Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is John Bachelor. The book is 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, in conversation with Richard Snow. We explicated how it is that the

captain and his officers, grown-ups, could be persuaded that a crew of young men,

very young men, these were men who were young boys who were looking

to be sailors, officers some day, how they could organize a mutiny against the captain and authority.

This is the Navy, US Navy 1842.

And Richard Snow explains how it is that they convinced themselves that these boys, led

by a young man named Spencer, who was the son of the Secretary of War, how they could be planning to go pirate here.

Richard Snow explains. There's much more of this later today.

Very much so that they that it seems like a

paranoia but the the extreme paranoia that that spills over

into hysteria I simply think that people once they got the idea that the

on this bizarre crew of kids were somehow going to band together

and their captain was clearly by now believing it.

Gansibor, all the officers had been patrolling all night fully armed, which, you know, they're carrying 40 pounds of equipment and it gets tiring. I mean, so people are tired, they're nervous, and the captain is beginning to say in all of his accounts that he can recognize

what's happening but by the terrible glare people are giving one another.

Well, there he's coming right back to poor

wall-eyed Philip Spencer and reading everything

and scary looks.

I mean, he's sure enough about that as a barometer to put it in his official reports.

So everybody's a little crazy.

...