Thursday, July 2, 2020

July 1-3, 1865-- Part 1: CSS Shenandoah Digging Icebergs and Watching the Sun


JULY 1ST TO 3RD, 1865:  After destroying a large fleet of Arctic whalers on June 26 and 28,  the CSS Shenendoah, Lt. James Waddell,  stood south "amid snow and icebergs" looking for more victims.

There he wrote, in "the immensity of the ice and floes", threatened with "danger of being shut up in the Arctic Ocean for several months. I was obliged to turn her prow southward and reached East Cape just in time to slip by the Diomedes when a vast field of floe ice was closing the strait....

"The sun was in his highest northern declination, and it was perpetual daylight, when he sank below the northern horizon, a golden fringe marked his course until his pale and cheerless face came again, frosted from icebergs and snow."

Lt. James Waddell Waxing Poetic.  --Old BRunBerg


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