On the 27th of November 1817, a Danish brig was found in peril upon the Goodwin Sands, off the coast of Kent. The pilots of Deal answered the signals of distress and succeeded in disengaging the vessel. Yet the absence of both the captain and his chief mate rendered this salvage inexplicable. Second Lieutenant Johannes Lorenzen immediately yielded command to the pilots, requesting that they bring the brig into port. Once ashore, he repaired to the Danish vice-consul: Captain Jens Nielsen Holst and his son Niels, the first lieutenant, had been cast overboard by the crew.
L’Espérance was bound from Hamburg for Messina, carrying ballast. She had cleared the Elbe on the 30th of October. Aboard there remained Lorenzen, the cabin boy Christian Waldvoigt, and seven foremast hands. The two men who denounced the crew had not witnessed the two Holsts vanish into the sea. Lorenzen lay sleeping in his berth, where he was nursing an injured leg; Waldvoigt was in his own. The case was thus to be constructed upon reported speech, contradictory admissions, the demeanour of the crew, and a vexing question: who had done what, and at what precise moment?
From the moment of disembarkation, the English and Danish authorities were obliged to determine where the cause ought to be tried. The deed had been committed on the high seas, yet beneath the Danish flag. At first, the Danish authorities in England favoured an English prosecution, an opinion which the English appeared initially to share. The Lords of the Admiralty concluded at length that the crime did not fall within English jurisdiction: the prisoners were dispatched to Flensburg, with Lorenzen and Waldvoigt as witnesses. This passage toward a Danish jurisdiction opened a protracted judicial inquiry, markedly distinct from the lucid account initially tendered to the vice-consul.
At Flensburg, Lorenzen explained that the discords had begun following a chastisement inflicted upon two seamen, Niels Hendricksen and Diedrich Widow. The captain had struck them with a hawser; Lorenzen deemed that they had deserved it, but that the cordage was too stout. A carpenter had protested that an officer ought not to strike a man at the helm before relieving him from his post. The incident was set down in the ship’s log by Holst himself. Further altercations ensued: curses, blows with a cane, threats of punishment. Waldvoigt’s depositions depict a brutal captain; those of Lorenzen are more measured.
Bread, likewise, became an occasion of rancour. On the eve of the catastrophe, the 26th of November, Holst sent word to Lorenzen to distribute a larger ration of bread to the crew, yet deferred the decision until the morrow. Shortly after five o'clock, a brief and plaintive cry roused the second lieutenant. He went forth, called for the captain and his son, received no answer, and presently found himself surrounded by the seamen. Jochim von Ehren held a curved tool used for splicing cordage; he and the carpenter Utterberg demanded that Lorenzen swear fidelity to the crew, upon pain of suffering the fate of the Holsts. Lorenzen swooned, then took the oath, hoping to gain time and devise some means of preserving his life.
He had not seen the murder. The sailors told him that the captain and his son had gone overboard. They explained that young Holst had been killed because he was of his father's blood and might have denounced them. The second lieutenant inquired why they had struck down a man whom all described as quiet and good-natured; their answers converged upon his kinship. The captain had been hated for his violence; the death of the son, to the seamen's minds, appeared as a necessary consequence of their first resolve. Subsequent confessions confirmed the double murder, but neither all its stages nor the parts borne by each man.
At mess, certain hands boasted of having taken a greater share than the rest. The depositions, however, agreed neither upon the origin of the conspiracy nor upon the deeds of that night. Peter Klever placed the initial colloquies two or three days prior to the attack, followed by a decision taken at the meal of the final day. Widow recalled words spoken by the cook and the carpenter. Kuhlmann claimed to have first thought of seizing command or forcing the provision store; the murder, he alleged, had forced itself upon them during a collective debate. Jochim and Utterberg likewise minimized their part. All were agreed upon the essential fact, while each contested who struck the first blow and the gravest acts.
Young Holst was the second victim, yet the proof of his slaughter was more confused still. Klever confessed to having seized him and cast him into the sea. He wavered as to the identity of his accomplice: first the cook, then Hendricksen. The carpenter placed Hendricksen beside Klever, but others saw nothing. The cook denied all participation in this second dispatch, whilst admitting his presence at the captain’s murder. The court retained the guilt of several men without managing to establish with certainty all the hands that had borne the young officer to the gunwale.
