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.
The rest of the squadron now went off in detachments to the Nore, to the number of ten or a dozen line-of-battle ships and frigates. On board some of them, at least, disgraceful weakness was shown by the officers. No one, perhaps, has the right to sneer at the commander who quails before unanimous and violent mutiny, unless he has himself faced that most dreadful of military dangers. But there is no excuse for an officer who shrinks from doing his duty when a part of his command is ready and even eager to support him. According to Brenton, who was then one of his lieutenants, Captain Fancourt, of the Agamemnon, was guilty of this weakness. He yielded to his crew at once, and not only so, but when he was told by some of the petty officers, who sent the message through Brenton, that, if he would order the marines to act, a large part of the sailors would stand by him, he deliberately refused, on the ground that there would be a fight, and that he could not bear to see his poor men “writhing on the deck.” As was only natural, no captain in the squadron was treated with more absolute contempt by the mutineers than Fancourt. By the 6th of June the North Sea ships had assembled at the Nore. Their arrival revived the spirit of Parker and his associates, which had been greatly shaken by the escape of the Clyde and the San Fiorenzo, and then further damped by the subsequent escape of the Serapis and the Discovery, armed transports, which succeeded in following the example set by the frigates. The news, too, from the shore was very bad; but the leaders still hoped to cow the country. A blockade of the river was ordered, and the trade stopped. Parker still professed great loyalty. The feasts on the Restoration Day, 29th of May, and the King’s Birthday, the 4th of June, were observed with all the usual forms. On the 4th of June, Parker sent on shore for the chaplain of the Sandwich to preach the Birthday sermon. The chaplain, whose name was Hatherall, came, and he had the courage to choose for his text Job xxvii. 5—“God forbid that I should justify you; till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me”—and to preach a loyal sermon on it. To the credit of the men, he was allowed to land unhurt. Other incidents of these days were not equally creditable. The surgeon of one ship was tarred and feathered. Brenton, who does not give the names, says that this man had been drunk in his cabin for five weeks, and he half excuses the act as one of “wild justice.” On the Monmouth, whose captain, Lord Northesk, afterwards third in command at Trafalgar, disliked the use of the cat, the men flogged the second master, two masters’ mates, a midshipman, and a sergeant of marines. They then shaved their heads, and turned them ashore. Parties landed from the ships and plundered the farmhouses. Trading vessels were overhauled and pillaged. In fact, the fleet was rapidly drifting into mere piracy. Meanwhile the anger on shore was growing daily. Troops and volunteers poured into Sheerness. The forts at the mouth of the Thames were supplied with furnaces for heating shot. Some vessels in the Long Reach were manned and got ready for service. The whole body of merchant seamen, who were threatened by the blockade of the Thames, were eager to serve against the mutineers. On the 6th of June Parliament passed the Act for preventing the seduction of sailors or soldiers, which made all communication with the mutineers an indictable offence.
This Act really broke the backbone of the mutiny. It showed the men that the country was not to be cowed. The timid or more moderate were frightened, and those who had committed themselves too far began to clamour for desperate courses. Parker talked of taking the ships over to Holland, and surrendering them to the enemy. Whether, even if he had induced the squadron to follow him, he could have got off is very doubtful. Lord Keith, who had arrived a few days before to take command of the naval operations against the mutineers, had removed the beacons and buoys from the Swin and other shallows at the mouth of the Thames, for the express purpose of cutting off their retreat. Without pilots, whom they could not obtain, they could hardly have got the ships out. But there was no inclination on the part of the men to follow Parker they knew not where. He himself obviously felt that the game was going against him, but an air of defiance was kept up painfully enough. Lord Northesk was “ordered” on shore with a statement of grievances to be given to the king. On the 7th the effigies of “Billy Pitt” and “Dundas” were hung at the yardarm. Parker went round the fleet reading extracts from what he called the king’s “foolish” proclamation, with seditious comments; but on board the Ardent, 74, he was openly rebuked by a Lieutenant Wardour for garbling it, and enough men stood by the officer to save him from retaliation. In fact, the dislike of all Englishmen for an upstart was beginning to tell against the mutineer leader. He was openly jeered at as a “pretty admiral of the fleet.” It does not appear that Parker ever called himself by this title, and the story that he proclaimed a “floating republic” is a myth; but he did exercise authority, and it soon became offensive. On the 10th June the first-fruits of the combined disgust, fear, and repentance of the men was seen in the escape of the Leopard. The captain had been landed, but one lieutenant at least remained on board, with some subordinate officers. This officer, whose name was Robb, learnt that he would find support if he attempted to retake the ship. During the night of the 9th June, he, with the help of some masters, mates, and midshipmen, trained two of the wardroom guns forward and loaded them with grape-shot. Next morning, when the tide was flowing, and therefore able to carry the ship up the river, he threw open the door and unmasked his battery. Then, leaving trusty men by the guns with orders to sweep the deck, if necessary, he rushed out and ordered the mutineers to surrender. There was a fight, but in the end Robb and his fellow-officers contrived to cut the cable, to get enough sail set to give the Leopard steerage way, and to carry her off, fighting fiercely all the time with those of the mutineers who refused to