18

By September 19, the gale was behind them. But not the icebergs. Even larger than many of the rocks, the bergs now demanded a reckoning.

“Today our enemy, ice, made its appearance,” Whittle wrote on September 20. “At first we saw a small piece and then several large icebergs, some of which were very close. Heavy fog occasionally. Doubled the watch to look out for the ice.” The ice was not hard to spot: some of the bergs rose to heights of 300 feet, and the exraider tiptoed gingerly among them. The great frozen masses inspired Captain Waddell to take a plunge, once more, into the unfamiliar waters of lyricism. “Day after day icebergs and savage blocks of ice came near us,” he wrote in his memoirs. “We were without a moon to shed her cheerful light upon our desolate path. Some of the icebergs were castellated and resembled fortifications with sentinels on guard, but although the nights were dark we escaped injury.”³⁵

And so Shenandoah was spared a reprise of her Arctic misadventures: she avoided contact with these monsters. By Friday, September 21, Whittle’s log showed a new dominant course: north. In fact the course would slant to the northeast; but with the turning of the Horn, Shenandoah and her crew now entered their endgame. For better or for worse, after nearly a year of conquest, on a cruise without equal in the history of the world’s navies, they were headed back to where they’d started. Toward a new world, or the next world.

When the gale-force winds finally calmed, they had been pushed far southeastward, not north. With lookouts aloft for sails and ice, Shenandoah finally swung out into the far South Atlantic, clearing the unforgiving Scotia Sea and seeking waters off the main trade routes.

At roughly the same time, the heavily armed Yankee cruiser USS Wachusett left Rio on an intersecting course with Shenandoah. Her mission: find and capture or sink the hated raider. She cruised eastward, searching the South Atlantic for weeks but reached Capetown without success. Shenandoah’s luck would hold. Wachusett passed within a few dozen miles of her prey, but failed to sight her.

Meanwhile, the restless crew was again wondering: north toward where? At this point, Shenandoah could plausibly be sailing for either Cape Town or Liverpool. But no one save the captain knew which.

Waddell’s air of secrecy strained shipboard tensions, already at crisis levels. Anger, anxiety, and paranoia, even black despair, had infected the 132 officers and crewmen since the encounter with Barracouta. The raiders now had sailed 40,000 miles since leaving Deserta nearly a year earlier, and every mile now weighed on them. Laughter had grown extinct. Small annoyances exploded into grim confrontations, even fistfights. Factions formed, one of them in favor of heading for Cape Town (the “Longitudes”); the other (the “Latitudes”) advocating for Liverpool. As of September 26, Shenandoah remained on a course that still left her captain time to choose either.

No relief from the fraught atmosphere came from their commanding officer. Here was the figure most responsible for demonstrating the ideals of discipline and morale. This captain was not up to it. Scowling, stalking the decks in imperious silence, erupting suddenly into bewildering tirades and issuing punitive commands, James Iredell Waddell could not contain his capacity for making matters worse.

Discovering Irvine Bulloch and the assistant surgeon Charles E. Lining engaged in conversation near the propeller house, James Waddell branded both of them—for reasons unclear—“a couple of croakers.”³⁶ Worse was shortly to come. Informed that the exhausted Lieutenant Dabney Scales had overslept one morning, the thickset captain flew into a rage. He summoned Scales and lashed out at him for willfully violating the rules of the ship. This marked at least the second time that Waddell had singled out Scales for abuse: in the midst of the terrible mid-December gale, he’d relieved Scales and Francis Chew of their watches, declaring them incompetent, as an incredulous Whittle had looked on in private disgust.

Scales, veteran of the same Yankee prison that had held Whittle, chose the high road here; he gracefully pleaded guilty and tried to convince Waddell that he’d had no disrespectful intent. This only served to incense Waddell further: he threatened to “give Scales passage to the nearest port.”³⁷

Waddell was only beginning. A few hours afterward, his self-possession veering once again out of control, he summoned the young midshipman John Thompson Mason and told him he’d assigned the fourth watch to his own clerk, Mr. Blacker, “and that if [midshipman Oris] Browne and myself had any objections to make he would relieve us from duty.”³⁸ This was utter nonsense, a tacit slander against the experienced midshipman’s competence. Mason held his composure and acceded to the move. The master’s mate, Cornelius Hunt, was more candid. Hunt did not want to share a watch with Blacker, an administrative officer untrained in naval duties, and told Waddell so. Waddell banished him from duty. That night, clearly in the grip of his monomania, the captain took the watch himself.

