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The Flag That Came Down on the Mersey

A Confederate warship kept burning ships in the Arctic months after the South had fallen, then ran halfway around the world to surrender. Was its captain an honorable last holdout, or a man fleeing the gallows?

7 chapters · 8 sourcesBy HistoraiPublished November 6, 2026

Questions about this story

What happened during the surrender of the CSS Shenandoah on November 6, 1865?

The Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah officially surrendered to the British government on the River Mersey in Liverpool on November 6, 1865. Commanded by Lieutenant Commander James Waddell, the crew lowered the last Confederate banner from the mizzenmast after sailing 17,000 miles to avoid capture and trial for piracy by the United States.

Why did the CSS Shenandoah keep attacking ships after the Civil War ended?

Lieutenant Commander James Waddell initially dismissed reports of Confederate surrender as Union propaganda after reading newspapers carrying Jefferson Davis's call to fight on. He only halted attacks on August 2, 1865, after stopping the British vessel Barracouta, which definitively confirmed the Confederacy had fallen and Davis had been captured.

How did the CSS Shenandoah reach Liverpool without being captured?

To avoid extradition and trial for piracy, Waddell disarmed the CSS Shenandoah by lowering the eight heavy guns into the hold and painting over the gunports. The ship then sailed 17,000 nautical miles for 122 days around Cape Horn without docking at any port or speaking to another vessel.

Why did Britain pay damages for the CSS Shenandoah after the Civil War?

The 1872 Geneva Tribunal found Britain had breached neutrality by permitting the CSS Shenandoah to take on 42 stowaways in Melbourne, Victoria, in February 1865. The tribunal awarded 15.5 million dollars in total damages to the United States, with roughly 3.8 million dollars allocated solely for Shenandoah's destruction.

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Period: 1864 - 1872 · 10 minutes · English · two hosts

American Civil War, end

The Last Confederate Shot

Bering Sea, June 1865
Ten whalers taken in seven hours
The war was already over

Ada: Picture the Bering Sea, late June of eighteen sixty-five. Pack ice stretching white toward the Diomede Islands, just below the Arctic Circle, and in the space of seven hours one ship captures ten American whaling barks.⁵⁸

Theo: Seven hours? That's industrial.

Ada: Eight of them are set ablaze, right there against the ice. The flames reflect off the floes, and the whalers watch their livelihoods burn. The ship doing the burning is the CSS Shenandoah, flying the Confederate flag.⁵⁸

Theo: But the Civil War's over by then. Lee surrendered in April.

Ada: That's exactly the thing. The Confederacy no longer exists. And this warship will keep fighting, then run seventeen thousand miles to the other side of the world to surrender, because by the end its captain is terrified he'll be hanged as a pirate. I'm Ada.⁵⁶

Theo: And I'm Theo. Welcome to Historai. So how does a Confederate warship end up in the Arctic in the first place?

Late 1864

Sea King Becomes Shenandoah

Built on the Clyde, 1863
Armed secretly near Madeira
Commissioned October 19, 1864

Ada: She started life as the Sea King, a fast tea clipper built on the Clyde in Glasgow in eighteen sixty-three. Two hundred and thirty feet, iron frame, teak planking, and a steam engine with a bronze propeller that could be hoisted clear of the water under sail.⁵

Theo: So a merchant ship. How does it become a warship?

Ada: A Confederate agent named James Bulloch quietly bought her in London in September of eighteen sixty-four. She slipped out under civilian cover, met a blockade runner at the uninhabited Desertas Islands near Madeira, and took on guns and officers there.⁴⁵

Theo: Loaded with cannon on a deserted island. Nicely deniable.

Ada: On the nineteenth of October, Lieutenant Commander James Waddell commissioned her, renamed her Shenandoah, and raised the Confederate ensign. Waddell was from Pittsboro, North Carolina, nearly twenty years in the United States Navy before he resigned in sixty-one.³⁵

Theo: And a crew?

