19

Dr. McNulty’s written challenge, worded in the absurd, self-regarding gentilities required by code duello, arrived at Whittle’s cabin the following morning. The bearer, as rumored, was Lieutenant Sidney Smith Lee, “who is the only man in the mess with whom I am not on good terms,” Whittle noted. “I demand an explanation,” McNulty’s letter began, and progressed through the prim suggestion that “should the demand appear extravagant, such other satisfaction as is looked for between gentlemen is expected at your earliest convenience.”

Conway Whittle played his role in the macabre little pageant with dutiful resignation. He consulted Dabney Scales, whose Mississippi roots presumably qualified him as an expert on the subject, to find out “if it were possible to settle this thing on shipboard.” Scales said no. Whittle then sought out McNulty’s fellow surgeon, Charles Lining, “and asked him to be my friend [second].”

He handed Dr. Lining a written reply for Lining to deliver to McNulty, and he recorded its exact language in his log:

Sir,

I have to acknowledge receipt of your note…. My language to you last evening…explained itself. Under the circumstances I have but to accede to your demand for such satisfaction as you desire. As the ship is not a place where such a thing can be settled, as soon as we get on shore, full satisfaction will be given you.

They would meet on some “field of honor”—if they met at all. Whittle’s phrasing of his request to Lining—to be his “friend” rather than his “second,” as code duello would prescribe—was both subtle and shrewd. He’d provided Dr. Lining a title crucially different from that of “second.” Given that solving matters of misunderstanding by mortal combat was increasingly frowned upon, this “softer” term allowed the principals to keep the references to an actual duel to the death somewhat ambiguous.

There was poignancy, as well, in Whittle’s naming Dr. Lining a “friend.” Friends had been few and far between for the lieutenant on this voyage. Distance and impartiality were part of the price he paid for his rank as executive officer of the ship.

Nor did Whittle expect to return home to find any friends, relatives, his sweetheart Pattie, or any intact social structure, for that matter. Isolation, disjunction from the world, and the prospect of the gallows—these were Conway Whittle’s portion in the year 1865. In this context, fighting a duel was only one in an endless series of dismal obligations. It was his duty. He was honor-bound. He would face his responsibility—but he would face it with a “friend,” rather than an accomplice, at his side.

In his journal on the night of October 12, Whittle was typically soul-searching, and typically forbearing of his adversary:

Thus ends, for the present, this disagreeable affair. It must come off when we get on shore. I have always been opposed to dueling but I have given an insult…. I must give him satisfaction and will meet him. I may have been wrong in not keeping my opinion that he had lied to myself, but I could not do it….

Whittle, who had taken several pages to detail the events of the preceding two days, as the crisis unfolded, made only a cursory, two-line entry—recording their course and describing the weather—for the following day, Friday the thirteenth: “It is very hot.”

On the afternoon of the fourteenth, their reliable winds vanished entirely and the Shenandoah fell becalmed under clear blue skies. Now only a few miles north of the equator, and almost precisely halfway between Africa and South America, they were at the crossroads of the Atlantic Ocean’s two vast maritime highways. They were sitting ducks. Reluctantly they began to fire the boiler and make steam. However, it was not a Yankee cruiser they had to fear, but the strange pinwheeling storms in what is now known as the equatorial countercurrent, where conditions of sea and sky will change in a matter of moments from dead calm to something decidedly different.

As the first wisps of Shenandoah’s smoke climbed straight up from the stack, the motionless ship swayed smoothly, almost imperceptibly, on the calm ocean. All eyes swept the horizon, and the few sails upon it, for signs of other smoke. Nothing, all sails slack, no smoke showing. Then, surprisingly, a light breeze sprang up from the southwest, from Brazil. It swung rapidly around to the west-northwest, from the North Atlantic. They watched the western margin of the clear, mild sea as a line of clouds rose above the far edge of the ocean and pushed toward the ship. In moments it stretched across the entire northwestern horizon. The approaching cloud deck divided the prospect into three tiers: the blue dome of heaven; a world-wide ribbon of pastel gray hues; and the turquoise green of the tropical Atlantic.

