Originally aired on November 07, 1997 - In part 167 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson explores the wartime activities of the Confederate ship Shenandoah.
#167 – CSS Shenandoah
The most successful of Confederate naval efforts in the Civil War came with the use of privateers. These were individual ships commissioned by the Southern government to prowl the high seas and destroy all Union merchant marine vessels they encountered. Exploits of the cruisers Alabama and Florida are well-chronicled.
Of the eight such war ships authorized another made strong claims to fame. CSS Shenandoah was the last Confederate raider to enter service. Originally built in Scotland in 1863, and designed for commercial sailing in the Far East the vessel was first christened Sea King. It made one trip to New Zealand before Confederate Naval Agent James Bullock purchased the ship for the Southern nation. The three masted steam auxiliary boat was refitted in the Azores with twelve guns and renamed Shenandoah.
In October, 1864, Confederate Naval Captain James Waddell arrived in Europe. A native of Pittsboro, North Carolina, Waddell in 1841 had been appointed a mid-shipman in the U. S. Navy. That same year in a duel with another mid-shipman Waddell received a wound that left him with a permanent limp.
He served aboard an iron-clad, was an ordinance officer at Naval Headquarters in Richmond and commanded Special Defenses at Charleston before going abroad to captain a new ship. His assigned was the Shenandoah.
Waddell was then forty, piercing eyes and heavy mustache gave evidence that he was a tough, daring, energetic officer. Waddell set sail from the Azores for Melbourne, Australia. His was a ship of war, but an insubstantial one. Throughout the life of the Shenandoah no more than half a crew was available. The vessel had two guns at the bow; two at the stern; and four on each side. Any pair of guns could be fired simultaneously, but a full broadside as everyone knew was likely to shake the ship apart. Shenandoah bagged twelve prizes as it made its way to Australia.
In mid-February, 1865, the cruiser suddenly appeared in the whaling waters of the northern Pacific. There it bonded four vessels and burned 22 others. Shenandoah quickly became master of the region between Japan and Alaska.
All was going well for the Confederate warship until August, 1865 when Waddell learned from a passing English boat that the Civil War in America had ended four months earlier. Now the specter loomed of Waddell and his crew being pursued and, if captured, treated as pirates and quickly hanged.
Waddell stowed his armament below deck; dismantled Shenandoah as a warship and made a frantic dash around Cape Horn for the safety of British waters. On the morning of November 6, 1865, almost seven months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox Shenandoah eased through a dense fog into Liverpool Harbor.
The last Confederate battle flag was lowered. The Civil War came truly to an end. Shenandoah had been at sea for thirteen months, yet it had traveled 58,000 statute miles, sailed for eight months without lowering her anchor and had cruised in every ocean save the Antarctic. Her record of captures was second only to that of the legendary Alabama. Waddell’s vessel had seized 58 freighters and whaling ships along with over 1,000 prisoners of war. The costs of those adventures is two deaths, both from natural causes.
Waddell remained abroad until 1875. He then returned to America and was in charge of the Maryland Oyster Navy when he died in 1886 at Annapolis. CSS Shenandoah did not have an honorable end. She was eventually sold at auction and purchased by the Sultan of Zanzibar. The ship led an active, but not always legal, existence until 1879 when it sank off a reef in the Indian Ocean. Its exact whereabouts today are unknown.
