Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  Sam spent the morning laying out in the sandy soil the master plan for his city, even going so far as to spot the precise sites for his various public buildings. It is recorded that he gave most attention to an eligible situation for the village church.

  Then he started to issue orders, and it was probably at this point that men like surly Silas Payne and the hardened Englishman Oliver began to suspect that Sam meant to destroy the Globe, align himself with the natives and kill off every one of the remaining mutineers. Sam would then be in a position either to rule Mili Atoll for the rest of his life, choosing such women for consorts as he wished, or to return to civilization as the sole survivor of a harrowing shipwreck, with a tale embroidered by any heroic lies he wished to tell. While Sam tramped across the sands of Mili, Payne and Oliver began to plot steps to protect themselves.

  At this point five or six hundred brown-skinned islanders—apprehensive for the last three days because of the big foreign canoe with spreading sails—began to approach. They were people of medium size, with broad dark faces, black hair and eyes and large grinning mouths. One of the Globe’s crew later granted that they were well made and handsome but said he found them most indolent and superstitious. “They were morose, treacherous, ferociously passionate, and unfriendly to all other natives,” he claimed, but another observer admired their “gentility and fine majestic walk,” the latter despite the fact that each footpath on Mili consisted of razor-sharp coral. When the men of Mili were not fishing, they traveled idly back and forth across the lagoon, or swam in the rolling surf.

  With these people bloody Sam Comstock displayed a remarkably gentle attitude, and he immediately began to offer the naked men around him fancy officer uniforms, hardtack, rope and nails. When Payne and Oliver, still aboard ship, heard of this, their apprehension regarding Sam’s plans doubled and they began talking seriously about specific moves to forestall the harpooner.

  Sam had directed that rafts be built of spars, and the Globe was steadily being unloaded. Sails, rope, clothing and most of the ship’s tools were dumped on the beach, along with a large portion of the ship’s hardtack, flour, beef, pork and molasses. For Sam’s personal use a large shipment of luxuries was hauled ashore: sugar, dried apples, vinegar, coffee, tea, pickles, cranberries and one box of chocolate. These were extremely useful as gifts to the admiring savages who observed the proceedings. At the end of the first night, harpooner Comstock, his stock of trade goods laid out on the sand, his cathedral well started in his mind, could sleep well.

  But aboard the Globe there was little sleep, and after long discussions with Oliver, Silas Payne made up his mind. In the morning he sent blunt word ashore that if Sam did not stop trafficking with the natives, particularly if he did not stop making them inordinate presents, he, Payne, would “do something.” Comstock ordered Payne to come ashore and explain what he meant by sending such a message.

  Payne marched right into Sam’s headquarters tent, and seamen some distance away could hear the bitter quarrel that was building up between their leaders.

  “You may do what you please with the ship!” roared Sam, “but if any man wants anything of me, I’ll take a musket with him!”

  Payne jumped at the chance for a duel. “That’ll suit me. I’m ready!”

  To his surprise Comstock replied, “I’m going aboard ship once more, and then you may do as you please.”

  Showing considerable courage, Sam boarded the Globe for the last time, stood spread-legged on the quarter-deck and bellowed out that he was willing to fight anyone there. Then he warned them: “I am going to leave you. Look out for yourselves!”

  Before the cowed crew he burned the paper on which the laws of the mutineers had been written, then jammed his cutlass into his belt, shouting, “This shall stand by me as long as I live!”

  He then grabbed a knife and some fish hooks and lines, scowled at his subdued crew and climbed slowly down into a waiting boat. On the beach he joined a band of fifty natives whom he addressed with furious gestures and then led toward the village huts. Payne, still ashore, watched this performance and that night, fearing a murderous attack by Sam and his new gang, posted guards completely around his own tent.

  Sam disappeared till next morning, but Payne’s spies spotted him, and Payne decided the time had come for a final settlement. Cautiously he approached the second boat steerer, Gilbert Smith, and proposed that they murder Sam together.

