“That,” snapped Nichols, “shows how damned little you know about it, lor this morning at daylight I just did change my course a quarter of a point, and that’s what fetched me here.”

Nichols had his wile aboard, not an uncommon practice in those days oi long voyages, and she proved the most intractable prisoner the cruiser ever took. Alternately denouncing the Rebels as outlaws and upbraiding her husband for his meek surrender, she remained uiimellowed by enforced association. When they put her ashore a month later, she muttered, “I wish that steamer may be burned.”

The Shenandoah reached Melbourne, Australia, on January 25, 1865, and her sea-weary men cut loose for the only real shore leave they were ever to have. Waddell, however, had no time for revels. His ship needed repairs, and he had trouble getting them as Melbourne’s official attitude stiffened under pressure from the American consul. He fussed, too, over a probably imaginary plot to blow up his ship. He was plagued by desertions, losing eighteen seamen from his still-shorthanded crew, and he was to be embroiled shortly in charges that he was enlisting Australians in violation of British neutrality laws.

Melbourne police tried to search the cruiser, were refused permission, and came back with military reinforcements to press the issue. Waddell stood them off by threatening to “fight my ship”; then a little later took the heat off by quietly unloading several Australians who were aboard. But when the cruiser sailed again on February 18, her crew discovered to their surprise that 42 “stowaways” had later slipped aboard. For the first time on the voyage Waddell had men enough to handle every gun.

The raiders sailed northward through the Pacific for six dreary weeks without spotting a Yankee sail, then took four whalers at a single stroke. The ships were caught at anchor off Ascension Island (now called Ponape) in the Carolines. Meanwhile, Generals Grant and Lee were meeting at Appomattox.

The Shenandoah ’s men, of course, knew nothing of the South’s collapse. Waddell pushed on, impatient to reach the whaling grounds. He reached that objective on May 21 when the cruiser nosed into the ice-laden Sea of Okhotsk, off the coast of Siberia.

A few days later they captured the Abigail , a whaler well stocked with whiskey, and the

From among the prisoners off the Abigail they gained a new recruit in one Thomas Manning, who had been the whaler’s second mate. Hunt described him as “a Baltirnorean by birth, anything by profession and a reprobate by nature.” He was also a most useful turncoat because he knew the waters, and he was willing to guide the Shenandoah to the whalers’ hunting grounds. With his help and a change in luck, the raiders took 24 vessels in a single week.

The list included five ships on June 22, one each on the twenty-third and twenty-fifth, six on the twenty-sixth, and eleven in a final orgy on the twenty-eighth. The ice-clogged sea lanes proved an ally now, preventing escape as the Shenandoah tracked her victims down. At one point in the eerie proceedings, three blazing ships lay behind the raiders, five more huddled helplessly ahead, and twelve longboats full of prisoners were strung out tow-fashion in the cruiser’s wake.

Captain Ebenezer Nye and First Mate George Smith of the Abigail took advantage of the general confusion to escape in a longboat. Risking death in the icy sea, they rowed and sailed 187 miles to warn other vessels at Cape Bering. Another tough old skipper, Captain Young of the Favorite, tried to defend his ship with a harpoon gun and had to be carried bodily from his deck. But most of the whalers were too stunned to offer more than shocked protests.

A mate on the William Thompson spoke for all of them when he greeted a Rebel boarding officer with “My God, man, don’t you know the war has ended?”

“Did Grant surrender?” asked young Orris Browne of the Shenandoah.

“No. The Army of Virginia surrendered. The war is over.”

“Sir,” replied Browne, “the war will not be over until the South is free.”

The raiders stuck to that view even when one whaling captain produced a tattered old newspaper as proof of Lee’s surrender. Waddell pointed to another item in the same paper—a report of the short-lived Danville proclamation in which Jefferson Davis vowed to fight on—and ordered the vessel destroyed with the rest.

