The Story of the Ship Globe of Nantucket

I

IN the original papers of the Nantucket whaler Globe, Captain Thomas Worth, which sailed from Edgartown, Massachusetts, in December, 1822 (her registry and crew list are in the Boston Customs House), you can see for yourself, if you wish, the starkly simple outline of such a story as few responsible imaginative writers would dare set down in black and white. On those authoritative, matter-of-fact pages are scrawled, in faded ink, the name of each man in the crew, a brief description of his person, an abstract of his life, and, after certain names, the significant comment, ‘Dead, killed Jany. 26, 1824.’

But the story of the Globe is more than a mere thrilling tale of the mutinous exploit of a band of boys and young men, which has stood for a hundred years as one of the grimmest in our history: in the old narrative, written by Hussey and Lay, the two survivors of all that happened at sea and ashore, — and between its lines, — there is a concrete and extreme example of such sanguinary madness as sometimes occurred on board the old whaling vessels, during their long voyages in distant seas.

In many of their logbooks, cases of melancholia appear, unnamed but unmistakable; and now and then one can find in the stained pages strangely detailed accounts of suicides at sea. There was scarcely a voyage that had not its mutinies; there were floggings and desertions galore; and once in a long while, as on board the Globe, the monotony and loneliness and hardhanded discipline during years at sea resulted in downright mania.

A hundred years ago, when thousands of square-riggers were laying their courses to every point of the compass, and our whalers had already rounded the Horn and thrust their bows into unfamiliar seas, the sailing of any one whaling vessel was an affair of little moment; the Globe weighed anchor on December 15, with probably no more ceremony than attended the farewell of any other whaler. An accident to her crossjack-yard, while she was working out of port, forced her to return; but, having fitted and sent aloft another yard, Captain Worth sailed again, four days later. It appears that, in spite of the strong influence of superstition on seafaring men, no one regarded the accident as ominous — for, of all the men on the crew list, only one failed to sail in the Globe, and he was ‘taken out of the within-named ship by order of law previous to his leaving this port.’ He was luckier than he knew.

Nineteen men, nearly all of them natives of New England and bearing good old Yankee names, sailed in the Globe. Besides the captain, whose age is not given in the crew list, the oldest of them, Chief Mate William Beetle, was twenty-six, and of the rest, who ranged down to fourteen, eight were seventeen or younger.

The brutality of life in a whaler has been, for more than a hundred years, a commonplace; and the author of that quaint old book, Evils and Abuses in the Naval and Merchant Service Exposed, and other writers of an early time, exaggerate little, if at all, when they say that it was a common practice in whaling vessels so to abuse the men that they would run away, or make a show of insubordination, whereby they would forfeit their lays and help a thrifty captain to save money for himself and the owners. It was entirely typical of the times and the trade that, while the Globe lay at Oahu in the Sandwich Islands, after an uneventful voyage, six men deserted and one was discharged.

To fill their places, the captain shipped four Americans, — Anthony Henson, Thomas Lilliston, Silas Payne, and a negro steward named William Humphries, — an Englishman named John Oliver, and a native of Oahu, who went by the name of Joseph Brown; and the recruits were as vicious an aggregation as the average sea captain could wish to be delivered from. The friction between officers and men, which had found expression hitherto in grumbling about the food, a universal prerogative of sailormen, now sprang up anew in various hot-headed outbursts, and a new party of malcontents formed a plan to desert at Fanning’s Island, whither the ship had laid her course.

Consider, then, the nineteen souls, officers and crew, who sailed in (he Globe from the Sandwich Islands. Most of them were striplings at best, and some of them were young boys, who might far better have been in school. They were never to reach Fanning’s Island.

The number of those who left the ship at Oahu exceeded by one the number of those who joined her, for a certain Joseph Thomas, who shares his name with a distinguished earlier citizen of New England, had entered the crew at some time during the voyage. He is not on the original crew list, and nowhere is he represented as one of the new men who were shipped at Oahu. As we see him dimly through a hundred intervening years, he appears to have been a peculiarly negative person; yet, in odd paradox, he was destined to play a part as decisive as it was passive in the fate of the Globe and her men; and of all those who were criminally concerned in her remarkable story only he was ever brought to trial.

