Adventures of a Sea Hunter (8 page)

On our first dive on the massive Japanese battleship
Nagato
, Lenihan, Nordby, Murphy, Livingston and I realize that we’re the first to visit her since the 1940s. We swim around the stern, past the huge bronze propellers that are surrounded by a swarm of sharks. Dan Lenihan and I drop down to the seabed and slip under the overhang of the stern to make our way in the gloom towards the barrels of the aft gun turret. As we hover in front of the gun muzzles, we both think of our dives at Pearl Harbor. Japanese ordnance experts modified some of the 16-inch shells from
Nagato’s
magazines into the aerial bombs dropped at Pearl. One of the bombs punched through
Arizona’s
decks and set off the magazine explosions that destroyed her. I can’t help think that this is a full circle for us, particularly Dan, who has worked very hard to document
Arizona
and bring more of her story to the public.

That full circle feeling comes back on a later dive that we start aft from
Nagato’s
bow. As I slip out from under the deck, my eyes catch something ahead in the gloom. Dan and Murphy also see it, and we all swim forward at a fast clip. The entire superstructure of the ship, instead of being crushed like that
of Arkansas
, is laid out on the white sand. It’s the bridge; it’s the bridge
of Nagato
, where Admiral Yamamoto heard the radio message that the attack on Pearl Harbor was successful:
“Torn, tora, torn!”
It’s incredible. Sometimes, science be damned, you just get excited by what you find.

My last dive at Bikini Atoll takes place a decade after the National Park Service survey. With John Brooks, a former
NPS
colleague, and Len Blix, the assistant dive master at Bikini, I drop down to look at the destroyer
Anderson.
(Since our 1989–90 survey, Bikini has been opened to the world as a unique dive park for those with the skill and
the cash to journey to what has been called the “Mount Everest of wreck diving.”)
Anderson
is a famous ship that fought in many battles, screening aircraft carriers in some of the greatest sea fights of the Pacific War, including the Coral Sea and Midway. She shelled Japanese shore installations at Tarawa and survived the war only to die beneath the dragon’s breath of the atomic bomb.

Anderson
lies on her side in the dark blue gloom. We approach the stern, passing over a rack of depth charges that have tumbled free and lie scattered on the sand. The decks seem undamaged, except for a torpedo-launching rack that has fallen off. The bridge lies open, its hatches blasted off. When I look down into the bridge, the dark interior swarms with hundreds of small fish that have sought shelter inside this sunken warship. Moving forward, I see a subtle reminder of the power of the atom. One of the destroyer’s 5-inch guns has been twisted by the heat of the blast so that it points straight back to the bridge.

As I sail away from Bikini for the last time, I pause to reflect on all that I’ve seen there over the years. The crushed hulls, toppled masts and abandoned test instruments are material records that preserve the shocking reality of Operation Crossroads in a way that can never fully be matched by written accounts, photographs or even films of the tests. This ghost fleet is a powerful and evocative museum in the deep. It is a very relevant museum, too. Operation Crossroads and the nuclear age that followed have had and continue to have a direct effect on the lives of every living being on the planet. The empty bunkers and the abandoned homes of the Bikinians remind us of David Bradley’s 1948 comment that the islanders might not be the last “to be left homeless and impoverished by the inexorable Bomb. They have no choice in the matter, and very little understanding of it. But in this perhaps they are not so different from us all.” As I leave Bikini, I hope that it is a record of the past and not the harbinger of a terrible future.

On November 26, 1842, Captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie of
Somers
adjusted his uniform and stepped forward to the young midshipman. “I learn, Mr. Spencer,” he quietly said, “that you aspire to the command of the
Somers.”

Philip Spencer smiled slightly. “Oh, no, sir.”

“Did you not tell Mr. Wales, sir, that you had a project to kill the commander, the officers, and a considerable portion of the crew of this vessel, and convert her into a pirate?” Mackenzie pressed.

“I may have told him so, sir, but it was in joke.”

Mackenzie glared at the boy. “You admit then that you told him so?”

Spencer’s smile vanished. “Yes, sir, but in joke.”

“This, sir, is joking on a forbidden subject,” Mackenzie said. “This joke may cost you your life.” Now furious, he leaned forward. “You must have been aware that you could have only compassed your designs by passing over my dead body, and after that, the bodies of all the officers; you had given yourself, sir, a great deal to do; it will be necessary for me to confine you, sir.” Mackenzie turned quickly to First Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort. “Arrest Mr. Spencer, and put him in double irons.”

Soon, Spencer was sitting on the open deck next to the ship’s wheel, hands and feet manacled. Mackenzie and his officers searched the ship, looking for incriminating evidence and for co-conspirators. They found both, or so they believed. The first was a note, written in Greek, with the names of those said to be “certain” or “doubtful,” and those to be kept, “willing or unwilling.” The night before, Spencer had approached Purser’s Steward Josiah Wales to confide his plan, joke or not, and had alluded to a plan on paper hidden in his neckerchief. Wales, fearful and sleepless, had reported his conversation with Spencer and told about the paper. A search of Spencer failed to find it, but a hunt of his berth turned up the incriminating document. As for co-conspirators, several of the crew had acted sullenly or had expressed contempt for the captain—led by Spencer, who had from the start of the voyage called the captain a “damned old granny” behind his back.

Then, the next evening, there was an accident with the rigging and a rush aft by the crew to fix. The crew’s dash to the quarterdeck, stopped by Lieutenant Gansevoort, who cocked his pistol and aimed it at the advancing men, was taken by Mackenzie as evidence that Spencer’s fellow plotters were trying to free him. The following morning, Mackenzie arrested two more men: Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell and seaman Elisha Small. On November 29, four more men joined them in chains. Mackenzie, on a small, 100-foot vessel with a 120-member crew—an extremely crowded ship—faced a real problem. He had no safe place to keep his prisoners, and he was not sure that there were not more mutineers in the ranks. He asked his officers for their opinion. They interrogated members of the crew and offered their advice on November 30: execute Spencer, Cromwell and Small as punishment, and quickly, to re-establish control of the ship.

The following day, in the afternoon, Mackenzie mustered the crew on deck. Most of them were young boys, teenagers, on a training cruise as part of an experimental program to create seagoing schools instead of the rough-and-tumble, often sordid, world of the between decks of a man-of-war. Now these boys were getting a strong lesson on the Articles of War, the rules that regulated naval life, and on the consequences of
defying the absolute authority of a captain and his officers. Spencer, Cromwell and Small, with hoods over their heads and nooses around their necks, stood on the deck. Mackenzie asked Spencer if he wanted, as an officer, to give the order to fire the cannon that would signal the crew to haul on the lines and hang them. Spencer had accepted, but now, at the end, found that he could not.

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.