A Hanging Offense
The Strange Affair of the Warship Somers
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Mutiny on the Bounty is one of history's greatest naval stories—yet few know the similar tale from America's own fledgling navy in the dying days of the Age of Sail, a tale of mutiny and death at sea on an American warship.
In 1842, the brig-of-war Somers set out on a training cruise for apprentice seamen, commanded by rising star Alexander Mackenzie. Somers was crammed with teenagers. Among them was Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer, a disturbed youth and a son of the U.S. Secretary of War. Buying other crew members' loyalty with pilfered tobacco and alcohol, Spencer dreamed up a scheme to kill the officers and turn Somers into a pirate ship.
In the isolated world of a warship, a single man can threaten the crew's discipline and the captain's authority. But one of Spencer's followers warned Mackenzie, who arrested the midshipman and chained him and other ringleaders to the quarterdeck. Fearing efforts to rescue the prisoners, officers had to stay awake in round-the-clock watches. Steering desperately for land, sleep-deprived and armed to the teeth, battling efforts to liberate Spencer, Somers's captain and officers finally faced a fateful choice: somehow keep control of the vessel until reaching port—still hundreds of miles away—or hang the midshipman and his two leading henchmen before the boys could take over the ship.
The results shook the nation. A naval investigation of the affair turned into a court-martial and a state trial and led to the founding of the Naval Academy to provide better officers for the still-young republic. Mackenzie's controversial decision may have inspired Herman Melville's great work Billy Budd. The story of Somers raises timeless questions still disturbing in twenty-first-century America: the relationship between civil and military law, the hazy line between peace and war, the battle between individual rights and national security, and the ultimate challenge of command at sea.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This coherent and absorbing study from Melton (The First Impeachment) is the first full-scale study of the "mutiny" aboard the U.S.S. Somers in nearly a generation. The brig Somers was on a training cruise in 1842, with more than 100 apprentice seamen aboard. The son of the secretary of war, 19-year-old Philip Spencer, began talking and writing wildly about leading a mutiny. When the captain, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, had Spencer and his two confederates, Cromwell and Small, put in irons, several incidents occurred suggesting attempts to rescue the men. After consulting with his officers and petty officers, Mackenzie decided that in view of the "clear and present danger" of a bloody mutiny, he should hang the three suspects, and did. The Navy conducted a formal inquiry into Mackenzie's conduct, then brought him before a court-martial. Melton, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, does his best to render the ensuing legal thickets intelligible to the 21st-century lay reader, without complete success. Better are his accounts of where the Somers affair fits into maritime history and the manner in which the isolation of the sailing ship made the captain's power nearly absolute. His final verdict is similar to that of the 19th-century Navy: Mackenzie exceeded his authority, but not wantonly or frivolously, and Spencer was a clear-cut and dangerous sociopath. Equal traces of eloquence and purple prose in saying so may appeal to post-Patrick O'Brien era maritime buffs. (Apr. 9)