Ada: Barely one. Only twenty-two of the original sailors signed on. He went to sea with twenty-four officers and just over twenty men. A warship almost without a crew.²⁷

Early 1865

The Melbourne Stowaways

Three weeks of repairs in Victoria
42 stowaways taken aboard, Feb 18, 1865
Then north to the whaling fleets

Ada: She hunted her way down through the South Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean, capturing nine Union merchantmen, burning most of them after taking off their crews. Then in January sixty-five she anchored at Melbourne, in the Colony of Victoria, for repairs.⁵⁸

Theo: A British colony. Isn't Britain supposed to be neutral?

Ada: Officially, yes. The United States consul protested, British law forbade recruiting. But when Shenandoah left Melbourne on the eighteenth of February, she secretly carried off forty-two stowaways who became crew.⁴⁵

Theo: Forty-two. That more than doubles his men. That's not an accident.

Ada: Hold onto that date, the eighteenth of February. It comes back to haunt Britain in a courtroom years later. For now, it gives Waddell the men to go wreck the New England whaling fleet in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.⁴⁸

Ada: On the twenty-second of June, off Siberia, Shenandoah fired a shot across the bow of the whaler Sophia Thornton. Historians call it the final combat shot of the Civil War.¹⁸

Summer 1865

The Barracouta's Newspapers

June papers dismissed as propaganda
Aug 2, 1865: the Barracouta confirms all
Burning ships now meant piracy

Ada: The day after that shot, Waddell captured a brig whose captain handed over San Francisco newspapers. They reported Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the fall of Richmond.⁵⁸

Theo: So he knew. In June he already knew.

Ada: He said he didn't believe it. The same papers also carried Jefferson Davis's Danville proclamation, that the South would fight on with renewed vigor. Waddell called the surrender reports Union propaganda and kept burning ships.⁵⁸

Theo: Come on. That's awfully convenient for a man who wants to keep plundering.

Ada: Accounts differ on exactly that. The whalers accused him of willful blindness. Waddell insisted Davis's words left it genuinely ambiguous. The real reckoning comes on the second of August, in the Pacific west of Baja California.¹⁵

Ada: He stops a British bark, the Barracouta, outbound from San Francisco. His lieutenant comes back with newspapers confirming it all. Johnston surrendered, Kirby Smith surrendered, Jefferson Davis captured. There was no Confederacy left.¹⁵

Theo: And now every ship he burned after the war ended isn't an act of war anymore.

Ada: It's piracy. A hanging offense under international maritime law. One of his officers wrote that the Southern Confederacy had, in his words, ceased to exist.¹⁶

Autumn 1865

Disguise and the 17,000-Mile Dash

Guns struck below, hull repainted black
Waddell chose Liverpool over Mexico
122 days, no port, round Cape Horn

Ada: Waddell told the crew there was nothing left to do but, as he put it, secure our personal safety by the readiest means at hand. He disarmed the ship on the spot. Eight heavy guns dismounted and tackled down into the hold, the gunports closed and painted over.¹⁵

Theo: Turning a warship back into an innocent merchant clipper.

Ada: The black-and-white gunboat banding on her hull, repainted solid black. Then came the argument. Beach her in Mexico, run for Valparaíso, make for Sydney. The crew wanted to scatter.⁵⁶

Theo: And Waddell says no.

Ada: He overrules them. Liverpool, England, where he believed British law was the only thing standing between his men and American extradition. Crew memoirs describe bitter, near-mutinous murmuring; Waddell's own journal insists they were obedient and unified. Either way, they went.⁵⁶

Theo: Straight across how far?

Ada: Seventeen thousand nautical miles, a hundred and twenty-two days, without touching a single port or speaking to another vessel. Around Cape Horn in the Antarctic winter, down to nearly sixty degrees south, under sail alone to save the coal.⁵⁸

November 6, 1865

Striking the Colors

Entered the Mersey at dawn, Nov 6, 1865
Flag lowered at exactly 10 a.m.
Final Confederate flag, final surrender

Ada: On the night of the fifth of November, eighteen sixty-five, they sighted the Tuskar Rock lighthouse and entered the mouth of the River Mersey. A pilot boarded near midnight, but he refused to guide an unidentified steamer in until she flew a national flag.⁶⁸

Theo: So after disguising her, Waddell has to show his colors anyway.

