The War of Wars (35 page)

The mutineers, in fact, had excellent cause for their actions, which were arrears of pay and bad food. Their demands were extraordinarily modest by any standards: first, ‘that our provisions be raised to the rate of sixteen ounces to the pound, and of a better quality’. The purser deducted two ounces out of every pound of meat and of flour in his ration as his perquisite. The purser of the period had no fixed salary; he was paid by gains of this character, and, naturally, as his perquisites expanded the rations of the sailors shrank.

Second, ‘your petitioners request that your honours will be pleased to observe that there shall be no flour served while we are in harbour’. That is, they wanted fresh bread while in port, instead of weevily biscuits. Also, ‘that it might be granted that there be a sufficient quantity of vegetables of such kinds as may be most plentiful in the ports to which we go’.

Third, that there be ‘better care of the sick, and that the necessaries for the sick be not on any account embezzled’.

Fourth, ‘that we may be looked upon as a number of men standing in defence of our country, and that we may in some wise have grant and opportunity to taste the sweets of liberty on shore when in any harbour, and we have completed the duty of our ship after our return from sea’.

They concluded ‘that we should suffer double the hardships we have hitherto experienced before we would suffer the crown of England to be in the least imposed upon by that of any other power in the world,’ but they were obdurate that they would not weigh anchor unless the enemy’s fleet put to sea and threatened Britain.

The strike had been carefully planned. Lord Howe, the highly popular former First Lord of the Admiralty, had for several weeks been receiving round robins and anonymous letters of complaint from Portsmouth, and had inquired of the admiral there whether there were real grievances. The captains there had put the whole business down to a few agitators. On 12 April, however, the port admiral learnt that there was a definite plot to take control of the ships on 16 April, so he rushed forward the date for departure of the fleet to the 15th, hoping to forestall it, but failed.

The seamen’s leaders were highly organized. They imposed their own discipline which was enforced through floggings. Each ship had its own ‘seamen’s captain’ to see that watches were kept and order observed, reflecting the high professionalism on which the seamen prided themselves. Every morning the crew was to man the foreshroud bars at eight o’clock and give three cheers as a sign of solidarity. A rope was hung at the end of the yardarm of each ship as a deterrent to indiscipline, although most miscreants were punished by being dunked in the sea three times to the intense amusement of crew members. Respect was to be shown to the officers, although they were not to be obeyed. The mutineers’ ‘delegates’ – their leaders – were piped aboard like officers and met in the admiral’s state cabin of the
Queen Charlotte
.

There the mutineers received the emissaries of the Admiralty. It was decided that Spencer, as First Lord, should not go aboard for fear he would be seized as hostage. So Gardner, Colpoys and Pole went across, where the first, an old martinet, started railing at the sailors as ‘skulking fellows who know the French are getting ready for sea and are afraid of meeting them’. The strikers’ leaders, quite reasonably, had asked for Pitt himself to guarantee their demands, and for a royal pardon: this was their only guarantee against terrible retribution. But after Gardner’s outburst the meeting broke up.

The mutineers now raised the red standard of rebellion on the ships and loaded their guns to repel an expected attack. Then news arrived that the government had bowed to their demands: these were to be met, and the King had signed a royal pardon on 22 April, after just a week of tense stand off. Cheering broke out across the fleet and the red flag was lowered. The fleet sailed for St Helen’s Bay. But arriving there the seamen learned, first, that the Admiralty had issued orders to the marines to be ready for a fight and suppress any further mutiny and, second, that an outburst of anger in the House of Commons had erupted against the Admiralty’s concessions. In an instant the mutiny was reignited and by 7 May all the St Helen’s ships were defiant once again.

