Connections between Mutinies in European Navies

Abstract

During the revolutionary 1790s, an unprecedented number of mutinies tore through the British, French, and Dutch navies. This simultaneous upsurge of lower-deck militancy in both allied and belligerent fleets was not coincidental, nor was it simply a violent expression of similar pressures making themselves felt on ships under different flags but all engaged in the same conflict. Instead, through manifold personal connections, men who circulated back and forth across the frontline, and through the gradual emergence of a common political ideology, mutinies across navies constituted a single radical movement, a genuine Atlantic revolution in this so-called age of Atlantic revolutions.

The revolutionary 1790s were the Atlantic's great age of mutiny. Shipboard riots, mass desertions, armed strikes, all-out insurrections, violence against officers, and even assassinations swept through Europe's wooden warships like a wildfire. In just over 10 turbulent years, the French, British, and Dutch navies alone experienced at least 150 single-ship mutinies, as well as half a dozen fleet mutinies that lasted from a few days to several months and involved between 3,000 and 30,000 men each time. The waves of mutiny that washed through the French, British, and Dutch navies in the 1790s were each exceptional, but the simultaneity with which they crashed into quarterdecks on both sides of the front was wholly unprecedented. At the end of the decade, between one-third and one-half of the 450 ships and 200,000 men deployed across the 3 fleets had experienced or participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies.¹ Put differently, by the late 1790s up to 100,000 experienced mutineers were spread across the lower decks of the French, British, and Dutch fleets, all of them men who had risked their lives to contest for power with one of the world's most entrenched autocracies, the European naval officer corps.

This was a major revolutionary movement, one perhaps, as the English commonist Thomas Spence demanded, that ought to be named in the same breath as the great convulsions of 1776 and 1789.² Despite its remarkable scale, however, the mutinous Atlantic has been nearly forgotten. The practice of writing north Atlantic histories primarily from national and imperial perspectives has led to the movement's segmentation and thus reduction, and ultimately has reinforced the assumption that events at sea were only of marginal importance even in this so-called age of Atlantic revolution. The present article will therefore attempt to once again join those national segments together, and shift the perspective from shore to sea, by first describing the similarities between mutinies in different navies; secondly, by recovering material connections between them; and finally, by tracing the outline of a common political ideology that emerged out of the mutinous Atlantic.

Mutinies in the French, British, and Dutch Navies

For most of the eighteenth century, the French navy had enjoyed comparatively high levels of social peace on board its ships. Between 1706 and 1789, there were five times more mutinies on privateers than on warships, four and a half times more on merchantmen, and more than twice as many in the nation's fishing fleet. After 1789, the proportions changed completely: mutinies in the civilian and paramilitary maritime industries disappeared almost entirely, while in the navy they went, virtually overnight, from episodic to endemic.³ These mutinies, however, did not correspond to the popular image, most famously epitomized by the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty, of a crew swiftly rising on the captain, permanently seizing power on board, and then disappearing with the ship over the horizon.⁴ The decomposition of the French state apparatus, coupled with the ideological redefinition of the nation, removed the necessity of running away and instead allowed discontented seamen to use mutiny as a way actively to participate in the republican reconstruction of the navy. They seized that opportunity with great enthusiasm and revolutionary élan.

Across the French Atlantic Empire – from Toulon to Saint-Domingue, from Martinique to Brest – tens of thousands on board the King's warships embraced popular sovereignty as the new principle of naval governance. Officers suddenly found their orders endlessly questioned, debated, and sometimes overruled by crews who self-confidently declared themselves to embody the national will and therefore to be answerable to no higher power, least of all one put in place by the old regime. Bourgeois port city radicals, themselves engaged in a struggle for municipal control with the old naval administrative corps, in most cases threw their support behind these claims, and thus was forged a powerful alliance that together spent four years tearing apart the once mighty Royale. Crews rioted through the streets of Toulon, Brest, and Le Cap; they ignored orders and refused to put to sea; they sabotaged their ships, threw admirals into prison, maimed and even murdered a number of officers. By 1793, the lower deck had become almost ungovernable. But then came the war. Under the pressure of Jacobin violence, blistering nationalistic propaganda, and top-down working-class friendly reforms, the back of French lower-deck insurrectionism broke. During the Thermidorian Reaction, and continuing into the Directory's reign, there was a sharp, destabilizing rise in the number of desertions instead.⁵

