With the often terrible conditions on board whaleships, one might expect mutinies to have been a common occurrence. However, ones that led to bloodshed and taking command of a ship were actually very rare. Whalers who were unhappy tended to just desert at the next port. Others made their demands sometimes in the form of damaging the ship, or more commonly through work stoppages (which I’ll write something about at a later time!). When it came to work stoppages, the Captain often acquiesced, as the unique pay structure of whaling meant that everyone was equally beholden to the success of the voyage. It was often far easier and more productive to hear out and try to address the demands of the crew than to resist and have a poor voyage.
There were however, a few notable violent mutinies that found themselves plastered over the newspapers. The Globe of Nantucket, January 1824, and the Junior of New Bedford, December 1857.
Alexander Starbuck, in his 1870s record of the history of the industry made a note alongside the Globe’s doomed 1822 voyage:
‘On this voyage and on this ship occurred the most horrible mutiny that is recounted in the annals of the whale fishery from any port or nation.’
The Globe mutiny was unique and particularly haunting in that it wasn’t a result of boiling tension or displeasure on a difficult voyage. The instigator, a 22 year old boatsteerer named Samuel Comstock, specifically signed on the ill-fated whaler with premeditated slaughter in mind. His aim was to eventually kill all the officers, take the ship by force, sail it to an island in the South Pacific, and create his own Kingdom on said island over which he would rule (the last bit, as one might expect, did not work out for him).
In January 1824 near Fanning Island, Samuel’s 15 year old brother George was at the wheel. Nearing the end of his trick, George made move to shake a rattle to relieve himself of his watch. He was harshly stopped by Samuel. The man was plotting to carry out his plans that night and didn’t want anyone awakened. George’s personal account ‘Narrative of the Mutiny, capture and transactions on board of the ship Globe of Nantucket’ details the exchange that happened between he and his brother.
“I had scarcely begun to shake it when Comstock came to me and said if I made the least damned bit of noise he’d send me to hell. This was very sudden and alarming to me his suspecting nothing I began to rattle but was thus suddenly checked by a brother in flesh but not in heart for if he had been he would have put away this wicked design thinking it would ruin me forever for little did he think I would ever get home to tell the fatal news.”
In the takeover of the ship, Samuel was accompanied by a handful of other mutineers (all of whom had signed on mid-voyage at Honolulu rather than original crew members), but it was he alone who did the killing. He murdered and mutilated the captain and officers by axe, by boarding knife (a three foot double-edged blade used for cutting blubber), by pistol, by drowning, despite their pleas. George reported it all in gruesome detail in his own words, though I’ll spare it here. In the midst of this bloodshed Samuel returned to his brother George.
“After killing the mate Comstock came up to light a lamp at the binnacle. I then spoke to him and asked him if he was going to hurt Smith, the other boatsteerer he said yes he should kill him and asked me where he was I told him I had not seen him (although he had been aft talking with me) for fear if I told the truth he would kill him or go in pursuit of him. he perceiving me shed tears asked me what I was crying about I informed him that I was afraid they were going to hurt me he told me he would if I talked that way this rather silenced me from fear of myself.”
Rather than killing the boatsteerer Gilbert Smith, Samuel, after his particularly brutal display of violence towards the commanding officers, effectively intimidated the rest of the crew into serving under him. Boarding knife in hand, he proclaimed to the surviving crew, ‘I am the bloody man and I have the bloody hand’. Samuel also told his brother George: ‘I suppose you think I regret what I have done, but you are mistaken—I should like to do such a job every morning before breakfast.’
A 19th c. whaler’s boarding knife.
George was ordered to be steward, and the rest of the crew was commanded to clean the gore from the cabins. The ship was painted all black to disguise her. They operated under a set of laws Comstock put forth, as they set course for the Marshall Islands to complete his designs. These laws were transcribed by two other survivors of the mutiny, teenage boys Cyrus Hussey and William Lay, who also wrote about the mutiny titled: A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket.
“That if any one saw a sail and did not report it immediately, he should be put to death! If any one refused to fight a ship he should be put to death; and the manner of their death, this—They shall be bound hand and foot and boiled in the try pots, of boiling oil!” Every man was made to seal and sign this instrument, the seals of the mutineers being black, and the remainder, blue and white.”
Samuel and George’s other brother, William Comstock, was a prolific writer. In addition to writing a narrative in 1838 titled ‘The Life of Samuel Comstock, the Terrible Whaleman’, he wrote a more general text called ‘A voyage to the Pacific : descriptive of the customs, usages, and sufferings on board of Nantucket whale-ships’.