After the crime, the crew ransacked the captain’s cabin. The men forced the lockers, yet returned the articles to their places. On the morrow, Lorenzen overheard that he was to be killed in his turn, the vessel scuttled, and the coast gained in the longboats. Profiting by the proximity of England, he sought to steer the brig toward the coast, but the cook hailed an approaching pilot boat with a false destination. When Klever perceived Lorenzen’s manoeuvre, the latter was obliged to put out to sea once more. He awaited another occasion.
Upon the Goodwin Sands, the second lieutenant suffered the peril to mount until alarm signals became indispensable. Two pilot boats arrived. The seamen attempted to bar them from boarding with capstan bars; Lorenzen persuaded them to admit at least one pilot, then gave such orders as would disarm his suspicion. Once the men were occupied, Lorenzen made a sign to the other pilots. Fourteen of them swarmed over the deck and took charge of the vessel. The mutineers still attempted to feign that the Holsts had been swept away by a tempest; they had previously heaved the ship’s stern gallery into the sea to lend credence to this tale.
In port, the crew delivered a purse to Lorenzen to pay the pilots. He showed them the coin, bade them keep peaceable, and reached Deal. The sailors, ever mistrustful, next required that he declare that the captain and lieutenant had perished in the storm whilst he lay asleep. Lorenzen promised to say whatever they wished. Yet during the night, an English man-of-war drew near, and the men were placed under guard. The act which had preserved the brig from stranding had likewise delivered her into the hands of the authorities.
Waldvoigt corroborated part of the narrative, though he had neither heard the threats levelled at Lorenzen nor witnessed the assassination. He related Holst’s brutality and the resentment of the crew. The prisoners, after an initial denial, at length admitted the double murder. They maintained that blows, insults, and hunger had driven them to extremity. The inquiry, however, verified the weight of the bread and stores: they accorded with the prescribed measures, nor was the quality of the provisions deficient. Hunger was thus a belief and an alleged motive, not a materially demonstrated privation. The captain’s violence, attested by several seamen, remains better documented, though the compiler joins to these elements his own conjectures regarding the disposition of the crew.
Another accusation weighed upon Lorenzen. Several prisoners declared that he had heard of the plot, perhaps even encouraged the sailors to revolt. Klever related that Lorenzen had answered him, “that cannot be,” before walking away; others imputed to him words hostile to the captain. The second lieutenant denied having participated in or favoured the murder. The accusations came from condemned men who had an interest in burdening their accuser, and their statements were contradictory. The tribunal ultimately acquitted him of the suspicion of complicity and of having abetted the crime. The retrospective narrative, while recording this decree, leaves a shadow of doubt; it supplies no conclusive proof against him.
The instruction consumed years. A preliminary summary inquiry was concluded in August 1818; formal criminal proceedings followed, and the charges and defences were laid before a commission at Flensburg on the 27th of October, and the 2nd and 3rd of November 1819. Judgment was pronounced on the 14th of October 1820. Six men were declared guilty of the concerted murder of the captain and his son; Hendricksen was tried for his participation in the conspiracy against the captain and for mutiny. The initial sentence condemned the first six to the wheel, and Hendricksen to decapitation. A royal pardon substituted the axe for the wheel in the case of five convicts, and commuted the sentences of Kuhlmann and Hendricksen to perpetual imprisonment; Kuhlmann first underwent the corporeal chastisement decreed by law.
On the 17th of October 1820, five men were conveyed outside Flensburg upon carts of infamy and executed with the broadaxe. Kuhlmann, having been scourged, departed for lifelong penal servitude; Hendricksen was likewise condemned to perpetual incarceration. The accounts of Pastor Valentiner depict the condemned men comforting the other prisoners, receiving communion, and composing themselves for death. This pious record effaces neither the discrepancies of the confessions nor the uncertainty surrounding the actions of each hand. Upon the Goodwin Sands, a signal had drawn pilots to a masterless vessel. At Flensburg, justice distinguished the ringleaders, the accomplices, and the witness turned suspect; yet the night of the murder could never be reconstructed in a single voice.