Like the pre-revolutionary French fleet, Britain's Royal Navy experienced relatively modest levels of collective unrest for most of the eighteenth century. But the 1790s were different (see Figure 1). Initially, the wartime rise in the number of mutinies was quantitatively no more dramatic than it had been during the mobilizations of the mid-1750s or late 1770s, but in the early 1790s the nature of mutiny itself was qualitatively different. In previous wars, mutinous seamen either came together in illegal shipboard assemblies or they simply rioted to give expression to their discontent. Experienced officers, in turn, usually took view that such mutinies, while most certainly disagreeable, in the end served a useful purpose in allowing for the periodic release of dangerous tensions that inevitably built up below deck. In response, they quietly addressed whatever triggered the mutiny, and noisily punished a few of the men so as to re-establish the appearance of proper subordination on board.⁶

Figure 1 Courts martial for mutiny, British Royal Navy, 1755–1805 Digest and Analysis of Courts Martial, TNA: PRO (UK) ADM 12/24.

The mounting pressures of the international arms race combined with the first flames of revolution flickering around the Atlantic rim noticeably strained the navy's turbulent corporatism, and then led to its complete breakdown in the early 1790s. As soon as the fleet mobilized for war, the lower deck launched a series of rapidly radicalizing and increasingly militant strikes to demand seaworthy ships, the expulsion of cruel officers, better provisions, guaranteed shore leave, payment of outstanding wages, and other improvements to their working conditions. Unlike most previous eruptions, which had either been disorganized or relatively deferential, mutinies in the early 1790s tended to be both highly organized and extremely confrontational. The type of mutiny that first appeared on the Winchelsea in 1793 (and was subsequently perfected on the Windsor Castle and the Culloden in 1794, and on the Terrible in 1795) began with a moment of running amok, a brief period of furious but planned chaos below deck during which a hard core of mutineers quickly drove known loyalists up to the main deck, removed the ladders and secured the hatchways, and finally barricaded themselves in the stern of the ship by running in two of the great guns and pointing them aft, in the direction of the quarterdeck. Then they issued their demands.⁷

After a series of defeated single-ship mutinies, most of which ended with several men hanged, the lower deck's militant strike movement culminated in the famous fleet mutinies of 1797, when over 30,000 men on more than 100 ships immobilized the navy's home command for two whole months in the midst of the annual fighting season.⁸ At the Nore anchorage, where the fleet mutinies peaked in late May, the mutineers developed a sophisticated committee system reminiscent of the revolutionary sections of Paris, elected a president, and proclaimed their ships a “floating republic”.⁹ It was the largest, best organized, and most sustained working-class offensive in eighteenth-century Britain. And it could not be contained to home waters. Revolts ripped through the Mediterranean squadron, then the Cape squadron, and finally reached even as far as the small Indian Ocean squadron stationed at Trincomalee six months after the original mutinies had been suppressed in England.

The crew of the Suffolk, at the time anchored in Colombo Roads, learnt about the fleet mutiny from an article in the 9 October 1797 issue of the Bombay Courier, and in response demanded the same concessions as those they imagined had been won at home, and then more (including jury trials to replace courts martial as well as the wholesale abolition of the current articles of war).¹⁰ News of the fleet mutinies also spread to the Caribbean, where it fired the viciously violent mutiny on the Hermione, which in turn ushered in a new phase of lower-deck militancy.¹¹ Instead of the strike-like mutinies that had dominated the early years of the war, conspiracies and successful attempts to take over the ship, murder the officer corps, and then hand over the ship to the enemy now multiplied.¹²