On the morning of Sunday, January 26, 1824, approximately two years and a month from the day the Globe had sailed, the ill-temper of all hands culminated in general disorder, and that mysterious wretch, Joseph Thomas, insulted Captain Worth, who thereupon flogged him with the end of the main buntline, while those of the crew who were not stationed stood in the hatchway.

All that day, the spark kindled by the flogging smouldered, but with no sign at the time to warn the officers and honest men. We know only that a great deal, all knowledge of which went to the grave with Joseph Thomas, was going on under the surface of the ordinary routine of life in a ship.

But concerning the events that occurred that night there is no slightest doubt. The grim history of the Globe has come down to us in the terse narrative of Hussey and Lay, in the depositions of other members of the crew, and in the newspapers of 1824 and 1825. The returned crew list bears it out; and the court records, so far as they go, confirm it.

It was the custom of the Globe that the captain and chief and second mates should not stand watch at night, unless the crew was boiling blubber. The third mate and the two boat-steerers had charge, respectively, of the three watches; and during the first watch that night, from seven until ten o’clock, Gilbert Smith, a boat-steerer, had kept the deck.

Captain Joy, of the ship Lyra of New Bedford, had spent most of the day on board the Globe, and had agreed with Captain Worth that, during the night, one or the other would show a lantern as a signal for tacking, so that the two whalers could come about together and bear each other company for at least another day. When Captain Joy had returned to the Lyra, Captain Worth had gone down into the cabin; but at eight o’clock he had come up for an hour, had had two reefs taken in the topsails, and had given orders to continue by the wind until two; then, setting the light as a signal for the Lyra to keep company, to tack.

Gilbert Smith, the boat-steerer in charge of the first watch, had gone below with his men at ten o’clock, leaving on deck Samuel B. Comstock, the other boat-steerer, and the crew of the waist boat, with George Comstock, the younger brother of Samuel, taking the first trick at the helm.

Assume for a moment young Comstock’s point of view, since he represents the majority of those on board the Globe, and since he, by reason of his station, saw certain things that no one else saw. Two hours later, when the time for his relief had come, the boy — he was only sixteen years old — sounded the sailor’s rattle that was used for such signals on board the old whalers. For two hours no living thing had stirred on deck. For two hours he had steered the ship, without hearing so much as a human whisper. Then, in the darkness by the helm, which was broken only by the light of the binnacle lantern, when he swung the rattle, his brother appeared beside him and whispered, ‘If you make the least damn bit of noise, I ‘ll send you to hell.’

The boy had had no intimation of trouble. His trick at the wheel was an old story. The very familiarity of his surroundings made the apparition the more startling.

Much alarmed, he waited until Samuel had lighted a lamp and had gone into the steerage; then, a second time, he sounded the rattle.

His brother returned instantly, in a murderous rage, and no one else responded to the signal. In fear of death, young George gave up the rattle.

He then saw four men — Payne, Oliver, Humphries, and Lilliston — come aft and join his brother, who started down into the cabin. Samuel was armed with an axe, and Payne with a boarding-knife — a keen twoedged blade about four feet long and two or three inches wide, used for cutting the blubber as it was hoisted into the ship. Lilliston, who afterward declared that he had not believed they would actually carry out their plans, started with them, — out of mere bravado, by his own account, — but went only as far as the cabin gangway. When the four actually entered the cabin, he faced about, and ran past young George and forward to the forecastle, where he climbed into his bunk.

As the four went below with their lanterns, George was again left alone at the wheel. He saw them for a moment, black against the lantern light; saw Lilliston burst out in a panic and rush forward, with only the pounding of his feet to break the stillness; saw the light play back and forth in the companionway; then heard terrible sounds.

The captain had slung a hammock in the cabin, and was sleeping there because his own stateroom was uncomfortably warm. Samuel Comstock, having stationed Payne to watch the mate, stepped up to the hammock and deliberately split the head of the sleeping captain with one blow of his axe.

At the sound of the blow, Payne, with his boarding-knife, blindly attacked William Beetle, the mate, who woke from a sound sleep and cried wildly, ‘What — what — what — is this — O Payne! O Comstock! — Don’t kill me! Don’t! Have I not always — ? ‘

‘Yes, you have always been a damned rascal,’ Comstock returned coolly. ‘You’d tell lies of me out of the ship, would you? It ‘s a damned good time to beg now, but you ‘re too late.’

