Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

Without the Fear of God by H. W. Corley

This is a story of mutiny, of every inhuman deed in the history of the seas and of many new deeds placed in that history.

“Without the fear of God before their eyes” — so ran the indictment in the ancient wording of the law of Anglo-Saxons — “Captain Adolph Pedersen, master of the barkentine Puako, and Adolph Eric Pedersen, second mate, with force of arms, unlawfully, feloniously, willfully, deliberately, premeditatedly, and with malice aforethought did kill Axel Hansen, a human being, by means and in a manner and form hereinafter set forth:

“They did beat and wound Axel Hansen, imprison him, withhold proper food and nourishment, inflict upon him cruel and unusual punishment by means of which Axel Hansen, suffering pain and anguish — in extreme weakness of mind and body, from a sense of danger and from well grounded apprehension of further attacks — did cast and throw himself into the ocean on the high seas.

“Near the stern he was crying for help, struggling to be rescued, he did grasp and cling to the logline attached to the stern of the vessel, all of which the defendants well knew and with means and appliances and duty to rescue and save him — did omit and refuse aid — did increase the speed of the vessel so that he was forced to let go the logline — did leave Axel Hansen in the ocean without sustenance and support by means of which he did drown and die.”

For the first time in many a long year the United States Government asked for a verdict of first degree murder in this case, whose charges parallel no other ever called in Federal Court.

The penalty, had the defendants been found guilty, would have been death by hanging, probably atop the old Federal Building, with United States Marshal Thomas F. MacCarthy the probable executioner. There with the sweet salt air snatched from him with his dying breath Adolph Pedersen would have swung and died.

But the jury, out ten minutes, acquitted the Pedersens. Premeditation could not be proved they said, and the defendants, later found guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment of their crew on ten counts, wept with joy at the verdict, like youngsters freed from an hour’s isolation in the nursery.

This is a story of mutiny and murder, of every inhuman deed in the history of the seas, of many new deeds placed in that history by these Pedersens, whose trial was called the most amazing in the history of the Federal Courts.

In the spring of 1918 “Hell Fire” Pedersen, as he was known along the wharves of Victoria, strode among the docks and sailors’ hangouts searching for a crew to sign for a voyage to Capetown with a cargo of lumber on his barkentine, the Puako, of which he had been master for twelve years.

With Captain Pedersen on this voyage would sail his two sons — his whelps, the seamen muttered darkly when they saw the boys — sixteen and eighteen, but born with the brawn of old Pedersen and a taste of his hell fire in their black young hearts.

No crew would sign on at first, and Pedersen was forced to get together such as he could, green hands, for few able seamen had a mind to ship with three of a kind. Only old Mattson, the carpenter, who has sailed with Pedersen these seven years, had ever repeated a voyage.

But at last, on April 27, after some weeks’ delay, the Puako and her crew left Victoria’s harbor.

There was young Reilly, a British subject, eager to join the navy and see the world had not the Puako seemed to offer a less exacting way.

Reilly had some trouble about getting aboard because of liability of the draft, it is said, and if Reilly deserted and ran away in time of his country’s need he has been well punished.

There was an old miner, William Jones, sent thither by his physician who thought the sea air would avert tuberculosis.

There was Mattson the carpenter, who ate with the captain, lived in his carpenter shop between foremast and mainmast, and enjoyed many other privileges as well.

There was Jack Joe, picked up while drifting from Hawaii, a crippled gnarled little five footer, with hands, though twisted by rheumatism, clever and agile at the wheel.

Frank Grielen; the two Campbells, one a schoolboy on a lark out of Iowa; Barney Olsen; John Henry Stewart and others. Then there was Axel Hansen, the boatswain, best sailor of the lot, but a “sea lawyer” — hated alike by officer and crew — carrying a book of rules beneath his shirt which told in black and white and no mistake where the authority of the officers ended, a book consulted deliberately on every order, no matter how serious the need of immediate obedience.

