Written by: Beck

Always does, doesn't it? Inasmuch as I won't have anything else new for you wonderful people today (it being May 9th and all), I'm making this a rather long one. Rather than edit the following book excerpt for brevity, I've cited the entire passage, and simply used bold text to denote the important bits for those more inclined to skim.

The year: 1807. The author: Richard Woodman. The book: The Sea Warriors. The pages: 183-185. (Great read, incidentally (ditto for pages 1-182 and 186-355). Sort of an Indiana Jones adventure stories kinda thing, only at sea, and it's actual history.)

In 1807 [Warwick] Lake was in command of the brig-sloop Recruit, lying in the Cornish port of Falmouth. His officers pressed a seaman out of a privateer, a Cornish blacksmith, named Robert Jeffrey. The Recruit then sailed for the West Indies and there, in November, her crew were put on short allowance of water. At the time Jeffrey was alleged to have stolen some rum from the gunners' cabin, and a few days later was observed to draw off two quarts of spruce beer [ed: spruce beer?] from a cask. These were undeniably punishable offences, but Lake decided to exceed even his draconian powers under Admiralty regulations, and put Jeffrey ashore on the uninhabited island of Sombrero with neither food nor water. The man was barefoot, and had only the clothes upon his back. Landing him, Lieutenant Richard Mould took pity on Jeffery to the extent of begging a pair of shoes from one of the seamen in the boat's crew; he also generously donated his own and his accompanying midshipman's handkerchiefs, for making signals. As a final indignity, Jeffrey's absence from the Recruit was explained in the brig's books by the letter 'R': officially, Jeffrey had deserted, or 'run'.

Word leaked out, however, and the scuttlebutt in due course reached the ears of the Commander-in-Chief at the Leeward Islands. When Sir Alexander Cochrane (an uncle of Lord Cochrane) learned of this outrage, he sent Lake back to rescue his wretched victim. On 11 February 1808 Recruit anchored off Sombrero and lowered a boat. The landing-party could find no trace of Jeffery, alive or dead. Lake was made post [i.e. promoted] in September 1808 despite this scandal, but the news spread beyond the Caribbean and brought the Admiralty into disrepute.

The popular and radical press, then clamoring for reform in British institutions, made much of this unlawful deprivation of liberty. The tyrannical behavior of Captain The Honourable Warwick Lake became a cause celebre, and word of it spread across the Atlantic to the United States to exacerbate the anti-British feeling already running high over the right to search. Lake personified the very worst of British naval arrogance, not to mention that of the British aristocracy and its view of the established order of things. At this point rumors reached London that Robert Jeffrey was living in Marblehead, south of Salem in Massachusetts, having resumed his life as a blacksmith. The British Government sent for him, first to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then by way of the 10-gun schooner Thistle to Portsmouth. Here the world learned his story.

On Sombrero Jeffrey had subsisted for eight days on limpets and rainwater caught in the fissures of his rocky prison. He saw several vessels in the distance but could not attract their attention, and grew daily weaker. But on the ninth day the schooner Adams of Marblehead appeared off the island and her master, John Dennis, took Jeffrey aboard, and back to his home port, where he had settled.

Upon the conclusion of Jeffrey's examination at the Admiralty on 22 September 1810 he was given all his back-pay, and the infamous 'R' was removed from his name. With an additional and substantial sum of money subscribed by embarrassed friends of The Honourable >Warwick Lake, Jeffrey returned to his Cornish home at Polperro. Nemesis had caught up with Lake himself some months earlier. As soon as news that Jeffrey was alive had reached London, a court martial was assembled aboard Gladiator in Portsmouth. On 5 and 6 February 1810 it heard the evidence, largely from Lake's own officers; Lake pleaded that he thought Sombrero was inhabited, though it emerged that he had been informed by both his lieutenants and his sailing master that it was not; indeed, this contemptible and worthless officer had had to ask the master the name of the island on which he was proposing to maroon Jeffrey. The court found the charge against Lake proved, and he was dismissed from the King's service.

From our lofty perches in the year 2004, we tend to assume that it's only since WWII (give or take) that the Western world has become an enlightened place that finds things like cruelty to prisoners abhorrent (Geneva convention, etc., etc). We're also inclined to believe that it's only in this modern era of instant communication that liberal reformers have sought continuously to upset the natural order of things. The only real difference is that things happen a little more quickly these days. It wont take 3 years to bring to justice the American soldiers who tortured their prisoners (though god knows it'll feel like 3 years). But the outrage felt by the world is the same.

So what's my point? Well, for one thing, keep in mind that it's 5 in the morning, and I haven't been to sleep yet. I was picking passages at random in a book I'd already read, and stumbled across a story which bears a striking similitude to today's cause celebre of choice. Essentially, I wanted to provide something of a reminder that such outrages will always occur, as it is not so much a function of the times, the places, the people, the circumstances, and on and on ad nauseum; rather, it is a function of human nature. So what I would like now is for everyone to please shut the ever living fuck up and get on with their lives. There was bad stuff. Bad stuff came to light. The people doing the bad stuff will be severely punished--they'll probably spend the rest of their lives in a military prison. The people in charge have apologized for the bad stuff, all the way up to designated buck-stopper Secretary of Defense Donald "Bad Stuff" Rumsfeld. Time to move on. The lesson to be learned here is that there is no lesson which will be learned. It hasn't been learned in the 200 years since Captain Lake marooned a drunken blacksmith, and it won't be learned in the next 200 years. The only difference will be the number of people blogging it.