Chapter XII: The Mutinies (1)

AUTHORITIES.—In addition to the general histories and biographies
of officers named already, two pamphlets ought to be consulted
for the mutinies. _A Narrative of Occurrences which took
place during the Mutiny at the Nore in May and June 1797_, by
Rear-Admiral Charles Cunningham, 1829; and _The Natural Defence
of an Insular Empire_, by Admiral Phillip Paton, 1810.

The year of St. Vincent and Camperdown was also the year of the great mutinies which mark a turning-point in the history of the navy. They were the culmination of long-standing grievances caused by old evils.

If we could reconstruct a crew (supposing the thing to have been done fairly and without beautifying), the spectacle would surprise, and somewhat disenchant, the spectator. To do it fairly we must take not a crack frigate commanded by a popular officer with a good reputation for luck in prize-taking, but one of the ordinary vessels, liners or less, which did the bulk of the heavy work of the old wars. If the date chosen had been well on in any of our naval wars, and certainly if it had been taken in the midst of the last and greatest, the figures of wax or wood—which we suppose to be properly ticketed—would tell a curious tale. It would be startling to see how many foreigners there were, how many landsmen, how many boys, how many quota-men, and state-the-case-men. The quota-men were those whom each county of the United Kingdom was called upon at one period in the old war to supply for the fleet. Of course they all came from the Cave of Adullam, and were, in fact, the scamps of every neighbourhood, tempted by high bounties. Their character is sufficiently well indicated by the fact that Parker, who headed the mutiny at the Nore, was a quota-man from Perth. The state-the-case-man is more complicated. As the press-gang swept all fish into its net, a great many were seized who were, or believed themselves to be, exempted. They were for ever appealing to the Admiralty for release, and the Department kept writing to the captains about them. For convenience, these letters were marked outside “State the case.” Hence the expression a “state-the-case-man,” as applied to the poor forced complaining creatures, of whom every captain would have been delighted to get rid, if only he could have kept his complement up without them. Of such material our crews were largely formed in the most triumphant times; for the navy was not popular with the real sailors, and least of all with the best. Although the prime men who were the real nerve of a crew were supposed to form a third only of the complement, they contributed more to the list of deserters than the ordinary seamen, landsmen, boys, and marines put together. Every ship carried a proportion of landsmen, who were not expected to do real sailor’s work. This perversity of the seamen was a sore grievance to officers. Admiral Cunningham, who was captain of the frigate =Clyde= during the mutiny at the Nore, and wrote an account of it, was very severe on them. He thought that they were as happy as mortal sailor could expect to be. But they were of another way of thinking.

This wrongheadedness of theirs, too, was an old story—as old as the seventeenth century—and, in spite of Admiral Cunningham, was thoroughly intelligible. It was a question of pay, both in amount and manner. As far back as the reign of William III., Captain Saint-Lo put the whole thing into a nutshell. The wages of A.B.’s were then 23s. a month for a month of twenty-eight days, which is 25s. a month on the year. This rate of pay remained unchanged, in spite of the fall in the value of money, till the mutiny at Spithead scared Parliament into greater, but still very measured, liberality. Now in Captain Saint-Lo’s time the average wages of a good man in the merchant service during war were 50s. and 60s. a month. In the eighteenth century they were known to go as high as £4. The men who manned the coal-ships in the North Sea earned as much as £6, £7, or £8 the run. Here was a contrast which the A.B. naturally perpended. But what had equal, or even greater, weight with him was the reflection that, whereas a man in the merchant service was sure of his money at the end of the voyage, the man-of-war’s man could never know when he would be paid. Admiral Cunningham quoted as one of the blessings of the sailors that the Admiralty had done all human wisdom could do to see that each man got exactly his right amount; but, unluckily, it was precisely the fatherly care of “My Lords” which constituted the grievance. The treatment given to the seamen had indeed been improved in the course of the eighteenth century. In 1758, George Grenville, who was then Treasurer of the Navy, persuaded Parliament to pass “an Act for the Encouragement of Seamen employed in the Royal Navy; and for establishing a regular method for the punctual, frequent, and certain payment of their wages; and for enabling them more easily and readily to remit the same for the support of their wives and families; and for preventing frauds and abuses attending such payments.” But these fine promises of the title of the Act were spoilt by many limitations. A man who volunteered was to receive an advance of two months, and could assign part of his pay for the support of his family. All men who had served for a year and upwards were entitled to be paid the wages due to them (less a deduction of six months, which was kept back as a guarantee against desertion) whenever the ship they were in came into a home port where there was a Commissioner of the Navy. But pressed men got no advance, and none of the men were paid when serving abroad, or at a home port other than a naval dockyard. The deduction of six months was calculated in a way which the sailors complained of. Their wages were paid by months of four weeks, but the deductions were made in calendar months.

