Before Americans became a nation and while still struggling in war as a collection of separate colonies brought together by the single aim of shaking off the yoke of British rule, they were a people so individualistic in their habits, so averse to discipline, so fiercely pioneers, that a student of those days is not surprised to read what George Washington had to say about our Continental sailors in an address to the second Congress in December, 1775. He wrote,
The plague, trouble, and vexation I have had with the crews of all armed vessels are inexpressible. I do believe that there is not on earth a more disorderly set. Every time they come into port we hear of nothing but mutinous complaints. (Captain) Manly’s success has lately, and but lately, quieted his people. The crews of the Washington and Harrison have actually deserted them …
Such was the crude material from which our Continental and, later, our Revolutionary crews were to be created, and I mention it by way of introduction to a search into the subject of mutiny or mutinous conduct as exhibited in our early navy, long before the well-known attempt at mutiny which took place on board the U.S. brig Somers in the autumn of 1842. As we know, the Revolutionary Navy died with Revolutionary Navy died with the Revolution; and for over ten years, or until the act of Congress of March 27, 1794, directed the building of six frigates to fight the Barbary pirates, we had no national vessels of war of any kind. But the seafaring population from which the crews of national ships were drawn, both before and after this interval of ten years, was the same, and the slow improvement in discipline aboard our ships is to be attributed to the slow general development of the Navy and especially to the fact that the authority of the officers was only with difficulty being established.
After the Declaration of Independence and during the Revolutionary War, there appear to have occurred two distinct instances of incipient mutiny, which may be considered as a continuance of that general spirit of insubordination which had existed in the earlier Colonial Navy and which General Washington had so deplored in 1775.
The first instance was a plot to rise in revolt on board the U.S.S. Ranger in the spring of 1778. This vessel had been built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1777, carried a crew of 123 men, nearly all of them Americans, and was under the command of John Paul Jones, who hoisted the new national flag of thirteen stripes and thirteen stars aboard her and took her to France. On April 10, 1778, she put out from the French port of Brest for the purpose of harrying British shipping in the Channel and adjacent waters and on April 24, while off the town of Carrickfergus, Ireland, sighted the enemy sloop-of-war Drake, a vessel of her own size, lying quietly at anchor in the harbor. What happened then is told by Admiral Mahan as follows:
Jones’s purpose had been to go in and attack, for which the wind was fair, but he was prevented by a singular incident which illustrates a class of difficulty he continually encountered. The first lieutenant, who had long been insubordinate, persuaded the crew that being Americans fighting for liberty, the voice of the people should be taken before the captain’s orders were obeyed, and they rose in mutiny. Captain Jones was in the utmost danger of being killed or thrown overboard. Fortunately the Drake was just then seen to be in movement,
and the two ships were later to become engaged in the duel which ended in the death or wounding of forty-two of the crew of the Drake and the hauling down of her flag.
Nothing in the way of mutiny really came off. There was no actual usurpation of authority by the men of the Ranger, and our search for examples of insubordination ending in blood or broken heads discloses nothing heinous. But this was because the enemy’s ship, the Drake, shook out her sails in the nick of time and started to come out of the harbor to attack the Ranger. What the democratic American crew really hungered for, above the rights of man, was to get into a fight. Like Captain Manly’s crew in the Colonial Navy in 1775, the Ranger’s men quickly ceased plotting against their captain in order to join in the more appetizing prospect of hammering and slashing at the persons of an enemy.
The next instance of mutinous conduct during the Revolutionary War was to occur on board the U. S. frigate Alliance, in February, 1779. This ship had been built at Salisbury, Massachusetts, and had been christened Alliance in honor of the treaty of February 6, 1778, between France and America. As Fenimore Cooper informs us, a grave mistake had been made by our government in placing this ship under the command of a French officer with the idea of paying a compliment to the new ally of the American Republic. “This unfortunate selection,” he says, “produced mutinies, much discontent among the officers, and, in the end, grave irregularities.” The Frenchman was the notorious Pierre Landais, well known to history as a man of insubordinate and tyrannical temper, who was later to be suspected of acting with treachery during the engagement of the Bon Homme Richard with the Serapis, and still later was to be discharged from our naval service as half insane. Of course, there was bound to be trouble on the Alliance with such a commander, and also with a mixed crew of English, Americans, and French, the English being volunteers who had been recently saved from a wrecked British frigate, the Somerset. The Alliance, lying in Boston in January, 1779, received orders to get to sea quickly, for the reason that General Lafayette was to return to France in her and he was impatient to get off. During the subsequent long journey across the ocean a plot to mutiny, inevitable in such a ship, began to incubate before the mast. What then followed is thus described by Fenimore Cooper:
After a tempestuous passage, the Alliance got within two days’ run of the English coast, when her officers and passengers, of whom there were many besides General Lafayette and his suite, received the startling information that a conspiracy existed among the English portion of the crew, some seventy or eighty men in all, to kill the officers, seize the vessel, and carry the latter into England. ... It had been determined to put Captain Landais, who was exceedingly offensive to the conspirators, into a boat, without food, water, oars, or sails, heavily ironed, and to turn him loose on the ocean. The gunner, carpenter, and boatswain were to have been killed on the spot. ... To each of the lieutenants was to have been offered the option of navigating the ship into the nearest port or of walking the plank.
