17
With grim prospects clinging about her like a permanent fog, Shenandoah wandered on vaguely south, parallel to the American continental coastline. Less raider than hobo now, she careered about, scavenging for the wind that had gone out of her sails. She dragged herself barely a hundred miles to the southwest on August 4. Whittle’s logbook probably caught the mood of every officer on board:
All day my mind has been distracted by the most painful thoughts.
How ancient the exhilarations of the previous October must have seemed—if anyone on board bothered to think about them at all. How foreign the language of Whittle’s exultant entries ten months back: “We hoisted the English flag and he to our great joy hoisted a hated Yankee flag. We then ran up our flag and hove him to with a blank cartridge. We lowered and armed a boat and crew…. Very soon we had the extreme satisfaction of seeing the flag which is now the emblem of tyranny hauled down….”
No more.
At one o’clock in the afternoon—Friday, August 4, 1865—a resigned Captain Waddell ordered all of Shenandoah’s officers and crew onto the main deck. There he spoke directly to them, for the first time, about the crisis looming over all of them. “It was my duty as a man and a commanding officer,” Waddell later wrote, continuing the pose of heroic resolve in his memoirs, “to be careful of the honor as well as the welfare of the one hundred and thirty-two men placed in my hands.”31
Fine words and true—yet the unapproachable Waddell likely called the assemblage only because he had no other choice. He felt himself hounded down, chased into a corner—first by the Federal ships he believed to be scouring the seas for Shenandoah, and, even more tragically, by his own junior officers. Several of them had approached Waddell sometime within the last day or two with a “petition” that they probably intended him to understand as a subtle ultimatum: they wanted to know exactly where the captain proposed to take the ship. No mention of either the petition or of the shipboard meeting appears in Conway Whittle’s journal; his notations for August 4 are limited to a note or two about the weather and his own tortured thoughts about fate and faith. But he clearly understood the ship’s direction, and the implications of that direction. Shenandoah’s course was designed to loop southwestward, not eastward; obviously, then, the plan was to swing well below Polynesia, then make for Melbourne. Whittle saw little need to debate, and left the meeting to the junior officers. Accounts of the event were dutifully recorded in the journals of Lieutenants Lining and Chew, and a midshipman named John Mason.32 They were worried.
In the hours following the news from Barracouta, Waddell’s pose of forbidding hauteur had begun to dissolve. Any scheme of attacking San Francisco now was obviously moot; but contrary to his later declaration that he “saw the propriety of running her for a European port,” Waddell had neither found nor voiced any clear-headed decision on where Shenandoah was headed. He’d appeared to accept a majority view of the officers that they return to Melbourne, which lingered in their memories as a haven of friendship and good times. There they would surrender to whatever British or American authorities presented themselves. Only on the morning after he’d instructed Irvine Bulloch to chart a course for Australia did the captain change his mind. Australia, he decided, was too far from home for most of his officers. Instead they would head for some English port, which he did not specify. Then he decided that the port would be Liverpool. Then he had said that, no, it would be a Yankee port instead, unspecified.
Waddell began the meeting on the fourth, as Lining remembered it, by thanking all hands for their service. He insisted that he had no hard feelings for the officers’ petition. Then he pointed out that he and his fellow officers faced consequences far more dire than the noncommissioned crewmen; they were almost certain to be prosecuted as criminals, very likely imprisoned, perhaps even hanged.
Then, in Lining’s version, Waddell reconsidered yet again and announced the latest course on which he and the officers had agreed: “I shall take the ship into the nearest English port and all I have to ask of you men, is to stand by me to the last.” He added, “As for this cruise, it is a record which stands for itself & all you have to do is be proud of it.”33 As Lieutenant Mason remembered it, the crew responded with cries of “We are” and “We will stand by you.” Several were in tears.34
Even so, Waddell’s phrasing—“the nearest English port”—left room for nervous speculation. Did he mean Liverpool? Or Melbourne, which was nearer, and part of the British Empire? Or Capetown, South Africa? Or was he intent on being purposely vague?
“Applications were here made to take the ship to Cape Town, and I declined to do so, keeping to the east of the 30th meridian,” he wrote, but that would come later. What seems true in this moment of deep cosmic unknowing was that no one, not even the captain, knew with any certainty at all where Shenandoah was headed.
Dismantling the armaments was hard, slow-moving work, and to complete it would require several days. The task of arming her at Deserta had been arduous, too, with seamen working around the clock to transfer these same arms from Laurel; but then the labor had been buoyed by the sense of high adventure, the romance of the last desperate chance to save a nation. Now the nation lay, starving, subjugated, no longer a nation. And the hauling of the iron weapons was merely a backbreaking strain.
