took a sly nap.

None of this nearly superhuman resoluteness earned him the slightest sympathy from Scales, the officer on whose behalf he’d extended himself.

S [Scales, whose watch he’s sharing ]—protested with the captain against my keeping watch with him. But it was productive of no change, by which I may expect to keep for an indefinite time, one of four watches at night besides being up all day attending to my duties as Executive Officer. It is hard, but as long as a merciful God gives me the health, I will do all I can.

Men around him began to crack under the oppressive blankness—most notably the men charged with safeguarding the others. The surgeon Lining, who’d been feverish from his throbbing eyes, stared and stared toward the horizon, obsessively seeking a sail. The normally volatile McNulty, Lining’s assistant, took refuge in rum from the heat and boredom, and fell into a stupor. “He looks very much reduced. He is a high-minded and noble fellow, and has that I know of but one fault & that is an infirmity by which he can’t help from occasionally imbibing too freely. He is now on a stool of repentance and I trust his good sense will take him clear of all temptation.”

On March 23, Shenandoah’s officers, in the grip of wishful thinking, identified a distant landmass hugging the horizon and steamed for it. This was Drummond Island, the largest of the Bishop group in the Gilbert Archipelago, thirty miles long and four wide. Its native name was Taputeouea. Surely Taputeouea and its sunlit coves—surely it had sunlit coves—attracted specimens of what they were looking for. “I think we may be repaid for the recent monotony by finding several unsuspecting Yanks hovering around,” Whittle wrote—sounding a little like a parched man expecting to see an oasis in the desert.

Toward nightfall, Shenandoah closed within twenty miles of Drummond Island, picking her way gingerly against a strong westerly current. “Very little is known of its extent,” Whittle noted, referring to its underwater dangers. Four hours steaming early the next morning brought the ship as close as she dared by 8:00 a.m.

We did not deem it safe to approach within less than six or eight miles. The land is low and at the distance seems to be thickly wooded with coconut trees. There is no harbor, port or light.

There were, however, Taputeoueans, and they streamed out to meet the stranger. “We saw several boats coming off under sail and waited for one hoping to get some information of value.” New human faces, the first in more than a month. A hungry anticipation swept the ship. Whittle made a sketch of one canoe, and avidly described its ribbing and framing—“of a small bush twisted in the proper shape,” under a coating of bark. The anticipation was soon dampened. The canoe bore three of the natives.

They were the most miserable looking set. They were perfectly naked and head bare. They had straight black coarse hair, were of copper color and looked very like the American Indian except that in the face they had few signs of intelligence. They had in their boat nothing but a few fish, some of which we bought giving them tobacco.

A sailmaker’s mate named Glover,

who spoke the gibberish, tried his best to get them to come onboard, but they were too much afraid and said they would come when the other boats got alongside. Their language is peculiar to them, being like that of no one else. They said they had not seen a ship for a long time and none had been near the island. They were very much frightened of the guns.

And so the fantasy of engagement dissipated into the hot wet air.

We soon got clear of them, and without waiting for any other boats, stood off under sail, letting the chain go down and hoisting our propeller, and soon left the island out of sight.

Whittle could not contain a cry of sheer agony. “Oh the terrible, terrible monotony!!!” But he instantly regained control: “N’importante. ‘Let us live with a hope,’ for our time will come. I am as certain that a merciful God has our holy cause in his own hands as that I am here and I most devoutedly say, ‘Thy will, oh Lord, not mine, be done.’”

More of the Lord’s demanding will lay just ahead.

Today our Gunner’s mate, Wm. Crawford, one of the Alabama’s crew, was guilty of insolent conduct at the mast and the Captain disrated him to seaman. He is one of those whose term expires on [April] 7th and no doubt the shortness of his time influenced him. I wish he was out of the ship.

I think these men will leave, but thank God we can be independent as we have enough without them…. They will have a nice time getting home.

At about 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 25, Shenandoah recrossed the equator into the Northern hemisphere. No festivities this time as with the mid-November crossing; no ritual horseplay, no King Neptune, no emetics or sacks of stewed apples. A grim fatalism had long since overtaken most of the officers and crew, seasoned equator-crossers anyway, nearly every one. Whittle, among the very few who still “lived with a hope,” continued to find that hope mocked by the fates. “We were all very much excited and elated this evening by the report ‘Sail ho!’” he wrote on Monday, March 27, “but found it only to be clouds.”