In practice the men got their wages not in hard coin on board, but in pay-tickets, which had to be presented at an office, and were only cashed when all the red tape had been duly complied with. As a ship’s commission in war-time might last four years, we can easily imagine what this might mean for a man who had been pressed out of a home-coming merchant-ship at the beginning of hostilities, and also what it meant for his wretched wife and family. But even this was not all. It frequently happened, when there was great need to keep fleets at sea, that when a ship was “paid off” and her crew had received their “tickets,” they were bodily turned over to a fresh ship, with their paper money in their hands, and sent off on another four years’ cruise. Admiral Ekins, who wrote after the great war, when something had been done for the men, says that he heard of a case of one who had served fourteen years without touching a penny of actual pay. This he gives as mere report; but he adds that, to his own knowledge, men often served nine years without the receipt of wages. After that, one understands what Nelson meant when he said that his heart was with the men who mutinied at Spithead. After all, their main demands were that their pay should be raised above the figure fixed in Charles II.’s time, when money was worth twice what it was in 1797, and that they should be paid whenever a ship returned to England—which assuredly were moderate requests. The practical results of the old system were horrible. For one thing, as the men had to buy their clothes, they were actually reduced to nakedness and rags for want of money. When a crew were turned over in the style described above, the Jews (by race or occupation) were allowed on board. To them the sailors sold their tickets at the price they were likely to get in a forced market. On these occasions a certain latitude was allowed by the humanity of officers. Liquor was winked at, and the “wives” of the sailors were allowed on board. The scenes which followed on the mess decks reproduced the animalism of the South Sea Islands without the picturesqueness. But it was not only by the “Jews,” and on board, that the unfortunate sailor was pillaged. William Hodges, who in 1695 made a pathetic representation of their grievances to Parliament, draws a dreadful picture of the misery inflicted on the whole class by the monstrous system on which they were paid. Hodges does not measure his language, and was plainly one of those good men in whom zeal for justice has eaten up moderation; but his statements are too substantially in agreement with probability to be rejected. From him we learn that when the sailors’ tickets were sent home to their families to be cashed, the poor women were compelled to come up to the pay office for their money, even from Scotland, and then if they were ignorant of the forms to be complied with, or a “Q” (query) was put against any name, which he declares was often done on frivolous pretexts, they were put off, and had their journey for nothing. Of course they sold the tickets to traders, who made a business of speculating in them. Hodges takes great credit to himself for having bought large quantities at the very moderate discount of half a crown in the pound. It is probable that, allowing for all risks—stoppage of deserters’ wages and Government delays—he did not make much profit. Still, his boast shows that a sailor’s family was thought lucky if it only lost 12·5 per cent. on his wages. Hodges may be believed when he says that in one small precinct of London he found a thousand, besides children, belonging to seamen’s families in absolute destitution.

There must have been a great fund of loyalty and discipline in England in the eighteenth century; otherwise all this would not have been endured for over a century by armed men, who again and again had the country, apparently at least, at their mercy. It is noteworthy that it was mainly against this that the fleet mutinied at Spithead. The Nore business was the work of political agitators—quota-men, themselves supported by quota-men. Little was said of the cat, which may, we venture to think, be taken as evidence that the cat was never the grievance it has been called. Admiral Cunningham asserts that the good men considered it a protection against the bad. The grievance of the pay, and the inhumanly long detention on shipboard, explains why the real seamen, who knew how valuable they were to the merchant-skipper, avoided the navy as much as they could. It is said by Admiral Ekins that, when Captain Manley Dixon was commissioning a ship for the Mediterranean, his crew was made up by men turned over from a ship which had just come home. A body of them came to him to represent that they had not been ashore for nine years, and to ask that, if he could, the captain would give them a run. Manley Dixon gave them his promise that he would, and kept it; nor had he any cause to regret his humanity. Captains of this stamp did much to alleviate the hardship of the system, but it sufficiently explains the straits to which we were driven to get good men. They were, indeed, extreme. Prisoners of war, smugglers, debtors, boys, old men, convicts, anything that could stand on two legs—all were taken. When Manley Dixon himself laid the =Lion= across the bows of the _Guillaume Tell_ outside of Malta, he was not only short-handed, but the large majority of his crew were boys—which explains why he did not allow himself to be boarded by the Frenchman, who had some two thousand seasoned fighters on board. There is an absolutely comic story told of Sir Home Popham, who was going on a foreign station as Admiral. He complained to the Admiralty that his crew were mere boys. In reply, he was told that his books showed that he had received his due proportion of A.B.’s—which is, by the way, a pleasing illustration of the trustworthiness of official papers. Popham was not to be fobbed off in this style. He weighed his crew, and found that they averaged under jockey-weight. Then the Admiralty did scrape together a hundred grown men for him. A crew of boys with a stiffening of seasoned seamen was not unpopular with captains, for it was active and amenable to discipline. The convicts were another story, yet even with them something could be done. It is said by Ekins that one captain received a batch of fifty at once. He called them aft, and made them a pregnant speech. He said that he knew their record, but was resolved to consider them as men of fair character, subject to this one proviso—if any of them misbehaved, he was to be punished twice as severely as another man. It was noted that the convicts generally behaved particularly well, and no doubt came back reformed characters. Perhaps it may be said that this is not only a disenchanting picture, but that it starts the question how, with such materials, we contrived to do so well? To this question several answers may be made. The human animal, even when he is a quota-man, state-the-case-man, or convict, is indefinitely improvable by discipline, particularly when it can be promptly and efficaciously enforced by the cat. Our discipline was good, and the cat was not, as a rule, abused; such officers as Pigot and Corbet being, in spite of foolish talk to the contrary, the exception and not the rule. Then there was always a proportion of men who preferred the order of the navy, and its life of adventure, to the pay of the merchant service. These seasoned the lump. Then there was the captain, with his harsh standard of efficiency and his nearly absolute power, to keep everybody up to the mark. We had an admirable cadre of officers, and under them a good body of warrant officers. They, with a proportion of really fine seamen, and the steady corps of marines, supplied a mould so strong and so admirably built that a great deal of inferior material could be run into it without too much risk.

