On Dec. 1, 1842, the U.S. brig-of-war Somers was wallowing through the long mid-Atlantic rollers under balmy skies, four days' sail from the Virgin Islands. Converted into a training ship, the brig was on her way home from what had begun ten weeks earlier as a routine cruise. But a terror unique in the U.S. Navy's history had mocked routine. From the main yardarm dangled three lifeless, hooded figures. They had been hanged by order of the ship's captain. Reason: alleged conspiracy to mutiny.
So opens “Queeg’s Predecessor,” a 1954 Time magazine review of Frederic F. Van De Water’s now out of print book The Captain Called It Mutiny. The implication of Van De Water’s book was that no mutiny ever took place except in the suspicious mind of the ship’s captain, Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie. Officially, the Navy saw it differently. In fact, that December mutiny was the United States Navy’s first (and remains the only) officially recorded mutiny.
Just the same, hanging his charges at sea without benefit of court-martial may not have Mackenzie’s wisest move. Particularly not when one of those swaying from the makeshift gallows – the ringleader of this mutiny, in fact – was the 19 year old son of Secretary of War John C. Spencer. Neither may it have been the most surprising of disciplinarian excesses or vindictive lapses in judgment:
“During the six weeks of final work before the Somers left on her maiden voyage Mackenzie inflicted about fifty separate punishments,” writes Leonard F. Guttridge in Mutiny: A History of Naval Insurrection.
Some were for desertion or theft, for which he ordered a dozen lashes, the maximum allowed, with the cat-o’-nine tails. The busiest punitive instrument was the colt, a three-stranded rope frayed at the ends, and he ordered shirt-clad adolescents whipped 422 times for blaspheming, being unclean, fighting, losing a hammock, spitting, throwing tea or tobacco on the deck, and most frequently “skulking” – which usually meant attempting to shirk duty
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“Even before he took command of the schoolship, Mackenzie had been described in public print as having a reputation for cruelty,” Guttridge adds, proceeding to detail a long list of disciplinary measures taken by the Commander both earlier in his career and on that fateful voyage.
Whether guilty of mutiny or not, Midshipman Philip Spencer was a recalcitrant and unruly conscript – and conscript he surely was, in essence, with little discernible interest in his Naval commission beyond his distinguished father’s insistence. A college dropout fascinated with pirate literature, Spencer twice drunkenly assaulted a superior officer while serving on the USS North Carolina and was entangled in another drunken brawl while on shore leave from the USS John Adams before being assigned to the Somers.
Mutinous or merely mischievous? Incorrigible or simply immature? Regardless, the young Spencer – whose apparent plan for the Somers was to make it a pirate ship on the Spanish Main – was a bit of an eccentric (with a lazy eye, at that). Writes Guttridge:
In a reference that begs further amplification, Captain Mackenzie would recall someone’s telling him that Spencer had amused the crew by making music with his jaw: he had the knack of “throwing his jaw out of joint, and by the contact of the bones playing with accuracy and elegance a variety of airs.”
Engaged in combat during the Mexican-American War, the Somers would eventually capsize and sink off the coast of Mexico in 1846. Unlike the hanged mutineers, Mackenzie would receive a court-martial – and ultimately be exonerated despite his hasty meting of justice. Hounded just the same by the scandal of “The Somers Affair,” he died in 1848 at just 45 years old.
And, with the need now evident for a more controlled – that is, land-based – environment for training future Naval officers, it was on this day in 1845 that the Naval School opened at Fort Severn in Annapolis, Maryland. Initially offering a five year program, with the first and last years spend on land (and three years at sea in between), the Naval School would ultimately become the four-year United States Naval Academy in 1850.
From the shores of another Navy town – Portsmouth, New Hampshire, home to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and occasional address of John Paul Jones – Smuttynose Brewing’s Finestkind IPA is an outstanding choice with which to salute more than 150 years of America’s finest.
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