20
Endgame:
She had breached the Irish Sea, home waters of the British Isles, but both England, to the east, and Ireland, to the west, remained invisible under a nighttime fog. On November 5, Shenandoah entered St. George’s Channel.
Cornelius Hunt’s log noted that Bulloch steered the ship brilliantly via chronometer and patent log. No one slept. Officers and crewmen alike scrambled about, organizing their possessions, making ready to depart the ship for a last time. Some men battled their fears of what awaited them by thinking of good things to eat on shore.
Friendships forged on board were annealed: Dabney Scales handed John Martin a drawing he’d made of Shenandoah as a memento of the voyage.
But some of the officers’ anxieties ran toward darker things. What was the true mood among this grab-bag crew? It was hard to tell, but clearly the meager pay-out of their salaries had made no one happy. “Hadn’t there been a chest of gold sovereigns aboard at one time?” They asked one another, and, “What of the money from the prize boats?” What was the extent of grudges held against Waddell? Worse, what of perceptions that in the final weeks he had risked everyone’s lives on this long dash north to England? Where did their loyalties lie, if they had loyalties, these sailors-of-fortune, these transfers from captured ships, these hardened vagabonds from the world’s nations, these brawlers, these drunks? One might have imagined a formidable core of ringleaders just by counting Conway Whittle’s punishment victims.
There was the fireman George Silvester, triced and gagged, demoted. And second midshipman Thomas Hall, accused of “scandalous conduct” and triced, gagged, and disrated; then triced again in an embrace with his fighting opponent Raymond; then triced again, for eight hours, after tormenting the Frenchman Rowe. Then Silvester again, for insolence. Then the gunner’s mate Crawford, for insolence. Then seaman James Fegan for refusing to obey orders. Then two officers and several men, for getting drunk on Abigail ’s liquor. Then second carpenter Lynch, clapped in irons and gagged for drunkenness and insolence. Even the convalescent Henry Canning had been triced, essentially, for getting on Whittle’s nerves.
Canning, at least, was dead. As for the others, and the crewmen sympathetic to them—were they perhaps a more immediate threat than the gallows?
Was Shenandoah’s final drama to be a mutiny?
Landfall.
Tuskar Light. They marked the time. Bulloch had brought them home with perfection. Running lights at midnight diverted everyone’s thoughts. A Liverpool pilot boat. Now came the moment that all aboard had yearned for and dreaded: contact, at last, with the world they had left behind. Waddell ordered rockets fired to draw the boat’s attention. He then signaled his own ship’s identity via lights—but it was a false identity. Waddell’s nerve had failed him again. His ship was called America, he signaled; it was ninety days out of Calcutta.45
An interesting choice of names, that: America.
The pilot boat approached the raider in the dark. Its lone passenger—the Mersey River harbor pilot—scrambled up Shenandoah’s rope ladder. The ship’s junior officers told him the raider’s true identity. Hunt’s reconstruction of the conversation between the pilot and Whittle, who greeted him, has been widely quoted:
“Good morning. What ship is this?”
“The late Confederate steamer Shenandoah.”
“The hell you say. Where have you fellows come from last?”
“From the Arctic Ocean.”
“And you haven’t stopped at any port since you left there?”
“No, nor been in sight of land, either. What news from the war in America?”
“Why, the war has been over so long people have got through talking about it. Jeff Davis is in Fortress Monroe, and the Yankees have a lot of cruisers out looking for you.”46
Whittle escorted the pilot to Waddell, who asked him to corroborate the reports of the war’s end. The pilot did so. All of Shenandoah’s options were now voided, except one. Waddell was gripped with a desire to exercise it while he still had some control of the ship. He instructed the pilot to bring Shenandoah on into port.
The pilot hesitated; the tide was low, he warned. The ship was likely to bottom on the sizable sandbar that rose between the sea and the entrance to the bay.