It was impossible that discontent should not be rife, and its existence was shown by the mutinies in individual ships which occurred during the American rebellion. They were generally hushed up, and quieted by concessions to the mutineers; but there was no general removal of grievances. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary war the grievances of the men were renewed and intensified. The press needed to supply the immense fleets then armed was severe. A rise of thirty per cent. in the price of all necessaries reduced the already inadequate pay to a starvation level. Minor grievances were more keenly felt because of the increase in the great one. It was the custom of the Admiralty to give the men only fourteen ounces for a pound in their rations, in order to prevent what was called leakage of stores. The medical stores were insufficient and bad; indeed, the whole medical department was ignorant and corrupt. The Greenwich Hospital pension was only £7, as compared with the £13 given at Chelsea. Then, too, the experiments of Captain Cook, and the reforms in diet by which Blane kept Rodney’s fleet in the West Indies in perfect health, had taught the sailors that fresh vegetables were an effectual protection against scurvy. Yet the Admiralty persisted in serving out flour to the squadrons when they were in harbour in England. The seamen felt—and they would have been made of strange flesh and blood if they had not felt—bitterly aggrieved that they, who were necessarily exposed to great hardships for the defence of their country, should also be unnecessarily subjected to a loathsome disease for want of what the Admiralty could easily have supplied. Here, then, were all the elements of mutiny. Legitimate discontent among the men, felt most keenly by the prime seamen, who exercised a great influence over their less skilful comrades, but also felt by the ordinary seamen, landsmen, and marines; and at the Admiralty an authority which was obstinate in neglecting real grievances, and had shown itself weak in dealing with insubordination in the last war. It was certain that as soon as a general combination could be formed—always a difficult thing to do among ships on active service—there would be an outbreak. Admiral Patton had predicted one as far back as ’92.

In the winter of 1796 a combination was formed in the Channel fleet then cruising off Brest under Bridport. It seems to have been confined to the prime seamen, who calculated, rightly, as it turned out, that their comrades would follow their lead. Four anonymous petitions were sent to Howe—“Black Dick,” as the sailors called him—who had been compelled by gout to resign the command of the Channel fleet, and was recruiting at Bath. Howe sent them to the Admiralty, which, finding them in the same handwriting, dismissed them as the work of an “ill-intentioned person,” and of no importance. This neglect was taken by the men as a proof that even Howe, who was very popular with them, could or would do nothing for them. They decided to act, and the opportunity came when Bridport anchored at Spithead in the early spring of 1797. It was known that the fleet would go to sea on the 16th of April, and the men were resolved that the order to weigh should not be obeyed till their grievances were redressed. By some means, which have never been revealed, news of this decision was given to Captain Patton of the Transport Office at Portsmouth on the 12th, and by him carried to the Port-Admiral, who at once forwarded it to London by semaphore. The Admiralty recognised the gravity of the danger at last, but could think of no way of dealing with it except to order the fleet to sea at once. Bridport hoisted his signal accordingly, but the men were ready with their plan and their determination. They manned the yards with cheers, hoisted the red flag—which was the recognised signal for battle—at the main, and took the command out of the hands of the officers. There are some features of this mutiny which are altogether exceptional. No man’s name is associated with it as leader; it was absolutely unanimous, the marines joining eagerly with the sailors; no officer was hurt; the admiral’s flag was not hauled down; the discipline of the ships went on as before—so much so that some bad characters, who took the opportunity to get drunk, were soundly flogged by their own comrades; but the crews would not get up anchor. A committee of thirty men—two delegates from each ship—was appointed to state their grievances to the king and both Houses of Parliament. It met in the cabin of Howe’s old flagship, the =Queen Charlotte=, and there drew up its petitions. They are excellently worded, quite free from bombast, and contain only a demand—firmly enough made, to be sure—that the pay of the A.B.’s might be raised to a shilling a day, and that of all others in proportion; that their grievances as to pension and rations should be removed, and that reasonable leave should be given to men in home ports to see their families. The delegates also insisted on a free pardon from the king, to be given in all the forms.

