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Two unusual pages immediately following the routine one dated “April 9” in the logbook of Lt. William Conway Whittle, Executive Officer, CSS Shenandoah, show time out of joint.

They shift abruptly to the future, with material that the lieutenant in fact wrote more than two months later, on June 22 and June 28, 1865, in the soul-dampening fog shrouding the Bering Sea. It was on the twenty-second that the raider’s officers listened as the captain of a captured New Bedford whaling ship told them that, weeks earlier, on April ninth, Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to General Grant after abandoning Richmond. Six days later this news was repeated by the skipper of a Hawaiian barque.

Clearly, Whittle removed these pages from their chronological place in the log, late June, and inserted them after his April 9 entries.

One of these entries is coldly factual: a businesslike tabular list of Yankee ships captured and sunk or burned by Shenandoah, and the total estimated worth of those ships and their cargoes. The other burns with emotion: a poem, a psalm, composed—disgorged—by Whittle in four ten-line stanzas and a coda of four lines. Not so much polished verse as chant, and not so much chant as a heart’s cry of intertwined grief and Christian acceptance, this untitled poem reads almost as a knight’s epitaph.

Oh mighty God, hast thou decreed

That our land shall not be freed?

That we shall be o’er run by foes

Whose deeds of shame each homestead shows?

Foes cruel, relentless and barbarous; seeking gain.

Shall our efforts, oh God, be vain?

If not, oh Lord, I humbly pray

That thou will change this night to day.

Look down in this, our time of need,

And with thy hands our rulers lead.

Our battles are with a savage foe,

Our deeds and valor all do know;

Sometimes driving, and others driven,

Trusting in ourselves and Heaven,

Fighting for everything that’s dear,

Ever hoping that Thou art near.

Ah! many a Southern man we miss

Who died alone for a Freeman’s bliss!

And many a helpless woman’s wail

Rings out like a death knell on the gale!!

Let every southern knee be bent,

And up to heaven the prayer be sent,

That God will aid us in the Strife

For Freedom far more dear than life,

So he will soften the hearts of cruel foes

Who would such a fate on us impose

That if their anger he can’t appease

He will in justice our banner seize,

And carry it with his own just hand

Till every foe has left our land!

Convinced of the justness of his cause

Let not a single Southron pause,

But leave his fireside, his home, his all

In answer to the righteous call,

And rush to battle with the cry,

“We will be free, or we will die!”

Let not his strong arm be staid

And let him not once sheathe his blade,

Till every Yankee invading foe

Feels the weight of its revengeful blow.

But if indeed our race is run,

Our every effort is outdone,

Then grant, Oh! God! that everyone

May cry, “Oh Lord, Thy will be done”!!

Beneath the poem is the notation:

C. S. Str. [steamer] “Shenandoah,”

At sea, June 22

W. C. Whittle, Jr.

Written after we heard of the surrender of a portion of Lee’s army and the fall of Richmond.

The reasons for the shuffled entries are self-evidently symbolic in one sense—to punctuate the end of the Civil War, and thus of Shenandoah’s mission—and somewhat mystifying in another.

As of April 10, the raider’s attacks had garnered a dozen ships and about $300,000 in Yankee dollars. But by the end of June those figures would skyrocket to thirty-seven ships and just shy of $1,400,000—or more than $16,500,000 in 2007 dollars. Why would the lieutenant enter the ship’s postwar conquests (complete with accurate dates, to be sure) with those achieved before Lee’s surrender?

Perhaps the switch in chronology reflected Conway Whittle’s concerns about the legitimacy of Shenandoah’s exploits after the war ended. To capture and sink an enemy ship during wartime is a recognized military action. To do the same after the war has ceased, however, is something else entirely: it is an act of piracy, and it is punishable by death.

Would Shenandoah’s crew be held accountable for an illegal campaign of serial destruction even though, to the best of their knowledge, they were acting under the rules of warfare? Even Lee’s surrender, in and of itself, did not officially end the Civil War. Jefferson Davis remained at large until May 10, and resistance by scattered Confederate remnants continued until the end of May. Not until June 2, when the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith signed surrender documents presented by Federal representatives, did the South formally acknowledge its defeat. Months more would pass before word of this reached Shenandoah.