In it, he relayed an instance where a whaling captain of the Coffin family came across the Globe following the mutiny, and the exchange that reportedly happened between one of the mutineers and Captain Coffin:
“What ship is that?” asked Captain Coffin again.
“The Ark of Blood,” cried the other captain “commanded by the Demon of the Waters!”
“Where are you from?” cried Captain Coffin.
“You are—inquisitive,” replied the other. “I am, like Lucifer, fallen from Glory and bound to Hell!”Astonished at such singular replies, Capt. Coffin knew not what to say. The moon burst through a broken cloud, and threw her silvery light upon the strange vessel. She was certainly a whale ship; her boats were in full sight. The mate said he supposed the Capt of her was drunk, or perhaps amusing himself with a joke.
“It may be a joke,” said Starbuck, “but it is a very rough one. Methinks I know the voice of the man who hails, but if he has attained to the command of a ship, his promotion must have been very sudden.”
“I will hail him again,” said the persevering captain; and putting the trumpet to his mouth he called out: “Have you any potatoes? The few which I have remaining are not fit to eat—they are soft as mush.”
“I’ll send you a hard one,” cried the other—and the flash of a pistol was seen illuminating the black side of the strange ship, when a ball whizzed past the Captain’s ear, and lodged in the foremast.
After this, the captain ‘wisely decided that a black ship might prove as bad as a white whale’ and the ships parted ways.
Tensions grew on the ship is it made its way to Comstock’s destination of Mili Atoll. One mutineer was hanged on board when Comstock suspected him of wanting to take command of the ship. The other initial men who joined up with him (as well as, of course, the others who had played no part) also suspected that when they arrived to Mili Atoll, Comstock was going to destroy the ship and kill everyone who came with him. They landed on the atoll on February 14th, and three days later the other mutineers shot and killed Comstock. They sent a party of six of the crew (George among them, led by the boatsteerer Smith) to secure the Globe lying at anchor. They didn’t anticipate that those six might strand the mutineers on the island, and the lack of foresight worked against them. Hastily, as soon as the group of men got aboard they cut the anchor chain and sailed away for help, eventually reaching Chile.
The two surviving mutineers and two young lads, Cyrus Hussey and William Lay, were all who remained on the island. Tension was also growing between the mutineers and the islanders of Mili Atoll, who had suddenly been met with a group of castaways who eventually began trying to aggressively impose their will on them. Ultimately, the mutineers were killed by the islanders after a series of escalations. Cyrus Hussey and William Lay were spared and protected. They were mostly kept separate from each other in two different communities on the island, where they lived mostly-peaceably with the islanders until they were eventually retrieved on November 25th by a naval schooner, the USS Dolphin, that was sent to find them.
“The Death of Samuel Comstock”. An 1840s illustration of Samuel Comstock falling back in the sand on an island, a cutlass in hand and a gunshot wound it his chest. From ‘The Life of Samuel Comstock, the Terrible Whaleman” written by his brother William in 1838.
In addition to the narratives shared by the survivors (easily found in the public domain), The Mutiny on the Globe by Thomas Farel Heffernan fully details the story of this event, if you want more.
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The other notable mutiny was that of the Junior, out of New Bedford at the close of 1857. This mutiny was more a result of ill treatment on board reaching a breaking point. The voyage was plagued with the usual bad luck, an inexperienced first-time captain, rotten food, and abusive officers. One man, a 24 year old boatsteerer named Cyrus Plumer, had a reputation of being rash and hot-headed. Prior to his signing on the Junior, he had been on another whaling vessel three years before where at one point he approached a fellow boatsteerer trying to get his support in staging mutiny to overthrow the captain and take the ship but, not finding it, deserted.
On the Junior, he found more support. On December 25th, 1857 Plumer encouraged the men (many of whom had had a bit too much to drink in light of the holiday) to take the ship that evening. The mutineers killed the captain and third mate, similarly as above, with a whaling gun, hatchet, a boarding knife, a blubber spade. The first and second mate were injured, with one taken prisoner by the mutineers and the other managing to stow himself in the lower hold for 5 days with a pistol with three shots, little water, and no food. A confession composed by the main mutineers in the ship’s log after the deed speaks to what happened after:
“This is to certify that we, Cyrus Plumer, John Hall, Richard Cartha, Cornelius Burns, and William Herbert, did, on the the night of the 25th December last, take the ship Junior, and that all others in the ship are quite innocent of the deed. The captain and third mate were killed, and the second mate was wounded and taken prisoner at the time. The mate was wounded in the shoulder with balls from a whaling gun, and at the time we fired we set his bed on fire, and he was obliged, for fear of suffocation, to take to the lower hold, where he remained until Wednesday afternoon. We could not find him before, but we undertook a strict search and found him there. We promised him his life, and the ship, if he would come out and surrender without any trouble, and so he came out. Since he has been in the ship he has been a good officer, and has kept his place. We agreed to leave him the greater part of the crew, and we have put him under oath not to attempt to follow us, but to go straight away and not molest us. We shall watch around here for some (time), and if he attempts to follow us or stay around here, we shall come on board and sink the ship. If we had not found Mr. Nelson the ship would have been lost. We have taken two boats and ten men, and everything that We wanted. We did not put Mr. Nelson in irons on account of his being wounded, but we kept a strict watch over him all the time. We particularly wish to say that all others in the ship but we five aforesaid men are quite innocent of any part in the affair.