Waddell replied that he didn’t care. He was not about to wait hours for high tide when any Yankee cruiser in the vicinity would most certainly show no hesitation in attacking. He ordered the pilot to make a run for it anyway. The pilot, perhaps with a shrug, went with Waddell and Whittle to the wheelhouse, where the pilot pointed out a course that would bring them to the lowest part of the still-submerged bar. How low was the bar, at this time of day, at this phase of the moon? The pilot could only guess. How deep was Shenandoah riding? At her bow, Shenandoah, fully loaded, needed a minimum of twenty feet of water under her keel. She needed more at her stern. When she was properly loaded, her bow rode some ten inches higher than her rudder, and when she was taken by the wind, the wide, flat bottom of her long, thin clipper hull would raise her bow farther, and she would plane upward a bit above the water. Even such a small effect helped make her faster, and in the 18,000 miles they had covered since they left the ice, that small amount of tail droop had mattered. By now, having consumed much of her coal and all of her perishables, they would need much less than twenty feet. They could proceed slowly. Or so they rationalized.
They moved. Whittle relayed the compass headings to the Officer of the Deck for the helmsman, as eager to get to land as anyone, who had already spun the huge wheel dead on course before the OD could even finish speaking.
Shenandoah’s bow swung precisely toward the Mersey channel, the ribbon of river that would carry them to Liverpool. Captain Waddell went below to his cabin.
The night was dark, but the ship’s company blazed with inner thoughts. James Waddell, to his credit, turned his thoughts to the preservation of lives. He began to compose a carefully worded letter of surrender to the new prime minister of Great Britain, Earl Russell, at Whitehall. Russell, unfortunately for the men on Shenandoah, had succeeded Lord Palmerston, their erstwhile supporter who had died a month earlier.
I have the honor to announce to your lordship my arrival in the waters of the Mersey with this vessel, late a ship of war under my command, belonging to the Confederate States of America. The singular position in which I find myself placed and the absence of all precedents on the subject will, I trust, induce your lordship to pardon my hasty reference to a few facts connected with the cruise lately made by this ship.
Waddell summarized the commissioning of the raider and her forays against United States merchantmen around the globe over the preceding year. Taking care to specify Shenandoah’s location from May through July—“the Okhotsk Sea and Arctic Ocean”—the captain made the case that his ship was far removed from any possible source of news when the Civil War ended. “Your lordship can imagine my surprise,” he wrote (presumably without irony), upon his learning of the war’s end only on August 2, from the officers of Barracouta. “I desisted immediately from further acts of war,” he assured the prime minister, and headed for a European port, “where I would learn if that intelligence were true.” Finding that it was true, he surrendered “the ship with her battery, small arms, machinery, stores, tackle and apparel complete, to Her Majesty’s Government.”47
The letter’s unstated message was simple: we are not pirates. We are honorable men of war, and have acted according to the rules of war as we understood them. Spare our lives.
Waddell was still working on his letter at 4:00 a.m. on November 6 when a tremendous jolt slammed through the ship and sent everyone stumbling. Shenandoah had run aground on the sandbar, exactly as the pilot had predicted.
Her immobilization reignited the fearful tensions among the officers. Conway Whittle imagined he’d picked up on a plot among the crew to plunder the ship for anything of value—a plot imagined by Lining as well. He hurried from cabin to cabin, telling his fellow officers to keep their sidearms handy.
No plundering occurred.
Shenandoah floated free of the bar with the morning tides and steamed past the mouth of the Mersey. The fog lifted briefly, and there lay the green pillows of England on either side, under constellations of seagulls: the first dry land since the Aleutians 124 days and 18,000 miles earlier.
She made her way carefully toward the inner harbor and, by 8:00 a.m., as the fog re-enveloped the landscape, Shenandoah anchored directly astern the British warship Donegal. Hunt later wrote that no one minded the fog, “for we did not care about the gaping crowd on shore witnessing the humiliation soon to befall our ship.”48
The formal denouement to Shenandoah’s voyage into history came two hours later.