Firing off the pistols and muskets was the only effective way to disarm the muzzle loaders. In these weapons lay a gauge to the ferocity that had launched Shenandoah’s mission. Pistols and muskets were small arms, the weaponry of the Confederate marines aboard ship, useful only in combat at close quarters. The Southern raider had put to sea prepared to fight to the last man. Any Yankee warship bursting from the fog at close quarters would face a death struggle, a hand-to-hand fight, blood and thunder.
But now—discharged into thin air. Into the fog.
“I never undertook a more painful piece of work,” Whittle recorded.
South of Mexico now, under balmy skies, less than two weeks above the equator. “It is deemed proper that we should cross the Equator to the ‘Eastwards of 115W’ in order to clear with the southeast trades the Tahita group of islands,” Whittle jotted on the fourth, his handwriting lax. “We are making a poor [job] out of our attempt. I trust that we may soon have a chance for the better.”
It was common lore among mariners that certain locations in certain oceans would offer predictably favorable winds during certain seasons. Thus, south of the equator and “Eastwards of 115W,” a ship would find trade winds coming reliably from the southeast. Such beliefs drew on experience, primitive meteorology, rudimentary oceanography—and luck.
More central to Whittle’s doubt was the very salvation of his soul: “All day my mind has been distracted by the most painful thoughts. Oh that I was a good Christian and that I might with true faith resign myself to my fate.”
The crew dismounted two signal twelve-pounders and stowed them below on the following day, “but having limited room for the [heavy] guns, we secured them on deck.” The wind remained anemic, and Shenandoah fired up her steam engines.
But—steaming for where? Whittle’s log still offered few clues. Perhaps he intended to keep any capturers in the dark. Perhaps Waddell himself had not yet disclosed his destination to his executive officer, or even decided on it. Would he order the raider to Tahiti for a hiatus while he thought of a final plan? Could he persuade anybody on board to follow him whatever he decided? Would he bite the bullet and sail her back to England? Did he simply wish to take her out of the now-dangerous shipping lanes? No one knew. Or at least no one was recording any such knowledge. A kind of lethargic indifference reigned as Shenandoah continued on her meandering course for the next ten-odd days, a course to nowhere: southeast generally, tacking back and forth in search of wind, headed as if for Colombia or Ecuador, or perhaps Panama, but not aiming at any of those countries really. A ship still out of the world; a ship without a country; a ship hunted now by an enormous, triumphant navy—a ship, perhaps, of dead men, or men soon to die.
More lamentations for Pattie on Sunday the sixth—lamentations giving way to near despair: “Oh! the first wish of my heart was to call her mine. All is blasted! All is gone save honor, self respect and love….”
Practical concerns took over the next day. Whittle double-reefed the fore and main topsails under winds that suddenly had turned to squalls. “I rove off a new full set of braces,” he noted that evening, putting to good use the beginning of the end of his stores from the New Bedford whalers. Whittle was starting to rig for heavy weather. Shenandoah had sailed nearly 6,000 miles since leaving the Aleutians, and had logged over 35,000 miles since leaving Deserta. The wear and tear on the rigging was by now tremendous; fraying and overwrought braces likely had caught Whittle’s eye. The same strong winds the Confederates were seeking thus became a hazard and a boon.
No amount of make-work, however, could relieve Whittle of his overwhelming sense of calamity.
How difficult it is to act when you can’t feel.
And the next day:
Oh! God how cast down I feel. When my thoughts revert to my country and dear ones and they rarely stray therefrom, I feel that God alone can give us strength to bear such adversity.
And the day after that:
To know how I feel would give anyone the blues. How my position is altered. No country, no home, no profession, and alas: to think the fondest wish of my heart, i.e., to marry, must be abandoned. Oh! my darling Pattie, how can I give thee up?!!
And the day after that—August 10 now, the ship reeling to windward, east by north, in another squall, under all plain sail:
What is to keep them from starving I cannot imagine. And my poor dear father, what will be his fate? I dread to dwell upon it but I am prepared to hear the worst. I fear that they will deal but harshly.
Whittle could not bring himself to write down what he meant by “harshly,” but his fear, clearly, was that his father, the commodore and director of the naval defense of New Orleans, would be hanged as a traitor. Or that he had already been hanged. And that the survivors in the family would be turned out to starve.
Whittle’s dark imagination, vivid enough when applied to his family, could never have embraced the scope of devastation on the continent beyond the horizon on Shenandoah’s port side. An estimated 200,000 men, Union and Confederate, had been killed in action during the war—but that was only the start of it. More than 64,000 would eventually die of their wounds. The greatest killer of all, disease, claimed an additional 400,000 lives. Most of the diseases had germinated in the miasma of poor sanitation: diarrhea, which claimed 35,000; typhoid, which killed 29,000; and dysentery, responsible for another 9,500 slow, agonizing deaths as well as measles, mumps, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, and the lethal effects of drinking from streams where dead bodies lay. All these and other horrors—24,000 died in prison—contributed to the toll: over 600,000 dead.
