15

Conway Whittle could not have realized it, but his own cause—Shenandoah’s mission—had now expired as well.

Covington, the latest ship taken by the raider, would bring the estimated aggregate value of these prizes to $1,399,080—or $16,500,000 in modern dollars. Many more months of lonely patrolling lay ahead for the black raider, but Covington, burned on June 28, was to be Shenandoah’s final prize.

The last two times her gunners had fired—at the fleeing Sophia Thornton on June 22, less than a week earlier—were the final shots of the Civil War. Sophia Thornton, the second-most-valuable of all the raider’s prizes, had tried to make a break for it as Shenandoah faced down the nine whalers. She didn’t try for very long. As soon as the raider started firing, Sophia Thornton stopped running. In all, there would be twenty-three others that surrendered without trying to run. But in Whittle’s log, she was the last to draw fire.

They had been near the northern edge of the Bering Sea, latitude 62.40 north, longitude 178.50 west, closer to Asia than to North America.

Whittle had written up the Sophia Thornton action with no fanfare—he had no way of realizing that his gunners had fired the Rebels’ final rounds in pursuit of an enemy.

Chased the vessel, a ship which put on all sail, running into the ice. We gave her two shots which hove her to. We boarded her, she proved to be the ship “Sophia Thornton” a New Bedford whaler. Threw a prize crew onboard keeping as prisoners the Capt. & Mates and ordered her to follow.

Shenandoah would take a total of more than one thousand Yankee prisoners, many of whom had just recently been bobbing along behind her in longboats. Her rampage so far had decimated the New England whaling fleet and driven it to near extinction. And she was not done hunting. But it had all come too late.

She would continue to scan the horizon, not looking just for prey, but for any ship at all that might have West Coast papers with more-current news. Indeed, from her last prize, Covington, the raider had continued to move the hunt aggressively, if fruitlessly, northward. But her officers doubtless understood by now—though no one dared voice the thought—that it was almost time to go home.

But where was home? What was home?

All they felt about the war’s outcome now was doubt and fear, but these they put aside. For the officers of the Shenandoah, both emotions were incompatible with honor and duty.

By the end of June, the last and greatest fire of Shenandoah’s mission burned itself out on the Bering Sea, and she edged deeper into the kingdom that now ruled her once more—the kingdom of ice.

In the evening of the conflagration, the raider pushed slowly northward through the treacherous Bering Strait toward the Arctic Circle. Two lonely landmarks let them set their position as the morning mists burned off a bit. The Diomedes, the small, grim set of islands that form the storm-swept western boundary of North America, now lay off to the east on Shenandoah’s starboard side, and off her port bow they could make out the headlands of Cape Dezhnev, or the East Cape—the northeasternmost point of Asia. Beyond, in the Arctic Ocean itself, they hoped to find more open water, and even more whalers. Then the fog swept in again, limiting visibility to a ship’s length, and a treacherous current soon made each increasing knot a test of nerves. The next morning, as the fog gradually blew away, “we saw ahead and all around heavy ice, floe and pack.” Further penetration would surely bring on a collision, a gash in the hull, frigid deaths for all hands. And with nothing but ice ahead, unbroken beyond the northern horizon, Shenandoah could expect no more whalers. It would be madness to go on.

At latitude 66.14 north, on June 29, 1865, Shenandoah reversed direction at last, and headed back south toward the Pacific, which lay nearly 1,000 miles below her on the far side of the Bering Sea. Shenandoah was about to travel 10,000 miles southward, then arc round again and sail another 9,000 miles north, back into the world.

“We went inside the Arctic Circle as was shown by our bearings,” Whittle noted proudly. “I suppose Yankeedom will be astonished at our coming away here after them.” He might have added that, with apologies to Gen. George Armstrong Pickett, Shenandoah had just reached the true “high water mark” of the Confederacy.

Fog and ice—familiar baleful companions—curtained the ship and dominated her crew’s concerns for the next several days. They were in a realm envisioned by Edgar Allan Poe, a macabre phantom-land where unseen danger threatened annihilation. On Thursday the twenty-ninth, shapes materialized, the dark contours of ships. “We hove to a French ship and the Hawaiian brig Kohola, who told us that the northern president had been killed and General Lee had surrendered,” Whittle wrote. “News anticipated.”

The sea was calm, but for once this was not a good sign; it was exactly the opposite. A calm sea in these waters meant that the normal swells were being muted by ice.

The terrifying ice worked its way deeply into the Confederates’ consciousness. At times the fog grew so dense that a sailor could not see his hands, much less the surface of the sea. In these intervals Shenandoah sailed on pure faith, and at horrible risk: “At 12 [noon], a very thick fog, but it being a little rough, we took it for granted that we were not near any heavy ice.” The ship’s propeller was raised out of the water as a precaution, her smokestack lowered, her topgallant sails unfurled. “I went to bed feeling very uneasy for fear of ice.”

