Barry Stone - Mutinies: Shocking Real-Life Stories of Subversion at Sea

In the vast, empty oceans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a ship of sea was a nation unto itself, an imperfect representation of the country under whose flag it flew, carrying the ideals, the laws and the values of its government to the farthest corners of the world. All that stood between life and death for its officers and crew was the respect the crew had for its captain, and the ability of that captain to lead and inspire his men.

The notion of a ship as a sovereign entity wasnt lost on the mutineer Richard Parker in 1797, when he called the rebel ships of Britains North Sea Fleet that fell under his command in the River Thames his Floating Republic. Mutiny was an act heavy in symbolism, and a ship that was without its officers and under the control of mutineers was a rogue statea law unto itself. The significance of the term was not lost on the British Government either. Such acts were unacceptable to governments whose power and continued longevity were often dependent upon control of the military and the maintenance of discipline and a proper chain of command. Stung into action by Parkers bold declaration, the authorities brutally put down the mutiny and promptly hanged Parker and twenty-nine of his accomplices from the yardarm of HMS Sandwich.

To refuse an order from a superior officer at sea, which is mutinys broad and grossly inadequate definition, carries far greater significance than simply disobeying an order. Whether it is a refusal to go into battle or just to swab a deck, refusing an order is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the government, a revolution in miniature. For a sailor or group of sailors to have their privileges withdrawn, or grievances ignored, to the point that they see even a technical act of mutiny as the only recourse left to them is an almost unheard-of event, and still retains the capacity to send shockwaves through a nations navy and its government.

In the days of sail the cramped, squalid living quarters in the bow that were home to a ships enlisted men were a stark contrast to the spacious officers cabins aft, emphasising the sense of separateness that magnified discontent and providing troublemakers with all the privacy they needed for the hatching of treasonous schemes. A ship can be a haven for disturbed minds and violent personalities, as was the case with Wager (1741), and small ships provide few places to hide from a mutineers bayonet, cutlass or pistol. With many vessels out of sight of land for months at a time, with their myriad hidden spaces and darkened corners ideally suited for facilitating the fermenting of grievances and the formulating of desperate acts of redress and retribution, it should come as no surprise that mutinies occur most easily at sea.

Of course, if a mutiny can occur at sea it can also happen in port, on land and in the streets, and governments have always been acutely conscious of the symbolic power even a failed mutiny can wield. A mutiny at sea involving a single ship is bad enough, but mutinies in home ports have a habit of spreading and encompassing entire fleets, particularly when vessels are moored in close proximity to one another and crews can coordinate their actions. In 1797 at Spithead, an anchorage in the waters off Portsmouth, a coordinated strike erupted in the Channel Fleet, Britains first line of defence against the navies of France, Spain and the Netherlands. The action began on the deck of HMS Royal Sovereign , was cheered on by the crew of HMS Queen Charlotte anchored nearby, and in no time the entire fleet was in open revolt. In Germany in 1918, what began as a mutiny among the sailors of the German Fleet moored in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel spread to shore and resulted, just days later, in the abdication of the Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II and the end of a monarchy that had been in place since 1871.

Despite the pervasive familiarity of the events involving William Bligh and HMAV Bounty , mutinies cannot be categorised or reduced to a convenient formula. The reasons that provoke them and the circumstances in which they occur are as varied as the crews that sail the oceans. A mutiny can be the result of the universal human desire for freedom and liberty, as it was with the Spanish-owned slave ship La Amistad in 1839, or a lightning rod for the igniting of a revolution, as with the Russian battleship Potemkin in 1905. Of course a mutiny can also be a bloody affair, as witnessed on the decks of HMS Hermione in 1797 when nine Royal Navy officers and Hermione s commander Captain Hugh Pigot, were slaughtered by a frenzied crew pushed to breaking point by their tyrannical captain.

But a mutiny can be almost endearing in its aims and motivations, like the day in 1954 when seven crewmembers of a Polish fishing trawler called Puszczyk beat up their captain, locked him in the lavatory, and sailed their boat into the English North Sea port of Whitby to ask for asylum and a new life free of communism. With the overwhelming support of more than 200,000 British Poles, the seven fishermen fought for their freedom in Britains High Court against a Polish Government determined to get them back, and won. Puszczyk s was an honorable mutiny.

Thirteen of the twenty-three mutinies studied in this book occurred after the Age of Sail; they include events aboard a merchant ship, battleships, minesweepers and destroyers. Even so, mutinies are increasingly a thing of the past. Two or three people cannot take over a modern warship. Unlike the days of sail, when all that was needed to commandeer a ship was the support of an experienced boatswain and navigator, to successfully wrest control of a modern ship from its officers requires the participation of enough sailors to maintain a sophisticated engine room, bridge and communications centrewhich makes Valery Sablins methodical and audacious commandeering of the Russian guided-missile frigate Storozhevoy in 1975 all the more remarkable.

Sailors have historically been moved to mutiny not because of a desire to gain some new right or privilege, or to grasp by using the tools of force and intimidation something that was never theirs, but as a last resort to regain something they once had that had been taken from them. Mutinies are rarely a question of loyalty to the flag the ship is flyingthey are born of requests for decent food, better pay, more humane living conditions. Even in the midst of mutiny, mutineers have for the most part remained loyal to their navy and to the flag it flies. Mostly, what some might view as mutinous activity is nothing more than the acquatic equivalent of a factory-floor strike or an industrial dispute involving little more than the presentation of a list of grievances. They are lock-ins. Sit-downs. For a period in the 1940s the Royal Canadian Navy almost owned the phrase: Sir, the men wont come out. It is rarely a question of sedition.

Mutinous behaviour is more common than naval records indicate, hardly surprising considering a mutiny is seen as both a stain on a navys reputation and an embarrassing admission of poor treatment of its servicemen and women. In the twentieth century, particularly as navies around the world have become more sophisticated, naval bureaucracies have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the stain of mutiny being placed upon them.

In 1919, crewmembers of the freighter USS Robert M. Thompson were protesting the ships abysmal living conditions and disobeyed the direct orders of their ensign to retire below decks. The refusal met all the textbook definitions of mutiny and was so called by the ships officers in their report to Naval Headquarters in Washington, but when it came to trial all references to a mutiny had been removed and the men were tried for disobedience. An incident in 1949 on the Canadian destroyer Athabaskan saw the ships commander, Captain Medland, casually place his cap over a list of demands presented to him by dozens of his crew so he could later claim not to have noticed them, toin effectcover up their massed declaration of grievances, one of the prerequisites of a mutiny.