Below the dark gray top half of the storm wall, the men could see a much lighter band of gray rain that reached from the bottom of the clouds to the surface of the sea. The storm front was growing higher by the moment, and moving toward the ship far faster than Shenandoah’s top speed. The crew, watching in the bright sunlight, knew that soon it would be raining in torrents. And as the wall of water—for it was more like being submerged than being rained on—moved inexorably from the bow to the wheelhouse, Shenandoah was drenched by an immense downpour, and the sunlight vanished.

In one way the storm was a godsend: the ship was light on potable water. Whittle had already taken action. He’d called out the crew to rig clean canvas sailcloth as catch-sheets. Stretched into funnels to form chutes, the cloth was used to direct as much of the fresh rainwater as possible into the ship’s water casks.

“Slow to start, slow to end,” the old weather-watcher’s rule of thumb, applied here in the reverse. This storm struck with the immediacy of a slap to the face. In less than fourteen hours the temperature of the air would rise more than forty degrees, up to one hundred twenty by the following afternoon, and the storm would vanish by morning, leaving the air once more as balmy as the tropics.

It was this enormous exchange of energy between the two colliding fronts that Shenandoah still had to traverse. When the two oceanic walls finally intersected that night in the dark, they almost sank the CSS Shenandoah.

At midnight Whittle was awakened by frantic screaming. It was Lieutenant Chew, who was on watch as officer of the deck. Whittle heard the junior lieutenant shouting orders to re-rig the ship’s sails, orders Whittle knew immediately were wrong. He jumped on deck in the driving rain, headed for the wheelhouse.

Unexpectedly the storm had pivoted almost 120 degrees and was now assaulting the ship from the northeast. Instead of having the wind in their sails, they suddenly had a gale in their faces. Chew, astonished, and even after this many months at sea still inexperienced, was yelling orders that were dangerously wrongheaded, given the lashing winds and high seas: to “hand down the Topmast studding sail jacks…and let go the Royal & Topgallant halyards.”

Chew had called for misadjustment in the sails. Whittle saw that as he ran, his nightclothes now soaked through. The wind had come around from port and was blowing in from starboard; worse, it was shifting direction capriciously. Chew’s adjustments had never caught up with the wind. The gale was trapping Shenandoah with her sails rigged to the left when they should have been set for the right, and then vice versa. The crisis quickly escalated: the wrong sides of the out-of-control sails filled with wind; and the gale, blasting into Shenandoah’s prow, began shredding her rigging, forcing her backwards in the turbulent ocean—backwards against her rudder. Backwards toward disaster.

Conway Whittle seized command just as the gale was starting to take control.

“I took the deck,” his matter-of-fact notes read, “shortened sail, keeping the ship off before the wind, and then brought by. The squall was very fresh & blew our miz. royal away, & carried away the m’n royal studding sail boom.” Those terse words barely hinted at Whittle’s rapid strokes of seamanship. Within moments he had relieved Chew (a fact his notes imply but do not mention); got the crew activated in purposeful sail-setting; taken the helm and changed the direction of the rudder, probably saving it from snapping apart; and, in sum, kept the vessel upright. “I was as wet as a drowned rat,” he allowed, “and caught cold. I never saw it rain so in all my life.”

His quick thinking and decisive action may have saved the lives of everyone on board. Including the life of Dr. Frederich J. McNulty.

Whittle spent the following day, Sunday, in his room, reading.

With the passage of the front, the doldrums then set in again: temperatures of more than 100 degrees, mild winds giving way to almost perfect calm. The ship was nearly immobilized by currents: the north equatorial current and the equatorial countercurrent, colliding. Everyone prayed for the trade winds, as they had on the voyage south along the American continent. On the sixteenth, someone calculated the total distance Shenandoah had run: 39,282 knots, or more than 44,000 miles.