Scales and Hunt were restored to duty a few days later. But the raging Waddell remained a loose cannon. His next discharge was directed at none other than Sidney Smith Lee Jr.—the nephew of the Confederacy’s vanquished godhead. Charles Lining was among the witnesses. “Old Lee got into trouble this morning for the first time since he has been in the navy,” Lining recorded with acid humor, using “Old” as a term of affection for his comrade. “It riles the old fellow a good deal.” Lee’s crime involved taking a few puffs of his pipe during his morning watch. Conway Whittle observed him and reported the infraction to the Captain. Waddell summoned Lee—Waddell was doing a lot of summoning these days—and tried to make him promise not to do such a thing again. Lee refused, and was stripped of duty. “I think that Lee is perfectly right in not letting any promises be extorted from him,” opined Lining.³⁹

It was Waddell’s own bumbling that halted this particular spree. “The Captain put his foot in it again,” was the way Lining characterized it.⁴⁰ Still in a manic mood the day after his crackdown on Lee, he ordered all the watch officers to his cabin and explained to them that because of Lee’s insubordination and removal, everyone’s duty time would have to be increased. Whatever reaction he was hoping for, he did not get it. Instead, Lieutenant Grimball spoke up, saying that he himself had smoked while on watch. Then Scales—perhaps savoring the chance to repay his tormentor—joined in: he’d smoked as well. Waddell, in Lining’s memory, was speechless. He threw the junior officers out of the cabin, wrote out a meaningless command restating his prohibition, and restored Lee to his post.⁴¹

Waddell’s shortsighted petulance defied comprehension. No one more than he should have recognized the blatant perils implied by this crisis of unity, and done everything in his power to heal them. He certainly could not count on deep-seated bonds of nationality to hold the Shenandoah crew together, no allegiance to common purpose. She was a ship of strangers, of tough seamen-of-fortune who’d been scavenged—enticed to ship—from this conquered whaler or that. Men from all over the world, speaking all languages, each of them spurred by his own motives, his own degree of commitment to the ship’s mission. Now, their mission abolished, death by hanging a distinct prospect for one and all, what was to prevent these hard, tough, defeated men from turning against Shenandoah and her captain? What were the guarantees against mutiny? Only loyalty, and Captain Waddell seemed intent on destroying anything left of that.

Conway Whittle’s logbooks are silent on the captain’s self-inflicted predicament. Despite having sparked the affair by reporting Lee in the first place, Whittle confined his observations during all this turbulence largely to remarks about the weather. Months, even weeks earlier, he would have jotted down and pored over every detail of Waddell’s mismanagement of his command, of the petitions, of the dissension. But now he resisted such temptations. Larger obligations loomed. Everything had changed. The mission as he had understood it—civilization, as he had understood it—these no longer obtained. The known universe had shrunk to Shenandoah and her crew. With all else lost, these must survive. Survival would depend on the crew’s unity, its sense of common cause. To that end, an officer must display rationality, and self-discipline must prevail over any other impulse. Thus, as Waddell grew ever more hysterical, Whittle grew ever more calm. He had, in effect, launched into his own modest version of the Reconstruction.

Few of his comrades seemed to notice this at first, or care. The “Longitudes” and the “Latitudes” grew ever more hardened in their opinions as the ship churned on.

By Wednesday, September 27, Shenandoah was nearing another point of decision. Still barely below the southern tip of Africa at latitude 41.14 south, longitude 24.40 west, she was drawing parallel with Cape Town, now some 2,000 miles away. Her course over the next twenty-four hours would tell the officers and crew all they needed to know. Isolated, Waddell shared nothing.