Meanwhile Admiral Colpoys, who had reoccupied his old ship, the
London
, at Spithead, ordered his men to fire on the mutineers’ boat when they arrived to seek support: three ‘delegates’ were killed and five wounded. As the shots rang out, Colpoys’ own seamen revolted: one group tried to bring a gun round to fire on the marines. In the tense confrontation the first lieutenant of the ship shot a sailor’s leader dead before being seized by mutineers and taken to the noose on the yardarm to be hanged. Colpoys rushed forward into the angry cluster of seamen and told them that he had acted on orders from the Admiralty, which he had issued to the lieutenant, and that he if anyone was to blame and should be hanged. The lynch-mob read the orders, or pretended to do so, very few being able to read, and the lieutenant was set free. The other officers were also set free, but the mutineers decided that full publicity should be given to the Admiralty’s ‘concessions’. Guns were trained on the ships from the shore, while the ships’ guns were trained back at them.

The dispute dragged on for another tense week. At last the most popular admiral, ‘Black Dick’, Lord Howe, arrived at Portsmouth on 14 May. The hero of the Glorious First of June was received aboard with much fanfare, where he proceeded to defuse the situation and agreed to the sailors’ new demand that the most hated officers be transferred to other ships: this list makes interesting reading:

1 admiral, 4 captains, 29 lieutenants, 5 captains of marines, 3 lieutenants of marines, 3 masters, 4 surgeons, 1 chaplain, 17 masters’
mates, 25 midshipmen, 7 gunners, boatswains, and carpenters, 3 sergeants, 3 sergeants of marines, 2 corporals of marines, 3 masters-at-arms.

The dispute had at last been settled, and to music the seamen rowed around the bay in procession in honour of ‘Black Dick’. On Monday 16 May the fleet set sail at last, a month late, to blockade Brest. The French were either entirely ignorant of the whole affair, or had failed to take advantage of the precipitous collapse of Britain’s defences.

Yet the crisis was far from over. Just four days earlier, at Sheerness, the North Sea Fleet staged an exact replica of the original mutiny with the men climbing into the forespars and cheering. Again the mutineers demanded that ‘no disrespect be shown to any officer whatsoever’ and even that swearing be banned. They were equally punctilious about discipline, but it was an altogether uglier revolt. The seamen’s leader, Parker, set up a blockade of the Thames and would only allow ships to go through to London with permits signed ‘L. Parker, Admiral’. This turned the ordinary people of London against the mutineers. Pitt ordered a flotilla of gunboats to be prepared for use against the strikers. Communications to the ships were cut off. Pardons were offered to all those who gave up the strike, and those who persisted were told they would be branded as rebels.

Troops poured into Sheerness and the inhabitants were expelled. The buoys and beacons at the mouth of the Thames were moved, so that any attempt by mutinous ships to escape would be endangered. All trade to London was now blocked by the mutineers, and it was feared that they would move upriver to shell the capital with their twenty-four warships. It was only when it became apparent that news of the royal pardon had been suppressed by Parker and the other strikers’ leaders that the seamen began to waver. In addition, they were running out of supplies: although they were blockading London, they themselves were being blockaded from the shore. Finally, on 31 May, after two weeks, they parleyed, offering to return to sea in exchange for two months’ pay and clothing, and a pardon.

However, the government’s mood had hardened since the Portsmouth mutiny had been settled, partly because Britain was no longer
completely undefended against the French and partly because of the fear that strikes would soon become endemic: the much less important North Sea Fleet was to be made an example of. Their demands were refused and two ships left the strike. This was offset by the arrival of four other mutinous ships from the squadron blockading the Dutch coast, which gave the increasingly desperate seamen’s leaders some respite. Parker and his associates were now considering escaping to Ireland or America (although patriotically they never contemplated France).

When on 9 June Parker ordered the fleet to flee to sea, none of the other ‘captains’ obeyed: they went on strike against their own strikers’ leader. Two more ships suddenly bolted from the mutinous fleet, and were fired upon by the others. Meanwhile fights broke out within the remaining ships: several sailors were killed. On 13 June five more ships broke away, leaving just fourteen. The following day these hauled down the red flag and the
Sandwich
hauled up a white flag and made for port.

Parker was seized, along with 300 other ringleaders. The revolt’s leader, who came of a respectable lower-middle-class family with a small estate, was aged thirty, dark and good-looking with a prominent nose. He made an impression with his dignified calm at the trial, and was hanged at the yardarm after dropping his own handkerchief as a signal to the executioner. His parting words were: ‘I wish only to declare that I acknowledge the justice of the sentence under which I suffer, and hope my death may be considered a sufficient atonement.’ Other seamen’s delegates were also executed or, in that most cruel of ritual punishments, flogged around the fleet. Henceforth any further such mutinies were ferociously repressed.