“That crew,” sneered the Pedersens later on the stand, “was utterly worthless. We worked hard to train them so that they could sail the barkentine. They did little, they cared for nothing. We had to turn the hose on them to keep them clean! One man in eighty degrees heat wore thirteen shirts on his back at one time!”

They set sail properly enough from Victoria, and in spite of the increasing bullying of the captain, and the increasing swaggering of the two mates, the men never dreamed what lay ahead.

Young Dolph, sixteen, the second mate, drunk with his new authority, loved to snap his fingers in the faces of these older men, and order them about from one task to another, no matter how the ship’s progress might be retarded by this deed.

He would draw a gun and shake it playfully in their faces, threaten the men at the wheel with the tiller stick and roar at their discomfiture.

He would tell his father lies concerning what he overheard in the forecastle. For young Dolph had an imagination and a memory. He had fed them both for years on pirate tales.

He told his father that the men were plotting to kill him. He hinted that the I. W. W. had hired Hansen to sink the ship, that already the men had stolen arms and handcuffs from the captain’s drawer with mutiny in mind.

The cabin boy, through a few well advised kicks and clubbings, bore out Dolph’s stories — he supplied much detail which, he said, he had gained through eavesdropping.

Dolph did everything to torment and provoke his father’s persecution complex — and all too soon Hell Fire began fearing for his very life.

His delusion increased with the miles which spun out in the wake of the Puako. And four weeks out of Victoria found him fearfully certain that the crew intended taking his life.

Caught fast in his delusion he polished his guns, left clubs about handily everywhere on deck and below, cursed and beat members of the crew whose business brought them suddenly behind him; feared for his food, never touching it until it had been tried by some other person. One day, when the ship was pitching, a sailor accidentally jolted him as he hurried on watch and Pedersen severely beat him. One beating led to another. It added to the peace of his sleep to see even one of the crew bleeding and cowed.

Then one morning old William Jones, the tubercular miner, stood at the wheel.

“You are plotting to kill me and my innocent sons,” Hell Fire snarled at him, kicking him in the shins and calling him vile names.

The second mate, standing near-by, strode up to Jones and struck him in the face with brass knuckles. “You are in the plot, you—,” they both cried. They beat him with the tiller stick, dragged him from the wheel and flung him into the lazaret, the rope locker, where he lay weak and bleeding, not, you see, benefiting so much from his sea trip as his kindly physician had planned.

Then the second mate and his father seized others of the crew and beat them, too.

The long evenings in the cabin were made merry with all sorts of tortures.

“Confess! Confess!” insisted Hell Fire. “You are all in this plot to kill me, you— You are all I. W. W.’s — Black Hands!”

They made Axel Hansen eat his I. W. W. handbook while the wounded and bleeding crew stood about. They broke ribs here and there, playfully crippled Jack Joe’s other hand to match his first one, trussed men up without food, worked them without sleep, handcuffed them, beat them, flung them into the forecastle, kicked them as they lay writhing on the floor.

“Confess, confess,” they said, and when the men begged the tyrants to tell them what to confess to, Hell Fire roared:

“Dolph, bring pencil and paper!”

Can you not see Dolph with his glorious chance here? He drew up papers, confessing to Black Hand plots, payments of money by German spies in saloons in Victoria, drew up papers signing over this imaginary money to the three Pedersens. Papers confessing mutiny and piracy, attempts to poison food, attempts to toss the master and mates overboard, to sink the ship, to destroy the cargo.

“They were brave men,” said Mr. Miller later at the trial in his summation. “It takes a brave man to suffer. They stood there suffering torture because they could not strike the captain — it is a serious offense. They could not refuse to obey the captain — that is mutiny.

“They could not take the command away from him — that would be piracy. They could only suffer. And those who could not endure the suffering threw themselves into the sea.”

Yet, with the penalty of hanging before them, the penalty for the deeds written, to escape further tortures most of the men staggered eagerly to confess and sign.

But one of them demurred and for the most humorous of reasons. What would his mother think if he confessed to such things as mutiny and attempted murder. He had a rib kicked into splinters for that.