  Boat steerer Smith replied, “I’m neutral.”

  Payne then dispatched a messenger to the ship to pick up the Englishman, Oliver, to whom he made the same proposal.

  “I’m your man,” Oliver replied.

  The two mutineers, supported by two henchmen, crept behind a sand dune, loaded their muskets and waited.

  Soon Comstock appeared behind a bush not far from the tent He turned and saw the muskets leveled at his heart, waved his hand and cried: “Don’t shoot me! I won’t hurt you!”

  It was too late. The four mutineers fired and Comstock fell, with one ball through the breast and another through the head. Silas Payne, a prudent man, feared a pretense. He rushed to the body and severed the young blond head with an ax—possibly the same one with which Sam had done for Captain Worth. The monster was dead.

  Sam Comstock was buried, as he had often said he wanted to be, with his cutlass at his side. Wearing his clothes and with all his possessions except his watch, he was sewn in a bit of canvas and stowed away under five feet of sand. He had been murdered without even the legal trial that he had accorded the Negro William Humphries.

  When a Nantucket schoolmate, Henry Glover, heard about Sam’s death, he wrote a poem about the lad whose “hand was acquainted with daggers,” which became famous at the time. It ended:

  In years that are coming the seamen will tell

  Of murders and murdered, and murderer’s yells.

  The tale, the lone watch of night will beguile

  When they sail by the shores of that desolate isle.

  And their beacon shall be, as they thitherward steer,

  The black rock on the grave of the young mutineer.

  The best epitaph, though, was the despairing exclamation of Sam’s Quaker father in a letter which he wrote from New York to break the news to his Nantucket relatives: “O, Samuel! Samuel! Heaven forsaken Samuel!”

  It would seem that with such a violent and appropriate climax, the mutiny of the Globe might well end. But this particular mutiny is cherished in sea annals because whenever it looks as if the story has ended, some new aspect arises to capture the imagination of the reader, so that there is not one drama of the Globe mutiny but many, and we now pass on to two of the most amazing.

  Ashore on Mili Atoll, mutineer Silas Payne took command, with the brutal Englishman, Oliver, as his aide. Their first act after stuffing Sam Comstock and his head into a winding sheet was an error in judgment. They summoned the surviving crew, studied them and pointed to the inoffensive boat steerer, Gilbert Smith, saying, “You return to the ship and guard it in case of a native attack.” George Comstock, brother of the murdered leader, and four others were told off to go aboard as well.

  Payne had selected Smith because twice during the mutiny—once when Sam Comstock needed help for his murders aboard the Globe and once when Silas Payne was seeking someone to murder the harpooner—Smith had shown himself to be without courage. He seemed a safe, colorless man who could be trusted with the vital ship.

  Nevertheless, Payne took the precaution of telling Smith, “I don’t want to run any chances of the Globe’s sailing. Send me back both the compasses. I’ll hold them here.”

  But when he reached the Globe with his five men, Smith consulted with George Comstock, who sought revenge for the murder of his brother. They secretly substituted for one of the ship’s major compasses the “tell-tale” compass that customarily hung in the captain’s cabins in those days. Payne, busy with details of organizing the life ashore, failed to notice the deception. That one oversight was his d
eath warrant.

  For boat steerer Smith had a most daring plan—to steal the Globe, As soon as the day’s light began to fade, but with utmost speed, since he must accomplish everything before the moon rose at nine-thirty that night, he organized the five men aboard. One stood with a hatchet by the mizzenmast, ready to cut the stern moorings. One stood by the wheel. Another loafed by the windlass with a well-greased handsaw to sever the anchor cable. Smith anxiously watched the darkness deepen until he was certain that none of Payne’s spies ashore could see motion aboard the ship.