Ultimately the mate did not keep his oath, making course for Sydney, Australia once the mutineers were out of sight in their boat. He alerted the shipowners of the situation, and word went round the globe. The mutineers were captured in Melbourne, February 1858, and brought to trial back in New Bedford. They were transported aboard the Junior itself, fitted out with prison cells to hold them. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. In April 1859 Plumer was found guilty of murder, and Cartha, Herbert, and Charles Stanley of manslaughter. The others were pardoned.
Plumer objected to his death sentence in a statement to the courts, saying first that he was not the man who killed the captain. That he indeed fired a shot at him but missed, and another crew member, Charles Fifield later killed the Captain with a hatchet.
“[he] stated to another person that I ‘missed the captain but that he did not miss him’ and boastingly showed the blood on his guernsey frock saying ‘it was the captain’s blood, and that he was the butcher’.
Plumer said that in the trial this man ‘wickedly sworn his own crime on my head’. He also stated that he didn’t take life but preserve it, in sparing the other two wounded officers. Officers who he ultimately held guilty for the mutiny in the first place through their complicity:
“The real culprit—the most guilty person in my judgement—the one who’s contriving brain and intiguing heart were the instigating cause of the conspiracy and mutiny on board the Junior”
He found no sympathy and was sentenced to hang, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison by president Buchanan, and then he was later fully pardoned 15 years later by president Grant.
A daguerreotype of four of the mutineers after their capture in 1858: Plumer, Rike, Cartha, and Stanley, sitting in a line against the wall with serious expressions, the first three dressed in dark suits, the last in just a shirt.
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These two mutinies garnered particular interest because they were so rare. Again because if people were unhappy they tended to ditch the whole affair, rather than shed blood. This was also partly because some captains reacted with their own violence at the prospect of mutiny, and found themselves pardoned by their peers for it. An example of this can be found in an article in the New Bedford Mercury, Dec 18, 1849. I’m curious about captain Issac Hussey’s relation to Cyrus Hussey, if there be one, and if that experience and ancestry informed his zero tolerance.
“In June last, while cruising in the vicinity of the King’s Mill Group of Islands, the crew of the Planter, led on by a few desperate fellows, refused duty, alleging as a cause that the ship had cruised long enough, and should go into port. Capt. Hussey refused to comply with the demands of the crew, whereupon they armed themselves with knives, handspikes, boarding knives &c. and threatened the lives of the captain and officers unless their demands were immediately complied with. Capt. H. endeavored to reason with them, and upon going forward to do so was met at the try-works and forced back.
After several ineffectual attempts to induce the crew to return to their duty, and finding that they had determined to force the captain to return to port or take possession of the ship, Capt. H. ordered the ship’s muskets to be brought upon deck and loaded with ball cartridges. He then addressed his crew, stating his determination to maintain his authority on board if need be at the cost of life, and gave them a half hour to consider the matter and make up their minds whether they would return to duty. At the expiration of the time, he again addressed them, and finding that they still persisted in their mutinous intentions, he very coolly and resolutely informed them that he had determined upon the course for him to pursue—that he was a good shot, and that the first man who, on being commanded by him, refused to obey, would be shot dead upon the spot. He then took up a tried musket and calling one of the ringleaders by name, ordered him to come aft; the only answer to which was defiance. Capt. H. then levelled his gun and fired. The ball entered the temple of the mutineer and passed out the opposite side of the head, and he fell dead upon the deck. The same course was then pursued with another of the ringleaders, who with the remainder of the crew preferred returning to their duty to being shot at—and the ship continued on her cruise.
The peril to which the vessel and crew were exposed by the conduct of the mutineers will doubtless furnish to the minds of all a sufficient justification for the extreme measures to which he was compelled to resort, and afford to him ample vindication by the laws of his country.”
It was a bloody world all around—oft times whales, sometimes men.