The devil in whom it had refused to believe being now raised, the Admiralty behaved after the unchanging pattern of authorities, who are obstinate when they might have yielded with credit. It became frightened. The position was, indeed, a dangerous one enough; for, though little memory of the fact remains, the spirit of the army was not much better than that of the fleet. The military pay had also remained stationary since the reign of Charles II., and in 1797 there was a serious danger that the garrisons near London would break out as the sailors had done. Fortunately, the Duke of York used his influence with success. The War Office was induced to be wise in time, and military discipline was saved from the shock of forced concessions to mutineers. There being no Duke of York to speak for the sailors, things had been allowed to drift to the pass they had now reached. By this time it was clear that the whole fleet was discontented. In the circumstances the use of force was perhaps impossible. There remained the alternative of instant, frank, and unreserved compliance with demands which, after all, were very moderate. Concession ought to have been the easier because it was universally felt in the country that the men were only asking for what should have been spontaneously granted at the outbreak of the war. The Admiralty took the weak man’s favourite middle course, which combines all the evils of the other two, and misses the good in them. The Board went down to Portsmouth and began to negotiate with the delegates. It showed a distinct tendency to make scapegoats of the subordinate officers, but refused for days to promise the rise of pay. The result of this line of action hardly needs to be told. The delegates refused to abate a jot of their demands. They even increased them by adding a demand that the grievances of particular ships should be corrected—in other words, that officers accused of tyrannical conduct should be dismissed. After ten days of useless talk, “My Lords” surrendered at discretion, promised everything, and took themselves off, having done their best to consolidate the power of the delegates, and not a little to weaken still further the authority of the officers. The red flag was hauled down, the Committee was dissolved, everything appeared to have returned to the old order, and the mutiny to be at an end. It was promised that the fleet should not go to sea till the House of Commons had voted the money for the increase of pay, and the king’s proclamation of pardon was published. Though it appeared difficult for the Admiralty to add to the blunders it had already committed, it contrived to do so. Some delay took place in the publication of the king’s proclamation, and the introduction of the vote for the wages in the House of Commons. As days passed, and nothing was heard of the proclamation or of the vote, the suspicions of the men were aroused. They knew the danger in which they stood, and began to fear that the Admiralty meant to cheat them. It was an absurd enough suspicion, but a not unnatural one. The Admiralty ought at least to have foreseen that it could only be removed by the utmost promptitude and openness, since there was no power at hand to control the fleet. Yet it kept silence, and delayed the execution of its promises from day to day. At Spithead discipline seemed to be restored. The bulk of the squadron moved round to St. Helens, leaving Colpoys’s flagship, the =London=, and the =Marlborough= at Spithead. Whether order would have remained unbroken is perhaps doubtful; but just at this moment the Admiralty took a step which set the whole mutiny flaming again. An order was sent down to the captains of ships which was a masterpiece of folly. It began by instructing the officers to be more careful in superintending the issue of stores to the men, and then proceeded to give them a number of directions as to the course to be taken for the preventing of future mutinies. The first part, which by implication accused them of pilfering—a charge never made by the delegates—caused profound indignation among the officers. The second, of which the substance was immediately known to the crews, converted their suspicions into certainty—and they instantly broke out again. With this outburst began the second and distinctly criminal stage of the great mutiny. Hitherto the conduct of the men had been as innocent as the nature of the work they were doing permitted. Now they were about to illustrate the universal tendency of all revolt against authority to degenerate into sheer violence and rebellion.

This order was to be inserted in the general instructions between the clauses providing for the reading of the articles of war and for the rating of the ship’s company. Among other things, it directed the captain to “see that the arms and ammunition belonging to the marines be constantly kept in good order and fit for immediate service as well in harbour as at sea.” At the end was a general direction to officers to be ready “on the first appearance of mutiny to use the most vigorous means to suppress it, and to bring the ringleaders to punishment.” Hitherto the inspection of the marines’ arms had been left to the marine officer. That a change should be made at this moment was not unnaturally considered an ominous sign by the men. The purpose for which it was made was clear enough to crews which were from the very nature of the case in a state of “preternatural suspicion.” Neither the arrival of the order nor its purport could be wholly concealed, though the captains were as reserved as they possibly could be. Rumours leaked out in an exaggerated form, and had the very worst effects on the minds of the men, who were already angry at the apparent delay on the part of Parliament to vote the money required to make good the promises of the Admiralty. This delay was undoubtedly a mistake. Pitt, looking too exclusively to the dignity of the Government, had decided that it would be the more becoming course to grant the money by a silent vote. As a mere matter of Parliamentary manners he was probably right; but it argued a certain want of imagination on his part that he did not realise the effect the silence of the House would produce on the sailors. The necessary forms of business might have made it impossible to bring the motion in sooner, but some notice might have been taken of the petition of the sailors to the Commons. Pitt decided otherwise, the Admiralty acted in its own injudicious way, and the mutiny broke out again at St. Helens just two days before Parliament voted the £372,000 required to provide for the increase of pay.