On that night the “Longitudes” could stand the suspense no longer. Seventy-seven of them, a little more than half the souls on board, signed a 6,000-word petition urging the captain to sail for Cape Town. Six officers were among the signers, effectively announcing their independence from their commander. The highest-ranking was Francis Chew, the fourth-ranking lieutenant behind Lee, Grimball, and Whittle. The other signatories were the sailing master, Irvine Bulloch; the ship’s surgeon, Charles Lining; the chief engineer, Matthew O’Brien; the paymaster, Breedlove Smith; and midshipman Oris A. Browne. Stressing the “anxiety and regret” with which the crewmen regarded their prospects, the letter went on:

So long as we had a country and a Government to support and sustain it was done cheerfully…so long as there was an object to be gained that object was sought for by none more eagerly than ourselves…. Now we respectfully submit, all these motives for exertion are gone.

The document went on to argue essentially that the horrors of capture were too great for Shenandoah to risk the long—over 8,000 miles—northward “gantlet” to England. The gothic rumors, and in certain cases the vivid memories, of the Union prison camps filled these formerly intrepid combatants with dread.

It is a well-known fact that during the war, with threats of retaliation sounding in their ears, the United States authorities frequently, almost generally, treated our prisoners with great rigor and severity. How much more will be the case now that the war has been concluded in the present manner?

What was to be gained by sailing on to England, the petition asked, and what would not be gained “by proceeding there in some neutral vessel from a neutral port?” It cited the prospects of terrible weather—they would be sailing directly into the North Atlantic’s fall hurricane season—and the instability of a ship whose weight had been depleted along with the stores of coal and fuel. It ended with rhetorical flourishes of good intentions and respect.

Waddell received the letter the following morning. He glanced at it, folded it up, and ignored its contents.

Shenandoah had now passed the optimal point of a course change. Her destination—England—was clear, yet still unannounced.

Hours later, Waddell received a second petition. This one was shorter, blunter, and more overtly demanding. The identity of its author signaled to Waddell that his adversaries extended virtually into his cabin: it was written by his clerk Blacker, who personally thrust it toward him. It bore ten signatures, all by noncommissioned officers. Blacker remained boldly in Waddell’s presence, obliging the captain to read it while he watched.

It greeted the captain peremptorily as “Sir:” and declared, after the obligatory opening pleasantries: “The ship has now arrived at a position where we feel the urgent necessity of impressing you with our feelings as to the destination.” The petition restated some of its predecessor’s arguments in favor of Cape Town, and laid out new ones with clipped precision.

The document pointed to the heavy volume of mail and merchandise steamers passing between the South African port and the British Isles, which would afford the men plenty of transportation chances; the proximity of Cape Town (about fourteen days’ sailing, compared to over forty days to England). Then it got down to brass tacks, forcefully restating the central theme of the first petition: the pervasive horror of capture.

[A]s this ship has gained for herself great notoriety, we may readily conclude that ships are already on the lookout for us on the usual route…. We can not reasonably expect any good treatment if we fall into the hands of the U.S. government. Their treatment of prisoners already has sufficiently shown how we will be dealt with, and as there are several paroled prisoners on board [ from Yankee camps] it will go doubly hard with them.⁴²

The captain finally grasped the glaring truth: the ship was close to insurrection, and he could no longer afford to wave away the signs. He sputtered a painfully impotent threat to Blacker: “I will be captain, sir, or die on this deck.” But even Waddell could see that his authority was critically weakened. He had chosen to stand aloof while the crew split into factions, and now he was reaping the whirlwind.

Soon to come were the petitions arguing for England. The first of these virtually completed a sweep of the officers and midshipmen. It contained the names of Lieutenant Grimball, the highest-ranking lieutenant behind Whittle; Lee, next in rank to Grimball; Scales, the fifth lieutenant; Frederick McNulty, the assistant surgeon; and the midshipman Mason, whom Waddell had needlessly tried to intimidate in the watch-shuffling incident. The second represented seventy petty officers and seamen who, satisfied that the ship’s course was to their liking, offered oily flattery and assurances of “complete reliance and trust in whatever it should please you to do.”⁴³

The crisis had exposed James Waddell—in case anyone remained in doubt—as a weak man, if not a coward. (His prewar naval credentials made a strong argument against physical cowardice.) In the traumatic wake of the two Cape Town petitions, he had summoned—once again!—a small circle of officers: Chew, Grimball, Scales, Lee, and Whittle. To these men, Waddell finally made a clean breast of his choice for a port: Liverpool. But these petitions—they had cast things in a different light. Waddell’s new decision was to let these officers decide.