Tacking to southward on Friday, August 11, latitude 6.19 north, longitude 107.45 west, winds southward variable, thermometer 80 to 77, cooling down. Then a tack eastward. Then a tack to the southward and westward. Then to the southward and eastward. “We are literally beating to the southward when we should have the northeast trades. These have entirely failed us. We are all wonderfully blue. All will be adrift as soon as we get home.”
And so “home” remained alive as a concept in Conway Whittle’s consciousness. But then, so did loss: “adrift” meant nothing if not “without mooring.” Homelessness.
Some variety—if only a change in the type of setback—at last on Monday, August 14: “Started to get up steam but broke one of the screws on a guide rod and had to delay until 8:20 p.m. for repairs.”
Another day of tacking west by southwest, then a 90-degree right turn, an enormous dogleg the next day, under steam. A goal had formed, though hazy enough to qualify as fantasy: “to get safely to some neutral port without capture.” But two days later, Conway Whittle had essentially lost all interest in his safety, his future: “I would just as willingly die as live.”
Shenandoah accomplished 146 miles on August 17, traveling by steam, trusting the repaired screw, and crossed the equator sometime during the morning watch. No one celebrated anything this time. But Whittle made a faintly optimistic note of the event. “Again we are in the southern hemisphere and its numerous stars are brightly lighting our weary way. The Southern Cross, Antares, and the Sickle are looking brightly on us.” The Southern Cross—one of the most vivid constellations that a sailor could wish for, perfectly proportioned, commanded a prominent swatch of the night sky. Many seamen, looking at it, had been seized with the impression that it was beckoning them. But Whittle, God-obsessed though he now was, seemed unable to respond to its transcendent glow: “Oh, how I wish we were just going in the Northern Hemisphere on the Atlantic side. All will be well if God so wills it. Trust in Him.”
And there, finally, thirteen days after meeting Barracouta, Whittle had revealed a course. Or, if not a course, a goal: the Atlantic, “North of the Line.”
Shenandoah was now about a week into her southwest course, a deviation of perhaps 100 degrees from the due-south trajectory she had been following. Strong winds had returned at last, and Waddell ordered the topsails unfurled and the steam shut down. She raced 225 miles on the nineteenth; but a key factor in her increased speed became a matter of concern as well. “Our ship is getting light and we have to watch her carefully,” Whittle wrote. In the months since leaving Melbourne, Shenandoah’s coal supply had dwindled—and, for that matter, the food supply as well: “our diet is regularly slim, regularly salt, and I would be ashamed to look a salted pig or cow in the face.” A lighter ship was a less stable ship. The only significant ballast that remained—the cast-iron cannons—threatened to roll about with the seas, adding to the instability.
And yet she sped on, though to what destiny none aboard knew. She still headed south by west, and she still moved more toward Australia than Africa. She made 188 miles the next day, paymaster Breedlove Smith’s twenty-fourth birthday. (“We celebrated it without any extra show.”) and 205 the day afterward; then 214, then 227, then 214 again. By August 24, Lieutenant Chew’s twenty-fourth birthday (again, noted without fanfare), she had reached latitude 22.26 south, longitude 127.15 west: the middle of the South Pacific. Shenandoah and her crew of youthful Rebels were now only a few hundred miles from Pitcairn Island, a spot any mariner afloat that day could well recognize. For Pitcairn Island was the destination of Fletcher Christian, leader of the most famous mutiny of all time. Shenandoah was probably less than a day’s sail from the resting place of HMS Bounty.
“We are, I expect, the youngest set of officers whoever went to sea,” Whittle reflected dully that evening. “The oldest member of our mess (Dr. Lining) is but 31 and the others range from 28 to 21. There are but four older than I and I am not 26.”
Far from Shenandoah’s lonely location, and unbeknownst to her crew, America had commenced an uncertain voyage of her own: the rough, fraught passage toward a healing that would tack just as fitfully, searching for its own strong winds, for more than a century to come. On August 17, Clara Barton, the “angel” of dead and wounded Union men and founder of the American Red Cross, raised a flag over the newly consecrated Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia, on the grounds of the largest and most hideous of all Civil War prison camps. Nearly one-third of the 45,000 Federals imprisoned there had died of starvation, disease, exposure, and their own wounds since the camp opened in early 1864. In Washington, President Andrew Johnson ordered that all charges of treason against former Confederate generals and politicians be dropped. The brutal commander of Andersonville, Captain Henry Wirz, was among the exceptions; he was hanged at the same Washington gallows as those accused of plotting Lincoln’s assassination.
The failed healing—the horrors—of Reconstruction lay ahead.