But the worst of all they did to Barney Olsen, who died later in Capetown. The crew was spared the sight of the Olsen beating, but they called Mattson in, the one member of the crew whom they could trust to clean up the blood, and take the mangled body out of the way.

“It looked like a slaughter-house,” Mattson admitted. “They told me to shoot young Reilly dead, but I told them I would not do that or anything else for them.”

He admitted, however, on the stand that he had been fairly willing to help with the water cure, to give rather than take that form of torture at the hands of the officers. So Mattson stood for hours pumping water onto half dead, half drowned men to escape these harsh measures.

“I’ve sailed seven year with Pedersen,” he said. “I like him. I here want to tell the truth.”

The Pedersens put Reilly into handcuffs and tortured him into signing a confession that he was a German spy. They starved a man giving him a spoonful of beans and three biscuits in six days, then beat and bled him into signing that the food was ample and good and that those of the crew who said otherwise were a complaining, mutinous lot.

And then the cook, John Henry Stewart, accused and punished for poisoning milk, putting ground glass into hot cakes, tobacco in beans and soap into the soup, suddenly, on May 23, went insane under their clubs and jumped overboard.

That sobered them a little, sobered them to act even more cruelly and more carefully.

“He told me to sign my name to a paper which told how well the master treated us,” Frank Grielen said at the trial, “and I refused.

“ ‘Wake him up,’ Pedersen yelled to the boys, and they began to pound me with clubs. I was in handcuffs. But they took them off while I signed.

“With the steward gone, Jim Campbell, never a good seaman, for he was used to coastwise voyaging only, was put in the galley. One night he was dishing up the beans when the captain entered, brandishing a gun and shouting: ‘You are in it, too! Confess, confess!’ ”

He did not know the new devilment on foot, and as they dragged him forth he asked the beaten sailors over whom he stumbled to tell him, “for God’s sake, what to confess to—”

“They’ll tell you,” sobbed one man, an eye nearly gone, with pitiful irony.

They did tell him — with the tiller stick, knives held over his scalp pricking him into submission, and hardly knowing to what he confessed, he signed.

And so it went. The confessions, fantastic, weird, wild, smacking of the pirate novels piled up. The men broken, bruised, half dead, half starved, weak, staggered about the deck or lay unconscious beneath the sails.

Then one morning six weeks out of Capetown, Axel Hansen was dragged out of prison and sent on watch. His face was fearfully bruised; he had just been released from the lazaret, and was so weak from long confinement that his movements were not swift. Those of the crew who had spirit enough to turn their heads as he passed by hardly recognized him.

Because it would be difficult with bruised legs and cracked ribs, the young second mate called to Hansen and ordered him to go aloft and loose the royal sail.

The deck was high with lumber, the hold filled with lumber, too, which made the vessel slow to respond to her rudder.

Hansen came down from aloft and the mate called him to step a little livelier.

“I am doing my best, sir,” Hansen said.

The first mate, Leonard, hit him with a knuckle duster. What he said then could not be heard by the crew, who told it later, but presently he reached out and slapped the man’s face and kicked him again and again.

Hansen ran down the deck stumbling, terror of too great torture to be endured written on his face.

He reached the side of the vessel, wavered, looked back, and jumped in.

That, somehow, sobered young Pedersen, who was soft, you see, because of his youth.

Jack Joe was at the wheel and Leonard called to him, bade him put the vessel about. He even lent a hand to hasten the movement, while Hansen, struggling in the water clutched the logline trailing from the stern.

The shouts from the crew drew Hell Fire to the deck.

“What the hell’s the matter here?” he cried, with more oaths making, as Jack Joe said, “very dirty in his mouth.”

“Who told you to bring the vessel round?” he asked Joe, striking him.

“The second mate, sir. There is a man overboard.”

Hell Fire strode to the rail, looked unconcernedly down, spat, and returned to the wheel.

“To hell with the man overboard, you—; put the vessel back on her course.”