But these bloody plans were never to be matured, for the good reason that among the mutineers was an American seaman of unusual intelligence and cleverness who was playing the double part of spy and of ringleader of the mutineers. This man managed to sneak unobserved into the cabin of the ship and to inform Landais and the Marquis Lafayette of their imminent danger. He was not a moment too soon. Cooper says,
The officers and other passengers were apprized of what was going on … and a few minutes before the time set for the signal to be given, the gentlemen rushed in a body on the deck, with drawn swords, where the American and French seamen joined them, armed. The leading mutineers were instantly seized. Between thirty and forty of the English were put in irons,
and the whole affair, so carefully planned, was to end in a complete failure.
Although this conspiracy was hatched under our flag, it cannot strictly be considered an American plot, and I only include it in this study of mutinies in our Navy because Fenimore Cooper remarks in his history, published in 1839, that it “is the only instance that has ever transpired of a plan to make a serious mutiny under the flag of the United States of America.”
I will show later that there had already been one other attempt at a serious mutiny before he made this statement in 1839, although it did not take place until 1813, or about thirty-three years after the affair which has been described as happening on board the Alliance. This long stretch of good conduct, 1779-1813, is surely a respectable record for a young navy, especially in those tempestuous times when there had been widespread and terrible mutinies in the French and British Navies. The mutinies of the Nore and at Spithead in England had lasted, on and off, from 1795 to 1800, taking possession at times of whole fleets and alarming the whole British nation. It was also during this period, 1789, that the most famous of all mutinies on a man-of-war, that of H.M.S. Bounty, took place while she was doing duty in the South Pacific. Yet our crews were not affected by these rebellions of the “people” before the mast in other navies. Before going further, it will not be amiss to say that since the foundation of our present Navy, which I date from the act of Congress of March 27, 1794, there has never been a real mutiny on one of our ships. There was the well-known plot to start one on board the U. S. brig Somers in 1842, about which so much was written at the time, and another attempt at mutiny to which I have already referred, and which is the reason for writing this paper. This latter attempt was to take shape and to rear its cobra-like head (but only for a moment) on board the U.S.S. Essex, David Porter commanding, while cruising against the British in the South Pacific during the War of 1812. It appears a curious exhibition of human nature as bred by the sea and by the old navy of sails, and is interesting to the naval officer, whether it arouses his condemnation or appeals to his sympathy. The causes of naval mutinies have not been many, or complicated. The chief ones have been— besides a malicious desire to rebel against all discipline—brutality of command, cruelty to inferiors, stoppage of pay, deprivation of liberty, and starvation. The desire to become pirates, as in the case of the Somers, has also been known to take possession of would-be mutineers. It was the general injustice and brutality of command which caused the mutinies of the Nore and Spithead. Stark brutality forced the rebellion on H.M.S. Bounty in 1789, though her captain, William Bligh, R. N., later threw out the idea (or perhaps was so blind to his own abnormalities of temperament as really to believe) that it was the seductive prospect of life upon a tropic isle rather than the hardships of naval discipline which had really caused the mutiny aboard his ship. It had been, he implied, the reluctance of his sailors to leave this Elysium.5 Perhaps he also wished to remind posterity that Circe once lived upon an island.
In the case of the murmuring on board the Essex, we do not have to waste time in searching for any example of brutality or cruelty on the part of her commander towards the enlisted force. No better authority for this statement can be found than the journal of David Glasgow Farragut, who was a midshipman on board the Essex during the War of 1812 and later wrote a journal of the cruise. In it he says that the devotion of the crew to Captain David Porter was “unbounded.” On one occasion when Porter wished to keep to the high seas in search of British whalers instead of going into port, he
Called the men aft and made them a short speech in his usual animated and enthusiastic style, showing the advantage of abstaining from the pleasures of being in port, that they might enjoy them the more in the future. The effect was always the same, a burst of applause and a determination to abide by his will.