In comparison with the French and British fleets, the Dutch navy appears to have experienced a higher level of unrest throughout the eighteenth century, but even here the explosion of the 1790s was extraordinarily intense.¹³ The combined French invasion and domestic revolution of 1794–1795 was greeted with mass desertions throughout the fleet. The following year, a squadron sent to secure the Cape of Good Hope colony surrendered to the British without firing a shot, in part because mutinies had broken out on several of the ships. Across the Atlantic, on the Suriname station, another squadron collapsed as low morale, miserable conditions, and high-handed, arrogant leadership triggered one mass escape after another, and also several murder plots. In the home command, things looked much the same. Approximately thirty crew members of the Utrecht were discovered in 1798 as they hatched a chilling plan to murder nearly every officer on board, fight their way past the shore batteries on Texel, and then sail for either Hamburg or England, depending on the winds. The following year, yet another fleet surrendered to the British amidst a violent, chaotic mass mutiny near the Texel anchorage. It marked the final, inglorious collapse of Batavian naval power.¹⁴

Though largely forgotten by later naval historians, the mutinies across the Dutch, French, and British fleets were not without consequence at the time. In the Batavian navy, where mutinies tended to be poorly organized and often lacked internal cohesion, the lower deck's chronic and violent disobedience nonetheless had the greatest impact. Not only was it a powerful check on the new regime's imperial ambitions and largely deprived its French ally of much-needed naval support against Britain, it also hastened the end of Dutch sea power in 1799, never again to be resurrected as anything other than a second- or even third-rate force. In France, by contrast, lower-deck insurgents rapidly moved beyond the exuberant chaos that accompanied the outbreak of revolution in 1789, proceeded systematically to clear nearly all remnants of the old regime from the fleet, and then pushed hard and successfully for a new, fundamentally different regime of shipboard governance, a victory that, at least in the short term, probably made the French republican navy a stronger, more highly motivated fighting force than its royalist predecessor had been. Only in Britain, finally, where mutineers struggled for years, where they developed highly militant and disciplined forms of mutiny, and in the end even mounted the single largest, most impressive insurrection of the whole period, had lower-deck insurgency comparatively little measurable impact on the war, other perhaps than driving up desertion levels, sharpening the manpower crisis, and scattering the runaways all over the Atlantic world, and sometimes beyond.

Figure 2 The mutinous Atlantic in the 1790s.

Motley and Mobile Mutineers

Even though each navy's wave of unrest was first triggered by local conditions, and subsequently followed its own trajectory, the simultaneity with which this extraordinarily large number of mutinies suddenly erupted in both allied and belligerent fleets is notable. Yet despite the surge in disaffected, violent mutinies across navies, common crewmen on both sides of the front never stopped fighting each other with great courage and savage dedication. The British, in particular, excelled at the newly reintroduced close-combat melee fighting of the previous century, but now with much larger crews, vastly more firepower, and consequently a great many more men killed and maimed in action. The Battle of Camperdown, fought between the British and Dutch navies on 11 October 1797, marked a milestone: despite lasting only a few hours, proportionately it was the bloodiest engagement since the Four Days Battle of 1666.¹⁵

The British usually out-killed their enemies by a vast margin – from the Glorious First of June 1794 to the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 by a proportion of about six to one – but against the Dutch at Camperdown the losses were more evenly balanced.¹⁶ Unlike French and Spanish gun crews who were trained to aim for the masts and rigging, the Dutch adopted the British tactic of pounding the enemy's hull with broadsides until there were no longer enough men left standing to return fire. They battered each other for hours at very close range until finally the exhausted, slower-firing Dutch were forced to surrender. Most of their 16 ships were damaged beyond repair, some were on fire, and three of them would eventually sink. Of the 7,157 men who had sailed into battle, 620 now lay weltering in each other's gore across the blood-soaked decks; another 520 were already dead. The British, who had entered the fight with 8,221 men, overall suffered 228 men dead and 812 wounded, many of them invalids for life. On some of the ships the carnage was staggering. The Ardent, which had locked yardarms with the Dutch flagship Vrijheid, received 98 shots into her hull, lost 41 men dead and 108 wounded. The Belliqueux counted 25 dead and 88 wounded.¹⁷