“I could hear Hansen crying for help,” Reilly said on the witness stand, shuddering. “Out of the sea came the smothered cries, ‘Oh, save me, save me!’

“But the captain ordered the crew standing about to take care of the sails. They did not move fast enough, thinking of poor Hansen there, and the captain hit them with the tiller stick. They sent the vessel on in higher speed. And at last poor Hansen let go the rope and sank out of sight.”

“I didn’t see a man overboard — I saw only spray,” the captain maintained on the stand. “It was too dark to see.” His attorney brought forth an almanac to prove that at four o’clock in that particular spot known among the seamen as “Sailor’s Grave” and the “Rainy Forties,” it was at dawn, too dark to see. Besides, a squall had come up. It was impossible to put about to rescue Hansen.

But the crew knew well — and the master knew they knew — that it would have been possible, had he wished, to rescue Hansen. Hell Fire did not take it as quite the joke young Dolph, the second mate, later seemed to believe it. Dolph found Hansen’s rule book and thus inscribed the fly leaf:

But the glib attorney hired to defend the Pedersens denied any guilt of Hansen’s death on the part of the defendants.

Seven days, he said, before Hansen died — jumped overboard, committing suicide — he had signed a confession admitting guilt of mutiny. He had confessed to planning destruction of the ship. He feared the just punishment which, once ashore, lay ahead of him.

The second mate told how Hansen had confessed to wishing to destroy the ship because the Black Hand was after him, and if they heard the ship was lost they would cease pursuing him, believing Hansen to have gone down with the ship.

“But would Hansen not have gone down with the ship?” asked the district attorney mildly. “How did he propose saving himself as the ship blew up?”

The second mate who had prepared the confessions had the intelligence, as they were read in court, to look rather foolish. He was clever enough to realize that they were absurd.

Had Hansen been blowing up the ship, the government pointed out, surely he would have done so earlier. Why should a roan endure months of torture if he had planned anyhow to end it all?

He was a melancholy Dane, the defendants chanted. He attempted suicide half a dozen times before he succeeded.

“Did you not know,” asked Mr. Matthews, “that it is customary to toss ropes or planks to drowning persons?”

“It may be customary,” said Pedersen, “but I did not see Hansen. I looked and saw only the spray. Besides there was the squall which kept us from putting about.”

“Did you order any of the crew to pull in the logline?” asked Mr. Matthews then.

“No; there was a stiff breeze, the ship was in the wind,” said the captain.

Now, strangely enough, on the stand battling for his life, Captain Pedersen belied his name of Hell Fire and his reputation as a swaggering bully. He spoke softly, even shyly. The jury — and it could not fail to impress them — had to lean forward to catch all he said. But his soft words were belied by another witness.

The government called Captain John Duffy, United States Navy, master of the American transport Luckenbach. Captain Duffy took a full rigged model of the Puako and set it on the floor, where he showed plainly that no matter how the weather, the Puako could have put about to take Hansen in.

He set the sails so that they were drawing a stiff breeze. He pointed the model as the Puako was heading when Hansen jumped into the sea. The court and the jury stood up while, on his knees, Captain Duffy showed how, even in the face of the wind, the vessel might have been brought about while rescue was made.

“If Captain Pedersen cared to have done so, Hansen could have been saved,” he testified.

The tortuous voyage to Capetown somehow dragged on. After the death of Stewart the master apparently feared the consequences of his death if they were reported to the American consul by the crew.

He enforced further signatures, drew up incriminating statements to discredit those who might cause trouble. This fear became even greater after Hansen’s death and the brutal measures of the master and mates became well-nigh indescribable. New and awful deeds were perpetrated.

Then the master went into the storeroom where Campbell was working around and hurled a cup with all his might at his head. It was a dainty cup, such as was used on those rare occasions when ladies came aboard, and it splintered into the flesh, cutting a gash as clean as a surgeon’s knife, laying the bone of the skull open.

Campbell, for no reason that he could find, was then put in irons, thrown into the lazaret, and told to “confess.”

They took him out because he had no idea what to confess to, and held him beneath the water pump for the water cure.