The disturbance began in the =Duke=, a three-decker, which had been the vessel immediately ahead of Rodney’s flagship in the line of battle in the great battle off Dominica in 1782. The crew forced their way into Captain Holloway’s cabin, and insisted on seeing the menacing Admiralty order. Holloway had destroyed it, foreseeing the effect it was likely to produce if made public. The crew were not to be stopped. They seized Holloway, and sent a message to the admiral demanding a copy of the order, with the threat that they would hang the captain or inflict “a degrading punishment”—in other words, flog him—if it was not produced. This was mutiny pure and simple, but Bridport was helpless, and the order was given up. Of course, it was instantly sent round the fleet to exasperate the prevailing ferment. This happened on the 5th or 6th of May. On the 7th, Bridport, having heard that the French fleet at Brest had dropped down to the outer harbour, hoisted the signal to proceed to sea. Thereupon the scene of the previous 15th April was repeated. The red flag was hoisted, ropes were reeved at the yardarm as a threat to “traitors” who should fail to support their fellow-members of the crews, and the officers were disarmed. The fleet was divided. The bulk of it was at St. Helens, while Admiral Colpoys, with his flagship, the =London=, and the =Marlborough= remained at Spithead. From the deck of the =London= the coming and going of the boats among the ships at St. Helens was distinctly visible. Judging rightly that the mutiny had broken out afresh, Colpoys decided to make a fight for his authority. He turned up his crew, and asked them whether they had any complaints to make. They answered they had not. Whether Colpoys overrated the meaning of the answer or not, he certainly decided to fight. The men may only have meant that, unlike the crew of the =Marlborough=, who had particular grievances, they had no complaint to make of their officers. It did not follow that they were disposed to break away from the rest of the squadron. The question was soon put to the test. Boats were seen coming into Spithead from the ships at St. Helens. They could only be bringing the delegates on their way to demand the adhesion of the =London=. Colpoys at once paraded the marines on the quarter-deck, stationed sentries at the sally-ports, and gave orders that the boats were to be fired on if they insisted on coming alongside. Then he ordered the sailors below. Some obeyed, but it was noted as a bad sign that among those who went below were the three warrant-officers, the boatswain, the gunner, and the carpenter. A portion of the crew, including, as would appear, most of the real sailors, collected in a group forward, and stood there facing the admiral, who remained with his officers and the marines on the quarter-deck. The delegates came alongside, and were warned off by the sentries. They then appealed to the crew, and with effect, for the men in the forecastle began to stir, and some of them started to unlash one of the forward guns and train it on the quarter-deck. Bover, the first lieutenant of the =London=, threatened to fire if they did not desist. Some of the men were cowed, but one of them, made of stouter and more dangerous stuff, dared the lieutenant to fire. Bover took him at his word, fired, and shot him dead. If the crew had been really wavering and the marines steady, this act of vigour would probably have quelled the mutiny. But, in the spirit they were in, it had a directly contrary effect. The whole crew broke out at once. The men forward rushed aft; those below rushed on deck; the marines broke from their ranks and mingled with the sailors. As might be expected in such a scene, different accounts were given of what happened. There was certainly a fight, in which several of the mutineers, a midshipman, and the officer of marines were more or less severely wounded. As a matter of course, the officers were soon overpowered. It is extraordinary that no harm was done to Colpoys himself. He attributed his escape to the fact that he faced the mutineers all through. They seem to have preserved some respect for him personally. According to one story, a mutineer who called him “a d——d b——y rascal” was silenced by his fellows with the threat of being thrown overboard; and another, who aimed a musket at him through a grating, had his weapon knocked out of his hands. But the men appeared determined to go to all lengths against Bover. He was dragged to the forecastle, and a rope prepared to hang him at the yard arm. The noose was actually round his neck, when Colpoys manfully came forward and declared that the lieutenant had acted by his orders. It shows how strong the tradition of discipline was among the crews still, that this was accepted as a justification. One of the topmen is also said to have appealed to the mutineers to spare Bover because “he was a brave boy.” The admiral and the topman contrived between them to save his life. Of course the =London= now joined the other ships, and the =Marlborough= with her. Colpoys and Bover were, after some discussion whether they should not be tried on board, sent on shore for trial. The coroner’s jury which sat on the mutineer found a verdict of justifiable homicide. The wounded midshipman and marine officer were carried to Haslar, but the sick and wounded seamen in the hospital showed such a savage determination to do them a damage that the authorities found it necessary to transfer them to a private house.

