On Sunday morning according to timeless routine, the crew mustered and the captain read the Articles of War. “Today at dinner,” Whittle wrote, “I did a thing which has rendered me very unhappy in as much as it is very dangerous.” While eating a slice of rhubarb pie he swallowed a piece of the glass bottle in which the fruit had been preserved. The cook had broken the neck off the bottle instead of drawing the cork. Dr. Lining worried that the glass could cause internal bleeding and be life threatening, so he prescribed three strong emetics to induce vomiting. Although anxious, Whittle put his life in God’s hands.
The four mates of Alina and Charter Oak refused to clean out the forecastle where they slept and so were clapped in irons with paroles withdrawn. The first lieutenant had his first disciplinary cases among the crew and was determined to make an example of him: Fireman George Sylvester had been insubordinate, refusing to take a turn at cooking for his mess. He was put in irons, and triced up (suspended from the rigging by the wrists with his toes barely touching the deck). When Sylvester complained, he was gagged and after an hour, begged to be let down. Whittle told him he should be ashamed of himself.
Discipline was absolutely necessary to the happiness of the men and to survival of all on board, recorded the first lieutenant; this was not tyranny but a “thorough governing.” Whittle would examine closely all reports and give the accused the advantage of doubt, but judging him guilty would respond promptly and decisively. “I hate to punish men but it must be done. You must either rule them or they will rule you. . . . When the men once see you determined and firm they will be better, happier and better conducted.”
An English seaman named Thomas Hall gave particular grief. When a quarrel with a French sailor came to blows, the first lieutenant put them both in irons embracing each other around an iron stanchion, hands secured to a beam over their heads. Their first impulse was to laugh, but they quickly concluded the joke was on them and politely asked to be let down. Whittle considered Hall to be smart and energetic with the makings of a good sailor, but the seaman continued to get into fights and was punished several times. “I was determined to conquer him, and I kept him up eight hours more and I found him as subdued as a lamb. He gave me his word that I would never have any more trouble with him.” Seaman Hall did not keep his word.
Methods of disciplinary punishment were more a matter of tradition and captain’s prerogative than formal regulation. Whittle thought that tricing had “a most wonderful effect,” although a Melbourne newspaper would later characterize it as “cruel and barbarous” and “a species of crucifixion.” If problems stemmed from abuse of alcohol, as they often did, Whittle would stop the grog ration. Imprisonment in irons was not helpful since it just gave the crewman a break from work and burdened the other men. One option Whittle did not have was flogging; the ancient practice had been abolished in the U.S. Navy in 1850 after much resistance from officers and veteran sailors and was never adopted in the Confederate navy.3
The first lieutenant also had to manage prisoners. Security in a confined environment required restraint and isolation with occasional punishments for bad behavior. Prisoners could not be housed on the berth deck with the crew, many of whom were former captives themselves. So the forecastle was the only space available—a cramped environment and particularly uncomfortable in high seas, which also housed sheep, chickens, and pigs. But Shenandoah would be chronically undermanned; the first priority was to recruit them. “When they first came off,” wrote Lieutenant Grimball, “they generally refused to ship, but we kept them in irons so long that, as is the case with all sailors, it makes little difference to them what side of the fence they are on, in preference to being in ‘limbo’ they joined Shenandoah. We have a splendid crew the majority being young men of all nations.” Whittle counted on crewmen employing “rough persuasion in the dark” to convince newcomers to join.
Shenandoah next captured the bark D. Godfrey, captained by Samuel Halleck, thirty days from Boston to Valparaiso. She was an old vessel with a valuable assorted cargo including tobacco and prime beef; however, most of it was underneath forty thousand feet of pine lumber and would have taken too long to move. A few hundred feet of rope and good plank, well suited for building a magazine in the hold, were confiscated.
Cabin and pantry bulkheads were knocked down by a few blows of the carpenter’s hatchet and thrown in a pile on the deck. A match was applied and in fifteen minutes flames burst through the skylights. “Darkness had settled around us when the rigging and sails took fire,” recalled Hunt, “but every rope could be seen as distinctly as upon a painted canvas, as the flames made their way from the deck, and writhed upward like fiery serpents. Soon the yards came thundering down by the run as the lifts and halyards yielded to the devouring element, the standing rigging parted like blazing flax, and the spars simultaneously went by the board and left the hulk wrapped from stem to stern in one fierce blaze, like a floating, fiery furnace.”4
Whittle was amused at the female prisoners who appeared to be quite in love with Shenandoah, enjoying a capture as much as he and his fellow Confederates; the little boy gave three cheers for Jeff Davis every day. The men of D. Godfrey did not seem sorry to see the old ship go—apparently Halleck had planned to sell her in Valparaiso anyway—and to the first lieutenant’s joy, five of the six sailors (three English, one Yankee, one from St. Johns, New Brunswick) along with a black steward signed the shipping papers. “They are all good, young men and the darkey is the very man I want for ship’s cook.” Whittle was proud of the crew; they had behaved well in this demoralizing work: “When in the world’s history was a parallel ever known[?]” A board of officers appointed to assess the prizes fixed the value of Charter Oak at $15,000 and D. Godfrey at $36,000.
The new black crewmember was John Williams, a freedman of Boston. He would desert in Melbourne and, in an affidavit for the U.S. consul, swear that Captain Waddell had urged him to join, saying that “colored people” were the cause of the war, and it would go better for him if he signed on or be hard on him if he did not. Waddell (according to Williams) said he wanted all colored persons he could get and offered a berth as a coal trimmer for six months with a month’s advance pay. Williams agreed to work but initially refused to join because he was a loyal citizen who had served the U.S. Navy. He claimed to have discharge papers from the USS Minnesota and also to have been on board the USS Congress when she was sunk by the CSS Virginia in Hampton Roads on the day before her battle with Monitor. Shenandoah’s shipping articles show that Williams signed on as a landsman at a salary of $15.58 per month, the position and pay offered to those with no seamanship experience. Along with his shipmates, Williams made his mark on the day D. Godfrey was captured, so whatever the degree of his resistance, it did not last long. The others signed on as seamen at $29.10 per month.5
The naval service was accustomed throughout its history to men of all shades, at sea in its own world—its authoritarian structures customized through centuries to the unique needs of that shipboard life and hardly less strict than slavery. The Union Navy, also desperate for men, had been far ahead of the U.S. Army in quietly enlisting hundreds of freedmen and “contrabands.” In both navies, to place one group into a separate category based on race would have disrupted efficiency and discipline. In general, and far more so than on land, men were accepted for their skills and performance regardless of color. It was a matter of teamwork and often of survival. Waddell would have enlisted blacks as seamen or even petty officers and paid them accordingly had they possessed the experience; he could not afford to do otherwise and would have seen no inconsistency in the notion. At least three of them would be enlisted from prizes as landsmen or ordinary seamen.
On 8 November, Lining noted the one-month anniversary of their boarding Laurel at Liverpool