Such slaughter does not call to mind the proletarian internationalism eighteenth-century deep-sea sailors are known for, nor does it suggest that the growing intensity and violence of their conflicts with the quarterdeck led naval seamen to reassess and readjust their national loyalties.¹⁸ Looks, however, may well be deceiving. Before the battle there was in fact a fair amount of uncertainty among officers on both sides about whether their men could be relied upon to fight at all. As for the British, they were well aware that it had been only four months since the final collapse of the fleet mutinies in early June. Throughout the uprising, many of the mutineers had repeatedly sought to assure their officers that, as long as they were given “their Due”, they once again would happily “go in search of the Rascals the Enemys of our Country”.¹⁹ But unfortunately, quite a few felt that they had not been given their due. Instead they had been made to suffer a veritable reign of terror once the officer class reconquered the quarterdeck. At least twenty-six men were executed, seventeen were sentenced to hard labor, five men were flogged through the fleet, and hundreds of others disappeared into various carceral institutions, including at least two men who were deported to the newly established penal settlements of New South Wales and Norfolk Island, both not far from where the crew of the Bounty had mutinied only a few years before.²⁰

It was meant to be an awe-inspiring display of state terror, but did it work? Had the lower deck been cowed back into obedience? It was far from clear. In the four months between the final collapse of the fleet mutiny at the Nore and the Battle of Camperdown, radical mutinies continued to erupt in both the home command and on stations abroad. Not even the men condemned to prison gave up. Several of them broke out of the dilapidated Marshalsea House of Correction and others joined members of the insurrectionary wing of the British democratic movement to launch a prisoner-rights campaign in Cold Bath Fields prison.²¹

If the British officer corps had some cause for concern when contemplating the loyalty of their men, their colleagues across the North Sea fared no better. In the months leading up to the battle, diffuse and violent unrest rippled through the fleet assembling at the Texel anchorage. In May, a British spy reported that the French “have so little confidence in the Dutch sailors and officers that they have shipped on board of every Dutch ship of the line such a number of French troops as they think sufficient to maintain discipline and enforce Patriotism”.²² But the cure, apparently, was worse than the disease for five months later, just before the battle, some of the French soldiers who were intended to enforce discipline on board instead conspired to assassinate the Hector's commander.²³ On the fleet's flagship, the Vrijheid, a sailor was executed two days later for murdering a soldier. He was sorry, he said before dying, for there were two more he would have liked to kill. On the Wassenaar, Gerrit Jan Nuvest, A. Franssen, and Jan Thyssen threatened to murder Lieutenant Preckels, who had sexually assaulted several men, including Nuvest, on whom he had tried to perform anal rape. On the Kortenaar, counter-revolutionary agitators were discovered with orange ribbons in their possessions, signifying loyalty to the deposed Stadtholder William of Orange, who from his exile in Kew had called upon Dutch troops to aid the British war effort against the revolutionary Batavian regime.²⁴

If some of the Dutch sailors were thus eager to see the Royal Navy triumphant – or at least to see the Batavian fleet lose – one small group among them most likely was not: British ex-mutineers who had fled to the continent following the collapse of the fleet mutiny at the Nore. During its final weeks, there was a lot of talk about taking the fleet to sea, but in the end only a small number of boats set off. One of these briefly dabbled in small-scale piracy in the Channel, but soon took a French privateering commission to go hunting for British merchantmen instead. Their ship, sailing out of Dunkirk, was called Le Président-Parker in honor of the executed former president of “the floating republic” at the Nore (Figure 3).²⁵ Much larger numbers of men simply trickled out of England alone or in small groups during the months that followed the collapse of the mutiny. Some went to America and caused trouble in the young US navy, others headed for the Low Countries.²⁶ In late July, one of the Admiralty's agents at Gravesend warned that a “practice has lately prevailed of many seamen embarking for Hambro’ [Hamburg] or Embden [Emden], but in fact they go to Holland. […]. I don't remember seeing such a number attempting to go out of the Kingdom as there has been for these three weeks or month past.” He suspected that the ever-pragmatic Dutch had dispatched recruiting agents to make the rounds in London's sailor town, funneling men by way of northern German ports directly to Amsterdam.²⁷

Figure 3 “Parker the Delegate, Sketch'd by a Naval Officer”. Richard Parker (1767–1797), was executed for his role as President of the Delegates during the British fleet mutiny at the Nore. Some of his former comrades who managed to escape abroad during the chaotic collapse of the mutiny subsequently honored his memory by christening their French-licensed privateer Le Prèsident-Parker. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. Used with permission.