St Vincent himself led the way when a mutiny broke out in his fleet off Cadiz; that ferocious old disciplinarian ordered the execution of a mutineer in 1798 aboard the
Marlborough
, a ship seething with discontent, and surrounded the ship with the rest of the fleet, threatening to sink it unless the execution was carried out by the seaman’s shipmates. Three other ships which had nearly joined the uprising were also threatened, and St Vincent ordered armed boats to row around one of them, the
Prince
, threatening to attack her if she went to the aid of the
Marlborough
.

A month later there was another attempted mutiny in St Vincent’s fleet, this time from the most disaffected element among the seamen, the United Irishmen, many of whom, after Wolfe Tone’s failure, had been impressed aboard the Royal Navy. (Some 25,000 Irish, most of them completely loyal, served aboard British ships at the time.) The leader of the rebels was a man named Bott, one of Tone’s senior lieutenants who sought the support of 200 men aboard the
Princess Royal
. Along with conspirators aboard a number of ships, Bott intended to seize the ships, murder the officers and hijack the whole fleet to Ireland.

St Vincent himself was in no doubt about the depth and danger of this audacious conspiracy, which would have dealt a death blow to British naval strength in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Bott, however, was by chance ordered to go on a routine boat mission just when he was supposed to lead the insurrection. He decided not to attract suspicion by refusing; and the other mutineers, panicking when the time set for the uprising had passed, revealed the plot. With St Vincent’s customary savagery, the ringleaders were arrested and hanged.

There were several other such plots discovered at the same time, although not on so large a scale, aboard the
Caesar
(in which six men were condemned to death for planning murder), the
Defiance
and the
Captain
, ten of whose crew were flogged through the fleet. But the spark had gone out of naval rebellion. In retrospect, what was remarkable was the way in which the first great mutiny, that at Spithead, had not been met with the brutality meted out to the later outbreaks.

The answer lay partly in Howe’s gentle and conciliatory character; but primarily in the very real fear on the part of Pitt’s government that revolution might spread through the fleet which was Britain’s only real protection at the time: had the French taken advantage of the mutiniest – (there are suggestions but no real evidence, that they instigated the Sheerness mutiny, as well as the one against St Vincent) Britain would have been left defenceless.

The most remarkable episode in the mutiny of the North Sea Fleet led directly to Britain’s third, and perhaps least known, great naval triumph after the Glorious First of June and the Battle of Cape St Vincent. The improbable protagonist was a giant of a man, a colossal six foot four inches in height, with a craggy weathered face, a huge chest and an even bigger belly who towered over every scene in which he appeared, so that young people would follow him through the streets of Chatham simply to look upon so powerful and impressive a man.

Admiral Lord Duncan, commander of the North Sea Fleet, in spite of his enormous physique and cliff-face features, was no fool: his penetrating eyes with their thoughtful, even intellectual expression revealed him to be more than a blunt old sailor. He was not brilliant, but he was practical and intelligent, as well as being utterly fearless. He had distinguished himself most famously at the attack on Moro Castle in the West Indies, where he had led his men through a gap in the walls armed only with a walking stick.

When mutiny broke out aboard his flagship, the
Venerable
, Duncan showed no hesitation: he simply strode down among the mutineers and challenged them: they went back to work. He spoke directly and plainly to them, displaying a deep Scottish religious streak in telling them off for swearing: ‘If there is a God,’ he told them, ‘and everything round us shows it – we ought to pay Him more respect. In the day of trouble the most abandoned are generally the first to cry for assistance and relief from that God whose name they have daily taken in vain.’ His somewhat awed men replied in a letter apologizing for the mutiny:
‘No one knows what unforeseen deamon possest our minds to act as we did; theirfore we pray and put our trust in the Almighty God that our future conduct may be acceptable to you and suficent to convince you of our fully repenting of our past mis-conduct.’