Before Comstock stopped speaking, the mate leaped out of his bunk and, getting Comstock by the throat, for a moment almost turned the tables. Comstock, taken by surprise, dropped the lantern and the axe, but managed, although half throttled, to call to Payne for help, while in darkness the struggling men fought back and forth across the cabin. It appears that Payne had lost his boarding-knife, too, and without disabling the mate; for he fumbled about underfoot till he found the axe and succeeded in getting it into Comstock’s hand, being himself, of course, liable to kill his own leader if he were to strike at the mate in the dark.

Comstock, all this time unable to break Mr. Beetle’s hold on his throat, then swung the axe on him, fracturing his skull, and knocked him groaning into the pantry, where he killed him, while Humphries held another light, and Oliver put in a blow whenever opportunity offered.

The uproar, which by then was terrific, had of course waked Mr. Lumbert and Mr. Fisher, the second and third mates, who could not help knowing what was going on, but who had no way of knowing that the active mutineers were so few. Unarmed, and terrified by the ghastly sounds on the other side of the bulkhead, they waited in complete silence for whatever should happen next.

Here, by allusion, is a very strange comment on the complete absence of esprit de corps — to use no stronger expression — among the officers of the Globe. Each mate seems to have fought for himself alone, and thereby to have contributed much to the success of the mutiny.

Stationing his men at the door of the stateroom, when he had finished with the mate, Comstock went on deck to relight his lamp at the binnacle, and found his brother, alone at the helm, in tears and almost overcome with fear. Comstock asked what had become of Smith, the second boat-steerer, threatened the boy, and returned below with the lighted lamp.

When Lumbert, hearing his steps, called from behind the closed door of the stateroom, ‘Are you going to kill me?’ Comstock carelessly replied, ‘Oh, no, I guess not.’

But, loading two muskets, he fired a chance shot through the door and wounded Fisher.

As the two burst open the door, Comstock made a thrust at Mr. Lumbert, but, missing him, tripped and pitched into the stateroom. Before he could turn, Mr. Lumbert seized his collar. Comstock twisted away, and found himself face to face with Mr. Fisher, who had got possession of the musket, and held it with the bayonet at Comstock’s heart.

Deliberately weighing the situation, and realizing that the two mates still did not know just how matters stood, Comstock held his ground without changing expression, and offered to spare Mr. Fisher’s life if he would return the musket. He was very cool, this murderous young madman.

At that moment the fate of the Globe and of most of those who were left alive on board her depended on Mr. Fisher’s decision. He must have known intimately Comstock’s character, and his folly seems incredible. He weakly took Comstock’s promise at its facevalue and gave up the musket, whereupon Comstock whirled about and several times bayoneted Mr. Lumbert; then turned once more on Mr. Fisher.

The folly of the third mate was even more remarkable, for there was a quarrel of long standing between the two; in a wrestling match, when the Globe was gamming with the Enterprise, another Nantucket vessel, Mr. Fisher had easily thrown Comstock, who had promptly lost his temper and started a rough-and-tumble fight, in which he got much the worst of it.

The odds, by Mr. Fisher’s own act, were now reversed with a vengeance. The hapless third mate, who, a moment since, had had Comstock at a tremendous disadvantage, found himself face to face with a young maniac armed with a loaded musket. Pleas and imprecations availed him nothing.

‘If there is no hope,’ he cried at last, ‘I will at least die like a man. I am ready.’

Comstock fired, killing him instantly; then turned on Mr. Lumbert, who was begging for life, though desperately wounded, and twice more stabbed him with the bayonet, roaring like the very caricature of a villain, ‘I am a bloody man! I have a bloody hand and will be avenged.’

‘Thus it appears,’ runs the old narrative, ‘that this more than demon murdered, with his own hand, the whole! Gladly would we wash from “memory’s waste” all remembrance of that bloody night. The compassionate reader, however, whose heart sickens within him, at the perusal, as does ours at the recital, of this tale of woe, will not, we hope, disapprove our publishing these melancholy facts to the world. As, through the boundless mercy of Providence, we have been restored to the bosom of our families and homes, we deemed it a duty we owe to the world, to record our “ unvarnished tale.” ‘

Meanwhile, Smith, the other boatsteerer, had started aft when he first heard the sounds of disorder; but learning what was on foot, he had immediately gone forward again. Realizing at last that there was no hidingplace on board, he turned to face Comstock, having made up his mind that, if worst came to worst, he would die fighting. But Comstock, emerging from the cabin, met him with every appearance of good-will and with a cordial invitation to join hands with the mutineers, which Smith promptly accepted as representing his only chance for life.