There remains one further strong possibility:

April 9 was the day, as Whittle realized only in retrospect, that the world began to learn that the Civil War was over—yet of course it was only later that he learned it. By repositioning the prize list to this date, Whittle may have been boldly underlining the inescapable fact that he and the others aboard Shenandoah were “criminals” under conventional rules of war, while at the same time insisting on their innocence on moral grounds. Here, Whittle may have begun laying the framework for defending his honor in the event of a military tribunal.

Conway Whittle may or may not have been absorbed by these themes when he tucked his June tabulation and his June poem back into the April pages of his log. The two documents are probably more significant for another reason entirely: taken together, they form a near-perfect, if inadvertent, snapshot of the two halves of Whittle’s nature.

By 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, Shenandoah, having dispatched her prisoners in small boats to an uncertain fate on the tropical shore, surged outward from the Island of Ponape (which Whittle again calls Ascension) under full sail. The ship, by afternoon, was some twenty miles from the island’s shoreline; the earth’s curve had rendered it mostly invisible, all but a smudge of gray-green mountain-tops and their bright white cloud cap. It was to be a long time before her officers and crew set their eyes on substantial land again.

The next day, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, having been turned down by fifteen other invitees, finally coaxed young Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris to come see a play with them at Ford’s Theater in Washington.

On April 14th, Shenandoah made 210 miles to the northwest under brisk winds off her starboard beam. “She is like a duck in the water,” Whittle exulted, “steers beautifully, and under short sail has averaged about 9 knots. This is splendid, and I consider that she is now in better trim and order than she has ever been.” Their black-faced labors to carefully reposition the bunker coal had paid off handsomely: by settling her ballast they had significantly enhanced her sea-keeping strengths. It would prove vital quite soon.

Adversity was never completely absent: Whittle’s ailing right-hand man and trusted ally had now worsened.

Jack Grimball is still very sick, having had a continuous fever all day. He is at times delirious and talking all the time. Poor fellow, he suffers very much, and he’s very impatient, thereby rendering his condition more painful. I have the greatest affection for him, and will nurse him, as I know he would nurse me.

In fact, a number of men voiced health complaints. Yet no real crises threatened—such as cholera, for example, the bane of ships at sea in that time. Even Captain Waddell seemed to have his psychic ailments under control. Thus Whittle writes optimistically, “I am delighted to be once more at sea, and hope to remain so until our work is done. I am a hater of port.”

Another 195 miles the next day, and Grimball’s fever broke; 186 miles the day after that; then 203. The brisk trades were hustling Shenandoah along toward a coveted expanse of ocean: the east-west shipping routes on a line between San Francisco and China. Whittle’s irrepressible optimism overtook him once more. He could almost scent the herds of unsuspecting merchantmen meandering back and forth beyond the horizon—or so he thought—and the aroma made him giddy:

Here we are ripping along at 8 and 9 knots under double reef topsails. Our noble ship is in splendid trim. Tomorrow we will be in a great track for prizes. I trust we may see something, and I hope that something will be a fine Yankee clipper…. Jackis nearly well, and all are happy.

By Tuesday, April 18, they had reached a latitude of 19.41 north. Whittle sensed that these helpful winds could turn with little warning into heavy weather, and ordered the crew to re-rig the stays for the masts. On that same day, the timetable he dreaded reasserted itself: “Five men’s time expired today.” Yet three of them immediately reshipped; the specter of mass desertion remained at bay. Grimball turned twenty-five, and the officers drank to his health in sherry.

But no prize. Perhaps restlessly, Shenandoah commenced a course change the next day, shifting northward from her dash to the northwest, and then, on the twentieth, east by north. Where were the Yankee merchantmen?! Whittle piled task upon task, to quell the crew’s impatience and also to fortify the ship against the storm he now felt sure was approaching. They rove fresh manila for the lower rigging; they made fresh water; they drilled at the great guns. Warm nights made sleep refreshing. But the breezes bore an undercurrent of danger.