submit. He brought her up the Thames with the remnant of the mutineers under hatches. The Repulse, 64, followed. Her crew spontaneously replaced the officers in command. She ran on the Nore Sand and lay under the fire of the mutineers for an hour and a half, but was at last got off, and carried into Sheerness. From that moment till the final surrender of the Sandwich, one vessel after another either cut and ran, or merely hauled down the red flag and hoisted the blue—which the sailors called the “signal of agreeableness.” On board the Standard the leader of the mutineers, whose name, “strangely enough,” says Captain Cunningham, was William Wallace, shot himself when he saw the game was up. A few of the more desperate men seized a smack and fled across the North Sea. They ran her ashore on the coast of Holland. Parker himself, whether from irresolution or from what in a better man one might call magnanimity, did not attempt to escape. He was surrendered by his messmates of the Sandwich, and, as we have said, met his death at the fore-yardarm like a man, having written the proper sort of letter to his wife, expressed due contrition for his offences, and asked, as the leader of an unsuccessful rebellion should, that his life might be accepted as sufficient sacrifice. If it was all, or even partly, affectation, at least it was the affectation of a man who knew the becoming thing to do. There were in all eighteen mutineers executed, of whom four were marines. The total number of men condemned to death was nearly forty; but the Government was not disposed to be more severe than it could help. When Duncan, at the head of a fleet consisting almost wholly of ships which had been in the mutiny, gained the battle of Camperdown, the king was advised to publish a general pardon. It was long before the discipline of the navy wholly recovered the shock it had received; but the great mutiny was over, and the State could afford to be generous without fear that its generosity would be mistaken for weakness.
The grievances of the men being universal, the conditions which led to insubordination were found everywhere more or less. As the Government in its dire need of men had gone so far as to send such known rebels as United Irishmen into the crews of some of its ships—particularly into those which had their headquarters at Beerhaven and to some of the vessels with Jervis—there was no lack of agitators ready to profit by the unrest of their comrades. Something, too, must be allowed for the force of example. Men mutinied on one station when they heard of a mutiny elsewhere. It was the report from Spithead which started the outbreak at the Nore. It was the arrival of the Alcmene frigate from the Nore which set going the ferment in Jervis’s squadron. The fatal result of all successful insubordination is that it sets the worser kind of man arguing that, if so much has been extorted already, more can be obtained by the same method. Therefore spasmodic outbreaks continued for a time to occur at home and abroad as the fire spread. Some were of little importance, and may be briefly dismissed. Among them was the insubordination at Plymouth which followed the mutiny at the Nore. Lord Keith had been sent there from Sheerness when the last of Parker’s followers surrendered. He was to hoist his flag in the Queen Charlotte as second in command of the Channel fleet. The outbreak was a comparatively slight one, and Keith quelled it by firmness and tact. In October, so soon as the news began to arrive from home, a very serious mutiny took place among the ships at the Cape. This was suppressed mainly by the firmness of the governor, Lord Macartney, and of Dundas, the general in command. They threatened to sink the ships, which were few in number and were lying under the guns of the forts. To this threat the men surrendered. Several of the more active leaders were hanged or flogged.
The most dangerous and the best known aftermath of the great convulsion at home was the so-called mutiny off Cadiz. The movement never went beyond partial disorder and treasonable threats in individual ships. Still, in view of Duncan’s experience at Yarmouth, it would be rash to assert that if firmness and promptitude had not been shown, a part at least of the Mediterranean fleet would not have broken away. It does not appear that Jervis had cause to distrust the ships which had fought under him on the 14th February, but as the summer wore on the Government began to reinforce him. Not unnaturally, it selected for this service such ships as it preferred to employ at a distance—namely, those which had been conspicuous in the Spithead mutiny, or had been noted for bad conduct in the squadron serving under Curtis on the coast of Ireland. These ships were swarming with United Irishmen, who formed a large proportion of the eleven to twelve thousand Irish in the fleet. In Jervis’s own squadron the marines had been largely recruited among Erse-speaking Irishmen. The admiral was early informed of what had happened in the Channel, and took his measures with vigour. All visiting from ship to ship was stopped, even the captains being forbidden to ask one another to dinner. The marines were quartered apart from the sailors, and the speaking of Irish was forbidden. Jervis took the wise and bold course. He made no attempt to conceal the news of the mutiny at home from his men. When the letter-bags were found to contain circulars, written in a fair hand, inciting the crews to mutiny, he ordered them to be delivered. He trusted to his own vigilance and to the wholesome effects of occupation. The bombardments of Cadiz were at least partly undertaken to keep the men busy. Being a man of judgment, he looked to it carefully that his men were well fed. He spared no pains to procure fresh food and vegetables from Morocco, so that his squadron was better provisioned and was in better health than many ships had been in home ports. Under an admiral of this stamp mutiny had the least possible chance of coming to a head. Resolute officers knew they would be supported, and the crews were saved from the exasperation provoked by unfair treatment and unwholesome food. Therefore Jervis never had to deal with a general outbreak, as Bridport had at Spithead, but only with the rebellious element represented by the United