The Dutch, however, were not alone in taking the enemy's mutineers into battle, for at least one of the British ships at Camperdown was crewed in part by former Dutch mutineers. They had been part of a squadron that sailed from the Republic in February 1796 to reinforce the Cape Colony or, if it was already in British hands, to reconquer it instead. One of the ships had barely left the North Sea before the crew mutinied and surrendered to the British.²⁸ The rest of the squadron struggled on into the south Atlantic, continuously plagued by open disobedience, desertion, and even shipboard riots. Within days of dropping anchor in Saldanha Bay, approximately seventy miles north of the now British-occupied Cape, the Dutch ships were surrounded by a powerful Royal Navy squadron at sea and thousands of redcoats on land. Discipline completely disintegrated and chaotic mutinies erupted on several of the squadron's most powerful ships. Officers feared for their lives, many were ritually humiliated and several nearly murdered. When Vice Admiral Lucas called a council of war to determine whether to fight or surrender to the British, it was its unanimous conclusion that the crews were as likely “to shoot and kill their own officers as fire on the enemy”.²⁹ It was the most shameful defeat in the history of the Dutch navy. Of the approximately 1,800 soldiers and sailors who had been part of the Dutch squadron, all but 300 joined the British. Some signed on with East India Company ships and others to work the docks at Cape Town. Quite a few went on board Royal Navy warships, and some of them ended up alongside British fleet mutineers on the ships that went out to meet the Dutch at Camperdown the following October.³⁰

There was thus beneath the surface – or better, perhaps, below the main deck – an exchange of inter-naval mutinous experience taking place even during the most brutal battle of the whole period. The extent to which this occurred at Camperdown, as well as its neat symmetry, was perhaps unusual, but the circulation of insurrectionary experience back and forth across the frontline in itself was not. Deep-sea crews, whether employed in the civilian or military industries, were notoriously multinational, with average proportions of foreign-born men on board warships ranging from about 20 to 70 per cent, depending on the navy.³¹ At any one time, in other words, there were tens of thousands who served under a flag that was not their own.

As the scale of warfare grew, and its full centrifugal force was brought to bear on the lower deck, these men began to circulate between different ships, different industries, and even different navies at ever-greater speeds. Sometimes they moved across the Atlantic commons by their own volition – perhaps by deserting from one ship and volunteering to serve for higher wages on a second one – but, more frequently, they were tossed about by the vagaries of the international maritime labor market, with its multiple coercive recruitment systems, by the instability of life at sea, or simply by the miserable dislocations of wartime economic crisis. As a result, warships became like nodal points in a vast, ocean-spanning network of itinerant biographies, where men of many different backgrounds and with many different experiences temporarily came together, to work, live, and struggle side by side.

Few warships contained less than half a dozen nationalities, and many had double that or more. The mutinous crew of the Dutch Utrecht in 1798 included men from all over the Republic, as well as Belgians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, one Turk, one South African, one Bengali, and one Indonesian (from the island of Batavia, today's Jakarta).³² And for some of them, this was not the first time, the first ship, nor even the first navy in which they stirred up trouble. Louwrens Perinay, a native Hungarian and one of the leading conspirators, promised that he would have no problem slitting the throats of lieutenants Block and van Solingen in cold blood: he claimed that while serving in the Russian Imperial Navy he had “participated in this sort of thing more than once before, during the war against the Turks”.³³ Carl Ortmann, a native Pole from the great Baltic port of Danzig, was delighted to hear it; he pulled out a knife and promised the others: “Voila Guillotine – elle agira” [Here's the guillotine; it will do its work]. Before ending up in the Republic, where he came after being captured by the British off Norway, Ortmann had spent time working on a French cutter, where he presumably had learnt the language and picked up his bloodthirsty Jacobinism.³⁴