Our wind from the northeast is growing much fresher, and I fear that the change of the trades to the southward and eastward will be attended with a gale. We are in all respects better prepared for it than at any previous time. But still, I would rather not see it. I am not so romantic as to see the grandeur of a gale. If I ever was. I have seen so many as to drive all such foolish admiration out of my head. Oh, if only I knew that all was well in our dear country. That God with his mercy will look upon us is my constant prayer.

Impatience now began to wear down Whittle’s good humor, as it often had on this voyage of long, frustrating intervals between brief, intense engagements. “The same old routine,” he allowed himself to grouse on April 21, “standing across the track of the California & China clippers. Not a sign of anything but constantly expecting to have better luck.” And then he brooded about the underside of that good luck.

Any vessel we might take would in all probability bring us news, later, by two to three months than any we have heard. I shall receive it with fear and trembling. It may be bad, it may be good, just as God wills it.

He did his stubborn best to dismiss the dire news received from the captured captains at Ponape:

…if true, which I very much doubt, it is very bad. Let it be ever so bad, our course & duty is clear and every new disaster…should nerve us to do our duty like men.

By this time Shenandoah had interrupted her rapid run up the western Pacific. Chagrin and bewilderment at the absence of the expected Yankee traffic prompted her officers to shorten her sails and throw her into a holding pattern: ten miles in one direction, nineteen in another, thirty-one in another. She was “standing-station” pacing, not sailing; a predator off the scent, snooping around the sea lanes, or “tracks,” in hopes her prey would stumble onto her. “I may say that we are almost out of the world,” Whittle had written a month earlier, a thousand miles off the Australian coast. Now the world seemed to have vanished entirely, and, with it, any sense that Shenandoah was guided by purpose. “Not a sail have we seen since we left Ascension,” Whittle wrote on the twenty-second, “and the last vessel seen was the wreck of the destroyed Harvest. Oh, I wish we could catch something.” And then, from the core of his sustaining resolution: “‘Have patience,’ says a little whispering bird.”

He found reason for hope in the very shimmering fact of the cruiser beneath his feet, and above his head. “I consider that the ship never before was as clean, as seaworthy, and in as good condition.” He saw that maintenance intensified and took on a near-liturgical form and significance: the decks kept constantly smooth via squads of crewmen on their hands and knees at close quarters with one another, rubbing their abrasive blocks of Bible-sized stone back and forth across the sand-sprinkled decking planks in unison, as their mates stooped in front of them, scattering water and sand in their path. “The decks all looked cleaner, and everything in better order [after inspection], than at any previous time. What an immense amount of good results from frequent use of sand and ‘holy stones.’”

He finished reading Thackeray’s Adventures of Philip, “gaining there from much useful information.” The novel, published a year before the British author’s death in 1863, is a rambling narrative focusing on Philip Firmkin, the loutish son of a seducer from a previous novel, as he lumbers through an unsympathetic society before a chance discovery leads him to wealth. Its full title is The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him and Who Passed Him By. Such a character would seem to offer little in the way of “useful information” for an upstanding fellow such as Shenandoah’s executive officer. But perhaps Conway Whittle felt a growing affinity with Frimkin’s alienation from the world. On April 23 he set down one of the darkest entries of his entire log:

How very long it will be before anyone in the world knows where we are. Only think that since we left Melbourne for parts unknown more than two months ago, we have seen nothing which could report us for months. No doubt our ship will be reported as having been taken to Father Neptune’s bosom. I trust that they may not get any such report at home, and if they do, I trust that they may only say that we are in God’s hands.

And again, the following day:

Today’s routine has been the same as that of the past week, with the same results. I do not know when I have felt worse than I have since I got up this morning. I, for some reason or other, slept very little last night, but took a little medicine today, and ate no dinner, and now feel well. We’ve had squalls of wind and rain all day. I have felt awfully homesick, but…

Indomitably…

…tomorrow may bring us a prize.

Not exactly.

Not a sign of a sail. If this be “the track,” I think we had better be making some tracks ourselves. I feel tonight as tho…

Inevitably…

…we would catch something tomorrow.

However…

Well here is another day gone and no sign of any prize. We are now, I fear, to the Northward of the track, but our time will come….

He based this fear on a mariner’s way of knowing. He could feel the altered quality of the wind against his skin.

The next day, nothing relieved the monotony except a fight between two drunken marines, “the grog of both being stopped in consequence.”