Irishmen, or rascals of the stamp of Bott of the Princess Royal, an agent of the Corresponding Society. A little firmness was enough to dispose of them. How completely this was the case was shown by the fact that Maitland of the Kingfisher (afterwards Maitland of the Bellerophon) suppressed disorder in his vessel by running the first man who was mutinous to him through the heart, and Captain Pearce of the St. George, with the help of his first lieutenant, Halley, was able to seize and put in irons two agitators who were rash enough to defy his authority. They were tried, condemned to death, and hanged next day. The admiral’s determination and his power to keep order were never doubted in his squadron. Among the vessels sent from the Channel was the London, the vessel in which Lieutenant Bover had shot the mutineer. Bover had returned to his post, and it does not appear that the crew bore him any grudge. When the London came into the Tagus, her captain, Purvis, went in his barge to report to the admiral. While he was in the flagship, the Ville de Paris, one of his barge’s crew, seeing a sailor looking out of a lower-deck port, sang out to him, “I say there, what have you fellows been doing while we have been fighting for your beef and pork?” The sailor of the Ville de Paris gave him this friendly warning: “If you’ll take my advice, you’ll say just nothing at all about all that here, for by G——d if old Jarvie hears ye, he’ll have you dingle dangle at the yardarm at eight o’clock to-morrow morning.” The crisis of the disorder was the so-called mutiny of the Marlborough. This vessel had come out from England, where an outbreak quelled with some difficulty had taken place in her. A court martial was held on the principal mutineers, and one of them was condemned to death. Jervis, who had a keen sense of the value of an imposing spectacle, determined to make an example. He gave orders that the execution should be carried out next morning, although it was a Sunday, and by the crew of the Marlborough—not, as was the custom, by a boat’s crew from another ship. Captain Ellison, of the Marlborough, an old officer who had lost an arm in action, went to the flagship to protest, and was received by Jervis very theatrically on the quarter-deck of the Ville de Paris, in the presence of all her officers. Jervis refused either to postpone the execution or to allow it to be performed in the usual way. With a brutal ostentation of authority, not unusual with him, he insulted Ellison by asking him if he was afraid, by threatening to send an officer to supersede him, and by jeering at his age. Ellison was compelled to endure the insolence of the admiral. He returned to the Marlborough, and next morning the execution took place in sight of all the fleet. A large force of armed boats was sent under Captain Campbell of the Blenheim with orders to lie alongside the Marlborough and fire into her if any disorder took place on board. The mutineer was brought to the cathead, and the rope was put round his neck. At eight o’clock the signal gun was fired from the flagship, and the man was swung off. By some horrible piece of neglect the tackle had been so badly fitted that it would not work properly, and the man had to be lowered. For a moment it was thought that the crew had broken into mutiny, and Campbell brought his boats nearer. But the defect was quickly put right, and the execution was completed. Then Jervis, who had been watching the scene from his flagship, said, “Discipline is preserved, sir.”
No account of the year of mutiny would be complete without at least some record of the story of the Hermione frigate. It was a case in which a badly constituted crew was driven frantic by a captain of manifestly inhuman violence and brutality. The mutiny occurred in September in the West Indies. Pigot, the captain, was an officer of no mark. He seems to have been one of those men in whom the exercise of authority and seclusion from the check of criticism by equals permit the development of moral putrefaction. It is difficult to write on that subject without touching on things which are tacenda. There was in the sea life of long confinement to the ship and long solitary cruises an underworld of the brutal lust generated among segregated men. The power to torture by flogging bred the foul love of inflicting torture which is never far from lust. It is a stock, and as it seems, a true story that Pigot, growing more and more frantic in cruelty, ended by threatening to flog the last men off the yards when the sails were handled. Two fell in their hurry to come down, and were killed by their fall on the deck. Pigot ordered the bodies of “the lubbers” to be thrown overboard. That night “hell broke loose” in the Hermione. The crew rose in revolt. Pigot was beaten down in his cabin and hurled overboard, all the commissioned officers were butchered—some of them while piteously appealing for mercy for the sake of their wives and children. The gunner, the carpenter, and one midshipman only were spared. It is recorded that the boatswain was given over to be tortured by the ship’s boys, and that they killed him slowly by scraping his flesh from his bones with dumbscrapers. Then the mutineers took the ship into La Guayra, and handed her over to the Spaniards.
It has been counted a signal example of the good fortune of England that the French made no attempt to profit by the disorganisation of the fleet during all these months of 1797. Some ridicule has been directed in France against members of the Directory who thought interference would be injudicious, since it would only tend to reunite the English. Yet the Frenchmen who judged thus judged rightly. There was no general disloyalty to the State among the mutineers. If there had been, what could have prevented the mutineers from taking the ships to Brest, or the Texel? If they shrank from going over to the enemy, they could still have sailed to America, for they were provisioned for long blockades, and there were men among them who could navigate. In the United States they would have found a safe refuge in an English-speaking community. They rose only against grievances. They did not attain all they wished, but they obtained a part, and they shocked their rulers into beginning to improve the conditions of their service.