Digressing for a moment from our study, let me say that the journal of the whole of this celebrated cruise was written in great detail by Captain Porter and first published in Philadelphia by the firm of Bradford and Inskeep, in the spring of 1815, and was illustrated with fourteen engravings from drawings made by Porter’s own hand. This original edition is today one of the rarest of books, for it was suppressed by order of the government shortly after its first appearance. It is a serious professional work and was valuable for its geographic and other scientific observations. It was written by a man whose personal characteristics crop out on every page, and whose reflections upon the primitive and unclad tribes on the little- known islands of the southern Pacific, where the Essex cruised, are marked by clever insight, by a love of human nature, and by a perfect freedom from all prudery of description. The book aroused sufficient interest abroad to be reviewed at length and with much venom in the British Quarterly Review, and to be translated into Italian in the city of Milan, where it was published in a 3-volume edition in 1820.
In writing with perfect unconsciousness of any impropriety in describing such customs of the natives of the Pacific islands as differed from our own, Captain Porter was only copying the manner of the celebrated Captain Cook and other explorers who had preceded him in the South Pacific by forty years, and who had told in simple and unvarnished language exactly what they had seen of the natives’ habits, morals, and general bearing. But he soon discovered that there existed a real of affected puritanism of the moment which was determined to be shocked by a sailor’s non-scientific comments upon the mores of primitive peoples. In the case of the Quarterly Review, he probably suspected that its prudery was due to the very irrelevant reason that he had captured many British prizes in the South Pacific; nevertheless, he decided to hearken to its cries of shame to the extent of slightly pruning some of his descriptions in the second edition of his journal which was issued in New York in 1822.
Returning to our narrative, the Essex on October 25, 1813, accompanied by her British prize, the Essex Junior, a converted gunboat of 20 guns, and by four or five British whalers which she had also captured, dropped anchor in a harbor of the island of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands. Porter took her there for the purpose of a general overhauling before resuming his cruise against the British in the South Pacific and with an eye to a meeting with Captain Hillyar of the British frigate Phoebe. His repairs kept him at Nukahiva until December 9, 1813. The cause of all the trouble that was to follow was the long stay of six weeks in a tropical island, in any tropical island of the South Seas. “Nooaheevah,” admits Porter in his Journal, “had many charms for a sailor.” Even the hostile editor of the Quarterly Review lays aside his rage for purity for one moment in order to indulge in the following burst of feeling, while describing the inhabitants of another South Sea Island than Nukahiva: “O happy people! Happy in your sequestered state! And doubly happy to have escaped a visit from Captain Porter, of the United States frigate Essex! May no civilized barbarism lay waste your peaceful abodes,” etc. Let Porter’s own words tell what happened at Nukahiva:
On the 9th of December, I had all my provisions, wood, and water on board, my decks filled with hogs, and a most abundant supply of coconuts and bananas, with which we had been furnished by the liberality of our Nooaheevah friends, who had reserved for us a stock of dried coconuts, suitable for taking to sea, and calculated for keeping three or four months.
I now found it necessary to restrain the liberty I had heretofore given to my people, and directed that every person should remain on board, and work late and early to hasten the departure of the ship. But three of my crew … swam on shore at night, and were caught on the beach and brought to me. I immediately caused them to be confined in irons, and determined to check any further disobedience of my orders by the most exemplary punishment. I next morning had them punished at the gangway, and set them to work in chains with my prisoners. This severity excited some discontents and murmurings among the crew, but it effectually prevented a recurrence of this offense.