Ada: He raises the Confederate banner one last time and steams in at dawn through a thick river mist. Local papers called it a Palmetto flag; naval registers say it was the second national Stainless Banner. Accounts differ even on which flag it was.⁶⁷

Theo: And people are watching?

Ada: Thousands. Word rips through the Liverpool Exchange that the notorious raider has come home. She anchors alongside HMS Donegal, a hundred-and-one-gun British ship of the line. A boarding party brings the formal confirmation: the Confederate States have fallen.¹⁵

Ada: At precisely ten o'clock that morning, the Confederate flag came down from her mizzenmast. The last official Confederate flag ever lowered, and the end of the only voyage around the world ever made by a Confederate warship, about fifty-eight thousand miles.⁵⁶

Theo: There's a Liverpool legend he surrendered on the town hall steps to the mayor, isn't there?

Ada: There is, and it's just folklore. The records show a naval surrender on the river, to Captain Paynter. Waddell wrote to the British Foreign Secretary, Earl Russell, handing the ship to Queen Victoria's government.²⁶

1865 to 1872

Exile, Auction, and Geneva

All 109 released after the deck muster
Ship sold; Waddell exiled until 1875
Geneva Tribunal: $3.8M for Shenandoah

Ada: Now the diplomatic storm breaks. Thomas Dudley, the American consul in Liverpool, fired off furious dispatches demanding every man be arrested and tried as a common pirate.⁴⁶

Theo: And the British answer?

Ada: Crown lawyers said they couldn't be tried for piracy, because they'd acted under a genuine military commission without knowing the war was over. London would only detain British subjects who'd broken the Foreign Enlistment Act by serving on a belligerent warship.²⁶

Theo: Which brings us back to those Melbourne stowaways with the local accents.

Ada: Exactly. On the eighth of November, Captain Paynter lined up all one hundred and nine men on deck for a nationality muster. Every single one claimed to be American, Confederate, or some other foreigner.²⁶

Theo: With broad Liverpool and Scottish accents, I assume.

Ada: Paynter certified there were, in his words, none known to be British-born subjects on board, and released every man. Dudley called it a deliberate charade to shield English sailors. British logs insisted they kept to strict standards of evidence. Accounts differ, but nobody was charged.²⁴

Theo: So the men walk. What about the ship, and Waddell?

Ada: The ship was handed to the United States, dismasted in an Atlantic gale trying to sail home, then sold at auction for fifteen thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds. The Sultan of Zanzibar bought her, renamed her El Majidi, and she foundered in a hurricane in eighteen seventy-two.⁵⁷

Theo: And the captain?

Ada: Waddell lived in European exile for ten years, afraid of a treason indictment, and only came home under a general pardon in eighteen seventy-five.³⁵

Theo: But that Melbourne stop didn't just vanish.

Ada: No. It became a cornerstone of the Geneva Tribunal of eighteen seventy-two, the arbitration over Britain's broken neutrality. Britain paid fifteen and a half million dollars in damages, and about three point eight million of that was for Shenandoah alone.⁴⁸

Theo: So one shorthanded clipper, burning ships after the war was lost, ends up costing Britain a fortune and closing out the whole Civil War.

Ada: That's the strange shape of it. A war that ended at a Virginia farmhouse in April had its last flag come down on an English river in November, lowered by men who may or may not have wanted to believe it was over. If anything here makes you want to stop us and ask, you can interrupt any episode and put the question straight to us.

Theo: This was Historai, where history answers back.

Research record

Sources

End of the war | National Museums LiverpoolMuseum or archive
Historical Documents - Office of the HistorianMuseum or archive
A Civil War Surrender Six Months After Appomattox | NC DNCRMuseum or archive
‘Due Diligence’ and the British Government’s Response to Confederate Ship Procurement in Britain during the American...Academic
CSS Shenandoah - WikipediaEncyclopedia
Emerging Civil WarWeb
Swan Song for the CSS Shenandoah - Warfare History NetworkWeb
The Raid of the CSS Shenandoah from a Southern Ocean Perspective – International Journal of Naval HistoryWeb