“We don’t know for sure. There are bits of symbology, some words in Swahili, a smattering of German, pictographs, but not enough of any one of them to make sense. From the looks of it, most of the bell’s interior is covered with it.”
“Okay, now astound us,” Remi said.
“Wendy was also able to pull a few more letters from the name beneath the Ophelia engraving. In addition to the first two—S and H, and the last one, H, she was able to pull two letters from the middle: a pair of Ns separated by a space.”
As Selma had been talking, Remi had grabbed a napkin from the holder, and she and Sam were working the anagram.
Selma continued: “We fed the letters and arrangement into an anagram program and cross-matched the results against our shipwreck databases and came up with—”
“Shenandoah,” Sam and Remi said in unison.
CHAPTER 14
ZANZIBAR
THE CONFEDERATE STATES SHIP SHENANDOAH HAD LONG FASCINATED Sam and Remi, but they’d never had the time to explore the mysteries behind the saga. Now it appeared fate had handed them a bronze invitation in the form of a ship’s bell.
A 1,160-ton steam cruiser, Shenandoah was launched at the Alexander Stephen & Sons shipyard in River Clyde, Scotland, in August of 1863 under the name Sea King. Iron-framed, teak-planked, and black-hulled, Sea King was fully rigged for both sail and auxiliary steam power, designed as cargo transport for the East Asia tea trade routes. Tea hauling did not lie in her future, however.
A year after her commissioning, in September 1864, Sea King was covertly purchased by agents of the Confederate Secret Service, and on October eighth she sailed with a full complement of merchant sailors, ostensibly headed for Bombay on her maiden trading voyage. Nine days later Sea King rendezvoused near the island of Madeira, off the African coast, with the steamship Laurel, which had been lying in wait. Aboard Laurel were the officers and the nucleus of the Sea King’s new crew, all loyal and experienced sailors, either Southerners or sympathetic British citizens. Their captain was Lieutenant James Iredell Waddell, a forty-one-year-old North Carolinian and graduate of the United States Naval Academy.
The Laurel’s cargo of naval guns, ammunition, and general stores were quickly transferred aboard Sea King, whose dumbfounded and angry crew were given the option of joining this new expedition at higher wages or being transferred to the Laurel and subsequently deposited on Tenerife, an island in the Canary Archipelago off the coast of Morocco. In the end, however, Waddell was only able to enlist enough of Laurel’s seamen to bring the newly commissioned commerce raider Shenandoah to half her normal sailing complement. Despite this, Shenandoah left the Madeira Islands on October twenty-first and set about her task of destroying or capturing Union ships wherever she found them.
Through the fall of 1864 and into the winter of 1865 Shenandoah sailed through the South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Indian Ocean and across to Australia, destroying and capturing Union-flagged merchant vessels before setting her sights on the Union’s Pacific whaling grounds, sailing north from New Guinea into the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.
In the nine months Shenandoah sailed under the Confederate flag as a warship, she accounted for the destruction of some three dozen enemy ships. On August 2, 1865, some four months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Shenandoah learned of the war’s end by the passing British barque Barracouta. Captain Waddell ordered Shenandoah disarmed, then set a course for Liverpool, England, where he and Shenandoah’s crew surrendered in November 1865. The following March she was sold through intermediaries to Sayyid Majid bin Said al-Busaid, the first Sultan of Zanzibar, who renamed her El Majidi, after himself.
For Sam and Remi it had always been this part of the Shenandoah’s history that they found
so intriguing. There were three accounts of El Majidi’s final disposition. One had her being scuttled in the Zanzibar Channel shortly after being damaged in the 1872 hurricane; the next, her sinking six months later while being towed to Bombay for repairs; the last, her going down in November of 1879 after striking a reef near the island of Socotra on the way home from Bombay.
“This raises more questions than it gives answers,” Sam said. “For starters, was it Blaylock or someone else who renamed her Ophelia?”
“And why was she renamed?” Remi added. “And why is there no record of her anywhere?”
“And the biggest question: Why did we find the bell at all?”
“What do you mean?” asked Remi.
“After Waddell surrendered the Shenandoah, wouldn’t she and everything aboard her have been the property of the Union?”
“Including the bell.”
“Including the bell,” Sam echoed.
“Maybe the Union sold her to the Sultan of Zanzibar, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“Could be. But that was in 1866. The El Majidi didn’t sink for another six or thirteen years, depending on which account you go with. Hell, the Sultan named the ship after himself. Does he sound like someone who would hang on to a bell with another ship’s name on it?”
“No, he doesn’t. Maybe whoever refitted her just tossed the bell overboard. For the sake of expediency.”
Remi was the devil’s advocate of the couple. She often did her best to poke holes in their thinking; if after going through the “Remi Gauntlet” the theory remained afloat, they then knew they were on to something.
Sam considered this. “Possible, but I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of the Sultan’s shipfitter. He’s probably not the wealthiest of guys—overworked and underpaid. Unsurprisingly, the Sultan demands the ship meet his royal standards, including a shiny new bell. What would this shipfitter do with a ninety-pound, solid bronze bell?”
“Sell it,” Selma chimed in.
“Let’s put a pin in that,” Remi said. “It seems safe to assume Blaylock himself came across the bell at some point. If it was still attached to the vessel, he either bought it or stole the ship, then changed the name to Ophelia. If the bell had been discarded by the Sultan, it means Blaylock salvaged the bell, blotted out the Shenandoah name, and engraved it with Ophelia.”