Having assumed command of the ship, Comstock called up all hands to make sail and shake out the reefs she was carrying, and, setting the lantern as a signal for the Lyra to tack, held the Globe to her course, thus making sure that the two would part company. He then had the bodies of the four officers thrown overboard under circumstances of unspeakable brutality, — and laid the course of the Globe for the Mulgrave Islands.

II

The monotony of those long voyages, when a man was forced in upon himself, with only the same few faces about him, day after day, month after month, and year after year, was worse than deadly. Is it surprising that, once in a while, a man like Comstock fell a victim to mania, and, having once ‘tasted blood,’ ran amuck?

Unquestionably Joseph Thomas, whose flogging had been the immediate occasion of the mutiny, had known Comstock’s murderous plans; and Thomas Lilliston, who had gone with axe and boat-knife to the very door of the cabin, had obviously been concerned in the plot, although he did not go below at the time. But the pledged mutineers were now only half a dozen men of a crew of seventeen; they had no assurance of the support of the other eleven, and much reason to doubt it.

When the new leaders of the ship’s company appointed young George Comstock as steward, in place of the negro, William Humphries, he accepted the post without demur, as was natural enough under the circumstances; and for a day and a night he performed its duties without incident. But on the evening of January 28, having occasion to enter the cabin, he surprised Humphries in the act of loading a pistol.

‘What are you doing that for?’ he demanded.

‘I have heard something very strange, and I ‘m going to be ready for it,’ Humphries replied.

George thereupon faced about and hurried with the news to his brother, who went straight to the cabin with Payne, whom he had made his mate.

Humphries, pistol in hand, was by no means willing to talk freely, and tried to evade Comstock’s questions. But Comstock finally extracted from him the story of a plot between Gilbert Smith and Peter Kidder to retake the ship, which Smith and Kidder promptly and flatly contradicted.

So the next morning Comstock ordered a trial. He appointed two men to serve as a jury, and put Smith and Kidder, and Humphries, guarded by six men with muskets, through the pretense of an examination.

Comstock according to the narrative of Hussey and Lay, then spoke as follows: —

‘It appears that William Humphries has been accused guilty of a treacherous and base act, in loading a pistol for the purpose of shooting Mr. Payne and myself. He having been tried, the jury will now give in their verdict, guilty or not guilty. If guilty he shall be hanged to a studding-sail boom rigged out eight feet upon the foreyard; but if he is found not guilty, Smith and Kidder shall be hanged upon the aforementioned gallows.’

It sounded well to those who were not in the secret, but it marked the end of Humphries. Comstock and Payne had decided on his fate the night before, and had secretly instructed the jury to return a verdict of guilty.

They took the luckless negro’s watch from him, seated him on the rail forward, covered his face with a cap, put the rope round his neck, and ordered all hands to tally on. Then they told him that, if he had anything to say, he had fourteen seconds in which to say it.

‘ Little did I think,’ he began, ‘ I was born to come to this — ‘

Comstock struck the ship’s bell, and they ran him up to the studding-sail boom.

After cutting him down and sinking his body with a blubber hook, they searched his chest and found in it sixteen dollars, which he himself had hopefully stolen from the captain’s trunk less than three days before.

Having thus concluded Humphries’s earthly affairs with neat celerity, Comstock read the laws that he had formulated to govern the survivors of the mutiny, and ordered every man to sign them. Here an odd distinction was made; the mutineers set black seals by their names; the others, blue and white seals. This precious document, conceived with a devilish ingenuity that challenges those who write the most sanguinary fiction, provided that any man who saw a sail and neglected to report it immediately, or any man who refused to fight a ship, should be tied hand and foot, and boiled to death in the try-pots of boiling oil. It represented the high-water mark of Comstock’s imagination and statesmanship.

Thus, cheered by the thought of all that had happened on board the Globe, and of the penalty to which they had subscribed themselves as liable in case they broke Comstock’s laws, that shipload of boys and young men sailed merrily off in search of some blissful island on which to spend their remaining days. Stopping by the way at one group and another, to trade for food and take pot-shots at the natives, they at last reached the Mulgraves, where, after cruising about, they found a relatively suitable place to establish themselves in accordance with their original plans.