The following day’s excitement involved condensing saltwater with the steam engine.

As to that issue of “being reported”: Whittle clearly expected that Union sympathizers had long since circulated the information regarding Shenandoah’s visit to Melbourne. Federal warships were doubtless under orders to scour the Pacific for the raider. They would be clueless, of course, as to the ship’s direction—until, say, King Nananierikie at Ponape disclosed to a Federal skipper just how he’d come into possession of those muskets and that beautiful sword. Weeks would have passed, of course; but inevitably the great Union net, cast over the entire Pacific, would begin to tighten. At which time only one hope would remain:

…that we are in God’s hands.

On Friday morning, April 28, after 11 days of fruitless course-reversals across the trade lanes, Shenandoah “made sail to royals on our course.” That is, she accelerated northward under extra sails laid on by her crew. She followed a zigzag route for several hours, still hoping to nab a merchantman that had strayed from the tracks, making only eighty-six miles; but the next day she changed tactics and raced 192 miles on a northerly straight line. Whittle’s exhilaration at being on the move again was tempered somewhat by the prospective loss of two good seamen. Louis Rowe and Peter Raymond, a pair of Frenchmen from Alina, the raider’s first prize, announced their desire to leave the ship at the first opportunity. “They are excellent men,” Whittle lamented, “and have been as hard as steel.” This brought to nine the number of crewmen resolved to leave the ship. How many more harbored similar intentions?

The barometer plunged the next day, and Whittle found a fresh reason for anxiety: “I trust we are not going to have a gale.” Nonetheless, “We prepared for it by reefing the main topsail and close reefing the fore main.” The skies cleared for a time, but the month of May rushed in on a moderate gale and a high sea. As the ship pitched and the crew laid on extra safety rigging, Whittle’s thoughts turned to a worse storm far from the western Pacific: “I wonder how our dear country is getting along.” The dear country no longer existed, as the lieutenant probably suspected.

Fickle elements toyed with the raider for several hours as she struggled toward latitude 35 north. The winds moderated, only to pick up again. Little hope remained for a capture in gale conditions; simply fighting for control of Shenandoah was often the helmsman’s only concern. But the waters yielded evidence that ships of some sort had been in the vicinity—chilling evidence. On May 3, during a break that followed a two-day gale, the ship knifed through great swatches of “whale food,” but they saw no whales. What they did see would draw the somber notice of any mariner in a wooden ship in these storm-ridden seas. Whittle’s notation of it was terse:

…we passed some driftwood which looks like a portion of a wreck.

The omens darkened considerably a short time later.

I saw what I have heard was never seen north of the line; i.e., a large albatross.

The albatross’s hour quickly arrived. Near midnight strong winds blew in a rain storm that assaulted the ship like artillery, and the seas ran wild.

Scales had the night watch. At first light, in the teeth of a rising storm and in need of backup, he sent for Whittle.

I was called at 6:30, the quartermaster informed me that it was windy, rainy, and squally weather. I went up to let Scales fix his toilet and found the ship under double-reefed topsails & reefed foresails, with a fresh breeze and a high sea a little abaft the starboard beam and going 9½ knots.

Shenandoah was ripping along, taking every advantage of the tempest behind her. She sailed northwest, on course, with the gale at her back, and just enough sails, pinched tight to the wind to drive the ship among the great Pacific swells at a rapid, controlled rate. Young Scales had chosen a fine balance between speed, risk, and performance, and Whittle was pleased. The captain would not be.

Whittle was about to be irritated not only by Waddell’s denigration of the absent Scales, but also by his less-than-aggressive approach to outsailing the oncoming storm, the strategy Scales had chosen to good advantage.

James Waddell, whose darkest demons seemed to find release in storms, now limped into view along the heaving deck and immediately countermanded his executive officer.

Shouting through the torrents, Waddell ordered Whittle to take in virtually all the sails and turn the ship into the wind. He essentially told Whittle to slow Shenandoah down and turn her off.

Glistening crewmen now labored aloft to tie back soaking, gale-driven canvas. The helmsman turned the wheel to starboard, and, rolling dangerously as the force of the gale broadsided her, Shenandoah slowly lurched about to face the seas that tormented her. In Whittle’s jargon, the ship was “laying to.”