From the southern Gilberts, Shenandoah shifted her course to the west-northwest and commenced a straight six-day, 930-mile sprint toward the outer edge of the Carolines, an enormous archipelago pinned like a tiara above the length of New Guinea. Their destination was the rudimentary anchorage that passed for a port at Ponape, then known also as Ascension Island, one of the larger islands in the eastern Carolines. Propeller lifted, topsails out, they ran along through extremes of weather; searing heat alternating with fierce brief squalls that could readily, violently, and unpredictably burst into gale-force, crisis-level storms. The winds lacerated the sail canvas; the crew reefed and repaired the sails on the run. Soon the raider slipped into the northeast trades, and the steady free wind blew her along at nine knots. Still: “No sails in sight! Oh! the monotony!” Heat and squalls took turns assaulting them on March 28—“Dull monotony reigns and really it is painful.” The next day, “I never saw it rain harder and more continuously…. Really, in this region ‘it never rains but it pours.’” Whittle being Whittle, he turned this weather “lemon” into lemonade: he rigged up clean canvas funnels from sailcloth to catch the rain and channel it into the ship’s tanks—fresh drinking water.

The thrill of action, finally, on that day—the first in a month—even though the quarry proved hardly worth it:

At 4:45 p.m., just as it lightened up, the joyous sound of ‘Sail ho!’ roused us all up. Sure enough, there was a little schooner on our port or lead beam. We stood in chase. At 6:00 p.m. we came down to her and hove her to.

She proved to be only a small Hawaiian trading schooner, and Shenandoah let her be—threw her back, in fishermen’s terms. Still, it had been fun while it lasted—and the skipper had tantalized all hands by reporting four vessels at Ponape.

A quick speculative detour into Charbrol Harbor on Strong’s Island on Tuesday, March 30—no prey there. “Made all sail, worked off steam, hoisted the propeller, and went booming along.” Whittle’s homesickness, perhaps, or the lush green tropic hillsides, played some tricks on his mind: “The scenery is fine. We were very close in and it looked like the portion of my dear old Virginia on the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad above Liberty.”

On, then, to Ponape. “Oh I trust we will make some prizes here.”

And then, more than two thousand miles south-southeast of Japan, three thousand miles from Melbourne, on the far western edge of the Pacific, after weeks of lashing squalls, psychological tension, tedium, illness, and concern for the social cohesion of the crew itself—after all this, on April 1, 1865, Lieutenant Whittle’s indomitable trust was finally, spectacularly, rewarded.

A night of sitting tight in the darkness, twelve miles from the reefs of Ponape, the invisible black ship poised like a beast about to pounce. No prey was yet visible, but the beast sensed something. At 2:00 a.m., before first light, the beast unfurled her topgallants, fired her mighty steam engine, and made her sprint for the harbor.

Sure enough.

Four ships, fat and complacent, lolled at anchor in the middle harbor, zebras at the watering hole, “All but one with the detested Yankee flag hoisted.” The raider dropped anchor at an unthreatening distance, offshore from the village, under British colors. A fifth ship now became visible. Toward noon, the officers hired a local pilot to steer them across the harbor toward the small herd.

Fearing some treachery on [his] part, we warned him that if he got us aground, death would be his instant portion. He was an Englishman named Thomas Horreicks. We had the English flag up, and he supposed us to be the English surveying ship.

Not really, as all in the vicinity were soon to learn.

The entrance is narrow, but very deep. We steamed in and moored ship in 15 fathoms water. We were delighted. There we were, safely moored, close to five prizes and they, thinking we were an English vessel. Some [locals] tried to come along side, but we beckoned them off.

Now the rebels acted with swift, disciplined military precision. Four longboats were lowered and filled with armed men: sailors now acting as Confederate marines, equipped with rifles. In charge were Shenandoah’s junior-officer elite: Lieutenant Grimball in the first, Lieutenant Lee in the second, Lieutenant Chew in the third, and Lieutenant Scales in the fourth. They would be looking to round up captains, mates, and papers of registry.

Oh what an April fool to the poor Yanks. There were no Captains on board as they were in the lead harbor “on a bust.” The boats shoved off. We fired a gun and ran up our flag. What a time.

One of the ships showed a Hawaiian flag. The remaining four were fair game: the Yankee whale ships Edward Carey and Hector, and barques Pearl and Harvest.

The helpless shock of the merchantmen aboard these ships must have echoed that of the Union army as it tended its evening campfires at Chancellorsville, when 30,000 of Stonewall Jackson’s foot soldiers and cavalry came bursting out of the Wilderness and spoiled everyone’s dinner. Conway Whittle recorded the unfolding adventure with the gleeful pacing and detail of a novelist.

The [Harvest] was the only one about which there was any doubt, but she had no bill of sale, a Yankee Captain and mates. She, with the rest, was condemned as a prize. The mates were all put in irons.

Now the rebel gunmen under Grimball sat in their armed boat under Harvest’s gangway and awaited the return of the carousing Yankee captains. They didn’t have to wait long.