They built a raft to serve as a landing-stage. They carried on shore a number of sails, many casks of bread and molasses and rum and vinegar, and barrels of beef and pork and sugar, and dried apples and coffee and pickles and cranberries, and considerable stores of chocolate, ropes, and cordage, clothing, and tools. It was their intention, when they had installed themselves in comfort and safe obscurity, to haul the ship up and burn her.

Payne, who had seconded the older Comstock in every detail of the mutiny and was now next in command, had charge of the ship, while Comstock superintended the landing of the various goods that were sent on shore; but becoming impatient of Comstock’s generosity in giving away plunder, especially to the natives, whose goodwill Comstock was secretly trying to secure for himself alone, Payne threatened to leave the ship, and eventually came ashore, where a lively quarrel followed.

When the quarrel was at its height, Comstock went on board again, leaving Payne on shore, and challenged various members of the crew to fight. But no one accepted his invitation; so the insane youth equipped himself with some hooks and lines, and a knife and a cutlass, and returned to the island, calling as he went over the side, ‘I am going to leave you; look out for yourselves.’ Evading Payne and the others at the landing, and hurrying inland, he joined a band of natives, whom, it was reported, he tried to persuade to butcher the rest of the white men, but with no success.

Payne, now left in command, and fearing that Comstock, who had gone with half a hundred natives in the direction of a village, would eventually succeed in his scheme, posted heavy guards that night; and the next morning, seeing Comstock approaching, he and Oliver, with others of the crew, concealed themselves behind some bushes, and with loaded muskets waited for their recent leader.

Comstock did not discover them until he was almost upon them. Then he cried, ‘Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me! I will not hurt you!’

They fired, and he fell. One ball had pierced his right breast, the other his head; but Payne, not certain that he was really killed, ran out and cut his head nearly off with an axe, to make sure of him.

Wrapping the body of this lad of twenty-one in an old sail, they read over it, with unconscious irony, a chapter from the Bible, fired a musket by way of requiem, and buried it five feet deep in sand. All this, two-andtwenty days after he had led the mutiny and struck down four men with his own hands.

Had the survivors been of one mind, they could have put their theories of Utopia to a practical test.; but, unhappily for our knowledge of social science, there were certain ones whose conception of an earthly paradise did not conform to the ideas held by Comstock and Payne.

In the course of the day, Payne ordered Smith, the surviving boatsteerer, who, it will be remembered, had declared his sympathy with the mutiny only after it was successfully carried out, and who had had no active part in it, to fetch the binnacle compasses on shore. Payne himself chose six men to take charge of the ship, placed Smith in command of them, and sent them on board. Then, setting a watch on shore to guard against the natives, he and his party turned in for the night.

At about ten o’clock an outcry woke them: ‘The ship has gone! The ship has gone!’

They found, to their alarm, that the ship had, indeed, disappeared. The strong breeze that was blowing made plausible the theory that she had dragged her anchor, and that she would work back in the morning; but morning revealed no sign of her. Without question, she had got safely away.

Smith, unknown to the party on shore, had quietly formed a counterplot, and had enlisted in his project those of his six men in whose loyalty he trusted. The only man on board who was in sympathy with the mutiny was Joseph Thomas, whose flogging had brought it to pass.

III

On the island, Payne was in a quandary. Enraged by Smith’s success in running away with the ship, he stormed and cursed, and threatened those on board her with instant death, if ever he should lay hands on them. Also he was in mortal fear of the consequences of her escape; but the arrival of throngs of natives soon forced him to dissemble both fear and anger. The inconsiderate Smith had left a cloud in the sky of Utopia.

For a few days the little group of maroons, as now they virtually were, lived peacefully enough. They traded for food with the natives, worked on their boat, and roamed about the island, visiting villages and exploring. But they were living in a fools’ haven.

Of those who were left, Payne and Oliver had had an active part in the mutiny, and at least one other was known to have been in the councils of the mutineers. So those who were entirely innocent, being each uncertain of the attitude of the rest, could only hold their peace and await whatever events the future should bring — except , that is, William Lay and Cyrus M. Hussey, lads of eight een or nineteen years, who were intimate friends of long standing and mutual confidence. Not only were these two secretly at odds with the whole escapade, of which they were innocent victims: they were kinder of heart than the others. Courageously, and with a humaneness that at the time and under the circumstances was distinctly creditable, they interfered with their fellows, to protect some of the old men and women of the natives from abuse.