Two days after that, Whittle made a deeply layered sentimental entry in his log:

This with all of us, and particularly myself, an important anniversary. It is the day on which the little steamer “Laurel” and this ship met at Madeira a year ago. The day on which we took on board our battery, stores & officers and, in fact the birthday of the “Shenandoah.” Since this day 12 months ago, how many changes have we gone through.

He summarized them: an initial wave of pride and rejoicing at “having an opportunity of saving our country,” followed by “the most heartbreaking despair at having no country to serve.” And then he turned to his other sustaining obsession:

To me the day is more dear in as much as it is the birthday of the dearest being on earth to me. This day twenty two years ago my darling Pattie was born.

After invoking (yet again) God’s blessing and protection on his sweetheart, with his characteristic rhythms of the Anglican prayer book, Whittle concluded:

At dinner today, I filled my glass with port wine, and silently drank her health. Oh! May she have many happy returns of the day. Many anxious thoughts has she had for me, for she loves me most dearly. And only to think that if the Yankees refuse us permission to enter the country, which I think more than likely, I may never see her again. The thought almost maddens me, but her motto “hope on, hope ever” shall be mine.

“Hope on, hope ever.” The motto could easily have been Conway Whittle’s, as well.

Northward. A little wind, roasting sun. Shenandoah tacked west, out of her true course north by east, seeking trade winds, but also seeking solitude—she was now moving into seas of heavy traffic. The shoulder of Africa had for centuries attracted and dispatched uncounted merchantmen, and even in these early post-slavery years, trade was brisk. At noon on the nineteenth, less than 200 miles off Praia, the main port of the Cape Verdes, she recrossed another nautical marker: “We were almost exactly where we were one year ago…which was…the day after we took Alina, our first prize.” Whittle squinted upward at the total eclipse of the sun that afternoon, “one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw…. In the middle of it, the moon’s disk was right in the center of the sun, with a bright circle of the latter all around it.” He wondered whether his dear ones might be looking at the same sight.

North of the Cape Verde islands under moderate trades, Shenandoah encountered one ship, and then another; but neither proved to be a dreaded Yankee. The ocean surface was like glass. On the twenty-second, Whittle estimated the ship to be fifteen days out of an English port. “What will become of us after we get there, God alone can tell. For myself, I have little or no faith in the existence of honor among nations, when the honorable course may clash with interest.” He agonized again about “my little brothers, sister, and dear old father,” and prayed again for the strength of Christian resignation.

The dying was about to begin.

“Two of our men are very ill,” Whittle wrote. One of them, delirious from advanced venereal disease, his body covered with ulcers, was William Bill, sometimes known as Bill Sailor, a Kanakan from the Sandwich Islands. The other was the mysterious marine sergeant George P. Canning, who had joined the crew at Melbourne, and had been bedridden with his festering gunshot wound to the lung that he claimed to have suffered under General Polk at Shiloh. Whittle had been no more successful than anyone else at figuring out Canning’s true background. The lieutenant described Canning as “a well educated young Englishman,” and understood him to have been on the staff of General Albert Sidney Johnston. Of the two sufferers, Whittle remarked, “Oh how I pity the poor fellows, because neither is prepared to die.” The comparison to himself was unstated, but clarion-clear.

William Bill was moribund the following day, Canning not much better. The trade winds themselves were dying. Whittle calculated the ship’s distance from Charleston, South Carolina, at 2,300 miles—“We are now nearer our dear ones than we have been for a long time…. I wonder if we will get any nearer.” He made some further calculations: 112 days since the crew last had seen land, 195 since they’d been ashore (at Ascension [Ponape]) in the South Pacific; 248 days since being ashore in a civilized place; and, out of the 365-day year, a total of 330 days at sea. “That’s right ‘hefty,’” he concluded.

