This coherent and absorbing study from Melton (The First Impeachment) is the first full-scale study of the "mutiny" aboard the U.S.S. Somers
in nearly a generation. The brig Somers
was on a training cruise in 1842, with more than 100 apprentice seamen aboard. The son of the secretary of war, 19-year-old Philip Spencer, began talking and writing wildly about leading a mutiny. When the captain, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, had Spencer and his two confederates, Cromwell and Small, put in irons, several incidents occurred suggesting attempts to rescue the men. After consulting with his officers and petty officers, Mackenzie decided that in view of the "clear and present danger" of a bloody mutiny, he should hang the three suspects, and did. The Navy conducted a formal inquiry into Mackenzie's conduct, then brought him before a court-martial. Melton, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, does his best to render the ensuing legal thickets intelligible to the 21st-century lay reader, without complete success. Better are his accounts of where the Somers
affair fits into maritime history and the manner in which the isolation of the sailing ship made the captain's power nearly absolute. His final verdict is similar to that of the 19th-century Navy: Mackenzie exceeded his authority, but not wantonly or frivolously, and Spencer was a clear-cut and dangerous sociopath. Equal traces of eloquence and purple prose in saying so may appeal to post-Patrick O'Brien–era maritime buffs. (Apr. 9)
