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Article Excerpt
Thomas Farel Heffernan, Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock. Cloth W. W. Norton, 2002. Paper Penguin Books, 2003.
Thomas Farel Heffernan's Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe is a dramatic and exciting read. The tale has all the elements of a modern novel--murder, intrigue, megalomania, and psychological tension--but it recounts actual events. In engaging prose, Heffernan recounts one of the bloodiest mutinies on board any American vessel, the 1822 mutiny on the Nantucket whaleship Globe. While many writers have been intrigued by the Globe mutiny over the last two centuries, Heffernan adeptly retells the story through a literary scholar's eye.
The tale's anti-hero, Samuel Comstock, was an experienced whaleman, but he left the sea to work in his father's whale products business in New York City. He quickly grew weary of life as a store clerk, and Heffernan informs his readers that Comstock's business was not minding the store, but rather "girls and fantasies." The "girls were legion" and the fantasies were "desert kingdom schemes that he had been talking about with [his brother] William."
When life ashore became too complicated, Comstock decided to go to sea again, but not as a whaleman. Instead, he had designs on a career in the United States Navy. However, these hopes were dashed when...
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