Category Archives: Essays

Queeg, as Captain of USS Caine, is a perfect metaphor for The Caine Mutiny’s climactic typhoon, Halsey’s Typhoon. Though Queeg, like Halsey’s Typhoon, may be considered something of an act of God in that the Navy no more gave birth to Queeg than it conjured up the wind and waves that battered Third Fleet (and consigned nearly eight hundred men to watery graves), in both cases it was a series of errors in judgment–a failure to heed warnings of impending disaster–that placed the ships and men of Third Fleet in the path of Halsey’s Typhoon, and the men of USS Caine in the path of Queeg.