Thus matters went forward, until a day when Payne and Oliver returned from an exploring expedition after the manner of the tribe of Benjamin, with two young women whom they intended to keep as wives, thus to lend their marooned state as many attributes as possible of the ideal existence.

The young women appeared to be well pleased with their new estate; but it would seem that, during the night, one of them thought better of her hasty and informal venture into matrimony, for in the morning she had disappeared.

Now Payne and Oliver were enraged and chagrined at this defection, and, promptly joined by Lilliston, they armed themselves in haste and, setting out in fury to recover her, attacked a village. With magnificent courage — and blank cartridges — the three howling white men put the villagers to flight, chased and caught the fugitive bride, and, fetching her back to the camp, clapped her into irons, and soundly flogged her.

The natives, who had until then been as friendly as could be desired, turned against the white men. Their ill-will first manifested itself in petty thefts and annoyances; and when Payne sent four men, armed with muskets loaded with fine shot, to recover stolen goods, the islanders turned, tooth and nail, upon the little band.

Up over the sand they swarmed, with sticks and stones and spears. Hurling missiles before them as they ran, they struck down and killed one man, Rowland Jones; and gathering in large numbers, they held a council and proceeded to destroy one of the boats, which sorely disturbed Payne, since the boats represented his only chance of escape from the island where, if at all, the authorities would seek to apprehend him.

Regarding his predicament as utterly desperate, he took his life in his hands and went himself to the natives, to see if he could not find some escape from the net that was so swiftly closing; but, according to the best bargain that he could drive, the white men got peace only by giving up everything they had and by submitting to the government of the natives, whose manner of living they promised to adopt.

To this both sides agreed. But as the natives began to seize upon their plunder, an old woman whom William Lay had befriended came up to him with her husband, and led him away from the others. Sitting down, the old pair held him by the hands. When, in alarm, he began to struggle, they held him the faster.

Suddenly an uproar burst out. The astonished boy saw his shipmates fleeing in every direction. At some distance he saw a woman thrust a spear through Columbus Worth, and beat him to death with a stone. He saw the natives overtake Lilliston and Joe Brown within six feet of him, and kill them in the same way.

The old woman and her husband now set Lay’s mind at rest as far as their own immediate intentions with regard to himself were concerned; for they lay down on him to hide him from their fellows, and turned aside the weapon of one who had seen him. But, although they soon got up and led him away, helter-skelter, over the sharp coral, which cruelly cut his bare feet, he still feared that at any moment they might kill him; nor was he completely reassured until he discovered that Cyrus Hussey also had been saved, and in much the same way.

IV

For nearly two years those boys, guiltless victims of the mutiny, lived as prisoners in the hands of the natives. Time and again whalers stopped at the Mulgraves; but always the islanders rushed the boys inland, and kept them hidden until the strangers sailed away. During most of their captivity, indeed, the two were kept on different islands and had no communication with each other.

The story of their experiences is a strange one. They learned to fish by the methods of the natives, and to dry breadfruit. Once, during an epidemic of a strange disease, for which the natives superstitiously held them responsible, their captors were about to kill them, when happily one of the leading men declared that the plague, instead of being caused by the presence of the white boys, was a punishment inflicted by their god because the natives had murdered the rest of the crew; and he argued the matter with such fervor that he convinced the others.

Famine came hard on the heels of pestilence, and the weeks of their captivity grew into months. They learned enough of the language of the islands to converse freely in it. They saw each other at rare intervals, and always under close watch. Thus they managed, after a fashion, to exist, until, on December 23, 1825, a schooner anchored off the island and sent a boat ashore. In Lay’s story of his experience he tells in detail what happened.

The natives were much alarmed when the schooner first appeared; but presently they naïvely formed a plan to swim out to her, a few at a time, until perhaps two hundred had got on board, who at a given signal should throw all the white men into the water. Lay, realizing that for the first time he had a fair chance to escape, was bitterly disappointed when the natives refused to take him with them.

