Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

The crewman at the cannon approached Mackenzie, saluted and said: “Mr. Spencer says he can not give the word; he wishes the commander to give the word himself.”

Mackenzie did not hesitate. “Fire!”

The gun roared, and the crew grabbed the lines and ran forward, hoisting three kicking bodies up the yardarm. There they struggled, slowly strangling, until life left them.

Mackenzie climbed up onto the trunk, the cover of the passageway leading below to the officer’s quarters. It was the highest spot on the deck. From there, he spoke to the assembled boys and men, reminding them of the dead men’s crimes and how all men were masters of their own fates, and not to follow the example of those three. He ended by pointing to the flag fluttering at the stern. “Stand by, to give three hearty cheers for the flag of our country.” Three cheers, and the crew went below to dinner. The bodies, lowered to the deck, were cleaned and prepared for burial. Cromwell and Small were lashed into their hammocks with weights. Spencer, dressed in his uniform, was laid in a wooden coffin made from two mess-chests. A sudden squall sprang up, covering the decks with rain. When it ended, the crew, called up from dinner, stood in ranks. Darkness had fallen, and battle lanterns illuminated the scene as Mackenzie led them in prayer. Then, one by one, the bodies splashed into the sea.

When Somers reached New York on December 14, news of the “mutiny” spread quickly. At first, the press acclaimed Mackenzie’s actions. The New York Herald of December 18 enthused: “We can hardly find language to express our admiration of the conduct of Commander Mackenzie.” But questions soon arose over the hasty nature of the executions, as well as their necessity. And then there was the matter of just who Philip Spencer was. The nineteen-year-old midshipman was the son of Secretary of War John Canfield Spencer. A difficult boy, Philip’s short but notorious naval career had been punctuated by drunken behavior and brawls. Somers, ironically, had been his last chance. Mackenzie and his officers had not been overjoyed, to put it mildly, by his arrival. Nonetheless, Spencer remained despite their protests and sailed with Somers on a voyage that took him to eternity.

Mackenzie’s actions aroused outrage among his detractors and concern from his friends when, in response to questions as to why he could not have kept the prisoners in irons until Somers reached port in the Virgin Islands just four days later, he explained that the quick executions at sea had been necessary because Spencer, as the son of a prominent man, probably would have escaped justice ashore. A damning letter in the Washington Madisonian of December 20, probably penned by Spencer’s angry and anguished father, whipped up sentiment for the dead midshipman, summing up his transgression as “the mere romance of a heedless boy, amusing himself, it is true, in a dangerous manner, but still devoid of such murderous designs as are imputed.” The actions of Mackenzie, on the other hand, were characterized as “the result of unmanly fear, or of a despotic temper, and wholly unnecessary at the time”

Debate over the “mutiny” and Mackenzie’s actions raged in the press, on the streets and throughout the nation. Anxious to clear his name, he asked for and received a court of inquiry. The month-long hearing absolved him of wrongdoing, but not sufficiently to satisfy him, his defenders, his detractors or the Secretary of the Navy, who immediately agreed to Mackenzie’s request for a full court-martial. The court-martial, on charges of murder, illegal punishment, conduct unbecoming an officer, and general cruelty and oppression, lasted two months. Some influential citizens rallied to Mackenzie’s support, while others, notably the famous author James Fenimore Cooper, railed against him as a tyrant and murderer. The court-martial finally acquitted Mackenzie of all charges, but not unanimously. At the heart of his own near-hanging was the fact that he did not have the legal authority to execute his men at sea; they had been denied the very court-martial that now protected the captain from a similar fate.

Alexander Slidell Mackenzie’s career was, however, effectively over. He retained his rank but not his ship, nor was he given any other command save a brief one years later.

One significant result was the decision to abolish training ships. Instead, in 1845, Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft authorized the creation of a school ashore, now the United States Naval Academy, at Annapolis, Maryland. And a literary reference to the affair appeared in a book written by Herman Melville, cousin of Guert Gansevoort, Somers’s first officer. Melville mentioned the “mutiny” in White Jacket in 1850: “Three men, in a time of peace, were then hung at the yard-arm, merely because, in the Captain’s judgment, it became necessary to hang them. To this day the question of their complete guilt is socially discussed.”

But the most famous use of the Somers’s story by Melville came in his last tale found in his desk after his death and not published until 1924 as Billy Budd:

O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend.
Ay, ay, all is up; and I must up too
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.

On that dark December afternoon in 1842, Mackenzie’s decision to hang three members of his crew was a controversial one. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and a seaman’s poem, published in the New York Herald in May 1843, sums up their view of this ship after the hangings:

The stains of blood are on thy deck,
Thy freight is curses dark!
And other hands than flesh and blood
Thou numberest ’mongst thy crew;
And a ghostly “mess” thou’lt always hear
Across the ocean blue…

And ill luck, and misfortune dire
Will follow in thy wake,
Till the ghostly three, where lie their bones,
Thy last dark haven make.

Then they started, the tales of a haunted, cursed ship. Much later, a member of the brig’s final crew, Midshipman Robert Rodgers, recalled his shipmates’ reactions when he told them he had been posted to Somers: “Get rid of that craft as soon as you can, for sooner or later she’s bound to go to the devil. Since the mutiny damn bad luck goes with her.”

As for Somers, the brig sank a few years after the notorious “mutiny,” with Rodgers aboard.

OFF VERACRUZ, MEXICO! DECEMBER 8, 1846

Ever since the war between the United States and Mexico had broken out in the spring of 1846, Somers had stayed off Veracruz, enforcing the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the port. Now, winter had come, and with it, more tedium punctuated by occasional excitement.

“He’s heading in, sir!” cried the lookout on Somers. As Somers tacked to pick up the wind and surge towards the incoming ship, the men loaded the guns. Lieutenant Commander Raphael Semmes was sure the other ship was going to try to bypass Somers and run into harbor, and it was his job to stop it. Lieutenant Parker, standing on the bulwark, telescope trained on the horizon as they tracked the suspected blockade runner, turned to Semmes. “It looks a little squally to windward, sir.”

A black cloud was racing across the sea, heading directly for them. The squall would bring powerful gusts of wind as well as rain, and Semmes knew that his ship was in trouble. Somers was “flying light” with little ballast, and the tall masts were full of canvas, spread to the wind, to give her the speed she needed to intercept the other ship. Somers was built for speed, but running with a full rig was a