At around 10:00 a.m., Donegal ’s captain, James A. Paynter, climbed smartly aboard the black raider. James Waddell, painfully stiff with humiliation and scurvy, stood impassive in his worn gray dress uniform and nodded to the perfectly tailored British officer. They exchanged salutes, and Captain Paynter officially informed Lieutenant Waddell of the Civil War’s end. Waddell showed no emotion as he acknowledged the information. He handed Paynter the letter that he had written to Lord Russell, asking that it be delivered to the British foreign minister in London. Waddell also handed the British captain a bag filled with gold and silver coins of several nations, which he said totaled $820.38. This was the money taken from ships after the date of the South’s surrender.
Then Lieutenant Commanding James I. Waddell performed what surely was the single most odious duty of his long naval career. He formally surrendered the CSS Shenandoah to Captain Paynter. Paynter acknowledged the surrender. The men saluted each other again. It was done.
For Shenandoah and her crew, the authority of the Confederate States Navy had ended. Their Civil War was now actually over.
Cornelius Hunt averted his eyes from this ceremony, and his glance fell on Lieutenant Conway Whittle. Whittle had turned his back to the proceedings. From his vantage point, Hunt could see the tears streaming down the young Virginian’s face.
The unspeakable duty performed, James Waddell turned to address the ship’s crew. They stood before him in orderly rows, perhaps the last time they would be so assembled. Waddell gazed at them, and they gazed back: a jumbled collection of jacks and tars and gobs and salts plucked from the merchant ships of the world; ordinary seamen who, by the simple caprice of fate, had found themselves caught up in one of the most fantastical naval escapades ever. Volatile, hard-drinking, quick-fisted men, cold-eyed strangers to one another for the most part, transients and opportunists who sailed with the Rebels not out of national loyalty but out of self-interest, convenience, release from leg irons, a little adventure. Yet these men had, in the end, melded into an entity that was more than the sum of its parts. Their self-discipline had often bent but never had been broken. Their cohesion as a sailing unit had been repeatedly stressed to the point of rupture, but, in the moment of crisis, never torn. Against all the probabilities of human nature, they had ceased to become many, and were one.
What would Waddell say to them—to redeem himself from things he had said in error, or things he had left unsaid—on this last opportunity to say anything to them? Would Waddell mask himself behind his familiar façade of icy, distant formality?
No one recorded his exact words. They were reported to have been brief and respectful. He simply thanked them for their loyalty and declared that they had nothing to be ashamed about.49
In his memoirs, Waddell was gracious toward his junior officers, some of whom had given him cause for bitterness. Speaking of “those noble men who were officers under my command,” Waddell declared, “The circumstance of age and rank, not superior merit or greater devotion to our cause, made me their commander. For thirteen long months we were thrown into a connection so close that the narrative I write seems rather a souvenir of our intercourse than a statement of historical events.”50
His brief remarks at an end, as Whittle and others wept, Shenandoah’s Confederate colors were lowered from the mizzen gaff: the last flag down.
Now, what was to be the fate of these dreaded, celebrated captives? Freedom? Incarceration? Execution? The long hours of waiting commenced.
They had surrendered. But they were not yet free
If any Confederates had been expecting a heroes’ welcome at Liverpool, they were mistaken. No one was even going ashore. Any lingering affection from the British government toward the rebels had been swept away by the bombast of Charles Francis Adams, who for months had been pressing Her Majesty’s government for massive reparations to the United States. Adams took the clearly valid position that Britain was responsible for permitting Shenandoah and other raiders (such as Alabama) to be built in British shipyards—never mind the clandestine nature of these projects—and thus liable to the United States for the huge economic toll taken by them. As for the presence and surrender of Shenandoah at Liverpool, Adams could hardly wait.
He wanted the British to incarcerate all hands immediately and turn them over to United States agents in Britain. The British ministers, perhaps understandably disinclined to honor every one of Adams’s demands as soon as he made them, demurred on this, pending talks with legal experts at Whitehall.
