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 risky business. “Shorten sail, Mr. Parker,” Semmes ordered.
An engraving depicting the wreck of the U.S. warship Somers, from Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, December 1847.
“All hands!” Parker bawled. “To the yards. Strike the mainsail and brail the spanker!” Men scrambled up the shrouds and spread out onto the yards, hands clutching at the billowing canvas of the mainsail as the helmsman eased off a bit to slack the sail. With jerks and lurches, as men grabbed handfuls of the thick canvas, the main sail climbed up the mast. After the men lashed the sail in place, they turned their attention to the spanker, its canvas spread out on the boom sling off the back of the mast. As they lowered the sail to half its full length, they tied off the loose canvas with the brails, rows of line sewn into the sail.
Then the squall hit. A blast of wind slammed into Somers, and the brig rolled. As a sailor screamed “She’s going over!” the man at the wheel called out: “She will not answer the helm, sir.” The decks canted sharply, throwing men and loose gear. In seconds, the brig lay on her side, water pouring into open hatches. Clinging to the rigging, Seninies knew he had one chance to save his ship. “Cut away the masts!” he ordered. Balancing above the waves on the bulwark, the men grabbed knives and axes and started hacking at the thick, tarred lines that supported the masts. But it was too late. The masts and yards lay flat on the sea, and the brig was filling fast, settling deeper into the water. Somers was sinking. When the hull started to go under, Semmes yelled out, “Every man save himself who can!” As the men threw themselves into the sea, Somers sank. Just ten minutes after the squall hit, the most notorious ship in the U.S. Navy was gone, taking thirty-two men with her.
Somers’s last captain, Raphael Semmes, was a son of the South. He survived the sinking and later, during the Civil War, to acclaim (or distress, depending on which side of the war you fought on), as Admiral Semmes of the Confederate States Navy, he helped to sweep the high seas free of Union merchant shipping, capturing and burning any ship flying the American flag i
n his raider CSS Alabama.
REDISCOVERING SOMERS
In 1986, the governor of Mexico’s Veracruz Province, Acosta Lagunes, asked art dealer, explorer and filmmaker George Belcher to search out historic shipwrecks for the Provincial Museum in Jalapa. Thoughts of Spanish galleons full of rich treasures for the museum’s galleries inspired the governor’s request, but instead of them, Belcher discovered the forgotten grave of Somers in 107 feet of water on June 2, just as a squall rolled over his survey boat and covered the scene with darkness and rain. Belcher knew the story of the infamous brig, and the significance of his find inspired him to seek protection for the wreck from both the Mexican and U.S. governments. But first, he had to firmly establish its identity, and so in May 1987, he returned to Veracruz with a small team that included shipwreck archeologist Mitch Marken and me.
Our dives proved conclusively that this was indeed Somers, setting off three years of negotiation between the United States and Mexico over who owned the wreck and what would happen to it. The Mexicans agreed to protect the site, in response to news that local divers had been plundering the wreck, taking weapons, bottles and the ship’s chronometer, which I had last seen lying in the sand at the stern, exactly where it would have dropped from the deteriorating binnacle at the wheel. It has never been seen again, a reminder that significant finds, if not acted on immediately, end up being taken by looters and souvenir hunters. While I condemn the souvenir hunters, I also blame bureaucratic circumstances when governments stand by, either for lack of funding or lack of interest, and leave sites like Somers unprotected and unexcavated.
Eventually, the two nations agreed to share the costs, such as they were, of documenting Somers. This was no mean feat for Mexico, as it had far less money than the United States. The Armada de Mexico provided a patrol boat, Margarita Maza de Juarez, its crew, their SEAL team (the Commandos Subacuaticos) and a team of underwater archeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, headed by Dr. Pilar Luna Erreguereña. I led the U.S. team, loaned by the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, with archeologists and wreck mappers Jerry Livingston and Larry Nordby, and photographer John Brooks. George Belcher and his brother Joel, the discoverers of the wreck, came as our guests but paying their own way. In July 1990, we gathered in Veracruz. It had been three years since I had last dived Somers, and, like George, I was both excited and uneasy about what we would find.
The thoughts of Billy Budd as he waits in the ship’s brig for his execution come to mind as I perch on the edge of the patrol boat, preparing to drop “fathoms down, fathoms down” to where “oozy weeds” do twist, not around a dead boy, but amidst the bones of Somers, the ship that inspired Herman Melville’s haunting tale:
But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
I turn to George Belcher and nod. Together, we roll off backward, splashing into the warm blue water. Other splashes follow us, and soon a cluster of divers is hanging on the anchor line. A final check of the gear, then we let the air out of our buoyancy vests and drop into the murky depths. Sixty feet down, I’m in a cloudy haze of grayish-green water, my dive partner a blurry form. Ninety feet, and the blur clears as I switch on my dive light. The bottom is approaching, so I give the buoyancy vest a quick hit of air. My descent slows and stops, and I’m hovering over a large iron anchor, nearly no feet below the surface. In front of me, the curving form of a ship’s bow rises up out of the silt, sweeping sharply back like the edge of a knife blade.