The ice followed Whittle to bed and entered his nightmares. “At 1 o’clock in the midwatch I got up having dreamt that we were in ice,” he wrote on July 1. Neglecting his overcoat, he dashed on deck and found Lieutenant Lee in charge of the watch, “the ship going very smooth and a dense fog.” These were danger signs, as Whittle instantly grasped; but Sidney Smith Lee, true to his family name, tended to laugh at danger. “I asked Lee how long it had been so smooth, and he said for all his watch and two hours of Grimbell’s. I told him my dream and said we were very near ice. He said he did not think so.”

Whittle ordered Lee to slow the ship. Less than a minute remained before his nightmare came true.

I went to my room for my overcoat and had not gotten to the door before the startling report of “land dead ahead!” was given. It was soon reported to be high ice. We were within a ship’s length of it before it was seen as there was a very heavy fog.

The calamity dreaded by everyone was at hand. Scrambling and hauling like madmen, the crew managed to swing the ship’s sails, and a southwesterly wind filled them in time to slow her down before the impact. Yet impact there was.

Everything was thrown aback but before she stopped her headway, she struck very heavy ice hard enough to wake everyone up. The shock was very heavy and those below thought she had knocked a hole in her bow.

The concussion of hitting a solid wall head-on, even at a crawl, was enough to send shock waves through the heavy ship. As she trembled and bounced backward, crewmen spilled from their hammocks and scrambled on deck to see whether they were about to drown. They were not; no gash opened up in the ship’s hull. Shenandoah’s teak-and-iron hull had held. But the crisis was just beginning. Whittle, still coatless in the gelid Arctic wind, fought to keep his mind clear, to focus on what needed to be done, instant to instant. A loss of focus would mean panic, and destruction. Leaving the overcoat behind, he dashed back onto the freezing deck, into action.

“I went forward, lowered the mats, while Lee took in all sail. Before he did this, she was well in the ice and going rapidly astern.” (The “mats” were thick, ice-buffering manila-rope blankets taken from the captured whalers.) A new fear suddenly seized him: the rudder. He sprinted for the stern to investigate, and arrived at the last possible moment.

Went aft and found it aport. Just had time to put amidships and put three men to hold it when it struck with great violence against a heavy piece of ice. Holding it amidships alone saved it. When it received the shock, the rudder chain was broken and the relieving tackles were broken in time to save it. The ship was in great peril. The ice was high, hard and heavy, and the fog very dense so that we did not know which way to go.

This second blow—at the stern—might have caused far more damage than the first, delivered to the bow, had not Whittle’s lightning analysis and instant orders, and the crewmen’s prodigious strength, prevented the worst. “Aport” meant that earlier, in a futile attempt to miss the iceberg, the giant flap of a rudder had been fixed “hard aport” at a 90-degree angle to the ship’s stern—an angle of maximum stress. The oncoming ice floe probably would have sheared the rudder away and left the raider unable to control her direction. By turning the great blade edge-on to the ice, and then holding it there, the three crewmen had acted like toreadors, with the rudder as the sword and the ice as the charging bull.

Yet the ship remained essentially out of control. Her rebound off the ice wall, reinforced by the wind, was now driving Shenandoah backward; and, as was the case with her forward motion, she had no real braking system. The next collision could smash her into splinters.

Only drastic action now could save the ship. No protocol in these Southern seamen’s experience provided for this profoundly Arctic predicament. As the frigid masses around them closed in—as the seconds ticked away their chances for survival—Shenandoah’s officers groped feverishly for an idea. And then inspiration struck: they would gain salvation by harnessing that which threatened to destroy them. They would use the ice floes themselves, first as an anchor to slow the ship, and then for leverage to propel them out of the closing ice-prison, and into a channel that would set them free.

We lowered a boat and ran out a grapnel to the west of north, hooked it to a heavy cake and winded her head in that direction. Ran it to another and hauled her ahead. Got up steam, lowered the propeller and by means of oars and poles, kept the ice clear of the propeller while we steamed very slowly. Hoisted our boat. At 4:30 got out of the heavy ice but during the early part of the day, up to 9:30 a.m., we were passing through heavy floes. At 9:30, got clear and I trust we may never see any more.

Open sea—befogged and featureless though it was—had never looked so good. It was Sunday morning of July 2, 1865, the day of the week on which Whittle customarily mustered the crew and read the Articles of War. On this Sunday morning, any such ceremony might have seemed superfluous, even a cruel joke. Most of the crewmen were leaden with the fatigue of their ice-floe exertions; moreover, evidence had mounted that Shenandoah’s war no longer existed. At 7:00 a.m., a sail had emerged briefly through the dense fog, but was enveloped again—it would be the last evidence of other human presence on the planet for a month. Yet Whittle commanded the Sunday ritual anyway. If Shenandoah was truly “out of the world,” and if the world as her officers knew it had been obliterated, then the world on her decks would have to suffice. And ritual would continue, affirming that civilization endured.

