Last Flag Down by John Baldwin

Author:John Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307394248
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

“I trust that the dull monotony of beating to windward will be relieved by catching a Yank,” Whittle wrote with his customary chops-licking brio as his log resumed on February 20—at sea once again.

Life was back to normal at last—better than normal, actually. The crew was looking robust and fleshed-out after a month’s dining on Melbourne’s finest produce and cuisine, and the raider herself had been restored to her maiden-voyage seaworthiness: renewed copper hull firmly in place, boards recaulked, rudder and prop in good repair, her storehouses bulging with quantities of food, water, medicines, and ammunition.

A neatly carpentered new galley now graced the berth deck beneath the main deck, sealed off from the weather. The change made it possible to dismantle an awkwardly nailed-together pile of boards that had offended Whittle’s eye for order since the beginning. The ugly shack had stood on the spar deck forward, and had served as a cook’s galley and miniature mess hall. As Whittle well knew, the structure could serve as something else entirely in combat: as shrapnel, if an enemy ball hit and splintered it. Ordering it cleared from the decks may have been a sign that Whittle believed the chances were increasing for such an encounter.

Shenandoah was presently bounding along off the headlands of Cape Howe at the southern tip of Australia, at latitude 38.15 south, longitude 149.37 east—smack in the Yankee merchant-freight lanes. She was at last turning her prow northward, and ultimately toward the great whaling fields near the Arctic Circle.

Her globe-circling mission would now entail three additional legs, each one alone roughly the distance she’d covered from the London docks to Melbourne. It would consume ten more months, virtually all of it out of contact with the world.

The cause for which she sailed would be lost within six weeks.

Half a world from that onrushing debacle, the revitalized Shenandoah enjoyed a new beginning, filled with hopeful portents. For the first time, James Waddell and Conway Whittle enjoyed the luxury of a full crew—ninety-six hands, more than the raider had held at any time since she ran up her colors, even with prisoners. Many of these men had seemingly materialized out of thin air once the ship had crossed the Rip and put Port Phillip Bay behind her. Actually, they’d crept into the sunlight from assorted dark corners below decks: the irreducible hard core of the many Melbourne men who’d begged to sign on with the Confederates. These new hands seemed equal to their tasks, Whittle noted, but “they have been stowed away so long it is hard to give them enough to eat. After we get them well filled up we will be all right.”

The strangest and most enigmatic newcomer to Shenandoah’s company had not stowed away; he had volunteered to join the crew as a marine at Melbourne, and Waddell accepted him on board—along with his personal servant, a Negro named Edward Weeks—and granted him the rank of sergeant. This gothic figure called himself George P. Canning, and claimed to have served on the staff of the Confederate general Leonidas Polk.

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