Sleeping in her grave, the clipper brig Somers, perhaps the most notorious ship in the history of the United States Navy, lies before me at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Canted on her side, the wooden hull largely consumed by marine organisms, Somers is now truly a ghost ship, her form outlined by the copper sheathing that once protected her hull from the voracious appetite of marine creatures. Impervious to the attack of the teredo worms that eat wooden ships’ hulls, the copper has leached its metallic salts into a thin layer of wood so that this fragile remnant of Somers still holds her form perfectly more than 140 years after she went down. A slow and steady decay, this, and as a result, everything lies on the seabed exactly as it once did on the decks and in the holds: iron cannon, anchor chain, the ship’s stove and other gear, even the iron fittings and blocks from the masts. Everything inside Somers, after she sank, lay trapped in the hull as it deteriorated and collapsed over the decades, and presumably much of it should still be here, buried in layers of rotten wood, sand, silt and thick masses of corroded iron. Indications of what was once inside the ship, and of lives interrupted and lost, include a small white plate, an oval serving platter from the officers’ wardroom and a small black glass bottle.
I drift past the iron davits for the port quarter boat. Lying flat on the sand, they are a reminder of the only boat to get away from the sinking Somers. It ferried several men to the safety of the nearby island of Isla Verde. Many others never made it, trapped below by the rushing water or drowned in the open sea as their heavy boots and uniforms pulled them under. I also recall, as I float for a moment over this spot, that this is where young Philip Spencer lay manacled to the deck on that long-ago night of November 26, 1842, in the first of a chain of events that cost three lives and ruined others. Spencer, Cromwell and Small were all chained at the stern, Small next to the aftermost 32-pounder carronade on the port side. That gun lies here now, and I swim up to take a look at it.
As I continue my tour of the wreck, I see that three of the four carronades on the starboard side lie buried muzzle down in the sand, showing that Somers sank sideways, never righting as she dropped into the depths, and landed on the starboard side. I stop and carefully run a small iron probe up inside the barrel of one of the guns. The probe stops 24 inches into the 4-foot bore of the carronade. I turn to another gun and try it. It, too, is blocked. I smile and turn to Pilar Luna, who is shining a light on the gun to help me guide the probe. These guns are loaded, as we expected. After all, Somers was ready for action, in the middle of a chase, when the squall hit.
A long metal tube, topped by what looks like an open trough, is the brig’s pump, once used to remove water from the hold, but useless on that fateful morning. Lying on the bottom, it is now being mapped by Larry Nordby and Jerry Livingston. Their tape measure indicates it is just over u feet long—a perfect match for the depth of the hold. A metal flange, almost halfway up the iron tube, would not be noticed by most people, but Larry instantly recognizes that it means the area below decks was divided into a berth deck, where the men lived, and a lower hold. This flange marks the location of that divide, a feature not recorded in the few surviving plans of the brig. It is also an indicator of just how small and crowded this vessel was, particularly on that winter voyage in 1842, with 120 men and boys packed on these decks and in
Captain Santos Gomez Leyva of the Armada de Mexico and Dr. Pilar Luna Erregueren a watch as Larry Nordby works on the map of the wreck of Somers aboard the patrol vessel Margarita Maza de Juarez, 1990. James P. Delgado
these berths. Confronted by the small size of Somers, we gain a new perspective on how just a handful of men, suspected of plotting a mutiny, could inspire the near-panic that led to three hasty hangings.
We find more reminders of the crew as we swim forward. Lying on its side is the huge cast-iron galley stove of the brig, its flue still attached. The hinged opening of the stove has fallen away, and when I flash my light into the stove, I can see that the drip pan and range grates are still in place. My light startles a small fish, which darts out of the stove, and I chuckle at the thought of its making a home where once it would have been cooked. A scatter of bottles and a ceramic jug are all that remain of the ship’s provisions, inc
luding a bottle with a lead foil cap from “Wells Miller & Provost, 217 Front St., New York.” That New York merchant was the nation’s leading manufacturer of preserved foods and condiments in its day, and finding the bottle is the sort of human connection across time that makes history special. This bottle probably held a popular condiment, a special touch to make a sailor’s meal just a little tastier. I like making discoveries like this.
As we turn to leave, I look down, and my heart stops. There are bones scattered in the wreckage, yellow and mottled. Thirty-two men died on Somers, and the wreck is a war grave. Have we found the remains of some of the crew? We’ve been told to respectfully collect any human remains and return them home for analysis and reburial, so I take a closer look. There are three vertebra and a short, small bone that could be from a radius or ulna. But I can tell that they’re not human. These are from a large hog or a small cow, part of the rations of salted meat packed in barrels and carried as provisions. Somers’s log shows she had nine barrels of what sailors liked to complain was “salt horse” when she sank. This is what’s left of some of it.
As I begin my slow ascent to the surface, stopping to decompress, I think about Somers and the stories locked in her decaying timbers. Powerful events played out on those decks and changed the course of a navy. Our team never loses sight of that tragedy over the next few days as we continue our inspection, complete our chart and finally bid the wreck goodbye.
After our departure from Veracruz, the Armada de Mexico closes the site to all divers and vows to keep a close watch on the site. A return visit by the National Park Service a few years ago found Somers looking much as we had left her, but with more evidence of unauthorized visitors who have taken souvenirs. With the exception of these few illegal divers, Somers rests alone in the eternal darkness. If that broken hull could speak, I’d like to think that, just like Billy Budd, she would ask to be left in the solitude of the sea.
Adventures of a Sea Hunter Page 6