Now she was no longer a sleek, fluid sailing ship making her way before the wind. Now she was at the mercy of the Pacific Ocean: a teak-and-iron container, filled with terrified men all wondering if they would ever see their loved ones again.

The ship, “brought by the wind, and laid to,” would now ride up and over each set of waves as they marched toward her. Keeping the rudder amidships gave the ship’s direction entirely over to the winds, waves, and currents. It also took control away from the helmsman. This struck Whittle as basically sound—so far as it went. Shenandoah was still riding the storm safely, but as darkness fell and the gale lashed the ship up and down, Waddell pushed the tactic beyond good sense.

This ship, under our present sail, with the helm half down, will lay to and ride the waves like a duck. But the Captain orders that the helm must be kept amidships. This throws her in the “trough of the sea”, which is very high, and she is laboring very much more than is safe, comfortable, or necessary. On these things he’s as stubborn as a mule, and I fear that his stubbornness will some day do us harm. Oh, how I do detest a gale of winds!!!

Whittle understood that running with little in the way of sails (which, in wind this fierce, could actually destabilize the ship), and using the rudder to help control the ship’s roll, they might survive by simply letting the gale slip past. Abandoning most attempts to control the ship became about the only way to save it.

But on this Waddell disagreed as well.

Waddell’s orders put ship and elements in opposition. Now the wind shoved and bullied the ship, converting it from an agile sailing vessel to a 230-foot barge. Now the raider bounced roughly, clumsily, through the high waves, taking them side-on, lifting to their crest as they drove in, with her spars nearly touching the water, then tilting to the opposite side, like a giant metronome, and sliding helplessly down the back trough, as men clung to ropes with one hand and their stomachs with the other. Only to be met at the bottom by another blind-siding wave. And another. And another.

Perhaps it was the very seaworthiness that Whittle had so recently admired that kept Shenandoah from being swamped, swallowed up. Lost. Father Neptune could not claim her as a prize through that long, torturous night. By midmorning of May 4, the winds were swirling, but much calmer; the sea still high, but less lethal. The sun actually came out. “This has been to all appearances a fine day,” Whittle was able to record. Yet the barometer remained low (29.4–29.3), and all hands understood the implications of that. Either they were in the eye of an enormous typhoon, or the post-equatorial shift in the trade winds he had looked for earlier now had them up against a conveyor belt of eastbound seasonal storms.

At ten-thirty that night, Whittle labored to keep his hand steady as he scrawled his log entry; the ship rocked and pitched as a new gale blew in from the southwest. And a new natural enemy arrived to reinforce the angry ocean: cold. Officers and crew shivered helplessly under the frigid torrential rains. Whittle imagined that the icy air emanated now “from the snowclad clifts [sic] of Japan.” His armor-plated duende, however, remained undiminished: “Going as we are from extreme warm to extreme cold weather & back, must make us suffer. But what care we in such a cause.”

By the end of the following afternoon, Shenandoah had clawed and stumbled her way across 122 wave-smashed miles. The storm seemed almost to be circling her, drifting away for a while, only to come rampaging back, like wave upon wave of icy, blue-clad infantry. Whittle’s equanimity grew almost surreal: “The weather is quite cold. Our time passes monotonously. But there are so many of us, and all so cheerful, that we manage to drive a good deal of care away.” And then the inevitable mantra: “I expect that when we shape our course for our cruise grounds, having given the ice time to drift clear, we will catch a good many Yanks. I trust it may be so, but patience!”

The “cheerful” crew turned out splendidly clad for inspection on Sunday, May 7, but as for “so many of us,” Whittle received more glum news that the ship’s numbers would soon shrink some more. “The times of three men were expired today and none desired to renew their engagement. This makes 12 who are only waiting an opportunity to get clear. These are, thank goodness, the last of the “six months men,” and I am heartily glad of it.” He made some calculations: “These taken from our 104, leaves 92 souls all told belonging to the ship. From these, after deducting 25 officers and 12 boys, stewards, and cooks, making 37, leaves us 55 all told, including firemen and marines.” Again, the silver lining: “This seems small, but when it be compared to the 46 all told with which we started, it will be seen that we are well off.”

