The Odyssey of the Shenandoah

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It was a futile hope. Unusually for this season and place, it was a windless day: no sailing vessels would be going anywhere quickly. And, in the end, the whaleships' masters aboard their unarmed vessels had little choice but to comply with the Confederates, who that day and for the past few weeks, had stubbornly refused to believe the reports that had reached them of the war's end. Indeed, the master of the William Thompson, one of the captured whalers, recalled that a Confederate officer "exultantly stated that he did not believe Lee had surrendered."

As officers and men from the captured whalers began rowing to the Shenandoah, Confederate prize parties—small groups of seamen led by officers— commenced boarding the ten whaling vessels. Soon enough, the Confederates' plans became clear: two of the captured vessels, the James Maury and the Nile would be "ransomed"—released after their masters had signed written promises stating that their vessels' owners would later pay the Confederate government money equal to the vessels and their cargos. Once the signatures were secured, those two vessels would be allowed to return to safe harbor in San Francisco. The eight others would be burned to the waterline and sunk.

By 5:00 p.m. the prize parties from the Shenandoah were scurrying about all eight of the doomed vessels. In accord with the Confederates' usual procedures, all crew members and living animals were removed from each ship. Likewise, all useful equipment, gunpowder, or stores were confiscated and taken back to the Shenandoah. Afterward, the parties searched the whaling vessel's holds for any available combustibles, including whale products, pitch, tar, and turpentine. These they spread throughout the vessels. Bulkheads, the upright walls compartmentalizing each vessel were torn down and piled in cabins and forecastles; the bulkheads' destruction at once created fuel and improved draft for the fire to come. The Confederates then opened all the hatches and cut the rigging. With no wind, the sails hung limp and free. Finally, before leaving, the prizes parties took fires from each of the eight ship's galley stoves and dispersed flames throughout the main decks and holds.

A Confederate officer aboard the Shenandoah who witnessed the conflagration recalled "a scene never to be forgotten by any one who beheld it." As flames consumed them, the eight crewless vessels drifted like crazed, rudderless ghost-ships amid the ice-floes. "The red glare from the eight burning vessels shone far and wide over the drifting ice of those savage seas; the crackling of the fire as it made its devouring way through each doomed ship fell on the still air like upbraiding voices." Chaos reigned: "The sea was filled with boats driving hither and thither, with no hand to guide them, and with yards, sails, and cordage, remnants of the stupendous ruin there progressing. In the distance, but where the light fell strong and red upon them, bringing out into bold relief each spar and line, were the two ransomed vessels, the Noah's Arks that were to bear away the human life which in a few hours would be all that was left of the gallant whaling fleet."

Sixteen years after General Robert E. Lee's troops stacked their muskets at Appomattox Courthouse, the Confederacy's president, Jefferson Davis, recalled events of mid-1865 from a decidedly different perspective than that experienced by those aboard the Shenandoah and her fleet of captive whaleships amid the Bering Strait's ice-floes.

In early April, as Union forces gathered outside Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, Davis—acting on advice from General Lee—had ordered the city's evacuation. By then, Lee's beleaguered Army of Northern Virginia, fleeing a Union advance, had marched west of Richmond, hoping to escape and fight another day. Davis and his cabinet, meanwhile, took a southwest train for Danville, Virginia. There, Davis lingered long enough to issue a proclamation calling for continued resistance to Union forces. With Yankee troops hard on his heels, he then drifted farther and farther south: through Virginia's fields and leafy forests, into North Carolina, South Carolina, and eventually Georgia. As Davis's scattered generals—Lee, Joseph Johnston, and Richard Taylor, among others—one after another, laid down their arms, the fifty-six-year-old president, deep into spring, still nourished stubborn hopes. If he could somehow link up with Southern troops still in the field, perhaps those in Texas under General Edmund Kirby Smith, he and his brethren in gray might reconstitute themselves as a guerilla movement. And, if they could do that, who knew how long the Confederacy might be able to fight on? Perhaps long enough to exhaust a war-weary northern public.

On May 10, Davis's luck, and with it his dreams, ran out: Union soldiers in Irwinville, Georgia finally caught up with and arrested him. Three weeks later, General Smith's forces in Texas surrendered; and on June 23, the Cherokee chief and Confederate general Stand Watie, aware of Smith's surrender, accepted the inevitable. He galloped into the tiny Indian Territory hamlet of Fort Towson—in today's Oklahoma—and surrendered his battalion of Cherokee, Seminole and Osage Indians to Union forces. The Confederacy had officially become a lost cause.

Even so, as former Confederate president Davis, now Union prisoner, recalled in his memoirs, one thought did bring him solace: "the Confederate flag no long floated on the land; but one gallant sailor still unfurled it on the Pacific"—"Captain [James I.] Waddell, commanding the Shenandoah cruiser."

Then en route to the Bering Sea, Waddell and his crew had been ignorant of the comfort their efforts lent their stateless president. Nor, for that matter, as they later claimed, did they know that, by then, they sailed without state or purpose. But just as war will have its heroes and its tragedies, so, inevitably will it have its ironies. That the task of firing the final shot associated with that entire four-year ordeal of death and destruction fell to Waddell and the men of his Shenandoah was surely one of them.

Boreal dawns, ice floes, and burning whaleships hardly belong to our usual mental repository of Civil War images. Such scenes evoke Moby Dick more than they do The Red Badge of Courage. That the Shenandoah captured those ten whaling vessels in the Bering Strait more than two months after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse adds only more incongruity. But on June 28, 1865, the obvious ironies, much like Davis' solace, meant nothing to the men gathered off this Arctic shore. For the whalemen and the owners of the destroyed ships, the consequences were tragic. For Waddell and his crew, oddly enough, heroism of a sort would soon be called for.