This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.

Here's John Batchelor.

It is 1842, the United States Navy in its early decades,

and an incident that is remembered as a mutiny, sailing the graveyard sea,

the deathly voyage of the summers, the U.S. Navy's only mutiny, and the trial that gripped

the nation. Richard Snow is the author. I welcome you, Richard. I congratulate you. Your book

is a fascination, not the least, because it

becomes suggestively the inspiration for two of Melville's masterpieces. Herman Melville also went to

see and had a relation with the crew of Summers. One is White Jacket, the other of course, the famous and unfinished and much-debated Billy Budd.

The man who is the, if we're not taking too much liberty with Melville's memory, who may be an

inspiration for Billy Budd, his name Philip Spencer.

He's born 1824.

Richard, what do we need to know about Philip Spencer

as we proceed him towards boarding the summers?

Good evening to you.

Good evening, thank you.

Well, the great naval historian Samuel Elliot Morrison felt he only needed to sum him up by saying he was a young punk.

And there is some truth to that, although if every adolescent boy was a young punk hang for it, the race would die out.

But he was a very difficult child and unruly student.

He had the misfortune to have a father who was both tremendously intelligent,

one of the foremost lawyers of his day, and with a savage temper and a scorn for all human frailty.

And Philip was sort of a dreamer and he withdrew.

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