State authorities were painfully aware of just how dangerous it could be to let experienced troublemakers circulate freely, especially after the suppression of the British fleet mutinies in the summer of 1797. In Britain, while the fleet mutinies were still raging on, concerns that its spirit might spread throughout the empire prompted an ad hoc executive committee of the imperial ruling class – including among its members the Prime Minister William Pitt, Hugh Inglis, Chairman of the East India Company, Thomas Raikes, Governor of the Bank of England, Richard Neaves, former Chairman of the Society of West Indian Merchants and the London Dock Company, and current director of the Hudson Bay Company, as well as forty-six other men of similar caliber – publically to announce that any seaman unable to produce a certificate of good conduct from his former commander henceforth would be barred from working across all of Britain's maritime industries.³⁵ In Sweden, following a strike among the Stockholm iron-carrier corps, King Gustav IV Adolph henceforth forbade newspapers throughout the country from mentioning news of the events at Spithead and the Nore.³⁶ The next year, naval authorities in Brest expressed alarm at, and urgently sought to end, the daily interactions local fishermen had with British warships, as well as put a stop to the unsupervised circulation of foreigners in and out of the port.³⁷ Across the Atlantic, Captain Thomas Truxtun, rising star of the infant US Navy, linked the growing unrest among his own men in 1798 to the British mutinies the year before. “The Seamen of Great Britain”, he fumed, “have sat such an Example of Infamy, that the Marine Laws of the United States, England, France, Spain, and Holland, as well as the Rest of the Maritime Powers of Europe, have been, and will still be made more severe in Consequence thereof.” This was all for the good, he believed, for “it is in the Interest of all Parties at War, to pass Laws, and check such Proceedings, and it has been wise in them to do it”.³⁸

Truxtun's keen sense of quarterdeck solidarity, which extended effortlessly even across the frontline when it came to such matters as ensuring the smooth continuation of the war, was never quite matched by the motley mutineers below deck, despite their increasing mobility and heightened disaffection. Only in very rare circumstances did they refuse orders to fight each other, and there is only little evidence in either the French, British, or Dutch archives that they ever developed an explicit consciousness of being engaged in a common struggle that crossed the frontline. When they revolted, they did so over specific local grievances, or against specific officers. There is a fair amount of evidence, however, that in the course of these struggles they began to articulate a common political ideology – sometimes only in fragments, at other times in great detail – that appears to have been rooted, and to have grown out of, shared experience. That ideology we might call maritime or, better still, lower-deck republicanism.

Lower-Deck Republicanism

The mutineers’ political ideas derived from several sources. Most important among these were the centuries-old traditions of maritime egalitarianism, forged at a time before the seventeenth-century emergence of specialized deep-sea battle fleets when shipping ventures, including marauding and war-making, were decentralized, cooperative undertakings with shared risks, relatively flat hierarchies, and forms of limited collective decision-making. These principles, which had assured common seamen a voice in the management of the ship, did not survive the professionalization of maritime warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when coerced service and violently enforced hierarchies replaced the relative egalitarianism of the privateering fleets.³⁹ But the memory survived, often deeply submerged, and occasionally it came gushing to the surface with torrential force. It is no coincidence, for instance, that naval mutineers during the 1790s repeatedly invoked piracy, that Patrick Tobin, after several times being denied his prize money, called “black colors as good as any”, or that Colin Brown demanded “a roving commission”, for among the pirate crews of the early eighteenth century they found within recent history a workable and successful model of equitable shipboard relations.⁴⁰ Many of the mutineers’ central and recurring demands – for equal shares of prize money, for the election of officers and the limitation of their authority, for the company's right to determine or at least veto the ship's mission, for democratic jury trials, voluntarism, and contractual agreements – had all been realized among the pirates.⁴¹

The mutineers of the 1790s were also strongly influenced by the ideas of radical republicanism that swirled around the Atlantic in that decade. In fact, they used the language of the revolutionary era, as well as its forms of organization, with such frequency that the specifically maritime character of their struggles at times seems lost: they established “committees”, selected “delegates”, elected “presidents”, addressed each other as “citizen”, and spoke in terms of “natural rights”, “consent”, and “justice”. To be sure, these were all political forms borrowed from the revolutionary movement on shore, explosive ideological contraband that had somehow found its way on to the lower deck.