In Waddell’s travesty of leadership lay a heaven-sent opportunity for Conway Whittle, should he want it: the chance to seize control of the ship from its faltering commander, restore stability, and bring Shenandoah to port as a hero.

Nothing was farther from his mind.

Whittle was the only officer who had signed no petitions. Though he privately favored Cape Town as the logical destination, the better angels of his nature expressed themselves in his logbook entry for Friday, September 29. This was the day, as it happened, that Shenandoah crossed her outward-bound track of November 29, 1864—eleven months, 45,000 miles, and the girth of a planet behind them. Whittle wrote:

The minds of a good many who were in favor of going to Cape Town seem very little quieted. There is a position approaching panic among them which I consider very disgraceful and imperious. Some look as though they had already been hung. In the name of honor, truth and propriety let us support the Captain. Even if we are caught and hung, why are we not men? Cannot we stand our fate like men, a fate which unjust tho’ it would be, has been stood and met by men of all countries. No! let us throw aside this childishness, and trusting in God, stand like men to brave all consequences of our participation in the struggle now ended by Divine will, for all that is dear to man. God has afflicted us for some just & holy cause; by his will alone can even a sparrow fall. If we are captured, which is most improbable, it will be by his will; trust in him and him alone!!!

Noting the seventy-seven signatures in favor of sailing to England, and the confidence the writers expressed in Waddell, Whittle continued:

Tho’ I differed with him for reasons well known to all, and thoroughly canvassed in my own mind, he has my unbounded support. I am willing to run any risk that he may incur.

Papers, petitions, &c., &c., are not my forte as Executive Officer. I will have nothing to do with them for he has my support in everything, except one, & that would be any attempt to go to a Yankee port.

October washed in on a dark wave. Shenandoah was making superb time under sail—well over 200 miles a day—yet she crackled with tension; hostility. Men found reasons to insult one another, take grievance, spread rumor. Waddell had made a feeble attempt at festivity when the ship recrossed her outbound route; he’d sent champagne and a note of congratulations⁴⁴ to the officers’ wardroom. When it arrived, three of the officers walked out. John Minor started a rumor that Cornelius Hunt had hoarded several hundred dollars found on a Yankee whaler. Men called one another names, nursed grudges and suspicions, stole things from one another; somebody lifted sailmaker Alcott’s opera glasses. The ship had now gone more than five months without being resupplied. Food and water were beginning to run low.

Whittle, fighting to maintain his officer’s stoic dignity, was no less immune to the prevailing dark cloud than anyone. He processed the growing dread not through anger, but through grief. His journal fairly palpitated with laments for Pattie, whom he had by now given up as lost. “Oh! How awful it is that there seems to be no prospect of my ever being able to ask her to be mine. When I asked before I had a profession to support us, but how changed!…Oh! how sad & heartbreaking to give up all hope of her being mine.” By October 5, he was imagining his father and brother and sisters lying in pools of their own gore. “My dear father, have they bathed his silvery locks with blood; my dear brother, have they slain my dear sisters and brothers…these thoughts harrow my brain.”

Worse and more immediate burdens awaited him.

He marked October 8 sadly: “One year ago today, I sailed in this ship from London. It has been a year of constant anxiety and labor from then till now. And to have such a sad, inglorious, pitiable & miserable end is truly heartbreaking.” No other Rebel had been aboard the ship longer than William Conway Whittle.

Three days later, Shenandoah crossed the equator for a fourth time. Hardly anybody took notice. Of more interest were the three cases of scurvy that erupted.

On Tuesday, October 10, as Shenandoah cut through the tricky currents of the Brazilian Basin, the miniature civil war raging around the raider’s decks at last swept Conway Whittle into its maw. The crisis began as a routine case of drunkenness. The hard-drinking and hot-tempered surgeon McNulty, the Irishman who had decked “Father Neptune” for hazing him, and who had triggered the hotel brawl in Melbourne, walked around now in a stupor, or sat slumped; he could no longer perform a doctor’s duties. Worse, his drunkenness brought out his dark side.

