For nearly two months, a man lived entrenched within the belly of a ship. He possessed knives, an iron bar, and, as the crew maintained, matches. Above him, the men hesitated to descend for the coal required by the galley; the master parleyed, proffered forgiveness, and then ordered the hatch battened down each night. Once the Lady Douglas had cleared Saint Helena, fear hardened into design. On the 23rd of April, 1887, Hassein was wounded by gunfire in the hold, hoisted onto the deck, and dispatched with a bullet to the head.
The British three-masted barque had sailed from Gascoigne, on the western coast of Australia, on the 11th of January, bound for London. Her crew was reduced to a mere ten hands; Captain James Cocks engaged two Malay mariners, Hassein and Cassein. According to the Pitaval narrative, Hassein proved an indifferent seaman, and his shipmates made him their laughing-stock. Ill-feeling deepened. He murmured against his lot and, according to the witnesses, attempted to cast himself into the sea; the boatswain’s mate restrained him.
On the 21st of February, Hassein disappeared during his watch. Cocks caused the vessel to be searched, without finding him. The official log ascribed his absence to misadventure or suicide. Ten days later, the second mate discovered him asleep in the fore-hold. Being questioned, Hassein declared that he felt wretched and wished to die. He refused to return to his station and procured weapons. He threatened any who should approach; the men no longer dared venture into the hold, where the coal stores lay.
The master sought at first to induce him to come up. Hassein consented to fill the coal-buckets in exchange for bread and water, but would not resume his duty. On the 28th of March, he appeared at dawn in Cocks’s cabin and laid a hand upon his shoulder. The master started awake and cried out; Hassein fled. Two officers seized him and clapped him in irons. He slipped his bonds, returned to the hold, and entrenched himself anew. The record does not disclose how he cast off his fetters, nor whether an accomplice aided him.
The mariners related that they had thereupon nailed planks across the opening by night, while leaving a grating by day to admit air. Hassein received rations of water, biscuit, and salt meat, according to the depositions, though the amounts and duration vary in the testimonies. The hands professed to dread an onslaught, an incendiary fire, or a breach in the hull. They feared likewise that his tools and iron bar might enable him to fall upon them unawares. Yet nothing establishes that he ever truly attempted to set the vessel ablaze or to slay any member of the crew.
On the 20th of April, off Saint Helena, one of the hands proposed putting the two Malays ashore. Cocks refused, announcing that he would carry Hassein to London to stand his trial. On the morrow, the master caused an entry to be made in the log charging Charles Hunt, an able seaman who had set his face against putting Hassein to death. Hunt was alleged to have supplied weapons and abetted a mutiny. At the assizes, the investigators found no proof of such complicity. Hunt maintained that he had merely given tobacco to Hassein and pleaded that he be brought to England. The testimony of the crew and the logbook revealed that the master’s official narrative did not square with the preparations actually set on foot.
On the 22nd of April, the men essayed to force Hassein from his retreat. They assailed him through the bulkhead, then fired upon him; a ball took him in the foot. On the following morning, they broke open the hatchway anew. The boarding party went armed. The boatswain’s mate, Gleaves, discharged a fowling-piece; the seaman Webster fired the master’s revolver. The record conjectures that one of the initial discharges, likely that of Gleaves, struck Hassein in the flank. Charles Hunt then descended by a line, secured a grapnel to the wounded man’s clothing, and had him hauled onto the deck. He was spent and could no longer offer resistance. Webster put a bullet through his head. Minutes later, the body was committed to the deep, weighted that it might sink.
The earliest entries in the logbook represented this death as an act of lawful self-defence and dwelt upon Hassein’s menaces. But the Crown relied upon the depositions taken in London and upon the mariners’ own written words. It contended that the crew had agreed beforehand to make away with Hassein, and had subsequently slaughtered a man already stricken and incapable of resistance. The defence urged that two months of terror had rendered the vessel unsafe, that Hassein was armed, and that the master was bound to preserve the lives of all on board. They pleaded moreover the rigour of maritime discipline and the obligation to obey lawful commands.
Upon the vessel’s arrival, the master delivered the logbook to the authorities. The preliminary examination occupied three weeks; the mariners were detained under ward while the magistrates examined the hands. Peter King, the steward, described the victuals and the renewals of the fray; David Thow corroborated the greater part of his account. Hunt, for his part, repudiated the charge entered against him in the log, relating how he had withstood the proposal to kill the man. The officers professed to have acted out of fear; the foremast hands disclosed that the design of slaying Hassein had been debated prior to the discharge of the firearms. The distinction between an unlooked-for emergency and a concerted resolution then assumed its full gravity.
The proceedings before the jury occupied the 29th and 30th of June. Counsel for Cocks, Gleaves, Evans, and Webster did not urge entirely identical pleas. Some invoked justifiable homicide and the preservation of the ship; Webster’s advocate maintained that a foremast hand could not be held answerable for executing the command of his superior. The prosecution retorted that no maritime discipline could warrant the execution of a man once disarmed and subdued. The logbook was read to the jurors, but the signatures of the officers could not outweigh the parol evidence that contradicted its tenor. The learned judge directed them to weigh the culpability of each prisoner upon the proved facts, without suffering themselves to be swayed by the apprehension that a conviction might undermine the lawful authority of shipmasters.
Mr Justice Stephen directed the jury to lay aside the broader consequences of their verdict for the merchant service. The question, he observed in substance, was whether the prisoners had taken life when no immediate necessity constrained them so to do. He reminded them that self-defence could not cover a killing compassed for convenience, or perpetrated after the victim had been rendered powerless. The terror of the crew appeared genuine in the depositions, but it by no means established that Hassein, once laid upon the deck, remained an impending danger. According to the chronicle, the judge regarded the final shot as murder, and the prior understanding as a circumstance of aggravation.
After deliberating for some sixty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against all four prisoners. They nevertheless accompanied it with a strong recommendation to mercy, believing that the men had acted out of ignorance and under an erroneous apprehension of the law. The judge assumed the black cap and pronounced sentence of death. The judgment did not silence the controversy: societies of seamen and mariners convened in London to petition for a reprieve, contending that the crew had acted in the honest belief of securing their own lives. Other voices recalled that Hassein had been brought up alive, and butchered while defenceless.
The royal clemency was signified on the 6th of July, 1887, in a dispatch from Whitehall. The Queen commuted the capital sentence upon Cocks to penal servitude for five years; Evans and Gleaves received each eighteen calendar months, and Webster one year’s imprisonment. The historical record does not pretend that the drama of the hold met with an undivided moral judgment. It leaves the reader, rather, at that precise frontier where the law severs apprehension from immediate peril: the crew had endured an agonizing season of strain, yet the mortal stroke was dealt only after Hassein had been brought on deck, maimed, and rendered utterly helpless. The ocean had swallowed the corpse; the assize record preserved the memory of the council held at sea.