Their whale boat came through a short cut. They, not suspecting anything as our flag was down, pulled leisurely, looking at our ship. All were a little tight. They were singing, laughing and talking when our boat, in charge of Lieutenant Grimball, pulled ahead of them. He hailed, “Boat ahoy? Haloo! Go along side of that ship.” “We don’t belong there” [responded the drunken captains]. “I don’t care, go alongside.” Seeing him armed, they obeyed, and over our gangway came Captain Eldridge of the Harvest, Captain Edwin P. Thompson of the Hector, Captain Chase of the Pearl, and Captain Baker of the Edward Carey. What a perfectly April fooled party. When they learned what we were, they were astounded. They were all put in irons except the Captain of the Harvest. His deposition was taken, and the sale of the vessel was, as she had the same Captain and mates, all Yankees and the same name, and no bill of sale, considered bogus, and he was out in limbo with the rest.

This was great fun. Lucrative, too.

Having the Captains, first and second mates on board, and not knowing the feeling of the natives, we withdrew our men, after having taken out all navigating instruments and we all had a great rejoicing. This amply repays us for our monotony, and is not a bad haul, as the cargo alone of one, i.e. 300 gallons of oil, is worth $4,000. These raised our prize list to 11 and two bonded, making 13.

The “feeling of the natives” soon became apparent. As in Melbourne, the Shenandoah raiders were greeted as heroes.

Of course we were soon surrounded with boats, all the natives in canoes, naked except a grass covering around the waist. The pilot was delighted when he saw our flag and knew who we were and said we would be heartily received by the natives. This is an island under none but local authority and protection with no civilization, and everything is under our guns. The Yanks were certainly caught napping this time. I only wish there were 50 instead of 4.

But the joyful tone in Conway Whittle’s “novel” abruptly gave way to deep dismay. The captured captains had some bad news for their captors.

They say Hood has met with a terrible defeat at Nashville. Sheridan has taken Savannah, and Porter Fort Fisher at Wilmington. All this, if true, is very, very bad.

To which Whittle added the familiar thought from the part of himself that must have explained his remarkable equilibrium:

Thy will be done oh Lord.

The bad news was several weeks old, but substantially true, and its import dire beyond measure.

John Bell Hood had met with disaster after deciding to invade Tennessee in November 1864 as a tactic for drawing Sherman’s army away from Atlanta. (Sherman had bludgeoned Hood’s forces when they’d ventured out of that besieged city to attack him.) His withered arm and stump of a leg apt symbols for the South’s mangled state, Hood led his ragged army of 37,000 men across the Tennessee River from Georgia in mud and rain. After executing a brilliant flanking maneuver against Union defenses, Hood moved toward Nashville. At Spring Hill, outside the city, confusion in the Confederate chain of command resulted in a pullback order in the midst of a battle that the Rebels seemed likely to win. Compounding this error, the distracted generals allowed a Union division to march in the black of night through the teeth of Hood’s trap as his soldiers slept. Angry and confused, the Confederates pursued the Federals, who managed to set up strong defenses at Franklin, south of Nashville, before their pursuers caught up with them. Hood launched an impetuous attack against the Union center; thousands of his men were slaughtered; and Hood, his chances of a great victory wiped out, sat on his horse and wept. His 25,000 survivors stumbled on to Nashville anyway, where a force of 70,000 drove them into exhausted, hysterical retreat. The West was now lost to the Confederacy.

It had been Sherman, of course, and not Sheridan, who’d capped the rout of Hood at Atlanta by commencing the March to the Sea. At Savannah on December 20, Sherman had sent his famous telegraph to Lincoln offering the city as a Christmas present. As for Admiral David D. Porter, he had reduced the vital Confederate Fort Fisher with a withering two-day bombardment that ended on January 14. The fort, a mile-long series of earthwork constructions about thirty miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina, had guarded one of the few remaining ports open to Confederate blockade runners off the Atlantic. Here, as at Nashville, the Confederates squandered several chances to defeat the Federals before they were fully prepared for battle.

On the day the Shenandoah crew learned of these disasters, the Confederacy was a week from collapsing.

On Sunday, April 2, Shenandoah opened herself to a state visit from the local royalty.

At 10 we set the pilot in the longboat with an officer, to bring off the King of the tribe of this portion of the island. He came with some half dozen of his chiefs. The whole affair was very ludicrous. Each of the dignitaries was naked, and covered with coconut oil. Each, upon getting up the side in the gangway like monkeys, would not come aboard until some officer gave them the hand of friendship. Each had a covering about the waist made of grass or coconut bark, and each with a slit cut in the lower part of the ear, through which they stuck the stem of a common clay pipe, which, after they took a turn [twisted it once around], was secure.