  Then he gave the signal. He himself grabbed the saw and in two minutes hacked through the bow cable. Others loosed the sails, and the ship paid off. The man astern now severed the hawser and all sails were rapidly hoisted. A stiff offshore breeze held and in the dark the Globe stood out from the atoll. Before the shore watchers could detect the theft, boat steerer Smith and his crew of five were headed for South America, 7500 miles distant.

  Seafaring men hold this to be one of the most remarkable voyages in Pacific history. The ship had no navigating instruments save the stolen compass, no charts, inadequate food and clothing, no spare rope, no fishing lines, no reserve canvas. No one aboard knew how to navigate, nor where he was going, and it was extremely difficult to handle so sharp a ship as the Globe with so few hands. What was most dangerous of all, one of the hands was the very man who had been the cause of the mutiny—the vicious Joseph Thomas of Connecticut, his lashed back now healed, his heart set upon preventing the Globe from returning him to the jurisdiction of an American court.

  But boat steerer Smith, a quiet, somewhat timorous young man who had shied away from any kind of violence, kept his ship headed roughly southeastward. He traversed seas studded with islands and uncharted reefs. He saw her through the doldrums and drove her through storms. He kept command of his starving men and kept watch upon Thomas, who was often noisy and disobedient. Through manifold troubles Smith continued quietly at his job, determined to send a rescue to the innocent men left behind and to bring the guilty to punishment.

  After almost four months, with increasingly poor rations and only guesswork to go by, he brought his ghost ship close to the shores of South America. What he intended to do if required to make port he had not the slightest idea, but fortunately in early June his lookout sighted a Chilean merchant ship that put some hands aboard the Globe to see her into Valparaiso harbor.

  The American consul there was Michael Hogan, Esq., an efficient and proper man, and when he heard the harrowing story of the mutiny and the subsequent journey of the gloomy ship, he officially reported: “This was a voyage most miraculously completed.”

  But Consul Hogan’s duty was clear. He ordered the six survivors arrested and put in irons below decks on a French frigate, there being no American men-of-war in port; but before long he relented and arranged a plan whereby a salty American sea captain on the beach in Valparaiso was given command of the Globe with orders to run her around Cape Horn and into Boston. When the time came for this captain to pick his crew he requested boat steerer Smith as his mate, and it was Gilbert Smith, a quiet man, who, promoted to master, finally brought his ship into Edgartown on November 14, 1824.

  The mutinous Joseph Thomas was promptly thrown in jail, and at his trial Smith, George Comstock and the others who had made the long trip home testified forcefully against Thomas; but the federal judge acquitted him for lack of positive proof. One thinks of this terrible man dozing in the Connecticut sun in later years and telling young boys who pestered him for stories: “I could tell ye lads about such islands as ye never dreamed of.” And for certain, he could have.

  What had happened on the paradise isle of Mili after the theft of the ship that fateful night? It had been a little past ten, with a strong moon rising, when a watcher shouted to Silas Payne: “The ship is gone!”

  Payne and Oliver burst from their tent and stared out to sea. “Maybe she dragged her anchor,” Oliver suggested.

  “Smith, Smith!” Payne repeated incredulously. But the Globe was gone, and next morning it was obvious to everyone that she would not return, unless accompanied by some avenging man-of-war.

  Payne fell into a furious rage, and the eight men who were marooned with him were directed to tell the natives—in whatever language they could muster—that the Globe had been blown to sea and could be forgotten. But the mutineers knew better, and from that fearful morning realized that they must plan against the day when some American warship would put into Mili with orders to take the mutineers at any cost.

  Accordingly, Payne ordered his men to tear one of the boats into planking, which was used to deck over another boat. “It will also be useful,” he explained, “if the natives turn difficult.”

  Payne required his men to sign no articles of piracy, but he made it clear that he was in command and that the Englishman Oliver was his aide. This choice occasioned a good deal of trouble, since Oliver had hidden a whole hogshead of grog, which he appeared determined to finish off in record time. He remained drunken and useless till young Cyrus Hussey, the cooper, secretly stove in the cask and dumped the liquor in the sand.

