Thomas Farel Heffernan: Mutiny on the Globe

By JACK LEIGH

This is a bloody tale of mutiny and psychopathy on the high seas. The Globe was one of 40 whalers which left Nantucket in 1822 for the Pacific. Half her crew of 22 were teenagers. The captain was 26.

Samuel Comstock joined the Globe, aged 20, as a boat steerer, ranked immediately below the third mate. It was his fifth ship and his third whaler. He would rather have been in the Navy but was thwarted by Quaker pacifist pressure on his family.

Young Samuel was a wild one with his fighting and womanising, but back in polite society his Quaker kinfolk found him witty and likeable. At sea in the whaleship Globe, he was a favourite with the captain.

Shipboard life was meant to discipline the young man and save him from dissipation ashore. His father, who was a New York merchant in whale products, even promised to buy him a vessel of his own.

So what does Samuel do? He murders his captain and officers and seizes the whale ship. It falls to his 15-year-old brother George, who is also aboard, to record most accurately the mad rampage of "Samuel Comstock the Terrible Whaleman" - as yet another brother, William, calls him in a book title.

That month-long cycle of violence early in 1824 left 13 seamen dead. Six others escaped in the partially disabled ship and two were marooned on a Pacific island in the Marshall group and were rescued nearly two years later.

The mutiny was driven by the psychopathology of Samuel Comstock who is "an icon of strangeness ... a malignant narcissist" and a sociopath "with no logic of feeling", says author Heffernan in terms more hyperbolic than psychiatric. The man was an underground "river of blood" waiting to erupt incomprehensibly, and drench the Globe.

His brothers were fascinated by his cranky ways, the grand delusions, risk-taking and tolerance of pain. Almost to the end, his every quirk and idiosyncrasy could be explained somehow. Human time bombs are often like that, but the fantasy to watch was a long-standing one - about becoming the white emperor of a South Sea island, a pirate king with his own native navy.

Samuel supported shipboard discipline and was seen as a captain's man. Grumbles about erratic rations and too little time to eat were taken up by riffraff crewmen who came aboard in Hawaii, and on January 25, 1824 the captain whipped one man severely for insubordination.

Samuel Comstock saw the opportunity to play out his darkest dream. He led a midnight attack, slaughtering the captain and three officers with the exultant cry, "I am the bloody man; I have the bloody hand."

With the ship won he set out to find a shore base, hanging one of his henchmen on the way for suspected treachery. The choice was Mili Atoll in what is now Kiribati, where the Globe was stripped of equipment and supplies.

Samuel began to lavish gifts on the islanders in a transparent attempt to have them wipe out all the other white men - who naturally became alarmed, and killed their deluded leader on the third day ashore.

Six men minding the ship cut loose and sailed away at night. Of the nine left, seven were massacred by the natives on February 24 and the other two were taken as slaves. It was June before the under-manned Globe reached Chile, with a distress flag flying.

The US Navy sent the topsail schooner Dolphin to find the castaways who were still thought to number nine, and what follows is a tale of bold leadership and bravery in contrast to the sordid story of the mutiny itself.

This book is well written, billowing along on its cultural collision course with old Micronesia, and charting the whalers' world which also impinged on early 19th-century New Zealand. Heffernan invokes Bikini Atoll and Melville's Moby Dick as rough coordinates for his tale, but any connection is purely atmospheric.

At bottom, this is one more story of dysfunctional, self-destructive people making a mess of their own and others' lives. It is a crime story going nowhere, like all the others which saturate our viewing and reading. It can be judged successful if it does not induce torpor and despondency. In fact it has a redeeming thread of hope and survival.

Bloomsbury

$36.95

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland reviewer.