John J. Domagalski, Escape from Java

The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord Mackenzie and others who stood in their way of seizing the ship?Would they go to their assigned posts to carry out the mutiny?Was the brig to be a piratical cruiser?Delgado describes the onboard tension this way in Chapter 5: "Somers was now a ship in the full grip of fear by the officers of the men and boys, fear of the officers by the crew, and no one sure of exactly what would happen next."Nathaniel Currier's "floating gallows" lithograph of two bodies hanging from Somers' yardarm below an unfurled American flag best illustrates what happened next.The iconic image of the hangings only opened the door for more anger and controversy from a fistfight in Tyler's cabinet between Spencer's father and Navy Secretary, Abel Parker Upshur, through the Navy with courts of this and that reviewing and judging, and writers like Cooper and a press eager to feed an audience on details that "proved" Mackenzie was correct or Spencer a "martyr."Delgado leads readers into that vortex of nineteenth-century recrimination that continues to this day.He has skillfully put the facts on the table in The Curse of the Somers.Like the author, I now believe "all parties are to blame," a major change from my first introduction to Somers through Cooper's 1844 pamphlet on Mackenzie's "despotism" and "unmanly conduct" on the cruise.Spencer was at the centre of the vortex that cursed Somers

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