Barney Olsen was led before the brave captain, handcuffed. The captain held up a screw-driver.

“Is this yours?” he asked, shaking it menacingly.

How could Olsen know what to answer? Yes? Or no?

He hazarded a guess — the wrong one.

“No, sir,” he said. Pedersen struck him full in the face with the blunt end. “Now whose is it?” he demanded.

“Mine, sir,” gasped Olsen, shaking away the blood from his face as best he could to answer.

One morning the second mate, as was his playful jest, strode up to some men trussed up in irons. “I’ll blow your brains out,” he jeered at them.

“Do,” begged one of the men hopelessly, “I am bad enough off as it is. Death would be welcome.”

At last the ship, after what must have seemed to the crew an interminable period, sighted the coast of Africa. The crew took heart just as the master and mates began to lose it. The Pedersens juggled the confessions rather worriedly to see if they embraced everything, and held a consultation as to how to avert trouble.

“We’ll get to Capetown,” proposed the resourceful second mate while his elder brother, handy only at the heavier work of beating and wounding, listened agape. “We’ll beat it for the consul, say that we have a lot of mutineers on board, and ask for military aid. We’ll show these confessions, get the crew jailed before they can open their black mouths.”

“I do hope the authorities will hang them,” said the captain, kindly.

On August 27, Captain William Howe, of Capetown, had a phone message from a naval intelligence officer. An American sailing vessel, the Puako, was in difficulty about forty miles off shore.

There was mutiny aboard; the captain asked for a tug to come and fetch him in, and for an armed party to take over the crew.

“We went out to meet this boat,” testified Captain Howe. “It was dark and rainy, and although we had searchlights, we failed to pick her up until the next morning. We had twelve men, four armed with rifles, the rest with revolvers.

“We boarded the Puako at daybreak. Her cargo, we saw, was lumber. We saw some men about the deck, but could see no indication of trouble save that the captain looked worried, very worried, indeed. We read the log and found certain contradictions. I asked to have the crew mustered upon deck, and Captain Pedersen said:

“ ‘We must have a guard for the ship; I am afraid all the men wall jump overboard.’

“So the men were lined up under guard. I expected to see a gang of cutthroat desperadoes; instead, I saw the most miserable lot of men I had ever seen in my life. Nine men, some sitting, some lying, too weak to stand. Eight of these nine men had black eyes, several, marks on their faces. The other men, I found, had not been lined up, they were too weak to bring out and had been kicked beneath sails and into lockers to avoid discovery.

“The men were fearfully thin, emaciated, bruised, shins swollen, and many in great pain. I could not get a statement from William Jones he was in such a weak condition. And these mutinying men seemed glad, very glad, to see us — we who had come to place them under arrest!

“Jack Joe was doubled up with pain. He looked an old, worried man when I saw him. Jim Campbell had an open wound red and raw between his eyes.

“I took the men off, intending to let them rest and eat for a couple of days and then get statements. I did not arrest the captain and the mates — then. But I searched their cabin.

“I found clubs, blood stained, rope ends, knotted, and brass knuckles. I found knuckle-dusters and firearms. There were rifles and repeating guns and automatic pistols in the captain’s bureau. The crew began to talk and I believed them.

“I arrested the three officers. I have never seen men eat as that crew ate when we fed them ashore. One man ate fifteen biscuits after the meal — a large one — had been nominally completed.”

Mr. Murphey, the consul, and the vice consul, Mr. Pizarr, went to the jail to look things over. They heard both sides of the story, observed that the officers were growing more and more worried, the crew more and more confident, stronger, as their wounds healed.

The consul and vice consul did not believe the stories of the officers, but put great credence in the stories of the crew.

“Instead of being mutinous the men were cowed, spiritless,” declared Murphey in a letter to the Secretary of State. “They looked ready to do anything to escape further tortures of the tyrants. I believe that the master is practically guilty of the death by murder of the two seamen who jumped overboard.”