This second phase of the mutiny lasted from the 7th to the 15th of May, and was in all ways worse than the first. Many of the officers were set on shore by the men, and among them, Admiral Alan Gardner, who had, idly enough, drawn his sword on the delegates in the cabin of the =Queen Charlotte= during the first stage of the mutiny. It is said that when told that a cutter was manned to take him on shore, he replied that he should at least be allowed his barge, and that the barge was allowed him. When the news of the mutiny reached London, the Admiralty had recourse to the officer to whom it might well have appealed at the beginning. It sent Howe down on the 10th with the Act just passed by Parliament for the increase of pay, and the king’s pardon. It was the admiral’s last piece of service, and a more disagreeable one could hardly have been found, for he had in fact to notify the surrender of Government to the mutineers. It was a duty, however, which he could not possibly refuse, for there were no means of coercing the men, and they would apparently not be convinced that no deceit was intended except on the word of “Black Dick.” Howe did the work in his usual solid way. He met the delegates on board the =Queen Charlotte=, and persuaded them to promise that the fleet should return to duty. The promise was kept. The squadron went to sea at once, and there was an end of what is commonly called the mutiny at Spithead, but was in fact the double mutiny at Spithead and St. Helens. If the disorder had ended here, the movement would have stood altogether alone among military seditions. Certainly no body of mutinous men was ever provoked by more genuine grievances, and none ever behaved with greater moderation on the whole. But it was not in the nature of things that it could stop here. The men had tasted the pleasure of defying authority, which is of itself corrupting. During the second outbreak they objected by name to over a hundred officers of all ranks from Colpoys down to two masters-at-arms. All these officers were left on shore when the squadron put to sea. The Admiralty did not try them, and it did keep them on full pay; but it did not restore them to their ships. This was, of course, a very bad example, and could only serve to convince all crews that they could get rid of any officer they pleased. If the prime seamen had preserved their influence throughout the fleet, the agitation might have died quietly. But these men soon made the discovery commonly made by any class which has headed a revolt against one above. It had set an example to those below. In the Channel, where the quality of the crews appears to have been above the average, there was no more open disorder, though the mutinous feeling continued to require watching. On other stations, where the quota-men and the convict element were more fully represented, the example set at Spithead was followed, and this time the leaders were seditious agitators of the stamp of Parker and Bott.

The end of the mutiny at St. Helens overlapped the beginning of the mutiny at the Nore. This more criminal movement began on the 12th May, three days before Howe received the submission of the delegates of the Channel fleet. At that date the North Sea squadron was at sea, under command of Admiral Duncan, watching the coast of Holland. There were at the Little Nore some half-score frigates and small vessels, together with two 64-gun ships—the =Inflexible=, commanded by Captain Ferris, and the =Director=, commanded by Captain Bligh. This was the Bligh of the =Bounty=, he who was afterwards deposed from his governorship of New South Wales by Major Johnston of the 102nd Foot. It would have been strange if there had been mutiny to the fore, and he not there. The flagship of Buckner, the Port-Admiral, was the =Sandwich=, 90, which was not armed for sea-service, having only her upper-deck guns on board. She was, however, full of men, and of prime seamen. For fear that they would desert, these men were not allowed on shore. Buckner, who wished to preserve them for Duncan, would not even give them to the frigate captains who applied for some of them by name to fill the petty officers’ berths. We can understand that there was much sulky indignation among them, and that the news of the outbreak at Spithead, which filtered in, set up some ferment on the flagship’s lower deck. There was a man on board her who was admirably fitted, by training and character, to turn discontent into mutiny. In France, as it had been four years earlier, this man would probably have played a considerable part. By us he is only remembered as Richard Parker the Mutineer, who ended his life at the yardarm of the =Sandwich=. He was the son of a tradesman at Exeter, and he began life in the position of a gentleman, as midshipman on board the =Culloden= in 1786. He was discharged from her, and then from the =Leander=, for immoral conduct, and for setting a bad example to his messmates. In 1793, when he had finished his time as midshipman and was rated mate, he was broken by court martial for insubordination, was sent before the mast, and thence invalided into hospital. For a space he disappeared. When he reappeared, he was in prison for debt at Edinburgh. He had married, and had attempted the trade of schoolmaster. To escape from prison, he took the bounty, and came into the navy again as quota-man from Perth. He had only been drafted to the =Sandwich= six weeks before the mutiny broke out. This is not unlike the early career of many heroes of the French Revolution. Whether Parker belonged to one of our native revolutionary societies of the time is not certain. It was afterwards asserted that he did, and was sent on board as being, from his training, a likely person to foment a mutiny. This, however, is so much the kind of story which would be told that it cannot be accepted as evidence. On the other hand, it is not intrinsically improbable. He himself had the grace to “die game,” and without betraying his associates on shore, if he had any. All we can be sure of is, that he was very much the stamp of man who did belong to Jacobin societies, and that his training had qualified him admirably for the part he played. On board the ships at the Nore he had to his hand plenty of the kind of material which the demagogue loves. The London police had been in the habit of sending its criminals on board for some time, and among them undoubtedly were members of the Corresponding Society and United Irishmen. Men of a better stamp felt the common grievances, and there was a feeling among them—very wrong-headed, but not wholly base—that it would be mean in them not to back up their fellow-seamen at Spithead.