Nooaheevah had many charms for a sailor; and had part of my crew felt disposed to remain there, I knew they would not absent themselves until the moment before my departure. This severity had the desired effect; whatever might have been their disposition, none thought proper to absent themselves except a lazy negro, whom I took on board through charity at Tumbez … This affair had, however, like to have ended seriously; my crew did not see the same motives for restraint as myself; they had long been indulged, and they thought it now hard to be deprived of their usual liberty. They were restless, discontented, and unhappy … Their situation, they said, was worse than slavery, and one Robert White declared, on board the Essex Junior, that the crew of the Essex had come to a resolution not to weigh her anchor, or if they should be compelled to get the ship under way, in three days’ time after leaving the port, to hoist their own flag. When this was reported to me it became necessary to notice it, and with such a variety of characters as compose the crew of a ship of war, none but energetic measures will answer. I was willing to let them ease their minds by a little grumbling. It was no more than what I expected, but a threat of this kind was carrying matters rather too far. I called all hands on the larboard side of the quarter-deck, and after stating to them the necessity of getting the ship in readiness for sea with all possible dispatch, informed them that was the sole cause of their confinement, which was by no means intended as a punishment to them, as their conduct had not merited any, but to the contrary, had met my entire approbation. I then represented the serious consequences which would be likely to result should all hands so far forget their duty to the service and their respect to my orders, as to follow the example of those who were now under punishment for going on shore without leave. All seemed impressed with a sense of the necessity of strict subordination. I now informed them of the report which had been circulated, and assured them that although I gave no credit to it, should such an event take place, I would without hesitation, put a match to the magazine, and blow them all to eternity. I added, “perhaps there may be some grounds for the report; let me see who are and who are not disposed to obey my orders; you who are inclined to get the ship under way come on the starboard side, and you who are otherwise disposed, remain where you are.” All hastened to the starboard side. I now called out White; he advanced, trembling. I informed them this was the man who had circulated a report so injurious to the character of the crew, and indignation was marked on every countenance. An Indian canoe was paddling by the ship; I directed the fellow to get into her and never let me see his face again. All now returned cheerfully to their duty.
This picturesque scene of a strong commander mastering a mutiny, told in simple language, is to be found in full in Porter’s own Journal; also (but not in full), in the memoir of him written by his distinguished son, Admiral David Dixon Porter, in 1875. Our naval histories carefully shrink from any mention of it, either from a vague feeling of squeamishness, or else from a belief that the suppressed mutiny was not of sufficient importance to be recorded. Charles Sumner, however, in his treatise on the Somers mutiny in the North American Review for July, 1843, calls attention to the Essex affair, and cites with admiration the conduct of Captain Porter in squelching it on the spot. Fortunately we are not confined to Porter’s somewhat meager description of his own act on that day, for there was one other witness of the event who knew how to describe it. That was Midshipman Farragut who, although at the time only a boy of 12 years and 5 months, has left the following account of what he saw:
Nothing further occurred worthy of note until we were ready for sea on the 9th of December, when, as was the custom on Sunday, many of the crew visited the Essex Junior, and, I suppose from having received some intimation that the ships were about to sail, dissatisfaction was expressed, as the sailors were loath to give up the demoralizing pleasures of the island.
On Monday morning l saw that all was not right. The Captain took his cutlass in his hand, which he laid on the capstan. He then, though shaking with anger, addressed the crew, who had been mustered on the larboard side of the deck, with forced composure.
“All of you who are in favor of weighing the anchor when I give the order, pass over to the starboard side; you who are of a different determination, stay on the larboard side.”
All of them, to a man, walked over to the starboard. He called up a man named Robert White, an Englishman, and said to him in a severe tone: “How is this? Did you not tell them on board the Essex Junior that the crew of this ship would refuse to weigh anchor?”
The man tremblingly replied: “No, sir.”
“You lie, you scoundrel!” said the Captain. “Where is the list of the men who visited the Essex Junior on Sunday?”
He then made several of them step forward, and put the question to them one after the other: “Did you not hear of this thing on board of the Essex Junior?”
“Yes, sir,” was the response.
Then, turning to White, he exclaimed: “Run you scoundrel, for your life!” and away the fellow went over the starboard gangway.
I believe Captain Porter would have killed the man at the moment, if he had caught him, but it was equally evident he did not make any great exertion to do so. White got into a passing canoe, and we never saw him again. Captain Porter then addressed the crew in a hearty manner, praising their good conduct, and holding up to reprobation such miserable villainies. At the same time, he gave them to understand that he always intended to act summarily when such disgraceful affairs came to his notice, and intimated to them that he “would blow them all to hell before they should succeed in a conspiracy.”
Having delivered this address, he wheeled around and ordered them to man the capstan, and the music to play “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The fiddle struck up, the anchor fairly flew to the bows, and we made sail and stood out to sea. Taken altogether, it was the most exciting scene I had ever witnessed, and made such an impression on my young mind that the circumstance is as fresh as if it had occurred yesterday.
This is the end of the story of the suppressed mutiny on board the U.S.S. Essex. It was a mutiny that was no mutiny. When the fiddle on that day played the peculiarly apt tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the sea-bitten and wrinkled tars, with greasy queues of hair and (some of them) with earrings in their ears, all of them manned the capstan bars and shook out of their heads the dreams of a life spent upon a tropic isle—“the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” Nukahivah had indeed many charms for a sailor, but these men were first and foremost David Porter’s hearties, and next to that, they were United States sailors. A few months later they met the British Phoebe and the Cherub, and they gave an account of themselves which will always remain an imperishable page in our naval history.