SAN FRANCISCO -- A team of researchers has found the 141-year-old wreckage of a warship that was the scene of an alleged mutiny and three controversial hangings that inspired a Herman Melville book and played a part in the establishment of the U.S. Naval Academy.
Discovery of the wreckage was announced Tuesday by George Belcher, who headed the 15-member team that located the Navy brig Somers 5 miles off Vera Cruz, Mexico, in June 1986.
'The news has been kept secret until now in order that the U.S. State Department, the Navy and Mexico have time to jointly protect the shipwreck site,' he explained.
'It's the closest thing to a storybook shipwreck I have seen,' said Mitchell Marken, the team's underwater archeologist. 'The whole structure is there.'
Melville's cousin was second in command of the Somers, and his tales of unusual shipboard cruelty led Herman Melville to write 'Billy Budd, Foretopman,' a classic work that was his second most famous book after 'Moby Dick.'
Three crewmen -- including the son of the secretary of war -- were hanged from the Somers' yardarm in 1842 as a result of an alleged mutiny, and the vessel gained a reputation as a ghost ship where the dead men could be seen dangling from the rigging on stormy nights.
Belcher said the furor over the cruelty during the ship's training missions was a major factor in the establishment of the Naval Academy, which was founded in 1845 as a supervised land-based training ground for naval officers.
The 102-foot Somers went down in a storm Dec. 8, 1846 while chasing a blockade runner during the Mexican-American War. Thirty-two crewmen were killed, seven were captured by Mexican troops, and the remaining 37 were rescued.
Belcher, a San Francisco-based dealer in Latin American art, said that after two years of negotiations, the governor of the State of Vera Cruz, Acosta Lagunes, asked him to organize and conduct a shipwreck survey around the port of Vera Cruz.
Using a map he found during his research, and with sophisticated detection equipment, the divers found the wreckage at a depth of 110 feet.
'The superstructure has crumbled, but her form and all of her artifacts are there just as they were on that fatal (day) when she sank ...' Belcher said.
He said that while the artifacts and gold aboard the vessel reportedly were worth some $1 million, 'We want to preserve the remains historically.'
James Delgado of the National Park Service said the discovery was especially significant because no other U.S. warship from the period has survived.
The Somers was launched on April 16, 1842. It had 10 cannons and a mainmast that towered 130 feet over the deck, he said.
'It was one of the fastest Navy ships of her time,' said Marken, who estimated the vessel was going about 14 knots when it apparently was capsized by an 80-to-90-mph gust of wind.
The alleged mutiny occurred as the Somers was returning from a training mission to Africa. One of those hanged by ship's captain Alexander MacKenzie was Phillip Spencer, 18, son of Secretary of War John Canfield Spencer. Also hanged were boatswain's mate Samuel Cromwell and seaman Elijah H. Small.
MacKenzie, was court-martialed but found innocent on five charges, including murder.
Among his defenders was Richard Dana Jr., author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.'
The mutiny incident turned the Somers into a ghost ship in the minds of some crewmen. In his memoirs, Robert Rogers, who was on board until two weeks before it sank, said there were traditions about ghosts of the mutineers seen in the rigging, most often on dark, stormy nights.
Marken said one of the divers told him 'somebody kept yelling at me while I was below.'
Belcher, who compared the mutiny incident to Watergate in its impact on the nation at the time, said it became a breach of etiquette in the Navy to even talk about the Somers, and no attempt was made to find it.
'It became a ship that had been forgotten,' he said.