That Parker had been active in fomenting the mutiny is clear from the fact that he appears as leader from the very beginning. It broke out on the =Sandwich= while most of the captains were on board the =Inflexible=, attending a court martial on a Captain Savage. As had been the case at Spithead, no violence was done to the officers. In the course of the day an incident happened which showed the difference of the two movements. The =San Fiorenzo= frigate arrived from Portsmouth. The mutineers cheered her as she came in, believing perhaps that she came to ask her help for the Channel fleet. But the =San Fiorenzo= was a loyal ship. Her captain, Sir Harry Burrard Neale, seeing from the look of the ships at the Little Nore that something must be wrong, gave orders that the cheers should not be answered. This was a bad sign for the mutineer leaders, and in the course of the day they learnt that the crew of the =Clyde= frigate, commanded by Captain Cunningham, was also loyal and would obey their officers. This was a warning to Parker and his associates of the dangerous nature of the game they were playing. Their one chance of success was the unanimity of the fleet; but they had gone too far to go back now. It was decided to coerce the recalcitrant ships. On the 13th the =Inflexible= ranged up alongside the =San Fiorenzo=, and threatened to fire into her if the crew did not cheer. With the consent of Captain Neale, the sign of adhesion was given. It is one of the comic incidents of the mutiny that, when the men took the command from Captain Ferris, they rated him midshipman to show that there was no ill-feeling. A similar course was taken with the =Clyde=. But though these ships were forced to appear to join, and to accompany the mutineers when they went out from the Little Nore to the Nore, they remained loyal to their officers. The men of the =Clyde= did so far show themselves mutinous as to insist on getting rid of the doctor and the sergeant of marines. The latter was, perhaps, a bully, and the medical department was, as we have said before, exceptionally and intensely unpopular among the men. Cunningham would have stood by his officer; but the doctor became frightened, and begged to be allowed to go. The sergeant of marines was discharged regularly to save appearances, and replaced by a man appointed in the ordinary way. The conduct of the men of the =Clyde= and the =San Fiorenzo= is worth noting, because it shows what it was that finally brought about the ruin of the mutineers. This fleet was not unanimous. These two vessels were forced into the mutiny against their will, and on board all the other vessels there was a loyal minority. The daily proceedings on board were not noted with detail on the logs, for good reasons; but it is known that on several vessels there were officers who defied the mutineers all through and withstood Parker to his face; yet they were protected from outrage by a minority of the men.

There were two stages in the mutiny at the Nore. The first lasted from the 15th to the 31st of May. During this period the only ships engaged were those already mentioned. On the 31st vessels began to drop in from the North Sea, and they continued to come till the 6th June. These were the ships which aroused the intense indignation of the whole country by first deserting their admiral in the presence of the enemy in the Texel, and then attempting to blockade the Thames. During the first fortnight the mutinous ships moved out to the Nore, dragging the reluctant =Clyde= and =San Fiorenzo= with them. The red flag was hoisted, and Admiral Buckner’s flag was hauled down. Day after day Parker with his committee of delegates and a mob of mutineers several hundred strong landed at Chatham and paraded the streets with red banners. Buckner was helpless. The only garrison in the town was a handful of invalids, and they, it was noted, began, “when elevated with drink,” to express the intention to appoint delegates of their own and to demonstrate for themselves. Parker was abundantly insolent to Buckner personally, but, on the whole, there was no great violence shown. A committee from the fleet visited the hospital, and used such strong language that the assistant-surgeon, a certain Mr. Safferay, committed suicide in a fit of terror by shooting himself. The boatswain of the =Proserpine=, who had made himself hateful to the men, was seized and dragged off to the =Sandwich= to be hanged. But he pleaded the orders of his superiors, and, strange to say, the excuse was accepted, as it had been in the case of Lieutenant Bover. The mutineers did not, however, let the boatswain off altogether. They paraded him round the fleet with two large swabs tied to his shoulders and a rope round his neck, while a boatful of drummer boys beat the rogue’s march. There was as yet more vacant horseplay and noise than violence among the mutineers. So little did the crews appear to be in earnest that they allowed eight days to pass before they presented their list of demands. When it was handed in, it was found to begin with a superfluous demand that, whatever had been given to ships at Spithead should be given to those at the Nore, and then to contain a demand that a ship’s company should have a right to object to an officer, and that the articles of war should be revised. It was now becoming clear that there must be no paltering with this mutiny. Lord Spencer, the First Lord, with his colleagues, Lord Allan and Admiral Young, came down to Chatham with an offer of pardon to those who would return to duty at once, but resolved to direct resolute measures against the disorderly ships. The militia was called out, and steps taken to put Chatham in a state of defence. An attempt to bring the men to reason quietly was made on the 28th May, when the king’s proclamation of pardon was read on all the ships. It was not without effect. On the =Brilliant=, at least, the mutinous party only kept the upper hand with difficulty. Throughout the fleet the loyal minority was encouraged, and some of the mutineers shaken. Parker did not improve his popularity by causing one of the sailors of the =Brilliant= to be ducked for speaking disrespectfully of the delegates. Still the mutineers kept possession of the squadron. The first serious blow was given them by the escape of the =Clyde= and the =San Fiorenzo=. Cunningham and Neale decided to make a push for freedom, and would have done it sooner if they had not had hopes of bringing off the =Director=. Cunningham was sure of his own men, who had refused to put him on shore, though Parker came with the demand himself, and had stood at quarters all through the night of the 28th with the guns cast loose, expecting every moment to be fired into. On the 29th, Cunningham took an opportunity while the ships were swinging in the tide, so that he was not actually under the guns of a mutinous ship. He cut his cables and made a dash for Sheerness. The mutineers fired on him as soon as their guns would bear, but he escaped serious damage, and after tacking twice, contrived to turn into safe anchorage under the guns of the forts. Sir Harry Neale was less lucky. A pilot, who had been smuggled on board the =San Fiorenzo= through the mutineers’ guard-boats, cut his cable too soon, and she cast the wrong way. There was nothing for it but to run through the mutinous ships, which Sir Harry did successfully, though fired into right and left. The =San Fiorenzo= was carried over to the coast of Essex, and thence to Portsmouth. On her way out she sighted the first of the ships which had deserted Duncan standing into the Thames with the red flag flying. Neale kept the red flag up himself as long as he was in any danger, and then went on to Spithead, where he arrived not only safely, but with a French privateer, which he picked up on his way down.

