CSS Shenandoah

• 1. Introduction

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  CSS Shenandoah fired the last shot of the American Civil War not in Virginia or Georgia, but in the fog-shrouded waters off the Aleutian Islands, months after the armies had already laid down their arms. The ship carrying that final shot was a repurposed British tea-trader, her teak hull now stripped of cargo holds and fitted with naval guns, her crew a patchwork of Southern officers and foreign sailors. She had been sailing for well over a year under a flag the rest of the world had essentially stopped recognizing. How does a warship fight on after the war is lost? What becomes of the men who sail under a defeated government's colors? And what happens to the ship itself when there is no nation left to come home to? Those questions trail in the wake of CSS Shenandoah like the smoke from the whalers she burned.

• 2. A Ship With Three Names

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  Alexander Stephen & Sons of Glasgow launched the vessel on the 17th of August 1863 under the name Sea King. She was built for Robertson & Co., also of Glasgow, designed as a composite passenger-cargo auxiliary of 1,018 tons meant to carry tea from East Asia and troops to New Zealand. US representatives looked her over while she was still being fitted out, apparently interested in purchasing her. She slipped out of their reach when her ownership changed and she made several runs to the Far East and to New Zealand transporting soldiers to the New Zealand Wars before Confederate agents in Liverpool took note of her.

  Wallace Bros of Liverpool eventually sold her to the Confederate Navy in a transaction completed on the 18th of October 1864. The purchase was arranged in secret, with Confederate Commander James Dunwoody Bulloch directing operations from Liverpool, a city that served as the unofficial home port of the Confederate overseas fleet. Liverpool supplied ships, crews, munitions, and provisions to the Confederate cause throughout the war.

  Sea King departed London on the 8th of October 1864, cleared for Bombay on what appeared to be a routine trading voyage. The supply steamer Laurel left Liverpool the same day. They met at Funchal, Madeira, where Laurel transferred the new ship's officers, the nucleus of her crew, naval guns, ammunition, and ship's stores. Lieutenant James Iredell Waddell of North Carolina oversaw the conversion in nearby waters, but he could barely bring his crew to even half strength despite pulling volunteers from both ships. The vessel was commissioned on the 19th of October 1864, the Union Jack came down, and the "Stainless Banner" went up. She was now CSS Shenandoah.

• 3. Commerce Raider at Large

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  Waddell's orders from the Confederate Navy Department were to seek out and utterly destroy commerce in areas as yet undisturbed by the war. He began hunting on the Indian Ocean route between the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, then turned his attention to the Pacific whaling fleet. Before reaching the Cape, the Shenandoah captured six prizes; five were burned or scuttled after their people were removed, and the sixth was bonded and used to carry the prisoners to Bahia, Brazil.

  On the 2nd of January 1865, the ship paused briefly at Ile Saint-Paul, where some of the crew went ashore to explore and gather food. She arrived at Melbourne, Colony of Victoria, on the 25th of January 1865 badly short-handed. While there, 19 of Waddell's crew deserted, some giving sworn statements to the United States Consul describing their service. The ship made up for the losses by signing on 40 men who had been stowaways; to avoid implicating the Colony in a breach of neutrality, none of them were formally enlisted until the ship cleared Victorian territorial waters. The Shipping Articles record all 40 as having joined on the 18th of February 1865, the date of her departure.

  After refitting, the hunting grew much more profitable. On the 3rd and the 4th of April, Waddell burned four whalers in the Caroline Islands at Lohd Pah Harbor, Pohnpei Island. A three-week sweep through the Sea of Okhotsk produced only a single prize, because a warning had preceded him. He pushed north past the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, where the rich whaling grounds had been a safe haven for American whalers for most of the war. That safety ended in the spring and summer of 1865 when Shenandoah captured 20 of the 58 Yankee whalers working those waters, destroying them more than a month after Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been captured on the 10th of May 1865.

• 4. Raiding a War Already Lost

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  On the 27th of June 1865, Waddell captured the brigantine Susan and Abigail and learned from her captain that General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia nearly three months earlier at Appomattox Court House. The captain produced a San Francisco newspaper reporting the Confederate government's flight from Richmond ten weeks prior. But the same newspaper carried President Davis's proclamation that the war would be carried on with renewed vigor. Waddell chose to believe the proclamation. He then captured 10 more whalers in the space of seven hours, just below the Arctic Circle.

  The decisive blow to any remaining doubt came on the 3rd of August 1865, when Shenandoah encountered the Liverpool barque Barracouta, bound for San Francisco. Waddell had been sailing toward that city intending to attack it, believing it weakly defended. From Barracouta he learned of the surrender of Johnston's army on the 26th of April, Kirby Smith's army on the 26th of May, and, most crucially, the capture of President Davis. The war had been over for months.

  Waddell ordered the Confederate flag lowered. The guns were dismantled and stowed below deck. The hull was repainted to resemble an ordinary merchant ship. In the full ledger of CSS Shenandoah's campaign across twelve-and-a-half months, she had captured 38 merchant vessels, the great majority of them whaling ships out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Waddell had taken close to a thousand prisoners without a single war casualty among his own crew, though two men had died of disease.

