Chapter 1:
The Trent Disaster
The Trent (left) is attacked by the San Jacinto
On November 7, 1861, as the American Civil War was flaring up to new heights, two ships met each other on the foggy open ocean.
One was the RMS
Trent, a British mail packet. It had served the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company on the Transatlantic route until the Crimean war, in which it was briefly converted into a troopship. On the date in question, it was transporting Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell through the Caribbean en route to Britain, where they would discuss formal recognition of the Confederacy by Britain, trade between the nations, and international agreements regarding privateering.
The other was the USS
San Jacinto. It was a Union military vessel with a complement of 235 officers. It was the latest cog in the North's machine to prevent the Diplomats from reaching Britain -- a pursuit that had involved numerous ships and incredible manpower. It had been sent out of St. Thomas in pursuit of the
Trent.
Captain Charles Wilkes (the commander of the
San Jacinto) had read of the Confederates' attempted voyage on the
Trent mere weeks earlier. He was known through his style of aggressive decision-making, and was often criticized by his naval colleagues for it, but it got the job done and motivated his men. When he read of the diplomats' journey to Britain aboard the ship in a newspaper while in St. Thomas, he decided to try and apprehend them as "contraband," a dubious way of ensuring that he complied with the recently passed Paris Agreement (a document restricting pirateering).
As the two ships drew nearer, the
Trent unfurled a large British flag. Wilkes and his men, of course, were unfazed -- they had seen this coming. They fired a shot across the bow, but the ship continued unabated. Wilkes, by all accounts visibly irritated, ordered his men to fire another shot -- this one directly in front of the
Trent. The order was relayed all the way down to Private Gerald Tennant, who had been placed in charge of the
San Jacinto's six eight-inch Smoothbore guns in stead of an ill gun captain. As he lit the fuse and stood up, he pressed his foot down on a rusty nail, and jumped away, rotating the cannon and changing the course of American history.
The metal sphere shot forth from the cannon, and slammed into the starboard side of the
Trent's deck. Plenty of wood splintered apart instantly, but the ball continued its journey by bouncing upwards and hitting a Royal Navy Officer squarely in the chest, killing him instantly. Three other passengers and officers were cut by flying wood and metal, including John Slidell himself. However, Wilkes remained unfazed. It would serve to teach the British a lesson.
Lieutenant D.M. Fairfax was acutely aware of the international incident that had just occurred, but he was ordered by Wilkes to board the ship, arrest the diplomats and their secretaries, and take the ship itself as a prize. The armed officers in the boarding party scared off protests from passengers, Mason and the wounded Slidell were arrested, and the ship's Union Jack was replaced with an oversized American flag as it was sailed to port alongside the
San Jacinto.
Three weeks later, John Slidell would die in prison of the infection he caught when a chunk of wood soaked in seawater cut a gash in his cheek. The ship would be taken back by Britain later in the war, but Mason and Slidell's mission would not even prove necessary. As soon as the news that Americans had murdered a British officer in cold blood, imprisoned diplomats from a foreign country, left over forty passengers stranded in the Caribbean, and removed the British flag from one of its ships effectively at gunpoint, they quickly issued directives to send three regiments of troops and corresponding artillery to Nova Scotia. The gears of war had begun to grind.