Adams’s reparation crusade, which he would pursue over several years, promptly infuriated British public opinion, and the British press, which turned its wrath on the raider and its crew. “The inability of the United States navy to catch this light-heeled enemy is an apt commentary on the pending claims for compensation on account of damages inflicted by Confederate vessels,” the Telegraph fulminated, “[claims] almost as extravagant as if London policemen were expected to aid those of Paris and New York in repressing crime in those cities.”51 The Star growled that “if the commander of the Shenandoah imagines that in England he is to escape with impunity, the action of Her Majesty’s government will promptly undeceive him…these men must not be permitted to walk abroad unchallenged as if they had been engaged in a meritorious enterprise…. It is disheartening to reflect how much the cause of maritime rights has been prejudiced by the fatal apathy we exhibited toward these Confederate cruisers.”52 The News wondered “how it is that this cruiser has been able to pursue her course without the least interruption from the navy of the United States. We have learned of her in various parts of the world dealing destruction and scattering dismay among merchantmen, whalers and other unarmed vessels, but no war-vessel of the United States appears to have molested her.” The paper went on to propose a sinister answer: “It is possible that the expectation of recovering from this country compensation for the losses…has made the Government and the people of the United States less eager for her capture than they otherwise would have been.”53
The London Times perhaps put the matter most coldly. Calling the raider’s arrival an “unwelcome event,” the newspaper remarked, “It would have been a great relief to ourselves…had the Shenandoah been simply excluded from the Mersey and left to roam the seas till she should fall into the hands of her pursuers.” The Times closed with a modest proposal: it suggested that the men be tried as pirates.
The ministers at Whitehall read the papers.
The boiling hostility from the British press, coupled with Adams’s public lusting to get his hands on the Southerners, could only worsen the anguish of the officers and men as they waited. They were trapped, and quite likely facing the ends of their lives. Escape was nearly out of the question. Shenandoah rode at anchor, and since there had been no formal response to Waddell’s letter, no one was allowed to disembark that first night. Malnourished, many weakened by scurvy, the sailors made poor candidates for escape in any event. They would have been virtually naked in this suddenly alien country. And so these swash-buckling seamen, recently the terrors of the world’s seas, were reduced to staring back blankly at the gawkers who appraised them from the safety of small boats. Lining thought that the spectators regarded them as wild beasts.54 Lambs awaiting slaughter was closer to the truth.
On the morning of the second day, the men watched with an escalating sense of dread as the British navy brought up a bristling gunboat, HMS Goshawk, and lashed her to Shenandoah on the far side of Donegal. Sailors on the gunship rigged a gangway to Shenandoah, and one Lieutenant Cheek marched aboard. With Cheek and a few customs agents came a squad of some fifty British marines and armed sailors. As the might of the British navy stood in formation on Shenandoah’s deck, Lieutenant Cheek asked that her officers be assembled.
Cheek addressed the officers in the wardroom. He told them that he was now in command of Shenandoah, and that the marines with him were in charge of the ship. He added that he would remain in charge until the Prime Minister had replied to Waddell’s communiqué. Then he made things crystal clear:
“You understand that you will be held as prisoners until Her Majesty’s pleasure regarding you is known. Also, you will understand that you will not be permitted to take the vessel out of the port again without permission.”55
Later, some of the southerners found dark hilarity in this—as if, having circled the globe and submitted themselves to the indignity of surrender, they might be planning another excursion.
The former Rebels were not entirely dehumanized; a few British naval officers took pity on their brothers of the sea, and brought some luxuries aboard for them: fresh eggs, fresh milk, whiskey, tea, sugar, tobacco.56 The cook Marlow somehow managed to slip ashore the first day and heroically returned with hampers of gleaming vegetables from the market. A young officer later remembered how, “as the hampers of onions, big, red, strong kind, were passed up…they were grabbed by officers and men alike, and eaten as though they were the finest apples.” The pretty English wife of the sailmaker Alcott was allowed to board the ship briefly, and the men gazed at her as though she were a mermaid.
