Book 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.
David W. Shaw Author of The Sea Shall Embrace
Them: The Tragic Story of the Steamship Arctic In this
well-researched and faithful account of the attempted mutiny aboard
the brig Somers in 1842, Buckner F. Melton, Jr., brings to
light a little-known chapter of maritime history. The book is rich in
detail and compelling, a blend of high-seas adventure and legal drama.
Buckner F. Melton, Jr., is a historian and
professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
An occasional commentator for National Public Radio, PBS, and MSNBC,
he has written columns for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and
the Raleigh News & Observer, as well as two previous
books, The First Impeachment and Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to
Treason.
