I'm John Batchel with Richard Snow. His new book is Sailing the Graveyard Sea. Highly recommended,

especially for the Navy, the deathly voyage of the Summers and the U.S. Navy's only mutiny and the

trial that gripped the nation. We're on board summers. It's September

setting sail from New York Harbor. It's built in Brooklyn. So this is its home port. And it's to go

to the Madeira onto the African coast, turn around and come back via St. Thomas, come back sometime at the end of the year.

It's a beautiful ship. Everybody admires it. It's very fast. Richard observes that it's probably

the fastest thing on the ocean the U.S. Navy has. And it's over-rigged, which means you have to be careful when you rig it.

It'll try to go faster and faster and faster, and that can lead to the sails tumbling down upon the deck.

It's overgunned.

It's got 10-32-pounders on board, but it's little.

Flush deck, I think that's what they call it, Richard.

So there's no...

There's no quarter deck.

There's no raised part of the ship where the officers live.

And there's only one Marine on board.

And as you said, it's 100 feet long and about 25 feet wide.

So it's little.

And it's got a crew now of 120, only 30 of whom seem to be mature sailors.

Everybody else is a midshipman.

And what were the midshipmen supposed to do, these boys between the ages of, I guess, 11 and 18?

What was their task on board?

They had light tasks, but it was basically this was to teach them the rudiments of being sailors.

...