A depleted Conway Whittle spent most of the rest of the day in his cabin, absorbed in the Bible—the Old Testament, judging from an entry two days later. He concluded his journal entries that evening with an entreaty to God, on behalf of his family and his beloved (provided they still existed), that expressed a dread he had not expressed before. It was a dread inspired perhaps by his experiences in the Yankee prison camp, and by his awareness, even back in 1864, of the South’s depleted resources.

God protect and feed them I pray.

It was the dread of famine.

Fog and drizzling rain dogged Shenandoah the following day, but exhilaration ruled her decks. She had put the Bering Strait and its icy teeth behind her and was running southward before the wind under full topgallants, with her fires banked and her propeller hoisted—a classic creature of the nineteenth-century seas, lean and elegant and assured. She was hardly out of danger yet—the currents beneath her were uncharted and wildly eccentric; the Aleutians lay ahead, where the lingering mists disguised the danger of a rocky island looming up. But the Confederates were racing for latitudes more congenial to them—the fat, sunny part of the globe—and besides, they had survived perils unknown to most seamen. God only knew what had become of their nation, but at this moment they felt unconquerable, invincible. The ship made 198 miles that day, running well, and by nightfall had reached latitude 56.56 north. “We are beginning now to have night, as in days of yore,” Whittle exulted. But then his anticipation of the fearful passage between the Aleutians resurfaced, and he hinted at it: “I shall be very much rejoiced when we get out in the broad Pacific once more. I shall hail it with joy.”

Two days later, Conway Whittle’s joyful mood tumbled down into pitch-darkness. He reached into his soul and ripped apart the lining that normally constrained the deep well of rage that he harbored toward the nation—the alien civilization—that had destroyed his homeland. The occasion was July 4, observed as Independence Day in America since 1777—a holiday, he well knew, that the North would celebrate with special vigor this year.

The South had once celebrated the Fourth with equal vigor. But the war had contaminated the day for Dixie. It had been on the Fourth of July two years ago that besieged Vicksburg surrendered to Grant’s army, while at Gettysburg, Meade had just decimated Lee’s legions: the beginning of the end.

And so, on an evening of smooth seas and light winds, Shenandoah having covered 185 miles, Conway Whittle ensconced himself in his cabin, raked his pen through pure venom, and unleashed into his journal a torrent of invective that a century and a half later remains a remarkable document, as pure an expression of the Southern patriot’s take on the Civil War as is likely to be found anywhere.

This is the 4th of July. Who can celebrate it? Can the northern people, who now are, and for years have been, waging an unjust, cruel, relentless, and inhumane war upon us, to take from us the very independence, the declaration of which 90 years ago made this day to be gloried in? Can they glory in the day? Have they the bare-faced audacity, when five of the original thirteen are now battling against more grievous wrongs from the others than they could ever urge as a support to their cause? Should they not rather blush with shame at their present course and relent?

He angrily answered his own rhetorical question.

Yes. They have the audacity. Their honor, honesty, Christianity, civilization is all gone. They blush at nothing except that which may be honest & honorable, and in their own acts they rarely blush for even these causes. Oh God mete out confusion and discord to their councils.

“Independence”?! The North had corrupted its very entitlement to the word! As Whittle scrawled on, he found himself disgorging a thought that might have shocked at least some of his fellow officers.

If any people can celebrate the day, the Southerners are the ones, for they are now battling the same right aggravated by causes ten times as strong as those for which in 1775 they fought. But if such a thing is possible and these wicked men be successful, I for one would regret from the depth of my heart that we ever knew a 4th of July for tomorrow I would rather be ruled over by the President of Liberia than by the Yankees.

Liberia, of course, was the west African coastal settlement occupied since 1820 by “free men of color” who emigrated there from America under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. It had declared itself a republic in 1847, and now was home to nearly 13,000 citizens.

In his next sentence, Whittle defiantly reaffirmed his cultural blasphemy, in language that in a later century would be denounced as arrant racism.

Yes, I would rather see the most worthless Negro in the whole world rule over us than the Yankees, who I consider a race of cruel, fanatical scoundrels, lost alike to honor, decency, honesty & Christianity. Any but those cruel, inhuman brutes, baser than the basest.

