Powers Ron - Last flag down: the epic journey of the last Confederate warship

CONTENTS

In loving memory of my son, Kevin Powers (19842005)
RP

To my true love, Babes
JB

C oal.

The Noble Cause bleeding to death, starving to death. The Northern aggressors with their dirty heels in the sacred ground of Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia; his generation largely in its graves, or soon to be. And here he was watching the empty horizon from a coal-laden merchant steamer off the coast of West Africa. Three decks below him, his crew bent to dismal duty, the drudgework of the high seas. They were securing the ships bunker coalher fuel supplyand preparing her cargo, of yet more coal, for heavy weather. The description given to those sweating wretches who had to carry it out said it all: coal heavers.

Coal.

A mundane cargo for this fine fast ship running now in front of the wind, racing for her life, almost due south, and almost diametrically away from the Confederate States of America. Within her, a cargo weighing almost as much as the ship itself and a valuable cargo indeed: 800 long tons of almost smokeless Welsh coal. A cargo so expensive its owners had sent a man on the voyage to look after it, to see it wasnt pilfered for fuel, to see it was delivered as planned. A cargo almost as mundane as the young coal agents undercover alias: George Brown.

To be hauling coal, not Enfields, at this moment of the Confederacys most parlous plight: Atlanta, proud citadel of the Confederacy, lost to Sherman; Lee in the trenches at Richmond since June; Sheridans cavalry chasing Jubal Earlys ragged men up the Shenandoah Valley, burning the fields and barns and mills behind them.

Norfolk, Virginia, or those remnants that had not been burned, was now under martial law; indeed, the homes of Browns family, the Whittles, the Sinclairs, the Pages, those still standing, were occupied by Federal troops. The South that the young man had known as a glittering nation unto itself, a kingdom of honor and deep traditions, where family names reached back in time until they seemed to merge with the land itselfthis Old South was now a scorched, bleeding thing, its armies ground up by the cold advancing Union machine. The war was in its brutal, inexorable end-game.

Sea King, since leaving London days ago, seemingly irrelevant to it all, had plodded toward the southern seas with a consignment of coal. Simply a modern merchantman going peacefully about its business.

Or so the slim boyish George Browncoal agent had hoped any dangerous adversary in the vicinity of the London docks would believefalsely. When he left the Thames on Sea King, he had staked his life, the life of a Confederate spy, on that risk. Any hostile interception, any search and seizure of that vessel and her stores, would have guaranteed his imprisonment, even death. But Sea King was gone now, reported lost, in reality sold to the Confederacy, renamed and reflagged.

George Brown had, for the first eleven days, risked only his own life, but now there were others, a new crew, and soon he would be risking these mens lives as well. Any hostile interception of this once-peaceful vessel now would be an act of war.

And war was his profession.

He was in fact an experienced and dangerous warrior of the sea: Lt. William Conway Whittle, CSN. And this risk was only the first in a Homeric voyage that promised more, and ever more terrible, risks.

What a busy day these twenty-four hours have been. Thank God we have a fine set of men and officers, and, although we have an immense deal to contend with, we are industrious and alive to the emergency.

Just the sort of mild pleasantries (aside from that emergency) one might expect from the mind of a slightly built twenty-four-year-old with narrow, sloping shoulders; a high, almost scholarly forehead crowned by a severely combed pompadour; narrow-set, vaguely disapproving eyes; and a small mouth that gave no hint of the eloquent mind inside. He could have been a schoolmaster or an assistant bank clerk. But on this dayOctober 26, 1864young Lieutenant Whittle commenced the log of an odyssey that would take its place among the most evocative testimonials produced by the Civil War.

Sea Kings cargo of coal had been a ruse. The emergency was real. The coal had been the final camouflage in a desperate, nonesuch skein of conspiracy conceived and carried out over many months by Whittle and senior agents of the Confederacy working discreetly in London and Paris late in the Civil War: a scheme to obtain this speedster of a shipthis Sea Kingfrom the English merchant navy with the quiet consent of Queen Victoria herself; load up a cargo of the black, fumy stuff; and, keeping her disguised as a harmless freighter, ease her out of the harbor at London, down the Thames into the English Channel, and from there toward her destiny as a killer of Yankee vessels. She would be met by her Rebel crew and her supply of armaments somewhere on the open ocean, far from the prying eyes of Yankee spies. Sea Kings cover story was virtually airtight. There was just one tie to the Confederacy when she finally left England, in fact there was only one Rebel on board at all, and he was undercover: Lt. William Conway Whittle, CSN, also known as Mr. Brown.

Conway Whittle was an ideal figure for this mission. Hed been personally selected by top Confederate operatives in Europe to be the ships executive officer, second in rank only to the captain. On the heels of his dashing exploits as a blockade runner, Whittle had been secretly summoned to Paris in September 1864. There he met with Commodore Samuel Barron, a lifelong friend of Whittles father, Commodore W. C. Whittle, and one of young Lieutenant Whittles primary mentors. Commodore Barron was also one of the key figures in the Confederacys hopes to patch together a navy from a European base. Barron handed young Whittle a letter that contained his instructions. He was to make his way via Liverpool to London and check into the fashionable Woods Hotel under the Brown alias. On the Friday morning of October 7, carrying a newspaper and dressed in unobtrusive business attire, the young man was to take a seat in the hotel dining room, pull the corner of his napkin through a buttonhole in his jacket, and await a stranger who would ask him, Is this Mr. Brown?