"Mutiny on the Globe" by Thomas Farel Heffernan

The true story of a whaling ship taken over by a homicidal maniac intent on ruling his own island kingdom proves that history is gorier than the movies.

By Stephanie Zacharek

May 9, 2002 | People complain about violence in the movies, but it's nothing compared to brutality in history. In 1824 an unhinged young whaleman named Samuel Comstock organized a small group of mutineers and took over the Globe, the whaleship he had set sail on two years earlier. He murdered the captain, First Mate Beetle and several other officers. Comstock and his similarly crazed men struck the captain with an axe, which killed him instantly. Not yet content with the results, they picked up a special double-edged knife used for cutting whale blubber and proceeded apace: "They ran the boarding knife through his body and drove it home with a blow from an axe; it entered below the stomach and came out the neck. They struck his head again with the axe. Mate Beetle, in spite of stab wounds and a fractured skull, was still alive. Both, however, were thrown overboard through the cabin windows. Mate Beetle died in the ocean in the dark of night."

That's how Thomas Farel Heffernan describes just a few of Comstock's horrific deeds in his magnificent "Mutiny on the Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock," an account of the grisly mutiny and its aftermath that reads like a novel -- and I'm talking about the kind you race through, not the kind you read dutifully. Heffernan is an expert on whaling history and formerly the president of the Melville Society; Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the 2000 bestseller "In the Heart of the Sea," about the wrecking of the whaleship Essex, has cited Heffernan's previous book, "Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex," as his inspiration. "Mutiny on the Globe" is firmly woven from facts, and clearly supported by a historian's meticulousness and care.

But Heffernan is that rare historian who is more interested in telling a ripping good tale than in backloading his book with 200 pages of appendices. ("Mutiny on the Globe" does, of course, include several appendices, among them a glossary of words used by the natives of the Marshall Islands in the early 19th century. And if you think that sounds boring, all I can say is: just wait.) The lore, if not the truth, of historians as a group is that they tend to be quiet, gentle, well-meaning folk who love nothing more than to go fishing for their history in their favorite place, the library. It's a gentleman's pursuit, one that may or may not flower into terrific writing, depending on the particular gentleman's skill and temperament.

So often, though, even the most well-meaning historians (no, especially the most well-meaning) write as if they need to preserve the delicacy of the ladies in the room. Heffernan, blessedly, seems to be of another stripe: He digs in past the elbows (suede patches be damned!) to get to the guts of the story, and refuses to soften the unsavory details. He seems to recognize that history is blood: Bloodshed is part of what makes us who we are, whether we like it or not.

And even beyond that, Heffernan is more interested in keeping his readers engaged than he is in impressing his colleagues. You can put "Mutiny on the Globe" in the same league with other highly readable historical books like "The Unredeemed Captive," John Demos' terrific 1994 account of a young white colonist who was captured by Native Americans in 1704 and who, evidence strongly suggests, chose to live among them rather than return to her family. Like Demos, Heffernan culls the details that are important to the story -- as well as those that are illuminating, funny, fascinating or just plain entertaining -- and throws the dross, like the useless innards of a whale, over the side. ("Mutiny" weighs in at a trim 280 pages, including notes.)

And it's some story. Heffernan supplies a brief family background for Samuel Comstock, "the terrible whaleman," as he was called in an account of his deeds written by his brother, William, in 1840. But Heffernan doesn't waste much time in getting to the nub of Comstock's psychosis. Comstock, Heffernan tells us, had been a scrappy kid who loved to play war games. The problem was that he simply never outgrew them, indulging his boyishly violent fantasies well into adulthood: "He was an adult as a child and a child as an adult," Heffernan notes succinctly. Comstock was well-raised by decent, God-fearing Quakers, but none of that helped much: "At the age of twelve he carried pistols and daggers and kept them under his pillow at night -- very un-Quakerish sport."

Eternally restless, Comstock tried to run away to sea at age 14. After he was caught, his father reluctantly granted him permission to sign onto a ship (Comstock's first voyage was on a trader, the Edward), and Comstock's career as a sailor began. Comstock's adventures include the usual fights and brawls as well as various sexual and romantic encounters (Comstock was, apparently, popular with the ladies). But one thing that Comstock learned at sea, although he never clearly explained the reasons to anyone, was that he despised the experience of sailing on a whaleship.

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