Waddell’s War on the Whalers
Tom H. Inkster describes how, nearly four months after the collapse of the Confederacy, a gallant Confederate naval officer was still bent on the destruction of Union shipping.
On April 9th, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse; and the American Civil War was over; but, far north in the Bering Strait, the smoke of burning Union ships still drifted across the Arctic sea.
News of Lee’s surrender had not yet reached James Iredell Waddell, commander of the Shenandoah, who had been instructed by the Confederate naval command ‘to do the enemy’s property the greatest injury in the shortest time’. It was hoped that the reports of their losses would induce the powerful New England whaling barons to agitate for peace.
Shrewd, a man of integrity, who exercised good discipline and followed instructions to the letter, Waddell was perfectly suited to the task. More than six feet tall, weighing two hundred pounds and ‘a splendid specimen of manhood, noble in bearing’, he had been born in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and appointed midshipman in 1841 at the age of seventeen.
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