The greatest iniquity, to the men of Whittle’s time and place, was not Southern racial subjugation, but Northern hypocrisy:

They will celebrate the day with even more enthusiasm than before. To the world they say they are fighting to free the slave, because they have in such a war the sympathy of the world; to their soldiers, they cry Union and the old flag, as the cry best calculated to make them rally. Whereas in their own cruel, cowardly, dishonest, and inhuman hearts, their sole object is gain, and not a single one exists but that has his eye on the rich spoils of land & property to be had in the south.

The Yankees tell the world they are fighting to free the slave? Very well, then! Let Dixie’s last stand reveal to the world the corruption of this claim, affirm the true cause of this war, and show the true affinity that united the two races in the Southland!

Let us free and arm our slaves, let every old man, every young woman in the south be armed. Let their principal practice and cry be to shoot dead the invader, whenever and wherever he be found, putting their trust in the justice of an Almighty, all powerful and all just GOD. The God of Jacob be our refuge.

The God of Jacob!—it was a biblical reference not lightly chosen by the anguished young Southern Episcopalian. Perhaps his recent nights of combing the Bible had drawn him to it. The God of Jacob was the Old Testament God of the elect, the God who chose some men and spurned others not in response to their intrinsic merits, but out of the mysteries of His own sovereign will. God chose flawed Jacob (the “cheater,” the owner of slaves, later a slave himself, and an exile) to become the patriarch of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Upon such suggestive myths rested a philosophy that Whittle surely knew well: the “Bible defense of Slavery.” This tradition, refined in Southern churches across two hundred years, pointed to the Scriptures for evidence of slaveholding as divinely sanctioned. The devout Whittle would have heard many sermons invoking—insisting upon—the righteousness of this view.

Now, at the height of his fury and anguish at the subjugation of his distant homeland, Conway Whittle turned to Scripture to reinforce a wishful thought of almost magical proportions: the notion of the Southland’s slaves rising up in the hour of gravest peril to become God’s instruments in hurling back the heathen invaders and restoring Dixie to the harmonious kingdom it once had been. He’d witnessed one hopeful portent aboard Shenandoah, when John Williams, the pugnacious cook, and a free black man, had elected to ship with the Confederates.

The larger unreality of this hope was hardly unique to Whittle. Nor were the limitations in his feel for the greatest, most fundamental and tragic of America’s contradictions.

Calls for the enlistment (or conscription) of Negroes had swept through Southern legislatures almost from the war’s outset, although seldom, in the early years, as armed troops. Black units, such as the First Louisiana Native Guards, were rare exceptions, and functioned mainly as provost guards. Male slaves more typically served—many of them quite willingly, many others with impassive fatalism—behind the lines, as teamsters, cooks, laborers, nurses, musicians in military bands—even, in a few instances, as chaplains. Only in the third year of the war, as reckless charge upon reckless charge decimated Confederate ranks, and the replacement pool of young Southern white men grew shockingly thin, did generals and politicians begin to think the unthinkable: slaves must be armed and, if necessary, freed, to fill the gaping holes in the Southern lines. Reports of this panacea would have pulsed across the ocean to Rebel operatives in Europe, and caught the attention of Conway Whittle in Paris and London.

In truth, nearly 200,000 black men saw front-line combat in the Civil War; but most of them—some 180,000—fought in the Union cause. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, free black men from the North and escaped slaves from the South rushed to enlistment, forming 163 units. Such regiments as the First Kansas Colored Volunteers fought with astonishing ferocity in battles such as Island Mound, Missouri; Honey Springs in what is now Oklahoma; Port Hudson, Louisiana; and the fabled doomed assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

Whittle’s dream of Negro solidarity with the Cause proved largely baseless, irrational, an impoverished reading of racial and cultural psychology. Ironically, so did the dreams of most black men who fought for the Northern cause. So did just about everyone’s on that subject, on that continent, in that time.

Whittle’s charge of “hypocrisy” had merit: the Union’s same Negro regiments that proved their bravery time and again on the battlefield (a third of them lost their lives) faced daily disdain, exclusion, even outright animosity from their white comrades in arms.

Lincoln himself seems equivocal about the institution of slavery in the months leading up to the war, and later promoted the state of Liberia as another magical sort of solution to the American Dilemma. The corrupt cynicism of the Federals who oversaw Reconstruction dashed whatever illusions of brotherhood might have survived among black veterans.

A final indication of these Faulknerian complexities lay in the fact that Conway Whittle’s dream was not entirely baseless. Within the slaveholding system, inherently cruel and dehumanizing, bonds of loyalty did develop between master and slave, bonds that some captive African Americans were willing to fight and die for. As one scholar has written, “It should be noted…that in almost every instance where a slave served loyally with his soldier-master, there was a long-standing close relationship between the two. Slave and master had often grown up together, and the emotional ties between the two were strong.”^*7

Shenandoah ran on southward, at speed, through heavy mists that blotted out the light and made the complex and deadly prospects ahead impossible to imagine.