Preface
The officers of the CSS Shenandoah, along with those who sent them and those who confronted them, left an abundance of first-person accounts. This embarrassment of riches in primary sources generated a daunting, but rewarding, task of editing. And so, this tale can be told almost exclusively by those who lived it. The accounts are concentrated in four personal cruise journals, two memoirs, exhaustive official documentation of postwar claims against Great Britain for supporting Confederate commerce raiders, the ever-useful Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, and contemporary newspapers. Collectively, these sources provide virtually every contemporary word written by those involved in or concerned about the events described.
The author has attempted to edit, condense, collate, paraphrase, and quote their words into a consistent narrative, elucidating those events and times (as much as can be imagined) from their perspectives and leaving judgments to the reader. Most quotes derive from the four personal journals and the annotated log of the captain. Because these sources are chronological and organized by date, usually without page numbers, they are cited only the first time a quote from the writer is encountered. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotes from that writer are from the same source on or about the date in the context of the narrative.
Secondary sources contribute background and context not provided by direct participants. The author’s personal training and experiences have proved helpful in clarifying the esoteric life at sea for those not familiar with it. His historical judgments beyond a love of the naval service, the sea, ships, and their history are, it is hoped, few and easily identified. The objective of this volume is to provide an entertaining and educational story not only for naval and maritime history enthusiasts but also for anyone who would enjoy a fresh perspective on the Civil War, even if they have never looked at it from across the water.
Admiral Raphael Semmes, the foremost sailor of the Confederacy, introduced his Memoirs of Service Afloat with the following:
The cruise of a ship is a biography. The ship becomes a personification. She not only “walks the waters like a thing of life,” but she speaks in moving accents to those capable of interpreting her. But her interpreter must be a seaman, and not a landsman.
A ship is fundamentally a machine—an instrument of marine transportation, ocean commerce, and naval warfare. But to those who create it, to those who sail or encounter it, and indeed to one who studies the records a century and a half later, a ship is a great deal more. It is a highly sophisticated artifact of human ingenuity. It takes on vibrant life and distinct personality (traditionally female in a historically male profession). It engages the passions. A ship can be, therefore, a central character in a life story through which we view more clearly our ancestors, their epoch, and their momentous war. Of course, she is all of these things—and not just an inanimate object—only because of the men in her life and through their collective experiences in her company.
The officers of the Confederate States ship Shenandoah were a cross section of the South from Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. From 19 October 1864 to 6 November 1865, they carried the Confederacy and the conflict around the globe and to the ends of the earth through every extreme of sea and storm. Their observations looking back from the most remote and alien surroundings imaginable, along with the viewpoints of the people they encountered, provide a unique perspective of the war with elements both common to and differing from land-bound compatriots.
These officers included scions of the deep South plantation aristocracy and of Old Dominion first families: a nephew of Robert E. Lee; a grandnephew of founding father George Mason; descendants of men who served directly under George Washington in the Revolution; and a relative, by marriage, of Matthew Fontaine Maury. One officer was an uncle of a young Theodore Roosevelt and another the son-in-law of Raphael Semmes. The officer from Missouri, by contrast, was a middle-class Midwesterner and former drugstore clerk. All but two, the captain and the ship’s surgeon, were under the age of twenty-five.
They considered themselves Americans, Southerners, rebels, warriors, and seamen embarking on what would be the voyage of their lives. They already had suffered three and a half years of bloody, discouraging conflict on board puny gunboats and lumbering ironclads up and down the interior waters of their fledgling country, frequently on the same vessels or in the same battles; a few were veterans of the CSS Alabama’s two-year cruise. They did not all fight for the same reasons but stood together in defense of their country as they understood it, pursuing a difficult mission in which they succeeded spectacularly after it no longer mattered.
Having sacrificed careers in the U.S. Navy that nurtured them, these men struggled to reproduce its essence in their new navy, one with few ships. Two of the five lieutenants had been deepwater sailors in the U.S. Navy and one in the merchant service. Four had attended the new Naval Academy at Annapolis, and two midshipmen had been appointed to the academy before secession changed their loyalties. Two of the lieutenants followed distinguished naval fathers who had served in Pacific exploring expeditions, in antislavery patrols on the coast of Africa, with Commodore Matthew C. Perry at the opening of Japan, and during the Mexican War. One of the fathers had been Naval Academy commandant of midshipmen; both fathers became senior officers in Confederate service.
Three heritages drove the men of Shenandoah. As grandsons of revolutionaries, they believed profoundly in liberty and democracy. They shared the atavistic social mores of the Southern gentleman class along with its timeless dedication to family, country, duty, and personal integrity. These characteristics were reinforced in their central identities as officers of the Confederate States navy, to which they applied the Southern martial tradition just as energetically as did their army brothers in arms.
The men they led, however, were a polyglot assemblage of international merchant sailors enlisted in foreign ports or from captured ships with enticements of gold and threats of confinement. They were of nearly every nation and color—including born-and-raised Yankees and several African Americans—representing that motley mixture of seafaring humanity operating within its own rigidly authoritarian and cramped society. In their professional roles, Confederate navy officers and seamen had more in common with Northern counterparts than with Southern comrades.
And all of them served Shenandoah—their mistress, their protector, their enabler. Having finally an opportunity to take the fight to the enemy in a fine blue-water ship, these Southerners endowed her with all the frustrated longing for victory, retribution, peace, and personal and professional honor. She was a magnificent ship, a reflection of a rich maritime heritage. The square-rigged sailing ship is among the oldest and the most complex creations of the human race, evolving slowly over millennia from fundamental concepts. For five centuries these vehicles dominated the oceans and enabled global civilization; they reached their most effective as well as their most esthetically pleasing expression in the clippers. Probably no other single technology had such far-reaching impact over so immense a span of time.
But in a few decades, natural elements of wood, hemp, and canvas would give way to forged and manufactured materials of iron and steel. The siren call of wind in the rigging was silenced by the thump of the engines and the roar of mechanical blowers; the fragrance of the sea was tainted by coal smoke. Shenandoah was a paradigm of dramatic transitions in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, and she presented stark contradictions: a valiant warship to Southerners, a hated pirate to Northerners. She was a swift and graceful tea clipper and a state-of-the-art steamer, an amalgam of wooden hull and iron frames, the epitome of the ancient art of tall ship construction, and a prime example of the new technology of the