Perhaps it was smuggled on board by the rising number of landsmen who were recruited in the late eighteenth century, men like Lawrence Cronin, a Belfast artisan whom the war had turned into a republican, and the tyranny on board the Hermione into a mutineer. Or perhaps someone like James Smart, who once had lectured at a meeting of the London Corresponding Society and was considered “a Scholar” by his shipmates.⁴² Such men injected shipboard struggles with a broadly understood language in which to articulate political aspirations and grievances. The fiery enthusiasm with which that language was embraced below deck in turn suggests that its content corresponded closely to the egalitarian culture already there. Mutinous sailors thus had little difficulty integrating the ideas of radical republicanism with their own political traditions. A 1793 petition from the crew of the French frigate Melpomene, for instance, combined the traditional petition form of the round robin, in which the lower deck's egalitarian and collectivist ethos is expressed by signing names in a circle and thereby giving each equal prominence, with the language of radical republicanism: the petitioners referred to themselves as “the sans culottes composing the crew of the Melpomene”, addressed themselves to “citizens, brothers & friends”, and adorned the document with the slogans “Union and Fraternity” and “Liberty or Death”.⁴³

The repeated invocation of fraternity, or brotherhood, first in the address, then in the slogan, is important. Along with liberty and equality, it was one of the core universalist values of the revolutionary movement, one that expressed the ideal of solidarity with the entire human race. But it was also a value that resonated in particular with seamen who – torn from home, scattered across the world, and thrown together in close confinement with men from many nations – frequently emphasized their shared occupational identity by referring to each other as “brother tars”. In contrast to the landed revolutionaries’ principled but abstract embrace of fraternity, the “brotherhood of the sea” was a lived experience that on one level included the whole community of seafarers and thus enabled men to move between different ships and navies, and on a second level expressed itself on individual vessels in the creation of “fictive kinship” networks (or, in Marcus Rediker's words, “miniature mutual aid societies”) that were especially strong if a crew had gone through combat together.⁴⁴ These bonds were invaluable before, during, and after a mutiny, when the strength of a crew's solidarity could mean the difference between life and death for everyone involved.

Radical republicanism held a further appeal for naval war workers. When revolutionaries spoke of tyranny, the horrors of slavery, and the blessings of liberty, naval war workers knew better than most what they were talking about. For them, “liberty” meant shore leave, a time when they escaped the coercion, the constant supervision, the twenty-four-hour work cycles, and the terroristic discipline of the lash, if only for a few hours. Commanders rarely entertained requests for leave, primarily to prevent desertion, and as a consequence hundreds of malnourished, overworked, and bored men remained cooped up in a tiny, wet space for months and years on end, which was one of the most important reasons why epidemic disease repeatedly tore through the lower deck and left thousands of victims in its wake. The slogan “Liberty or Death” was therefore not just a threat, not just a measure of the lower deck's determination, but also a simple statement of fact. The ever-present danger of death, moreover, as well as perhaps the likelihood of having to inflict it upon others, in turn contributed to the enthusiasm with which naval seamen embraced the ideas of consent and popular sovereignty. Seamen in the Batavian navy, perhaps because they were all volunteers and to a large extent foreign-born, were especially prone to justify mutiny by arguing that the post-revolutionary change of flags invalidated their prior agreement of service: they had not given their consent to serving the Batavian Republic.⁴⁵

The issue of consent was also centrally involved when it came to the single-most important trigger of mutiny across all three navies: punishment. Again and again, sailors rose up and liberated a shipmate if they thought the punishment – by flogging, keel-hauling, running the gauntlet, or any other means – too severe or wholly unjustified. And significantly, mutinous crews during the 1797 fleet mutiny reeved yard ropes (used to hang men on board ship) in order to symbolize that they had reconstituted themselves according to the principles of the lower deck and from now on assumed the responsibility of maintaining good order themselves, an act mirroring the widespread erection of gallows in front of the houses of the French rural aristocracy in 1789.⁴⁶

This was more than just a confrontational gesture. Seamen were well aware that their collective security on board ship, especially when lying so close to shore as they did at the Nore, depended on strict discipline and careful attention to duty. The mutineers therefore took great care to maintain regular and good order among themselves, and they created democratically controlled courts to try men for a variety of offences, most commonly for drunkenness and neglect of duty.⁴⁷ In some cases, punishments were imposed “by the desire of the majority”, in others following the verdict of a jury.⁴⁸ Often the mutinous crews went to great lengths to follow proper procedure when trying a man, formally swearing juries and witnesses to strict impartiality, and providing the accused with a competent councilor who pleaded on his behalf.⁴⁹ The courts were willing to recognize extenuating circumstances, even when they tried their former persecutors. The boatswain of the Proserpine, for example, argued that he had only followed orders when he had abused the crew, and this was enough to sway the court to commute his corporal punishment to ritual humiliation.⁵⁰ Others were not so lucky. Master's mate Edward Dawson of the Monmouth, along with the sergeant of marines and a midshipman, was found guilty of conspiring against the ship's company and therefore sentenced to three dozen lashes, which was exceedingly mild compared to the bloodthirsty punishments usually imposed by regular courts martial for the equivalent crime of mutiny.⁵¹