On the twenty-fifth, as Shenandoah plodded along under light winds, the lookouts espied a menacing shape on the horizon. Standing to the westward two points off the port, lee, bow, this ship was clearly no merchantman: “She was made out to be a brig with great drift between her masts, no mainsail, staysails, or studding sails, with royals set.”

It was obvious that the vessel had turned toward the Rebel ship. “Very soon she was on the same tack as ourselves, and standing higher than we, was crossing our bow.” She was going to intercept them, there could be no other reason for such a mid-ocean course adjustment. Officers and crew assumed the worst. They looked on with dread as the brig bore steadily down on them over a four-hour stretch.

To alter their course or to switch to steam, under these circumstances, would have the same effect as semaphoring, “WE ARE SHENANDOAH.” The “great drift between her masts” that Whittle mentioned—he did not say what lay between, but, by implication, the “drift” was wide enough to accommodate a steamer’s hoisting smokestack.

For Shenandoah to fire her boiler, risky at best, it would first require raising her own smokestack. This action would have changed Shenandoah’s profile immediately. She would no longer appear to her adversary as a harmless merchantman. Hoisting the stack would announce her warrior status. Steam was not an option.

Indeed, any visible change in Shenandoah’s course could prompt this stranger, now almost certainly a Yankee man-of-war, to launch a full-speed chase. And so the Confederate ship sailed on toward the Yankee’s intercept point with feigned indifference, while all aboard strained to contain their anxieties.

Luckily for the southerners, first contact had occurred late in the afternoon. If the disarmed Rebel fugitive could just manage to maintain her ruse until nightfall, escape became a possibility. She managed.

As soon as it was dark, we wore short around [turned off course], got up steam, steamed dead to the windward for 16 miles, and then went our course, putting out all lights. If she be a Yankee, she will be somewhat astonished tomorrow morning to find no vessel in sight…she will have a sweet time finding us, as we will remain under steam until we get a good breeze.

At first light, all eyes scanned the horizon for the brig. Gone.

A close call. How many others lay ahead, on this high-risk, open-sea scramble toward Liverpool?

William Bill died at 5:00 p.m. the next day. “He was such a sufferer that we cannot regret that he is relieved. God have mercy on his benighted soul, I pray.” A day after that, Bill was buried at sea. The sight of the Rebel naval colors—white field, with the Stars and Bars in the upper left corner—at ceremonial half-mast unleashed wrenching thoughts in Whittle:

When I saw our poor flag weeping, I could but be plunged into the depths of thought connected with it, which made me still more melancholy. Our poor downtrodden country, our weeping flag, we are as it were, the rear guard of the armies of the South.

North of the Azores by October 28; indeed, north of Boston, Shenandoah could at last shape her course on a line for Cape Clear, the southern coast of Ireland. But the ocean had one more trial for Shenandoah and her men before they sighted land. Two weeks to the day after the midnight storm that shredded her rigging, a gale struck her at noon, accompanied “by a tremendous sea, the height of which I never saw equated except off these very islands when I was in the str. Nashville in February 1862.” Perhaps Whittle was forgetting Cape Horn, or South Africa’s Cape Rollers, or the violent Christmas gale in the Indian Ocean; perhaps not. Shenandoah survived again, and they sailed on.

As much as he longed for their arrival at Liverpool, he worried at the same time that the English government would give them up to the Federals. He lapsed into French as he expressed his concern and resignation: “Nous verrons, J’espere que non mais je le croit.” [“We will see, I hope not, but I believe so.”]

The mysterious, nettlesome Sergeant Canning died at 5:30 on the thirtieth. “His death is very sad,” wrote Whittle. His next thought unconsciously spoke to the complex moral reckonings that could bedevil an officer whose defeated homeland was founded on slave labor, yet who recognized the humanity of all men. “The poor old Negro (Weeks) who waited on him, was by him terribly abused and he cursed him most terribly up to the very last. Oh! it is a terrible sight at anytime to see a soul take flight, but when you see a man die who up to his last breath is a sinner the sight is awful. Oh! God let us prepare to die.”

