His name was Samuel Comstock and he was a young, ambitious sailor whose fascination with the paradise of the South Pacific prompted him to organize a mutiny against his commanding officers and hijack a whaling vessel. Sound familiar? At first glance, Comstock’s story might read like a version of Fletcher Christian’s tale of rebellion [See Mutiny and Murder on Pitcairn Island] and flight through the numerous islands and atolls of the region. But Comstock, from most accounts at least, was a born butcher whose motives were much more complex and bizarre than those of Christian.
 But who was Samuel Comstock? He was the eldest child of a respected Quaker family residing on the island of Nantucket. His father had started out his adult life as a schoolteacher, but had made a quick change – and a quicker fortune – in the whale hunting industry. The Comstock family only spent a little over a decade on Nantucket before moving in a wealthy quarter of New York City, but the impact of the wharves filled with foreign vessels and the hard but glamorous life of a sailor left a lasting impression on Samuel. Even at the youngest of age he fantasized about going to sea. This was not unusual for a boy from his background, but there were numerous things about young Samuel that both friends and family members found unusual, often disturbing.
He had little fear for his own safety and an uncanny tolerance for intense pain. He was a cunning thief and a practiced liar. His brother William once caught Samuel raiding their father’s wine cask. When Samuel went to shift the cask, it rolled over his hand causing blood to spurt across the floor. Panicked, William yelled for help while Samuel, without any expression of pain, gulped down his stolen wine. He looked at the amazed William and said that no one was going to deny him his ill-gotten drink. His impulsiveness and blunt desires more often than not seemed to squelch his sense of morality… what there was of it. Some sources describe him as possessing a kind of spiritual confusion that certainly manifested itself during the time of the mutiny when his pacifist Quaker background would have come back to haunt him. Despite all this, Samuel was also a highly intelligent, often tremendously patient and appropriate young man when necessary.
In 1818, when Samuel turned sixteen, he pressed his father to allow him to go to sea. Mr. Comstock agreed, provided that the vessel was a whaler. To Mr. Comstock’s mind, the busy life of the whaler would not provide Samuel with as much time to find trouble. Probably the elder Comstock should have known his son better. It was on this voyage to sea that Samuel killed his first man, a thief who assaulted him outside of a prostitute’s home in South America. Samuel pushed the man over a cliff and into the sea, albeit in self-defense. Once released, Samuel’s baser urges, both violent and sexual, seemed to be in need or greater and greater gratification. Perhaps this was why he began to fantasize openly about sailing to the South Pacific and setting up his own island kingdom. Presumably, such an arrangement would allow "King Samuel" as much vice as he wanted with no repercussions. His family members, who were used to Samuel’s extravagant talk and flamboyant behavior, dismissed his musings.
In 1822, Samuel and his younger brother George joined the crew of the whaling ship Globe. By this time, Samuel was considered an old hand at twenty years of age. The rest of the crew was young, with many being teenagers. The inexperience of the crew is something that Samuel would exploit later. He was plotting and preparing, and for the next two years would continue to do so until the time was right to strike. In the interval, Samuel studied many of the islands of the South Pacific that were visited by the Globe and created a powerful clique among some of the crewmembers.
 The hard life aboard ship and poor whaling conditions caused many of the crewmembers to lament their situation openly. From time to time, Samuel would test the mood of the ship, waiting for enough discontent to strike. The ship’s captain, Thomas Worth, provided Samuel with his opportunity on January 25, 1824. On that day, the captain brutally whipped a disobedient man, creating great dissention among the crew. Years earlier, Samuel had told a friend that he was quite prepared to cut a man to pieces, even remove his head if necessary. January 25th was the night when those dark words would ring true. In the small hours of the evening, Samuel and his co-conspirators crept into the officer’s quarters and decapitated Captain Worth with a hatchet.
From there, Samuel went on an orgiastic killing spree. Alternating between guns, knives, hatchets and bayonets, he tortured and killed all of the ship’s command crew. Most of the innocent crewmembers hid, including Samuel’s brother George.
Once the killing was over, Samuel quickly installed himself as the Globe’s new captain. In a moment of fallacious democracy, he gave the crew the option of voting someone else into the lofty position, all the while brandishing a cutlass and a pistol. There was no dissention. The crew, conspirators or not, were terrified of Samuel and awed by how easily and remorselessly he had killed so many. With his power firmly in place, Samuel set out to find the island kingdom of his dreams.
By mid-February, Samuel and his terrorized crew had landed on the beaches of Mili Atoll in the Marshall Island Chain. But shortly after landing, whether it was due to frustration, his own selfish goals or just his sense of theatrics, Samuel announced to the crew that he was leaving them permanently. He stalked off into the jungle, presumably to seek out the native islanders and begin his monarchy. The other crewmembers of the Globe naturally did not trust Samuel’s proclamation and they posted sentries just in case His Highness decided to return and shed more blood. The following morning, Samuel did in fact rematerialize from the trees. When he saw the armed men waiting for him, he charged forward, probably in the hope of intimidating them. They raised their muskets and Samuel stopped in his tracks.
"Don’t shoot me!" he bellowed. "I am not here to hurt you."
They didn’t believe him and in an instant of gunfire King Samuel was no more. The other sailors buried him on the Mili beach and then danced on his grave. As an ironic twist to the mutiny of the Globe, the mutineers quickly found themselves to be the victims of another rebellion. This time Samuel’s brother George and five other innocent crewmen led the mutiny. This handful of innocents seized the ship and stranded their crewmembers on Mili Atoll. The natives of the island quickly acted to rid themselves of this violent brood of Americans. Most of the castaways were killed, and two were kidnapped and imprisoned by the natives until they were rescued by another ship almost two years later.
So what really prompted such malicious actions from so young a man? Was Samuel Comstock a sociopath? A psychopath? His brother George, who successfully returned to Nantucket, would later write of his older sibling:
"It appears as though [Samuel] had been given up to his own sins to do as he thought best and see how soon he could work his own destruction which soon followed after having imbued his heart in innocence’s blood and bathing himself in wickedness and perdition."
Samuel’s other brother, William, would use George’s eyewitness accounts as the basis of his book THE LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK, THE TERRIBLE WHALEMAN, 1840.
[This information was originally transmitted as an enewsletter in July 2005.] |