• 5. Surrender on the Mersey

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  Returning to a United States port was not a realistic option. Waddell and his officers understood that commerce raiders had been excluded from the amnesty granted to Confederate soldiers, and that Lincoln's assassination had removed any reasonable expectation of leniency. The crew feared being tried and hanged as pirates. Captain Raphael Semmes of the Alabama had escaped piracy charges by surrendering on the 1st of May 1865 as an army general under Joseph E. Johnston, but Waddell almost certainly did not know that. Waddell chose Liverpool, where Confederate Commander Bulloch was still based.

  Shenandoah rounded Cape Horn and sailed more than 9,000 nautical miles in three months, pursued by Union vessels the entire way, before dropping anchor at the Mersey Bar. A pilot refused to guide a ship flying no flag into the port. The crew raised the Confederate flag, and CSS Shenandoah steamed up the River Mersey with colors flying to crowds gathered along the riverbanks.

  The Liverpool Mercury reported the arrival on the 7th of November 1865, describing the considerable excitement on the exchange at the sight of the Shenandoah steaming up the Victoria Channel with what the paper called the Palmetto flag at her masthead. HMS Donegal happened to be riding at anchor between Toxteth in Liverpool and Tranmere in Birkenhead. Waddell maneuvered alongside the British man-of-war and surrendered the Shenandoah to Captain Paynter of HMS Donegal on the 6th of November 1865. The Confederate flag came down for the last time under the watch of a Royal Navy detachment. Waddell then walked up the steps of Liverpool Town Hall to present a letter to the mayor, formally surrendering his ship to the British government. Shenandoah was the only Confederate warship to circumnavigate the globe, and this was the last surrender of the American Civil War.

• 6. The Crew Dispersed

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  British law officers investigated whether the officers and crew had violated the rules of war or the laws of nations. Three men had already swum ashore in the cold November waters rather than wait for a verdict. The investigation concluded that no charges were warranted, and the entire crew was unconditionally released. A Liverpool Mercury account from the 9th of November 1865 described the parole in detail: Captain Paynter came aboard on the steamer Bee, the roll was called on the quarterdeck, and as each man answered to his name he was asked his nationality. Not one acknowledged being a British subject, though the paper noted that several who claimed to be Southerners spoke with an unmistakably Scots accent. When Paynter told the men they were free to go, the reaction was described as every demonstration of joy. Before leaving, they gave three cheers for Captain Waddell.

  Some time in December 1865, officers S.S. Lee, Orris M. Brown, John T. Mason, and W.C. Whittle sailed from Liverpool to Buenos Aires by way of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo. They eventually settled near Rosario on the Parana River and tried farming. As hostility from Washington softened, Brown and Mason returned home first, followed later by Lee and Whittle. Mason studied law at the University of Virginia, settled in Baltimore, and married Helen Jackson of New York. Whittle, born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1840 and an 1858 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, was appointed captain of a Bay Line steamer between Baltimore, Norfolk, and Portsmouth in 1868 and served in that capacity until 1890, then worked as a superintendent for the Norfolk and Western Railway Company before helping found the Virginia Bank and Trust Company in 1902.

  Waddell, born in 1824, returned from England to the United States in 1875 to captain a Pacific Mail Company ship out of San Francisco. He later commanded a force policing the oyster fleets of the Chesapeake Bay. In 1886, Waddell died of a brain disorder and was buried at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Annapolis, Maryland.

• 7. A Flag and a Final Wreck

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  After the British handed Shenandoah over to the United States government, the ship was sold to Matthew Isaac Wilson of Liverpool. Wilson sold her in 1867 to Majid bin Said, the first Sultan of Zanzibar, who renamed her El Majidi after himself. On the 15th of April 1872 a hurricane struck Zanzibar; El Majidi was one of six ships owned by Seyed Burgash that were blown ashore and wrecked. Her crew were rescued, and she was refloated on the 7th of July. After temporary repairs, she attempted to sail on the 10th of September 1879 carrying 130 passengers and crew from Zanzibar to Bombay, where she was to receive further work. She developed leaks in the Gulf of Aden, and sank off Socotra in November 1879. A few survivors escaped.

  The ship's battle ensign traveled a different path. Lieutenant Dabney Minor Scales gave the flag to his cousin Eliza Hull Maury for safekeeping. Her brother, Colonel Richard Launcelot Maury of the Confederate States Army and the eldest son of Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, brought the flag back from England in 1873 and donated it to the Museum of the Confederacy in 1907. The flag measures 88 by 136 inches. It had been the only Confederate flag to circle the earth during the Confederacy, and the last Confederate flag lowered by a combatant unit in the Civil War, in mid-river on the Mersey on the 6th of November 1865. It has been in the museum's collection ever since, a tangible thread connecting the last act of a war to a gallery in Richmond.