19 | November | 2015 | Shenandoah Down Under

At last, after its 13 month circumnavigation of the globe, the CSS Shenandoah returns to Liverpool! The Confederate flag is lowered for the final time and the ship is taken into the charge of the British Customs Office. With the American Civil War back home now over for many months, its reappearance is something of an embarrassment for everyone.

While the British government tries to figure out what to do with the ship and its crew, what do the Shenandoah’s Officers do to their Customs Officer captors? If your answer is get them so drunk that they go to sleep in the lee scuppers, then you have been paying attention!

And so the voyage of the Shenandoah ends, with one last act of farce, as an English Naval captain comes on board and asks all of the obviously ethnically diverse crew if they are Southerners, for if they are they’ll be allowed to go free. All to a man answer (attempting as best they can in Good ‘ol Boy southern accents) “Yes”, and so are allowed to leave, whistling Dixie…

…and in next week’s episode, we’ll recount the multifarious fates of the Confederate pirates, most of whom do not return to American for many a year; the ignominious end of the CSS Shenandoah itself; and why the Shenandoah’s “treaty offensive and defensive with the whales” meant we still have whales to protect today.