The letter -written by Captain Waddell, the commander of the
Shenandoah, -to.Lonl Russell, was publishedethis day week, an 1 it is difficult to suppose that it was on the strength of that document that the Government acquitted him of the crime of making war after the Confederate Government had ceased to exist. Captain Waddell says that he was in May, June, and July of this year in the Okotsk Sea and Aretic Ocean, and engaged in acts of war as late as the 28th day of June, " in ignorance of the reverses sustained by our arms in the field, and of the obliteration of the Government under whose authority I had been acting. This intelligence I received for the first time on communicating at sea on the 2nd August with the British bark Barracouta, of Liverpool, fourteen days from San Francisco. Your Lordship can imagine my sur- prise at the receipt of such intelligence, and I would have given to it little consideration if an Englishman's opinion did not confirm the war news, though from an enemy's port." We suspect this last strange sentence is Captain Waddell's mode of implying that he had before received the same news, not so confirmed, from his captures, and had given it " little consideration " in practice. He intimates that he did not choose to be convinced by any Northern evidence, from which we are at liberty to infer that he had had such evidence in plenty and done his best not to believe it. Cer- tainly the American papers believed that the whalers captured by Captain Waddell did not leave pqrt till they could take with them evidence of the end of the war.
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