Sailing the Graveyard Sea

September 4, 2023
Historian Snow (Disney’s Land) examines in this gripping narrative the mystery surrounding the 1842 execution of three sailors aboard the training vessel USS Somers. One of the ship’s young recruits was midshipman Phillip Spencer, a teenager who was “insolent, sullen, scornful of hierarchy.” (He was also the son of the secretary of war, John Canfield Spencer.) While on a voyage across the Atlantic, the ship’s “self-righteous” captain, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, was informed that Spencer was sharing with his fellow recruits fantasies of seizing the Somers and turning it into a pirate ship; Mackenzie acted immediately, harshly, and, many claimed in the aftermath, illegally, by assembling a court-martial. According to Snow, it was due to intimidation by the captain and his first officer that the jury reached a guilty verdict. On Dec. 1, 1842, when the ship was only 13 days from home port, Spencer and two supposed coconspirators were hanged. The events on the Somers became headline news, and speculation abounded: Had there really been a mutiny afoot, or had the captain committed murder? As a result of pressure from Spencer’s powerful father, Mackenzie was tried by a Naval court, but he was acquitted. Snow delves into the investigation and courtroom drama, drawing on court transcripts to vividly recreate scenes on board the Somers. Readers will be intrigued.

September 15, 2023
A page-turning history of an infamous mutiny. On Dec. 14, 1842, the U.S.S. Somers sailed into New York Harbor minus three of her crew, hanged for attempted mutiny. The ringleader was the son of the secretary of war. Drawing on copious contemporary sources, Snow, author of Disney's Land and I Invented the Modern Age, quickly sets the scene before diving into his characters. The man behind the mutiny plot was Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer, a pirate-obsessed, 18-year-old ne'er-do-well whose distinguished father gave up on educating him after a failed college career and consigned him to a naval career. "Surely," writes Snow, "the confinement of shipboard life would offer [Spencer] little chance to run off into a career of depravity." In fact, it took him less than a year to be disciplined off two ships before boarding the Somers for one last chance. The ship's commander, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, was a harsh disciplinarian with an "enthusiasm for the lash" whose writing displayed "a relish for violence that approache[d] the prurient." The shipboard drama drew national media attention once the Somers returned to port, as did the ensuing legal proceedings: first an inquiry, then a court-martial. Snow pieces together the events from trial transcripts (including the highly irregular kangaroo court that led to the hangings), contemporary accounts, and retrospective recollections. The result is consistently compelling, despite the author's reliance on sources replete with what he characterizes as "nineteenth-century treacle." Much of the book's appeal derives from Snow's tart commentary on those sources: "It is hard," he writes, "to find a glint of humor anywhere....Of the lighthearted touch he had little; of self-deprecation, none, ever." The result of the court-martial was acquittal, but the affair became "a forbidden topic in naval circles," resurfacing periodically for re-examination; readers of this iteration will find it an absorbing one. A hell of a yarn.

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