After a drawing by Captain Porter.
The prisoners, having liberty as well as the crews, not only went looking for temptation but they got together and planned to get in a lot of native canoes and carry the Essex Junior by assault, when, the Essex being dismantled, they hoped to capture the entire Yankee force. A traitor revealed the plot, however, and the prisoners were thereafter kept well in hand.
And then came an incipient mutiny. The sailormen had enjoyed life with their friends, the Nukahivas, so much that when, in December, Porter determined to go in search of an enemy worthy of the ship, they first grumbled, and then some of them, under the lead of an Englishman named Robert White, talked of refusing to go at all.
This talk reached flood-tide when on Sunday, December 9, 1813, a lot of the men from the Essex visited the Essex Junior, when White openly boasted that the crew would refuse to get the anchor at the word from Captain Porter. But White was very much mistaken. His words were reported to Porter, who, next morning, mustered the men on the port side of the deck and then, with a drawn sword lying across the capstan before him, said:
“All of you who are in favor of weighing the anchor when I give the order, pass over to the starboard side.”
A Marquesan War-canoe.
From an engraving by Strickland of a drawing by Captain Porter.
They all passed across the deck promptly. Then he called out White, and asked him about his Sunday boasting. White denied having made the boast, but a number of the crew testified to what he had said, and at that Porter turned on the fellow and said in a burst of anger:
“Run, you scoundrel, for your life.”