The Naval Mutinies of 1797: Unity and Perseverance, ed. Ann Veronica Coats and Philip MacDougall

Abstract

England’s ‘French Revolutionary’ moment came, if it was ever going to come, with the great naval mutinies of 1797, which seemed to open the door to French armies and announce the fall of another ancien régime. Contemporaries regarded the prospect with horror or delight, but nobody could ignore what was going on. For two months the three kingdoms held their breath while the outcome, first at Spithead and then at the Nore, seemed to tremble in the balance. There can have been few events in modern British history on which so much turned, and one would naturally expect that generations of historians would have devoted themselves to studying and interpreting them. Instead, we find almost total indifference. One rather unsatisfactory monograph appeared in 1913, and there has been a handful of semi-popular works since. Several recent historians have invoked the mutinies in passing to support their theories, but none of them has done any original research on the subject. To remedy this neglect the editors of this volume, Ann Veronica Coats and Philip MacDougall, organised in 1997 two conferences on the mutinies. It has taken them fourteen years to find a publisher, but at last we have a handsome volume which advances our knowledge of the subject further and faster than it has moved in the whole of the past century. There are sixteen chapters, of which nine are the work of one or both of the editors. They deal with the principal mutinies in home waters: two in succession at Spithead, the Nore mutiny, and the mutiny of the North Sea Squadron which joined the Nore. Other chapters look at naval discipline and shipboard life in a wider perspective, by way of context. The editors and some, though not all, of the other contributors have kept their work up to date, which is important, because there have been some significant additions to the literature on the subject since 1997. All these chapters are based on solid research, and this should make it impossible for even the most careless historian to repeat some of the baseless myths which have swirled around the mutinies for so long. No longer can we be told that the mutinies were led by quota-men—scheming landsmen teaching the simple sailors how to undertake a political act. On the contrary, the mutinies were led—as mutinies were always led—by the natural leaders of the lower deck, the petty officers and leading hands. They drew on the long traditions of collective action which were native to the seafaring world—but they were far from politically innocent, and were well aware of what was going on in the outside world. Their skilful handling of the newspapers gained, and kept, public support. The Spithead mutineers won in the end because they were more united, better informed and more politically sophisticated than the Lords of the Admiralty, whose tactless blunders wrecked their own position. In this sense the mutineer-leaders were thoroughly political, but the majority did not choose to involve themselves with the political ambitions of the Corresponding Societies, still less the French revolutionaries. Only at the Nore was there a minority of extremists who tried to push the mutiny in a much more political direction than the majority were willing to take. Only here were there, possibly, some United Irishmen, for Irish leadership is another hardy myth which will have to go.