But after Lieutenant Cheek took over, he virtually locked the ship down. He even refused a boatload of additional foodstuffs, sniffing, “We’ll feed our own prisoners.” And the malnourished, angry, fearful men watched as the supply boat moved off. And more hours passed. And Whitehall deliberated. And the men of Shenandoah continued to await their fate.
On the night of November seventh, however, a handful of Rebel officers carried out what seems to have been a gambit to escape. Perhaps working through the same channels as Alcott and Marlow, they arranged for a dinghy to pull up beneath Shenandoah’s bow under cover of darkness. Irvine Bulloch, Sidney Smith Lee, Charles Lining, and midshipman Orris Browne dropped on board, and were ferried to Liverpool.
Shortly before they departed, the officers invited Whittle to join them. Whittle refused.
Browne remembered making the offer, and he remembered Whittle’s reasons for refusal, and he remembered the words with which he expressed that refusal, for the rest of his life. And Browne remembered the aura of nobility that underlay Whittle’s words, that unbending Southern chivalric sense of duty that set Whittle apart from everyone else who sailed with Shenandoah around the world.
Browne repeated those words back to Whittle nearly thirty years on.
At dawn the next morning Browne and Bulloch returned to await their fate.
Smith Lee rejoined the ship at midmorning. Cornelius Hunt never returned. He alone made a clean escape, and years later published his vivid memoirs of the voyage.
The British marines doubled their guard, planted the offending dinghy on the raider’s deck, and made it clear that any other craft that approached the captive ship would face their gunfire.
And the men of Shenandoah continued waiting for their futures to be decided—life or death.
The officers were the first to learn. The news arrived at 7:00 p.m. on November 8, as they stared moodily at their dinners belowdecks. It arrived in the person of Captain Paynter, who clambered aboard the ship and descended upon the group, clutching a telegram. The telegram was from Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary at Whitehall, and it announced the Crown’s verdict regarding the captives.
The officers doubtless stood nervously as Paynter began to read them the wire. History does not record their reactions, but stunned speechlessness would be a good guess.
What had impelled the foreign secretary and his peers toward this particular verdict? Was it their memory of England’s long history of profitable trade with a slaveholding society? Was it Britain’s long tradition of impersonal but ultimately evenhanded justice? Had the blood lust of the British press affected their judgment?
The telegram didn’t say. What it did say was that Shenandoah’s mariners were to be set free.
Free, with the exception of one category: British subjects. Any son of England aboard the ship would face the wrath—and almost certainly the gallows—of his government. For an Englishman to fight in the navy of another country meant death.
As Waddell and his junior lieutenants struggled for control of their emotions, Captain Paynter spoke again: it was required that this sorting take place at once. On deck.
Chairs scraped and cutlery clattered as the officers brushed through the wardroom and hustled into the dark, chilly Liverpool air. Paynter had instructed one of their number to assemble the crew on deck and call the roll. Tellingly, it was not Captain Waddell, but Lieutenant Whittle, whom the British captain selected for the task.
In foggy winter mist pierced only by the orange glow of shipboard lanterns, the shadowy, shambling figures materialized from their bunks, from their mess, from whatever cramped nook or cranny of the ship they’d chosen as their waiting-place. They floated into their ranks like bearded, gray-garbed ghosts. In stark contrast to their gaunt shabbiness, a detachment of Royal Marines, imposing in bell-shaped shakos and red tunics, armed with muskets and fixed bayonets, stood at the ready on either side of the ship.
As the Shenandoah men fell into place, a thought struck Whittle: For all they knew, they’d been gathered to receive their death sentences!
He watched through the gloom as Captain Paynter, his brass buttons catching the oil lamps’ glow, ordered them to attention and snapped to his full military bearing. The British officer turned his gaze on the crewmen, and then on Whittle, who stood with the ship’s articles in his arms. Paynter indicated that Whittle was to begin.
