The Albion Cooper was a Maine-based brig with a crew of eight men sailing near Cuba in September 1857 when Abram Cox and Peter Williams mutinied.
Williams had been disciplined aboard ship for fighting with the first mate. As retaliation, he convinced Cox to join him in a plan to kill everyone else aboard the ship. Once the rampage began, another crewman, Thomas Fahey, agreed to join them. The three men killed the five others and threw them overboard.
Finding themselves unable to sail the ship they now controlled, the three men plundered the ship, set it ablaze, and boarded a life boat. Picked up after a few days at sea, the men confessed.
Returned to Maine to stand trial, Cox and Williams were sentenced to death for murder on the high seas. They were hanged in the prison yard in Auburn, Maine, before a crowd in excess of five thousand on August 27, 1858.
The Federal Death Penalty Project 