If the reeving of yard ropes symbolized the emergence of a new order in the fleet, the red flags that flew alongside of them were intended to show that it was here to stay, whatever it took. The red flag had several overlapping meanings in the late eighteenth century, but it usually indicated the intention to suspend temporarily peaceful means of conflict resolution in favor of brute force. Authorities on shore, for instance, sometimes used the red flag to announce martial law, and in the navy the “bloody colors” signified that a ship was prepared to give battle. The latter use of the flag had evolved from the medieval baucans, a thirty-yard-long solid red streamer that north European ships flew as they sailed into combat to indicate that no quarter would be given or taken, or, in other words, that it would be a fight to the death.⁵² Pirates during the so-called Golden Age used the “bloody flag” to convey the same meaning, and they ran it up the mast if their prey refused to surrender at the sight of the black Jolly Roger.⁵³ During the great 1775 Liverpool sailors’ revolt, lower-deck insurgents fought under the red flag as they bombarded the city's Mercantile Exchange.⁵⁴ It re-emerged at Spithead, where it occasionally flew from the masts of the mutinous fleet, but at the Nore “the bloody flag of defiance” was there from the beginning and it flew throughout. Sailors even brought it with them to shore and marched behind it during large demonstrations they organized at Sheerness.⁵⁵

Unlike its earlier appearances during moments of emergency and struggle, there are signs the mutineers at the Nore embraced the red flag as a positive and permanent symbol of their ongoing fight for better conditions. One of their communiqués was signed with the slogan “Red For Ever” and an eyewitness reported that he had heard some mutineers shouting “Huzza for the red flag!”.⁵⁶ This perhaps indicates that a substantial number of the mutineers no longer believed that they were engaged in a narrow corrective or restorative struggle for lost rights and paternalist class compromises but instead had begun to develop a consciousness of permanent opposition between themselves and their rulers, the have-nots and the haves, that pointed towards the vicious social conflicts of the industrializing nineteenth century. Many mutineers in addition wore red cockades fixed to their hats and caps, bringing together the red flag's combative maritime symbolism with the red of the French Revolution, which by the late 1790s had become an international symbol of regicide, class warfare, and social renewal.⁵⁷ The mutineers were so successful in colonizing the meaning of the red flag that the navy dropped it entirely from its official Signal-book for the Ships of War in 1799, thus surrendering its powerful symbolism to the global labor movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵⁸

Conclusion

The radical republican ideas of the mutinous Atlantic cropped up with increasing frequency throughout the 1790s. Perhaps in each case they were arrived at independently, but more likely they are evidence of cross-fertilization, of a homogenization of lower-deck culture and experience brought about by the circulation of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of men back and forth across the frontline. This never resulted in anything akin to the famous Christmas Truce of World War I, and in only one known instance was lower-deck action explicitly aimed at preventing a battle from taking place, and the reason was not the men's principled unwillingness to fight their brother tars.⁵⁹ Mutinies, with only a few exceptions, were not aimed at forcing the belligerents to sue for peace, but rather to demand drastic improvements in the conditions of war work.

And yet despite that, the history of naval mutiny in this period, its massive scale, its transcendence of national and imperial boundaries, its politically sophisticated radicalism, does not support the conventional view that links mass military service in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with the transition of premodern patriotism into modern, belligerent nationalism. It would appear instead that the connections between mutinies in different European navies at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as the mutineers’ pioneering use of the red flag as a positive symbol, together raise the possibility that early working-class internationalism, with its dual strategy of pragmatic national claims-making and utopian cosmopolitan insurrectionism, may in part have had its origins in the revolutionary Atlantic, far out at sea, and deep below deck.