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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 A
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:
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:
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.
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 ru
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 ru
“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 in his raider CSS Alabama.
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 bi