Sailing the Graveyard Sea: The Deathly Voyage of the Somers, the U.S. Navy’s only Mutiny, and the Trial that Gripped the Nation
Richard Snow. New York: Scribner, 2023. 259 pp. Illus. Biblio. Notes. Index. $29.
Reviewed by Captain Bill Bray, U.S. Navy (Retired)
The alleged mutiny on board the brig Somers in November 1842 that saw three crew members executed at sea quickly became a national scandal and an em-barrassment to the U.S. Navy. It also became a cause célèbre for an increasing number of Americans who felt Navy life for young men (boys, actually—of the 120 crew members on board the Somers, some 90 were teenagers, half of whom were 16 and under) was brutish and cruel and in need of reform. In fact, the affair was one impetus in the Navy finally opening a formal school ashore for midshipmen in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1845.
However, the mutiny’s influence in the U.S. Naval Academy’s founding can be overstated—many attempts at establishing a midshipmen school had been tried before and, with the advent of steam propulsion, by the 1840s the momentum to do so had accelerated. It is reasonable to assume that President James Polk’s new Secretary of the Navy in 1845, George Bancroft—a Harvard and German university–trained academic and historian of some renown—would have established a naval school even if the Somers mutiny had never happened.
A fixation on the Academy connection overshadows important aspects of the Somers mutiny, such as what actually happened on board the ship that compelled the commanding officer, Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, to hastily convict and hang Midshipman Philip Spencer and two coconspirators just two weeks before the ship returned to New York from a three-month West African and Caribbean cruise. Or how Mackenzie and his supporters corrupted the ensuing court of inquiry in the commanding officer’s favor.
That Spencer was an immature, hard-drinking troublemaker with a romantic fascination with piracy is not in doubt. He failed college twice. He also was the son of the Secretary of War, the stern and humorless John Canfield Spencer from upstate New York. In 1841, Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur commissioned the younger Spencer an acting midshipman at the request of his father, who felt life at sea on a man-of-war would finally shape him up. Spencer served first on board the North Carolina and later in the John Adams. He was in frequent trouble on board both ships, and, while the John Adams was in Brazil, he was detached and sent home on board the Potomac following a fistfight ashore. At Upshur’s intervention once again, Spencer was transferred to the Somers in August 1842, just after Mackenzie had taken command.
Mackenzie was a harsh disciplinarian who demonstrated an almost sadistic predilection for having crew members flogged for the most minor offenses (12 lashes for improperly disposing orange peels or washing a jersey, for impertinence, for skulking, for profanity, etc.). Thus, the tragedy of the Somers cruise seemed destined when the delinquent son of a cabinet officer was placed under one of the Navy’s fiercest proponents of the lash.
Richard Snow, winner of the 2017 Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison award for distinguished naval literature for his excellent history Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle that Changed History (Scribner’s, 2016), brings his impeccable research and eloquent storytelling to bear in this wonderfully engaging book. Accessing the ship’s log book, other Navy records, and court of inquiry and court-martial transcripts; contemporary newspaper accounts, correspondence, and diary entries; witness recollections (some from decades later); and commentary from writers James Fenimore Cooper and Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Two Years Before the Mast), Snow delivers a compelling narrative of a commanding officer who panicked and abused his power and of a Navy—its glorious War of 1812 victories far in the past—out of touch with the expectations of a new generation of Americans. The Somers mutiny executions should not have happened, but they did spark a modernization the Navy badly needed.
Captain Bray is a retired naval intelligence officer and the deputy editor-in-chief of Proceedings.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
David Grann. New York: Doubleday, 2023. 352 pp. Illus. Notes. $30.
Reviewed by Joseph Reynolds
David Grann is the bestselling author of the books Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, both of which have been made into feature films. His latest work, The Wager, focuses on an expedition in 1740 during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Part of a larger fleet whose mission was to attack the Spanish in the New World, this small squadron of five gunships, a reconnaissance vessel, and two supply ships was tasked with a daring attack on the Spanish fleet on the west coast of South America, by sailing around Cape Horn and launching raids up the coast of Chile.
The vessels were led by Commodore George Anson, who captained the lead ship, HMS Centurion. (See “Anson’s Voyage,” August 2023, pp. 14–21.) This venture did not start out auspiciously. Britain was low on sailors and low on trained shipwrights. There were months and months of waiting in Portsmouth to get the worm-ridden timbers replaced and the ships up to snuff, including all supplies necessary for such an expedition. During this period, a typhus epidemic swept through the ships, and Anson was down hundreds of sailors from the start. Grann goes into great detail about what happens to victims of typhus: “diarrhea, vomiting, bursting blood vessels and fevers reaching as high as 106 degrees,” often followed by delirium and death. At that time, no one understood the link between lice, which were prevalent on board, and the disease. Lice were mostly harmless though irritating, but when scratching opened up small sores, their feces, with all the associated pathogens, would be transmitted into the men. Various theories about the malady were posited, but at that time there was not even a theory of sanitizing surgical instruments, let alone a theory of disease origin. Men died by the scores.
To fill the ranks, the Royal Navy press-ganged any merchant sailor it could find on the streets. It also pulled old-age soldiers out of the pensioner’s home. Some of these men were in their 70s and completely unfit to serve, notwithstanding the fact that most of them had never even been on board a ship. Anson was embarrassed by this and tried to send the old men home, but the Royal Navy insisted, and he had to take them. None survived.
Even as they started nine months late, the winds were not with them and they waited weeks before they could leave the English Channel. With a tightly packed crew, there was more typhus to come. After this latest typhus outbreak, scurvy set through the ships. Again, there was no notion of the disease’s origins, and, from a modern perspective, some of the theories and treatments were bizarre. One treatment set by the ship’s surgeon was a potion containing arsenic. The men were not cured and suffered terribly.
The supply ships were sent home, and the fleet eventually reached Brazil, then ruled by Portugal. The British resupplied and moved south. Soon they rounded the Horn, and more havoc ensued. Huge seas and storms pummeled the ships, and many broke up or disappeared. They soon lost sight of each other. David Cheap, newly promoted captain of the Wager, fell during one storm and was sequestered in his cabin in pain. Land was sighted, but it was ignored. Again, there was little understanding of longitude, and ships depended on dead reckoning to determine their positions east and west. The Wager was too close to land, but the warning was ignored. Soon she foundered and broke up on the rocks of a desolate island in Patagonia. Conditions were horrible—it was freezing, there were more storms, the survivors had little shelter, and they suffered from starvation. The scurvy was cured, though, as the men started eating the celery they found around the shores.
Soon, the crew broke up into various militant groups. There was one group of general renegades in the bush. Another group, led by a master gunner named Bulkeley, began plotting to leave, but they would have to convince the captain. Captain Cheap still had bizarre ideas of making it up the coast to attack the Spanish, but most of the men, in poor condition, thought this reckless. After one sailor—seemingly suffering from delusions caused by starvation—was caught stealing, Captain Cheap summarily shot him in the head. A few days later, the sailor died. The men plotted their mutiny and abandoned Cheap. One midshipman, John Byron, had second thoughts and returned to the captain.
Grann captures the unremitting suffering these sailors endured, and then goes on to describe the twist in the tale: Both groups of men made it back to Britain, both with obviously different accounts and rationalizations of their actions. This is a quick, easy read, and Grann knows how to drive a narrative.
Mr. Reynolds graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1987 and is a chief engineer in the U.S. Merchant Marine, though right now he is “just a guy.” He lives in South Carolina.