Whittle opened the ledger. He would skip the uniformed officers, whose nationality was as obvious as it was damning. He prepared to start with the noncoms. He looked at the names in lamplight. He knew full well where the first man was from. The first would be JohnL. Guy, the gunner. Guy was English born and bred. Would Guy know what to say? Of course not. Whittle understood now why Paynter had ordered this polling to commence at once.
The men did not know the consequences of their answers! Paynter had wanted it that way: to announce that he was culling them for British subjects, or even to give the word time to circulate, would be an open invitation for any Englishman to lie.
Whittle’s suspicion of Paynter was mirrored by the crew. The huddled captives could only assume the worst. This was a cold-blooded inquisition, a ransacking of the helpless ranks, for Southerners. What else could it be? The fire-breathing British newspapers…the well-known fulminations of Charles Adams…the incontrovertible truth that they had plundered American merchant ships in peacetime…they were going to hang.
Certainly, from their point of view, they would just as likely hang if they announced themselves Confederates as they would if they said Englishmen.
Whittle looked into the ranks of the men. He spoke the gunner’s name clearly: “Guy.” As soon as he heard his name, the gunner left ranks, walked uncertainly across the deck, and stood in front of Captain Paynter. The man Whittle had punished brutally, the man who had most probably fired the last shot of the Civil War, waited to learn his fate.
“What countryman are you?” Paynter asked.
And Guy may have hesitated, or he may not have, but in an accent without a hint of drawl the gunner said clearly, “I’m a southerner.”
Paynter looked at the gunner. This was no Dixie-born Johnny Reb. Paynter glanced at the hundred or so men standing on deck in the November air.
“Next.”
The gunner made his way to the far rail, and Whittle called the next name, “Harwood.” The ship’s boatswain came forward. He was as much an Englishman as Paynter himself.
“What countryman are you?” Captain Paynter asked Harwood.
“I’m a southerner,” came the reply. Paynter’s eyes narrowed.
“Next.”
Here was the sailmaker, the man whose wife had met the ship with fresh food three days earlier.
“Alcott.”
The Liverpool native crossed to Paynter and drew himself up.
“What countryman are you?”
“I’m a southerner. A Virginian, sir.”
Conway Whittle listened with gathering amazement and a kind of euphoria—an awareness that some motive higher than mere personal survival had taken collective hold of these men—a glimmer of belief, perhaps, that the distant God he’d prayed to throughout the voyage had indeed been attentive, and was now inspiring these men to consecrate their lives—when the answers to Paynter’s question began to come back, one by one…
“Southerner!” “Southerner!” “Southerner!” “Southerner!”
“Southerner!” from the Godfrey Bostonians. “Southerner!” from the Delphine men of Maine. “Southerner!” from the Australian stowaways and the whaling men of Edward Carey and Hector and Abigail and all the great flaming roundup in the Bering. Only a few men, whose Polynesian features betrayed them, muttered the truth of their nationalities. These sailors-of-fortune, who had sailed uneasily together, were prepared to die together.
A silence after the final name had been called. Whittle, who had wept at the lowering of the Confederate flag, must have shed some tears in the darkness for the gallantry of these men. All eyes were fixed on Captain Paynter, who was struggling to form a response to what he had just heard.
Something about these ragtag devils must have moved him, pierced through his martinet’s steeliness. Southerners, British…it no longer bloody mattered, did it?
Bugger all. He let every man-jack of them go free.
Their last voyage together was on a ferryboat that took them from Shenandoah to Liverpool. And then they drifted off quietly and separately into a fog denser than any in the Aleutians, the fog of history. Many of the officers, faced with certain arrest and trial in the United States and uncertain of their safety even if they remained in Britain, tried their fortunes in South America. Francis Chew, Dabney Scales, and John Grimball lived for a while in Carlota, a haven for ex-Confederates not far from Vera Cruz, Mexico. Sidney Smith Lee, Orris Browne, and John Mason were among a group that headed for Argentina, where they lived as farmers in another Confederate enclave, Rosario, tending cattle, chickens, and vegetables.
