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Unbeknown to Captain Robert B. Pegram, a young man who called himself Francis Dawson had joined the crew under false pretenses as its fifty-first member. Pegram had thought he was dealing with a boy of sixteen or seventeen when Dawson first asked to come on board. He offered him a position “as a sailor before the mast,” meaning the lowest rank of seaman, and assumed that this would be the last he saw of him. Dawson boarded the ship with the help of one of the master’s mates. But he was no teenage runaway; he was in fact a twenty-one-year-old who had failed to break into the theater as a playwright and was looking for a new occupation. His real name was Austin Reeks; his father had ruined the family through one idiotic financial speculation after another, leaving his mother dependent on the charity of relatives. A widowed aunt who paid for Austin’s education was the inspiration for his new name: Francis Warrington Dawson. Mrs. Dawson’s late husband, William Dawson, had been an officer in the Indian Army. The change of identity and the leap into an adventure was not untypical behavior for Austin. He had never wanted to be himself, living in poverty with a father who made him ashamed and a mother he pitied. “My idea simply was to go to the South, do my duty there as well as I might, and return home to England,” Dawson wrote in his reminiscences. One of his great strengths was that he believed his own stories. Once he had claimed that he was motivated to fight for the South by idealism, it became true.

He needed every shred of his sense of duty to survive his difficult initiation into life at sea. On his second day, Dawson’s trunk was broken open and his belongings stolen. The old sea hands disliked the interloper who spoke fine English and said his rosary at night. They resented even more his obvious rapport with the ship’s officers, and they punished him with the worst jobs. After nearly three weeks of hazing from the crew, Dawson decided that his life was “truly a hard one. I could not have borne it but that I know how judicious is the step I have taken.… Time does not in the least reconcile me to the men in the forecastle! More and more do I detest and loathe them.” Fortunately, once Captain Pegram discovered Dawson’s presence, he took pity on him and gave orders for his bunk to be moved to the upper deck. He soon felt an avuncular concern for the impetuous youth and was overheard saying that he would do something for Dawson once they reached home. Dawson hoped so. “I am told that I may make a fortune in the South if I chose,” he wrote his mother. “God grant that I may for your sakes.”45

Dawson was part of a small but growing number of potential recruits who were trying to reach the South in spite of the blockade. “There may be some whose experience in the field or for drill may be useful,” Mason wrote to Richmond after several ex-officers called at the new headquarters of the Confederate commission at 109 Piccadilly. “Will you please advise me what I am to say to such applicants.”46 While he waited, Mason was careful to be encouraging without committing himself or the commission to anything illegal under the Foreign Enlistment Act. The British authorities’ punctiliousness over the Nashville had shown him that there would be no leniency as far as the law was concerned. Slidell could afford to be less fastidious. Soon after his arrival in Paris, he received a visit from a tall, leather-faced Englishman in his mid-fifties who declared his intention of joining the Confederate army. Impressed by the man’s soldierly past and bearing, Slidell agreed to supply him with letters of introduction. In late spring the Knoxville Register announced that an English volunteer, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, had arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, on board the blockade runner Nelly.47

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In Parliament, William Gregory was pleased to learn that Richmond had instructed Mason to challenge Britain’s observance of the blockade; safeguarding the country’s economy would be taken much more seriously by MPs than independence for slave owners.