Somewhat better news the next day: four of the ship’s best men, whose terms of service had expired, came forward to announce that they would like to reship “upon condition that they would be discharged at the first European port we got to. The Captain consented…. This raises the number of 92 souls attached to the ship as enumerated yesterday, to 96. Thank God for this.”

The weather lifted now—or seemed to—allowing Shenandoah a couple days of sailing at something like her accustomed cruising speed. Then, on the tenth, another gale struck her, “which nearly took us aback.” Did take them aback, in fact; caught unprepared by the violence of the winds out of the northwest—winds that threatened to blow men from the rigging—the crew had no time to adjust the sails or change course. The steersman managed to swing the bow around so that the ship, rather than being swamped, was merely blown backward out of control. And, struggling as she was to survive, let alone sail, she covered some seventy miles on a course entirely of the storm’s choosing, fighting heavy seas and winds so strong as to blow the sailors’ breath from their lungs.

I am sick and tired of gales. I have seen enough.

But gales had not seen enough of Shenandoah. It was springtime in the western Pacific, when storms bloomed like magnolias in Virginia. Gales, it seemed, would be the raider’s curse until she cleared a latitude of 45 or 50 degrees north. She was presently at 39.54. At 2:00 p.m. the next day, a sudden wind shift to the northward prompted an emergency close-reefing of the fore and main topsails and forestaysail. Too little, too late. Two hours later the wind, gusting furiously, blew the lead main topsail to pieces. Among the most important stabilizing pieces of canvas on the ship, it was suddenly nothing but scrap. Now it became a fight for control. The crew performed heroically.

[We] unbent the remnants letting all but the patent [ furling device] blow overboard. Not being able to bend another topsail while by the wind, we goose-winged the foresail, and got the ship before the wind and ran before a furious gale & terrific sea. Got up and bent another main topsail and set it close reefed, gale blowing furiously.

Each of these tasks entailed terrifying, life-threatening risks. Crewmen edged their way across the rain-slick deck to the coaming, their eyes nearly shut against the torrents and their bodies leaning into the wind. They climbed up the wildly whipsawing ratlines, knowing that any false purchase on the ropes would mean a plunge to the death. Once aloft, they hacked away at the remaining debris, then sheathed their knives and rigged the replacement sails with their bare hands, keeping an elbow hooked around the boom to prevent the wind from whisking them out to sea like kites.

Somehow they succeeded, and Shenandoah rode out the hellish Saturday night of May 13. At around 3:00 a.m.—“gale moderating but a terrible sea”—they hung on as the ship rolled nearly on her side; then, surviving that, they set the main staysail. All hands labored virtually without letup until nightfall and another blast of bone-chilling cold.

By Tuesday—exhaustion rampant throughout the ship—the worst of it was over. The raider made eighty-three miles and sat at latitude 43.29 north, nearly out of the danger zone. “This has been a good relief after the bad weather for the last few days,” Whittle wrote in an understatement. “The temperature getting mild and pleasant with a fine sun to dry our sails and decks. I trust we will be taken to the northward of the 45th parallel without any more bad weather.” His trust was augmented by what he took to be a kind of anti-albatross vision. “I witnessed today a peculiar sign of something. There was a very bright and distinct ring around the sun. I hope it indicates good weather.”

Whittle trusted too well and too soon; the ring indicated the opposite. Wednesday, May 17—the day Shenandoah crossed the long-anticipated 45th parallel—brought a new heavy swelling of the seas. The temperature dipped below freezing, and the latest maelstrom was accompanied by another unwelcome traveling companion, whose damp blankets would shroud the ship for the next several dismal weeks.

“A heavy fog superseding the rain,” Whittle described it. The fog betokened yet another menace peculiar to these arctic latitudes: it “made us think that an iceberg was near.”

The wind abated the next day, but freezing rain pelted the ship. The fog thickened. The ship lay to. The thermometer continued to drop. Ice coated the deck. The crew was depleted—one more northeast gale could be a disaster.

There seemed but one option left for the Confederate ship and crew that had sailed out of the world.

Today we celebrated Bulloch’s 30th birthday.