James Waddell, hemorrhaging from scurvy, and weakened critically by weeks of deprivation, found a small house in Liverpool. He sent for Ann in America, who had been living under Federal restrictions in Maryland for the duration of her husband’s voyage. She joined him and they took up residence in a town near Liverpool. After a lengthy recuperation in England, Waddell worked there for a shipping company until his pardon by the U.S. government in 1875. Returning home, he was appointed captain of a newly built passenger liner named San Francisco, a mail runner on a route linking San Francisco, Japan, and Australia. His first port of call was Australia, where people still remembered him and welcomed him with cheers and parties.
On her return voyage, San Francisco struck an unmarked reef fourteen miles off the coast of Mexico. Waddell remained the last person aboard, and brought the ship within three miles of shore before she sank. An investigation exonerated and commended him. He continued on with the company before retiring to Annapolis with his wife. Some years later, sea duty of a sort called him again: the governor of Maryland asked him to command a nautical police force battling oyster pirates in Chesapeake Bay. Waddell won this war: surprising a small fleet of raiders one night, he ordered howitzer fire. He sank one boat and captured three others. He wrote his memoirs for his family’s records, and died in 1886.
William Conway Whittle and Frederich McNulty never fought their duel.
Whittle’s sisters and brothers all survived, far from Tidewater, safe in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and were united, eventually, with their father, Commodore Whittle.
Whittle never reencountered Pattie. He never mentioned her in his subsequent writings, and he never spoke of her to any of his descendants. He provided no indication that she was ever found.
Aware that he and all the officers still faced prosecution, even the gallows, in the United States, and fearing rendition at the hands of Adams, Whittle left for Europe immediately. After getting his strength back in Paris, and learning that any hope of returning to the States was lost, Whittle accompanied Browne, Smith, and Mason to Argentina and farmed with them there for a few years, until he had farmed the grief and bitterness out of his heart. After a general decree of amnesty in 1868, he came home to Virginia, where he became captain of a steamboat plying the route between Norfolk and Baltimore. He married a Norfolk woman in 1872—Elizabeth Calvert Page, the daughter of the renowned Confederate naval commander Richard Lucien Page. Page, his son-in-law-to-be Conway Whittle, and also Whittle’s father Commodore Whittle, shared a curious and unwelcome Civil War distinction. All three had been defeated by the same man: Admiral David G. Farragut, a fellow prewar naval officer and their neighbor on Duke Street, in Norfolk, until 1861.
William Conway Whittle and Elizabeth Calvert Page had four children, and remained in Norfolk all their lives. They lived in an elegant brick house of Federal design that still stands, thanks to Whittle’s descendants and admirers who linked arms a century later and stood in front of the bulldozers when developers threatened to raze it. In later life, Whittle founded the Bank of Virginia. In 1910 he published the story of his cruises on CSS Shenandoah and CSS Nashville. He died in 1920 at the age of eighty.
Shenandoah never regained her glory. Two days after Paynter released her crew, Thomas Dudley finally got his hands on her. The U.S. consul inspected her and found her in a squalid state of repair and sanitation. Perhaps his judgment was flavored with partisanship and frustration. He ordered her sailed to New York, but she was turned back by a storm. Eventually the government auctioned her to a wealthy dilettante, the Sultan of Zanzibar, who used her as a yacht for a while. In 1879 she struck a coral reef during a gale in the Indian Ocean, and sank.
Alone among all the men who sailed under Shenandoah’s flag, Lieutenant Conway Whittle returns history’s gaze without lowering his eyes.
He fought for a cause condemned by the infallibility of the time-present perspective: a cause that claimed many and noble ideals, but a cause fatally compromised by its defense of human slavery. Yet Conway Whittle owned no slaves, nor was he ever known to align himself with that institution. Before the Civil War his mother, sister, and older brother had all died while his father, a Captain in the U.S. Navy, was at sea on a mission to stop the slave trade.