Four whalers were bonded to provide a parking place for prisoners. One of them, the barque James Maury, furnished a macabre touch. Her captain had died en route to the Bering, leaving a wife and two children aboard. Not wishing to bury her husband at sea, but not wishing to put back in mid-voyage either, the practical widow had pickled her departed in a barrel of whiskey. Waddell gave special orders to spare the vessel.

As the Bering raid ended, the Rebels left

He was flirting now with a bold new idea. He had learned that San Francisco was defended by one ironclad, whose skipper he knew to be a careless, lazy fellow rather disinclined to fight. If he sailed in boldly, he might ram and seize the ironclad and capture the city. He was still toying with the idea when, on August 2, the raiders met a British barque and hailed her for news of the war.

“What war?” asked the English captain.

The truth could no longer be denied. The Shenandoah was a ship without a country, and had been during all of that pointless, destructive rampage through the whaling grounds. Her men, if caught, might very well be tried as pirates.

Waddell assembled his crew, delivered a rousing oration on the glories and hardships they had shared together, and said he would seek sanctuary at the nearest English port. He handled it so well that few noted an ambiguous phrase in the Captain’s address. They thought he would run for Australia, which seemed quickest and safest, and they realized only later that “the nearest English port” might mean a long, dangerous voyage back to England itself.

Waddell kept his counsel while officers and men bombarded him with petitions and advice. Most of the officers wanted to put in somewhere, anywhere, just so it was soon. Most of the men were willing to go along with the Captain’s judgment. After a while it became apparent that all petitions were a waste of time. Consulting no one, confiding in no one, Waddell set his course south, then east round Cape Horn, then north and east. He was determined to make England.

The ship was seething now with the feuds and jealousies of weary, frustrated, frightened men who had been penned up together for too many months. Junior officers openly disparaged the Captain, and he reacted in stiff-necked fashion, demoting first one officer and then another to the status of “passenger” for the most trivial offense.

Then death struck the ship. The first to go was a Kanaka native, a man known only as Bill, who had joined them from a whaler. “Poor fellow,” wrote the ship’s chief surgeon, “he had been suffering from venereal for a long time and was covered with ulcers.” A little later they lost George Canning, who was suffering from an old, unhealed lung wound.

Sick, tired, and quarreling though they were, the Rebels managed somehow to hold together. Their luck held, too. They saw only one ship in more than 17,000 miles, and Waddell avoided that one by changing course at night. The long strain eased at last on November

They anchored that night off Liverpool, the port whence they had sailed thirteen months before. Behind them lay a globe-girdling voyage of almost 60,000 miles in which they had captured 38 American ships and taken 1,053 prisoners without fighting a battle or killing a man. Ahead lay a final, unpleasant duty. On November 6, 1865, Waddell surrendered his ship to the British and ran down his flag for the last time.

The British did not exactly welcome this turn of events. They had connived quite openly in arming Confederate raiders, and now that it was all over they regarded the Shenandoah as a chicken come home to roost. England would have to pay damages later—the owners of the whalers sunk by the Shenandoah after the war had ended were eventually reimbursed from the Alabama Claims monies—but meanwhile a diplomatic way had to be found to dispose of the surrendered Shenandoah ’s crew. England announced that she would arrest any United States or British citizens found aboard, but added that she could not detain a citizen of the former Confederate States.

That decision was relayed to the ship, and the Shenandoah ’s men lined up accordingly to declare their loyalty. In the tongues and accents of a dozen lands they did solemnly swear that they came from Dixie. A British officer accepted these affidavits without battins; an eve, and all hands were turned loose.

Most of the real Southerners knocked around Europe for a few years, then slipped back to their homeland one by one as war’s memories faded and old hatreds began to wane. Waddell himself eventually became a familiar figure at the old-timers’ bench close by the gates of the United States Naval Academy. He was accepted there, but he was never an insider again in the institution that he had once loved and served and then fought against. Beside his name in the records of the United States Navy still stands the single word “Dismissed.” As for the Shenandoah, she remained to the end an oddly romantic ship. She was sold at auction to the Sultan of Zanzibar and perished one stormy night in the Indian Ocean.