Last weekend I watched the classic 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, which sparked the question: Have there been mutinies aboard U.S. naval vessels, and if so, what were the outcomes? –Jeff P., via e-mail
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Navy ship but no formal charges. The ship was the brig Somers, discussed in this space before. In 1842 the Somers set sail on a training mission in the Atlantic with a large number of apprentice seamen. During the voyage the ship’s officers heard reports of an impending mutiny, with 18-year-old midshipman Philip Spencer pegged by an informant as the ringleader. With only ten officers to control more than 100 men, the ship’s captain, Commander Alexander Mackenzie, quickly arrested Spencer and two alleged coconspirators. The three were accused of plotting to seize the vessel, throw loyal seamen overboard, and turn the Somers into a pirate ship. No formal court-martial was held; rather the assembled officers decided the men were guilty and on December 1 Mackenzie had all three hanged. An inquiry once the Somers returned to U.S. waters determined that Mackenzie had acted properly, but fearing he might be brought up on criminal charges in a civilian court (Spencer’s father was secretary of war), the captain requested and was granted a full court-martial. Though widely criticized for acting precipitously, Mackenzie was cleared on all counts after a two-month trial.
Formal charges, ship at sea carrying U.S. military cargo, but not navy. In March 1970 during the Vietnam war, two sailors used smuggled guns to seize the merchant ship Columbia Eagle, en route to a U.S. Air Force base in Thailand with a cargo of napalm bombs. Most of the crew was tricked into leaving the ship for a lifeboat drill, and the mutineers steamed for Cambodia, where the government granted them asylum as antiwar revolutionaries. Unfortunately for the plotters, two days later the regime was overthrown and they were held as prisoners. One was ultimately returned to the U.S. and convicted of mutiny and other charges; the other escaped from custody in Cambodia and was never found.