The King’s name—Whittle was scrupulous about the spelling—was Nananierikie. He was short and fat, and was escorted by about fifty canoes, and he brought with him a few attendants and his grown son. “They expressed astonishment at the size and general appearance of the ship…. The Captain took him in the cabin and gave the party something to drink. And then told him at length the object of our visit.”

When Nananierikie learned the object, “He was much delighted and begged that the prizes might be destroyed in the harbor so that [the locals] might get the copper” that lined the ships’ hulls. “This was, of course, readily acceded to by us, and as it obviated the necessity of our taking them out and applying the torch.”

Nananierikie became the latest landlubber to receive a grand tour of the ship. The guns in particular impressed him. Before the king left, the officers struck a deal with him:

We promised to let him have a great many of the things from our prizes if he saw that no harm was done to our stern fasts, or no thievery was permitted before we burned our prizes. [If anyone was going to help themselves to the captured ships’ stores, it would be the Confederates!] We made him a present of 22 old prize muskets, and an old sword. This last, we made him buckle around his naked waist, the blade dangling about his legs, much to the injury of his shins.

He left us the best of friends, inviting all of us ashore, and claiming that we all had his hearty welcome. During the whole day we got quantities of coconuts, pineapples, pigs, chickens, bananas, plantain, etc, giving tobacco in payment. We got some few articles from our prizes.

Before disposing of these “prizes,” Whittle and Waddell allowed the crew a little shore leave—a low risk, in that no liquor existed on the island—and oversaw some maintenance chores aboard ship, such as reconfiguring the ballast of coal—the stubbornly problematic coal—toward the stern, so as to lighten the bow in anticipation of heavy weather. As the men worked, they digested the bad news they’d received, and brooded on the fate of their homeland.

Sherman’s sweep through Georgia, Whittle knew, had left Charleston, South Carolina, open to an attack from the rear—“which will, I fear, ensure its fall.” Hood’s defeat in Tennessee “shows that we are weak and will, I fear, cause an evacuation of the ground gained.” As for the fall of Fort Fisher: “This, if true, closes our last port of Wilmington, and closes all doors to the world.”

Typically, Whittle could not allow himself to close off all hope. “Much allowance is to be made of this news coming via California, which it is well known is very unreliable.” Honesty compelled him to add:

But I fear that there must be much truth in some of these reports. If they are all true, it is terrible. In God’s honor, I resign all, and in his divine will is my trust. I can never think that an almighty and merciful, and all powerful God will allow such a people as ours to suffer such subjugation. God grant us his blessing I pray.

The next day the Confederates commenced consolidating what now must have seemed an infinitesimal victory, measured against the larger war. Whittle’s accounting of it lacked the poetry that had infused his earlier descriptions of enemy ships destroyed.

One boat employed transferring stores from our prizes. In the evening, sent an officer with a boat, got the prize barque Pearl underway. Ran [her] aground on a reef high up and destroyed her by fire. She’s the 8th vessel burnt.

The day after that, “Having taken the prize ships Hector and Ed. Carey” to the places pointed out by the King, we fired them…. We brought the barque Harvest nearer the ship in order to be more convenient for shifting stores of which we will want a good deal.” Eight days later they got around to firing her, too.

Whittle and Waddell were more than happy to honor the king’s wishes and situate the doomed ships so that their charred skeletons would be left visible high above the water. This would allow the islanders easier access to their copper hulls; and it would also serve as a calling card from Shenandoah. No longer were her officers concerned with stealth and subterfuge. They were here, in this part of the watery world, and they did not care who knew it—Yankee skippers, Ambassador Adams, Consul Dudley, Abe Lincoln himself. Their business, after all, was to destroy those who might object. And there was little left to lose.

On Friday, April 7, “Shifting coal and stores. Weather pleasant. The officers making many purchases of curios, paying for them with tobacco, cloth, etc.”

On April 8, “Employed stowing fore hold with provisions from our prize. The times of Simpson, Reid, Fox, Brosnan & Crawford expired. Brosnan reshipped for 12 months. Weather very pleasant.”

On April 9, the day that the Cause died on the other side of the world:

A day of rest. Let the port watch go on liberty in the forenoon & the starboard watch in the afternoon, each carried two plugs of tobaccos. Pleasant.

The next day, Harvest was stripped of her stores and fired. Whittle estimated the total value of the four Yankee ships at $107,759. On Thursday, April 13, he and Waddell pardoned all prisoners, put them ashore to tell what tales they would to the next visitors, stowed anchors and chains, hoisted the great propeller, and made sail. “I am rejoiced to be once more at sea,” Whittle wrote.

Despite this joy, Whittle and the rest of the men with him were almost infinitely alone now. And in one sense, despite a growing kernel of denial, their mission was actually over.

His Southern nation existed no more, but the voyage of Shenandoah was just now truly under way.