  The natives still appeared to be friendly, even though they mourned the loss of Sam Comstock, who had been extremely generous with them. On February 19 there occurred one of those trivial things which seem to be of no moment at the time, but which in this case was all-important, since the happenstance enabled one of the crew to live to write an account of the amazing things that later transpired.

  It was a fine Pacific morning and the lagoon lay like a mirror, with native canoes drifting dreamily from one tiny island to the next. Will Lay, the youngster who had refused to join the mutiny when Sam Comstock approached him at the maintop masthead, casually strolled to a village, where his white skin and odd American jabber caused a good deal of hilarity. One old married couple took particular delight in the young man, and the next day Lay revisited them and was invited to spend the night in their shack. He was kept awake all night by rats, which grew to ferocious size on Mili, but it was clear to him that the old people liked him and were growing to think of him as their son, and he cemented this feeling by bringing them small presents.

  Other castaways were less gentle. Silas Payne foolishly tried to overawe the native men by shooting off his swivel gun, but instead of being frightened they were deeply impressed and began plotting as to how they might get such a weapon for themselves.

  Then one night Payne and Oliver went exploring and returned with two young native girls, whom they installed as their wives. But next morning Payne’s girl fled, so he and Oliver set forth to bring her back. Arming themselves, all the white men marched in formation to the village and began to search the huts. Hidden in a crowd of women, the missing bride was found, and under a shower of musketry fired into the air was hauled roughly back to the tent, where she was publicly flogged and thrust into irons, presumably to show her the superior merits of the white man’s way of life.

  Payne never learned. Next morning, upon discovering that the camp’s tool chest had been smashed and robbed, he demanded the return of every piece, under threat of dire vengeance. That night a native brought back half a chisel, which had been broken. “Where is the other half?” demanded Payne, and kept the messenger as a hostage.

  At dawn, Payne sent a company of four men to recover a missing hatchet. They were armed with muskets loaded only with birdshot; Payne, remembering the murder of Comstock, would not trust them with ball. In the village, their threats produced the hatchet, and they started back, followed by a straggling horde.

  Then it began. One native threw a big chunk of coral. It hit one of the mutineers. He staggered, fell. These white men, then, were mortal! In a flash, the bombardment started. The fallen man died under a merciless torrent of stones, his face smashed to pulp. The other white men broke, ran for the tent and made ready for war.

  The natives brought out their spears and clubs, but, displaying admirable strategy, they attacked not the men but
the boats and began smashing them. This threat to Payne’s sole means of escape was so great that he bravely ventured out alone and for a whole hour held parley with the chiefs on the beach. He returned with a pact that was a virtual surrender for the white men. In return for their lives, the mutineers would give the natives everything they had, and would furthermore adopt the Marshallese way of life.

  The natives at once began to pillage the camp, grabbing knives and bits of iron, smashing the provision casks, tearing clothing into shreds. Oliver objected. He was answered with whoops and howls. Then the massacre started.

  Women and even children took part in the killing. An old crone of sixty ran one mutineer through the body with her spear. Other Mili Islanders brought down two of Payne’s men, and completely macerated them with great stones. Several natives began to lead Payne away, as if to safety; then one of them seized a stone and struck him on the head.

  Payne tried to run, but a second blow felled him, and thus he died, smashed to pieces by chunks of jagged coral. Oliver ran only a short way before he was killed in a clump of brush. In a few moments, seven of the mutineers were slain. If Sam Comstock, the man of vengeance buried five feet below the scene, could have watched the bloody death of Silas Payne, he would have rested content.

  Young Will Lay, appalled by the slaughter, found himself dragged from the spot by the old couple he had befriended. They held his hands, threw him on the ground like a log, and squatted on top of him, hiding his white-skinned body from the fury of the mob. One native warrior swiped out at him with a handspike, but was fiercely warned off by his old protectors. Will was then spirited away toward the village, his bare feet lacerated on the razorlike coral.