← Harold's Old Time Radio
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The rest of the story. The USS Summers was among the most splendid warships in the United States Navy. And yet, only six months after receiving her commission, November 1842, there was trouble aboard, serious trouble. She had just sailed from Monrovia, Liberia, was on her way to St. Thomas, when the officers became aware of mounting restlessness among the crew, on the 26th, was arrested. One midshipman named Philip Spencer, who, it was determined, had been stirring up his comrades to mutiny. The plan, apparently, was this. Spencer and the mutineers would take the ship's officers by surprise, would throw them in the crew who remained loyal to the sharks, and then they would turn the Summers, a United States warship, into a pirate ship. Commander Alexander Mackenzie and his officers, investigated thoroughly, made their judgments carefully. By December 1, they were unanimously satisfied that they knew the guilty parties and what must be done with them. Midshipman Spencer and the other conspirators must hang. And that very day, from the yard arm of the vessel they had attempted to commandeer, they hanged. But this is the rest of the story. Later that month, the Summers returned to her home port of New York. A naval court of inquiry launched an investigation of its own into the aborted Summer's mutiny, subsequent execution of the unsuccessful mutineers. No detail was left unexamined, no witness unquestioned, no innuendo uninterpreted. Thereafter, Commander Mackenzie himself was court martialed and the entire matter was investigated all over again. But in the end, in the end, the officers of the Summers were utterly exonerated and returned to duty, although aboard other vessels. And to this day, considering the immaculate thoroughness the proceedings, there is less doubt regarding what happened aboard the Summers in the autumn of 1842 than in practically any other case of crime and punishment at sea in the history of the United States Navy. There's a reason for that. The Summers herself, by the way, was less fortunate than the officers who served on her maiden voyage. After all official inquiries had ceased, she was assigned to the Home Squadron cruise the Atlantic coast of the West Indies. But then, in the spring of 1846, was drafted into the Mexican War. In December of that same year, in that same war, while chasing a blockade runner off Veracruz, she was hit by a sudden squall, capsized, foundered and went down. Seven of her crew were captured, the rest drowned, and she was only four years out of the shipyard. A tragic and yet somehow appropriate end, some said, as though the shame her decks had once borne was finally too much to bear. For the reason the investigations into the Summer's mutiny were so meticulous was that the identity of the chief mutineer made him so unlikely. As such, therefore, his crime was difficult to believe. And yet it happened just the way I've related it. When a young midshipman aspiring to piracy conspired to murder and was hanged when he failed a boy named Philip Spencer, the son of the United States Secretary of War. Now you know the rest of the story.