The desertion of Duncan by his squadron was the culmination of the great mutiny. It was also the event which proved to the country and to the better stamp of men throughout the fleet what the consequences of insubordination inevitably are. None were made more indignant by it than the crews in the Channel, who refused to have any dealings with Parker, and even volunteered to assist in reducing the mutineers to order. News travelled slowly in those times, and it is probable that the crews in the North Sea had only a very vague notion of what had been the end of the Spithead outbreak; but they did know that there was a Dutch force in the Texel getting ready for an invasion of England, and they did their best to leave it an open road. As might be expected, the conduct of these men was throughout wanting in the moderation shown at Spithead. Among the demands which they made was one that in future a common sailor should be a member of every court martial by which a foremast man was tried. The revolutionary flavour of that demand was beyond dispute. When the ships actually reached the Nore, some of their crews not only committed acts of savage violence on officers, but were guilty of downright piracy.

The trouble in Duncan’s ships began in Yarmouth Roads on the 27th of May, the day before the =Clyde= cut her cable and ran for Sheerness. On that day the crew of the =Venerable=, 74, the flagship, who are said to have been instigated by Parker, and who must in any case have known what was happening at the Nore, ran into the rigging and began cheering in a disorderly manner. They had to deal with a body of officers who were not to be trifled with. Duncan called the marines under arms, and sent his officers among the men with orders to bring them down. The order was obeyed, and the men mustered in the waist. Then the admiral gave them a little address, the point of which was that he would go all lengths before he would allow the command of the ship to be taken out of his hands. When one of the men cried out that this was precisely what they meant to do, the admiral drew sword on him, and would have cut him down if his arm had not been held by the chaplain. Then he ordered all who meant to stand by their officers to go over to the starboard side, and was instantly obeyed by all the crew except six. These six were at once put in irons in the wardroom. They were, obviously, entirely surprised by the turn their adventure had taken, and sent a humble message begging for pardon. Duncan, with what would have been weakness in another man, forgave them. It was not credible that the crew of the =Venerable= was the only one infected by the mutinous spirit, and the admiral called on his captains to report whether they had seen any sign of disaffection among their men. With the single exception of Captain Hotham, of the =Adamant=, 50, they replied that they had seen none. Duncan went on board the =Adamant= and mustered the crew. There was a repetition of the scene on the =Venerable’s= deck; one of the crew of the =Adamant= told the admiral that they meant to dispute his authority. Duncan was, as his pictures remain to prove, a man of great height, and his physical strength was immense. He seized the impudent fellow, and swung him over the side of the ship. Then, holding him suspended by one hand, he asked the crew to look at this fellow who dared to dispute his authority. The Adamants cheered with delight, and no more was heard of their discontent. For a moment it appeared as if the admiral’s personal influence would keep his whole squadron steady; but the appearance was delusive. On the 29th May he ordered his ships to sea, and they stood out; but no sooner were they clear of the shoals off Yarmouth than all of them which had been declared to be trustworthy deserted him, leaving him only his own flagship and the =Adamant=, on which he had already faced and disarmed the mutiny. Duncan’s further conduct is famous in our naval history. He took the =Venerable= and the =Adamant= over to the Texel. There he remained through the summer, announcing his intention to fight the Dutch if they came out, and go down with the flag flying. As he had his two crews now well in hand, it is credible that, if the enemy had put to sea, our naval history would have included another last fight of the =Revenge=.