Mutiny on the Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock by Thomas Heffernan
Whilst sailing between Hawaii and Tahiti in January 1824, the captain and officers of the Nantucket whaling ship 'the Globe' were attacked with whaling gear, shot, and dumped overboard under the audacious direction of twenty-one-year-old Samuel Comstock, whose dream was to found his own tropical kingdom. This eventually led to his own violent death at the hands of his co-mutineers. Only a few members of the Globe's crew survived: two men who were rescued after years on a Pacific atoll, bizarrely spared after their fellows had been slaughtered by the natives living there, and a handful more who retook the ship and carried news of the mutiny to the US Navy. Escaping with the ship was George Comstock, Samuel's younger brother and a horrified witness to his brother's murderous deeds. George's remarkable firsthand account, written upon his return to Nantucket, has never been published in full, and Mutiny on the Globe will present portions of it for the first time.