Dr. McNulty got on one of his periodic drunks, and was so abusive to some, that he was reported to me. I, by order of the Captain, ordered him to confine himself to his quarters. He is a poor unfortunate, whom I greatly pity on account of his weakness.

This entry made no mention of what had really happened: Whittle had interrupted the surgeon’s liquor-fueled tirade and escorted—perhaps carried—the doctor to his cabin as other crewmen looked on. There he relayed Waddell’s order to stay put. The half-stupefied McNulty drew a pistol on the lieutenant and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t rescind the order. Whittle, risking his life, snatched the gun away and carried it to Waddell, along with a brief summary of what had happened. He assumed that the incident was over and would be forgotten—a routine case of a drunken seaman lashing out.

It wasn’t over. The next morning McNulty, sober now, sought out Waddell and insisted that he had not been drunk; his abusiveness to his fellow crewmen had been in defense of the captain—whom they had disparaged—and as for the pistol, he’d produced it only with the intention of showing it to the lieutenant. Whittle’s version of the story? Why, it was nothing but cruelty!

McNulty was lying, bald-faced, on all counts. Conway Whittle disliked lying; he abhorred the surgeon’s implication that he himself was a liar, and he certainly had no intention of seeing his good name besmirched in the ship’s record because McNulty wanted to absolve himself. Whittle acted at once, but carefully. He checked with two witnesses who affirmed that McNulty had been intoxicated. Then, with Dabney Scales in tow as a witness, Whittle knocked on McNulty’s cabin door.

I asked him if he intended to deny my report. He said, “All I say, Sir, is that I was not drunk.” I asked him if he was not intoxicated, he said he was.

This was clear insolence: McNulty, confident that Waddell was now safely on his side, was toying with Whittle, mincing words to provoke his superior, daring the lieutenant to call him on the double-talk—or call him a liar. McNulty was an expert at goading people.

I asked him why he did not tell the Capt. so [that he was intoxicated], instead of leading him to believe that my report was false, he simply said, “Well, didn’t I?” I replied no.

Here things began to escalate. Whittle grilled McNulty on whether he’d actually just drawn the pistol “to show me,” as McNulty had also told the Captain. McNulty said that was also true. Whittle, being the man the gun was pointed at when he took it away, took the taunting no longer, but he took the bait.

I said that he did not. He asked, “How do you know?” I replied that I was certain of it and that I believe furthermore that he knew that he did not. He said, “Well, Sir, when we get on shore there is a way to settle this thing.” I said yes, and that at any time or place I should be ready to do so. He said, “Well, then, do you waive [the class privileges of your superior rank]?” “Yes, Sir,” I replied, “I waive everything.”

The “way to settle this thing,” of course, was via code duello: the duel. Dueling was one of the darker rituals of Whittle’s beloved Southern culture. With its roots in medieval concepts of manhood, its rules codified and recodified over the centuries (the ten rules of “code duello” were established by an Italian in 1595), dueling fit perfectly with the Southern embrace of chivalry. Gentlemen whose honor had been insulted did not cower; they did not run—nor did they call on friends or relatives to back them up in taking vengeance. Instead they sought “satisfaction” according to the elegant, lethal rules of code duello: the formal challenge, usually delivered by a “second”; the meticulous selection of weapons, often ornate pistols handcrafted for just this purpose; the rendezvous at the appointed site—usually a remote field, and usually at dawn; the elaborate courtesies of speech and gesture that preceded the bloodletting.

Conway Whittle had just completed a historic around-the-world mission on behalf of the Southern nation that he venerated. He had left behind—perhaps forever—a young woman he’d loved. He had survived epic storms, Yankee intrigue at Melbourne, and the irrational wrath of his own commanding officer. He had conducted himself with chivalric restraint and perfect decorum in dealing with hundreds of hated Yankee prisoners, including wives and children, who had fallen prey to Shenandoah.

He was nearly at the voyage’s end. And now, having acted bravely and out of recognition of his duty, Conway Whittle faced the prospect of death—at the hands of a fellow Southerner, under rules of honor that were sacred to his beloved nation.

A further, crowning irony lay in wait for Whittle: the bearer of the formal challenge from McNulty, the “second” chosen by the alcoholic surgeon, was to be none other than Sidney Smith Lee.