He was a man trapped in history, as all men and women are trapped in history: a man whose selfless loyalty to native ground and tradition placed him on the wrong side of history’s ledger.
Yet he was as good a man as history seems able to produce: a warrior of courage inconceivable to most people; a naval officer of surpassing calm and intelligence; a seeker after Christian redemption; a steadfast lover; a student of human nature; a gentle soul; a custodian of virtue.
Whittle demonstrated these qualities again and again, through gestures as large in their way as the seas around him. Perhaps his most convincing demonstration was contained in a few quiet words that have been all but lost in history’s oceanic fog: the words Whittle spoke to Orris Browne aboard Shenandoah on the night of November 7, 1865, the words that Orris Browne never forgot.
Browne reminded Conway Whittle of these words in a letter written on stationery engraved with Browne’s elaborate, swirling letterhead, and dated November 8, 1893—twenty-eight years and a day after Whittle spoke them. The letterhead bore the return address of Browne’s prosperous truck farm: Hollywood Place, Cape Charles, North Hampton County, Virginia.
Browne had been a guest at the home of John T. Mason, the Shenandoah midshipman who’d slipped into Liverpool with Browne and the others that long-ago November night. During his three-day stay, he and his host had been poring over Mason’s logbook. Mason had hoped to assemble a reunion of the raider’s officers, but Browne was the only invitee able to be there. (“We had looked for you, but Mason had your letter saying you could not attend.”)
“You were missed more than anyone, for several reasons,” Browne wrote to his friend, who was then fifty-three. “You were the nearest officer to the place of meeting who was absent.” And then Browne turned to what he really wanted to say.
“You are now the senior officer of the crew,” he began, “and you were, during the cruise of the ship, the real commander of her in many tight places, and at times, you were the only man that I know of who could’ve directed Waddell, our Captain.
“I never really understood Waddell, though I tried to. At times he did well, he was comfortable to the position that he held, at others he was entirely impotent and limp. Again, on plain propositions clear to almost anyone, he would rush off the wrong way, perfectly satisfied that the most profound wisdom was guiding him. I believe that he was honest, conscientious, and not lacking in courage, but still he was weak.”
Browne reminded Whittle of the English marine guard that took charge of the ship, and the anxious waiting, over three days, while the British government debated the demand of Charles Francis Adams that the crew be handed over to the United States for trial as pirates. He fondly recalled some hijinks the young officers indulged in during the wait: A “little ‘convention,’ as Smith Lee would call it, in the Ward room,” a “jubilee in the Steerage.” And then he brought up the night of the aborted escape:
We…made our arrangements, which were to have a boat under the bow sprit at night, and drop down into it. But if the boat did not come by 12 o’clock, then with certain of our crew, we would cut away one of the Shenandoah’s boats. In this we would have been opposed by the English Marines, but we decided that we could get away with them, that we were going ashore.
Browne reminded Whittle of a moment of decision he’d imposed on the lieutenant: a decision in which Whittle had been invited to choose between expediency and honor.
I invited you to join us after telling you of the plans. You replied, “There is no objection to the plan, or to your going, but I cannot join you. I am the Executive Officer of this ship, and I must stay here, let the consequences be what they may. If to hang is the end, I shall see the last of it. My position is different from that of you and your associates. You are the junior officers of the ship, and I advise you to go. Take this”—offering me your pocketbook with all your money—“you will need it. I may never want it.” And when I declined to accept it, you insisted upon it, saying that the little you have will not go far. That occurred on the poop deck, abaft the mizzenmast, and a little on the starboard side.
That is where Browne and the others left Conway Whittle. In a sense, that is where he has quietly stood ever since, meeting history’s gaze: on the poop deck of a fallen ship, abaft the mizzenmast, and a little on the starboard side, the Executive Officer eternal, under a flag of valor that will never go down.