Only when he asserted that a vessel having but two masts could not hail from his country, and that consequently he could not speak the language of the strangers, did they let him set out with them; and even then, when they came within striking distance of the schooner, which Lay saw was armed, they fell victims to the complaint sometimes called ‘cold feet,’ which appears to prevail in the Tropics as well as in the Arctic: they paddled back to shore and hid him in a hut with some forty women, and ordered them to guard him closely.

‘My fears and apprehensions,’ poor Lay writes, ‘were now excited to a degree beyond human expression, and the kind reader will pardon all attempts to express them.’

When the schooner, instead of showing signs of fear, boldly sailed along the coast and sent out a boat, the natives themselves lost courage, and taking Lay along, fled at midnight, in their canoes, to a remote part of the island many miles away. But their flight was futile: on the morning of December 29, they discovered a sailboat standing in for the very place where they were hidden.

By this time Lay was nearly wild with fear lest once more, and forever, he be snatched away from under the very hands of the white men. But, simulating quite other sentiments, he assured the alarmed natives that he would fight on their side against the strangers, and suggested — both he and they, it would seem, now forgot that two-masted vessels came from a strange country whose language he could not speak — that he himself go down to the shore and persuade the sailors to leave their boat, so that the natives could seize their arms and kill them as soon as they should be taken off their guard. The lively debate that followed was decided by an appeal to the god of the island, and the auguries favored Lay’s scheme.

They greased him from head to foot with coconut oil, and gave him strict orders concerning his behavior. Then, followed by a hundred islanders, the boy went out on the beach, face to face, for the first time in two years, with a number of men of his own blood.

Hailing the boat in English, which, of course, the natives could not understand, he warned her men of the plot, and made sure that they were well armed; then, as they landed, he ran up to the officer in command, who grasped his hand and asked if he had been in the crew of the Globe.

With the white men he retreated into the boat, while all the natives remained seated in accordance with his plan, except Lay’s master, an old fellow whom he had called father, who rushed after him and tried to drag him back, until the boat’s crew threatened the old man with a pistol.

The vessel, Lay now learned, was the U.S. schooner Dolphin, which had sailed from Chorillos, near Lima, on August 17, 1825, by order of Commodore Isaac Hull, to find and bring back the survivors of the Globe. With Lay as guide and interpreter, her officers and men in short order forced the natives to give up Hussey, whom they had concealed. After exploring the Mulgrave Islands, where they rewarded the natives for their care of the two boys and reprimanded them for massacring the others, all hands set sail for the Sandwich Islands, and thence for Valparaiso and Callao. There the crew and passengers of the Dolphin transferred to the man-of-war United States, in which they returned to New York and, on April 28, 1827, anchored opposite the West Battery.

The Globe, after a rough and tedious passage, had arrived safely at Valparaiso, where the men on board her were arrested, pending an examination, after which they refitted the ship and returned to Nantucket, under command of one Captain King. They reached their home port on November 21, 1824, and were again examined, before Judge Hussey, and were all acquitted except Joseph Thomas, and released under bonds of $300 each as witnesses. Thomas, whose guilt was clearly indicated, was sent to Boston, to be given another hearing.

As Thomas entered the story, so he goes out of it, an unreal, inscrutable figure. He moves through the old narratives without passion and, for the most part, without speech. When and where he joined the crew, I do not know. His name does not appear on the crew list, nor is he mentioned as one of those who were shipped at the Sandwich Islands to replace the deserters. He was insolent and he was flogged — seized up to the rigging, with the crew standing by, and lashed with a rope’s end till his back dripped blood. But even then, when he was the immediate occasion of mutiny and murder, he remained negative and impersonal. Still silent, — still insolent, it is implied, — he was carried back to Boston. Never, so far as report shows, did he manifest concern about his fate. ‘Joseph Thomas,’ say the Boston newspapers of December 8 and December 9, 1824, ‘one of the crew of the ship Globe, was examined on Tuesday before Judge Davis, and on the evidence offered was fully committed to take his trial at the May term of the Circuit Court, on charge of mutiny and murder on board said vessel.’

There all traces of him end. Could he have died in jail before the day of his trial? His flogging introduced a remarkable chapter in the history of whaling; but the man himself is as impersonal and mysterious as Bede’s sparrow.

Thus is concluded the story of the Globe. For a while, it was one of the famous stories of New England; now, at the end of a hundred years, it appears to be nearly forgotten. Yet I venture to prophesy that never, so long as people read our old stories of the sea, will it be completely lost.