“We went to the jail, Mr. Pizarr and I,” related Mr. Murphey later. “How pathetically glad the men were to be there! Jones stripped and showed us his body, kicked and beaten black and blue in stripes, his eyes blackened, his head wounded by clubs. We saw the outrages committed on the other men. We heard their stories, and we believed the crew — not the officers. We are earnestly advising you to do the same.”

When the crew was fit to travel the entire lot was shipped back to England in custody, the officers also in custody, but having the run of the deck, shipped to England and thence to America, six thousand miles to their native land, for a fair trial.

The crew, freed from torture, was jubilant and browsed about — these cutthroats who had been accused of piracy, mutiny and fighting among themselves — like a lot of playful lambs.

But the captain and the mates did not wax calmer as the days passed, and the Rochester, on which they traveled to New York, neared the harbor.

The officers on the Rochester sent a wireless message to the district attorney’s office asking for a deputy marshal to meet the boat in the harbor and take off prisoners charged with piracy and mutiny and others with murder on the high seas.

The files which had come over from Capetown were sent to the district attorney from the State Department at Washington. The charge against the crew was dismissed. You have read that the Pedersens were acquitted of murder, but the other charge, inhuman treatment of the crew, was not so easily disposed of, though the defense did their best.

It brought a policeman out of San Prado, California, who said that Hansen was the worst type of I. W. W., had been often arrested for starting riots, and had served two terms in jail.

He had even heard Hansen advocating the destruction of certain ships and cargoes going out of western ports.

There were even good words to be said of Pedersen by picturesque old salts, from “Sailors Snug Harbor.” They had shipped with Pedersen, they said, and never heard tell of such tales as had been unfolded in court.

The judge averred that it would, after all, be impossible to prove premeditation in this case, and the jury, after ten minutes, brought back the verdict of not guilty of murder. Pedersen, absolved from direct guilt, wept for joy.

Then later there came another trial of all three, master and the two young mates, who, ashore, looked hardly capable of the crimes with which the government charged them.

The indictment accused the Pedersens on ten counts, “Against the peace of the United States and their own dignity, and contrary to the form of the United States that, without justifiable cause, they did beat and wound” six members of the crew, one of whom died at Capetown. The other four counts were for imprisonment.

“The master of a ship,” the court stated, “is vested with almost military authority over his crew by law. With this authority he may punish his crew for insubordination, refusal to obey orders, mutiny and other offenses, but he may do so only in the manner authorized by that law.

“He may use whatever force is necessary to quell a riot or put down a mutiny. He may oppose violence with arms or weapons when necessary, but he may not, as means of punishment, beat a member of the crew who, at the time of beating, is not himself attempting assault on the master.”

At this trial the character witnesses and the soft shy ways of Pedersen availed nothing. The stories told by the seamen, the scars exhibited and the surly looks of the boys had their weight.

Pedersen’s attorney tried to make much of the confessions exhibited, but failed to do so.

“Yes, these men signed confessions,” said the district attorney. “And they have signed these repudiations, too. I venture to state that even without two or three men to help me, I could take the master of the ship into a room, handcuff him and force him to admit that he was the devil himself. I venture to believe that he would be glad of the chance to sign any document.

“These seamen are ignorant men,” he said further. “You have heard their consistent stories. You have seen the light of truth in their eyes; you have seen their wounds. They have not been tripped up in cross-examination. They looked the court in the eye and did not hesitate.”

The jury was out two hours and fifteen minutes. Then they returned a verdict of guilty. But they asked such clemency as was consistent with the facts for the mates, on account of their extreme youth.

Adolph Pedersen was forthwith sentenced to eighteen months at Atlanta, and the boys were sentenced to six months in Essex County Jail.

Thus ends the story of one of the most fearful voyages known to truth or fiction. Even Wolf Larsen — Jack London’s Sea Wolf — could not have enacted the part of Pedersen.

Brutal, yes, but fair in his brutality. He would call his men to the deck. “Put up your fists and fight,” he would say, waiving the law that it was a crime to strike a master. Wolf Larsen at least gave his men a fighting chance!