Still hunting the trades—and a purpose—on August 23, Shenandoah found herself far out in the central Pacific, more than 3,000 miles west of the South American coast and her ideal trajectory. (But then, what meaning could “ideal” have, absent a destination?) She had all that day continued to hold a course that could indicate Australia: south by west. But toward evening she began to hook southward again, and the winds, like an omen of her fate, remained swirling, capricious, “baffling.” They crossed the Tropic of Capricorn on August 24, and their westering ended. They were now some 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile. The next day they would make their final turn east.
August ended with the raider at latitude 19.18 south, longitude 120.02 west. The nearest land would be Easter Island. Whittle was not sorry to see the calendar turn: “Looking at what I have gone threw [sic] during the month, I will always recall it as the most trying time of my life.”
September began with plunging temperatures, and shipboard morale headed in the same direction. Whittle sent a seaman named Vanavery to the masthead for nine hours for insolence, without food or water. “When he came down he was like a lamb. A good thrashing would do him great good.”
Seamen Peter Raymond and Thomas Evans occupied the place of honor the following day, for fighting. Whittle may have had things other than meteorology in mind when he scrawled, “It is getting cold.”
The inner weather worsened as well. “I am weary, weary, weary,” Whittle wrote on September 6, more than 1,000 miles from Cape Horn. “No language can express my brokenhearted feelings.”
Days of desultory winds had pushed them slowly southeastward and out of the South Pacific Basin into the waters west of the Horn—“into the thoroughfare,” as Whittle called it. This was the east-west trade route for merchantmen headed toward the Drake Passage, the tortuous 400-mile stretch between Antarctica and Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America, where the Atlantic and the Pacific collide. The waters ahead were among the most violent in the world.
The strong winds so maddeningly absent during Shenandoah’s mournful creep southward seemed to appear at last as they approached the tip of South America. For five uninterrupted days there had been favorable weather with near-perfect winds: she covered over 262 miles on the ninth of September, her record for the cruise. The almost uncanny conditions continued to improve, and on September 11, roughly where the Pacific Ocean starts to funnel down into the mouth of Drake Passage, Whittle chose to write, with prescience:
Ship under all sail. Crossed the Royal Yard. Here when we have been led to believe that we might expect the most terrible weather, we are having as fine weather as I ever want to see. It is a little odd that it is nothing. I suppose the weather off the pitch of Cape Horn will make up for this. Nous verons. [‘We will see.’]
And so they did see.
Surprisingly, during the actual passage under Cape Horn itself, the weather still remained virtually perfect. That afternoon, however, and true to their reputation, the winds picked up, but still the skies remained clear. On the twelfth, the crew spotted their first sail since Barracouta had crossed their path with the bad news. They had been out of touch with humanity for forty-two days, while covering 6,000 miles. “Kept in company,” Whittle wrote. Here was a different motive for pursuing a stranger: loneliness.
It was no good. The stranger proved—perish the thought!—faster. On the following day, she hoisted an English flag, “& signalized, but we did not reply. She walked right away from us most shamefully. Got up the port fore topmast studding sail but she still beat us.”
Shenandoah had not “signalized” because she really did not want to get too close to any ship, even for the sake of human contact. She was incognito now, and she struggled along like a furtive shadow-creature, head down, features concealed. And, as feared, the weather worsened.
“Beautifully clear weather, but blowing like scissors with a heavy sea…I suppose we will have it heavy.” Here, probably, was one of the laconic Whittle’s most understated predictions.
The gale that finally smashed at her would last nearly six days.
The cyclonic winds whipsawed her, now coming down from the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, now churning up from the South Shetland Islands, off the tip of Antarctica. The winds brought heavy seas from the north that seemed intent on pushing the ship back, in a savage, nature-spawned reprise of the late war. At moments Shenandoah seemed once again to be trapped in an endless gale.
The crew fought to maintain control night and day as mountainous seas and a powerful northerly wind pushed her far off course to the eastward. By the fifth night of the storm, Bulloch and Whittle, indeed all the men, worried about being blown into the notorious Shag Rock in the dark. That danger passed, but hundreds of miles of rocks lay in their path, an unnerving archipelago starting with the South Shetlands and the South Orkneys.
It was a storm that made men think about one single thing: their own mortality. And it was about this storm that Waddell later expressed a memory of wishing that the gale would take both the Shenandoah and himself beneath its waves and end their torment.
An inner desolation, even darker and colder than the moonless South Atlantic, took hold of the captain, and his thoughts turned toward the welcoming peace of oblivion:
The struggles of our ship were but typical of the struggles that filled our breasts upon learning that we were alone on that friendless deep without a home or country, our little crew all that were left of the thousands who had sworn to defend that country or die with her, and there were moments when we would have deemed that a friendly gale which would have buried our sorrowful hearts and the beautiful Shenandoah in those dark waters.