Abstract
Many books have been written chronicling the amazing voyage of the Confederate commerce raider CSS Shenandoah, which was not only the last of the ‘big three’ Southern deep-water cruisers (the others being Alabama and Florida), but the most unusual in many ways. In her cruise during the last year of the American Civil War and beyond, she circumnavigated the globe, visited every ocean but the Antarctic, and took the lion’s share of her mostly-whaleship prizes after the war was actually over, unbeknownst to predator and prey alike. The final, non-stop leg of her voyage home stretched from the Bering Sea around Cape Horn back to her Liverpool starting place, where she was the last combatant to lower the ‘stainless banner’ of the Confederacy six months after the war had ended in America.
Originally built as a swift sail/steam merchant vessel and then converted for war – and unlike the earlier, dedicated warships Alabama and Florida, whose relentless derring-do ended in sinking or capture at the hands of the enemy – she delivered her lengthy voyage of destruction untouched by her foes. Through luck, good seamanship, and clever deployment, she put the final coup-de-grace to American merchant ship registration for a century to come and helped end the whaling industry in the process. Also unlike her more aggressively-led sisters, she suffered considerable internal disarray among her officers, due to her distant and sometimes-vacillating Captain James Waddell. This latter difference has been the focus of much that has been written about her, even including one excellent book devoted to a cultural and psychological analysis of her officer corps. Others focus primarily on her political and military management, and like too many books about naval vessels, often ignore the human experience of simply being aboard and part of a remarkable voyage around the world and everything that involves.
This book manages to remedy that, and thus is truly a standout. Accessible to the non-expert in things maritime, it illuminates how ships of that time functioned, what it took to work them, and the variety of cultures that blended to accomplish it. The author, coming himself from a life at sea, speaks from inside the experience and his descriptive gifts for exploring the sights, sounds, and feelings of the life at sea bring you aboard and make you part of the voyage. In this respect, it has more of the intimate feel of a movie than a formal documentary, which is welcome and fulfilling from page to page, keeping you involved with the life inside while still aware of the history simultaneously going on aboard ship and around the globe.
Key to the success of the author is his choice of whom and what to pull from among the many journals kept by the ship’s officers, as well as contributing documentation from other contemporary sources. Although he draws from them all, the description tends to swing around the notes of Missourian Lt. Francis Chew, who described what was going on about him in a very experiential fashion: the sea, the sky, the food and drink, the curious cultures passing by, and the general feelings of a well-spoken adventurer seeing it all for the first time. Where others focused on the politics or the military aspects of what they were doing, Chew just lived the life, clearly enjoyed it, and his writing exudes it. Although author Hughes doesn’t mention it, the young lieutenant was a musician (a fiddler) who had earlier helped organize a spontaneous shipboard minstrel show on board CSS Palmetto State as she cruised downriver to engage Union warships in Charleston harbor, and in one get-together on Shenandoah the crew once ‘danced their clothes off’ to his tunes. He has been somewhat overlooked in earlier books about the cruise, perhaps because he didn’t posture as much as the rest, but it’s clear he was too busy enjoying and noting his surroundings to be distracted by issues of social competition. The author has taken note of this, and it opens up the whole narrative as a result.
In the same vein, the author takes time to illuminate the neglected corners of the travelogue itself, from the social politics of 1860s Melbourne to the fascinating and obscure cultural and architectural history of Pohnpei in Micronesia. Whether it’s dealing with the sights and smells of native islanders, negotiating dangerous but jewel-like icebergs, sweating in the tropic heat or shivering in an arctic gale, this book takes you there, and all imbued with the immense sense of historical awe that the officers and crew themselves clearly felt about what they were privileged to be going through. They did many things before and after, but this voyage was to be the centrepiece of their lives, and they knew it. Thanks to author Hughes’s impeccable sense of selection and description, so do we.