Wordsworth remarks on the French National Assembly and the Jacobin club, ‘I saw the revolutionary power / Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms’. These lines, where Wordsworth compares revolutionary power to ‘a ship at anchor’, question the relevance of nautical signifiers to revolution. One answer lies in exploring how naval mutiny came to indicate a revolutionary trope during the Romantic era. In the 1790s, mutiny became the focus of public debate, not only surrounding the French Revolution, but also on issues of English national identity and the right of rebellion. In the case of the Bounty mutiny in April 1789, the crew suffered under the sadistic Captain Bligh, spontaneously arose in violence to overthrow him and his officers, and commandeered the ship back to an island paradise in Tahiti. As James McKusick has noted, the Bounty mutiny ‘came to be widely regarded as a British equivalent of the Fall of the Bastille, endowed with all the attendant hopes and anxieties of those who witnessed that dramatic event and its turbulent aftermath’. After the publication of Lieutenant Bligh’s account of the mutiny, the brother of lead mutineer Fletcher Christian composed an answer, sparking a pamphlet war of no small scale. As Geoffrey Sanborn reports, Wordsworth’s interest in the Bounty mutiny had a personal as well as political dimension: he wrote to the editor of the Weekly Entertainer newspaper on 23 October 1796 in defense of Fletcher Christian, who was a family friend of the Wordsworths. But beyond the Bounty, the 1797 uprisings at Spithead and the Nore proved the most important naval uprisings of the period as they clearly illustrate the ideological, rhetorical, and poetical correlation of naval mutiny and revolution, not between England and France, but between the British Navy and English radical organizations. This essay will investigate the political engagement and discursive aspirations of mutinous sailors within the context of 1790s radicalism. This aim entails, first, a claim that a connection exists between organized radicalism and naval mutiny and, second, a reciprocal framing of mutiny as a way to read radicalism, and of radicalism as a way to read mutiny. Although a mutiny usually arises when a ship’s crew violently and spontaneously overthrows its captain and officers, the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore (April–June 1797) inaugurated mutiny as a planned event: these occurred at anchor in domestic waters with two fleets acting in accord, were largely non-violent, and were spurred by no immediate external prompting. In a manner befitting the influence of the radical organization the London Corresponding Society and the United Irishmen, the crews elected delegates and negotiating committees, took oaths of loyalty, Frank Mabee