It was Canning’s unceasing, graceless abuse of the loyal Weeks, even as the moment of death approached, that so distressed the young lieutenant. Whittle saw the old veteran giving up his last chance for absolution, for forgiveness. That was what made him a “sinner” from his Episcopalian perspective. And it was death that awaited all of humankind. Perhaps it was a sense of being a fellow “sinner” with Canning, and a sense that his own imminent death was likely, that renewed Whittle’s constant struggle to attain Christian grace.

Canning joined Bill in the oceanic grave the next day. The Catholic burial service was read by Dr. McNulty, as Whittle noted without comment.

Nine hundred miles from Liverpool by noon November 1—about four days out from land, Whittle calculated. He was plunged in gloom, as he confessed in his log: “Some how or other, I look forward to our safe arrival in an English port with very little hope.” The feeling had only deepened on the following day: “I feel that we are men with something awful hanging over us. I do not look forward to our arrival at an English port with as much hope and good cheer as the rest. Why is this? I can’t say.” But he did say, “I fear that upon our arrival, if the Yankees were to declare a refusal to give up our persons a just cause for war, and England’s interests were opposed to a war, the English government would make a sacrifice of honor to interest.” Shenandoah’s unawareness in the Bering Sea that the war had ended, in other words, could very well count for nothing when the officers and crew were brought before a Yankee or even British court or tribunal. No innocence. No innocents. Sinners all, in the law’s eyes and perhaps God’s as well. The gallows would do Dr. McNulty’s work for him, for all of them, Dr. McNulty included. Honor and interest. Soon the mulling of it became almost too much to describe: “Of the future I will only think, without putting my thoughts on paper.”

Two hundred eighty miles out from Cape Clear by noon November 3. Two hundred ten by 8:00 p.m. Sails all around them by now. Whittle continued to brace for the worst.

One was a six topsail yards ship, with very white canvas, and every indication of her being a Yankee.

Whittle was clearly counting the miles. “We are gradually approaching the end of our journey.” As always, routine maintenance was the order of the day. He ordered the spar deck holystoned, “and it really looks very well.”

On that day, Captain Waddell commenced the payment of Shenandoah’s officers and men for their services on the mission. The coffers were woefully sparse. “Upon calculation, it is found that it would take some $30,000 to pay, [of] which we have about $4,000. This, deducting the probable cost for pilotage, etc., will get every man in the ship $1.00 for each $7.10 he has due him.” Whittle himself received $45.90, “having some $326.00 due me.” It would be the last money he’d have for a long time, he figured, “and it only grieves me to know why. I do not love money, and have no desire to be rich. All I want is enough to live on and support my darlings at home.”

The gale-force winds were long behind them now. The skies had ceased to breathe, as though the spell of Appomattox were slowly spreading its stillness around the globe. Shenandoah became a creature of the night in the final days of her voyage—hanging listless in the water by day, sails limp, her captain unwilling to draw attention via smoke from her engines. Only after sunset did the firemen belowdecks heave into the ship’s dwindling supply of coal, and make the propeller turn. She crept in this petty pace for three days.

The last entry remaining in Conway Whittle’s logbook sums up both his sense of desolation and his unquenchable determination to somehow surmount it.

“Where there is a will there is a way,” and this shall be my motto. I am sure not to starve on it.

Scarlett O’Hara, screaming out from Southern literature sixty-one years in the future, hardly put it better: “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!” Eighty-five years on, another southerner, William Faulkner, far more elegantly consecrated the hopes of the Conway Whittles of that era: “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

Doomed, enduring, defeated, willing their way, Conway Whittle and the men of Shenandoah edged toward Liverpool and whatever fate awaited them there.