Two Naval Mutinies

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 27, 6 July 1905, Page 2

Two Naval Mutinies

History— like the human experience of which it is (or ought to be) a record— -has a trick of repeating itself. The great naval mutiny that has seized upon the remains of Russia's fleet and threatened to turn into a full-blown revolution had its dose counterpart in the great upheaval of ' the handy man ' that for a time menaced the separate national existence of Great Britain in 1797. In those wrtld and woolly days the ' wooden walls ' of England were (according to Lecky and James) ' the last, resort oi tainted reputations a nd broken careers. Scapegraces in respectable families, disqualified attorneys, cashiered excisemen, dismissed clerks, laborers who through idleness and drunkenness had lost their employments, men from every walk of life, who, through want of capacity or want of character, had found other careers closed to them., poured steadi-ly into ' the navy. Among the recruits were thousands of helpless Irish ieasants from the North and West, who were torn from their homes by the illegal \ iolence of ' Satanides ' Carhampton, ' without sentence, witfiout trial, without e\enacolor of legality,' during the first phase of the Orange Reign of Terror in Ulster. These heterogeneous elements, however, fused eventually into the splendid fighting material with which Duncan and Collingv/ood and Nelson faced the battle and the breeze and won such renown as had never before, and has neveir since, been achieved by the British navy.

Bi.t in 1797 things were far from gay with the men v. ho went down to the sea in fighting ships. r l he careless, dauntless, childlike sailor-man of whom Dibdin sana; livcU under a savage regime. ' Tfie ships,' says Lecky, ' were often hells uron earth The pay was miserable. The allowances weie inadequate The lash was in constant use, and in no other English profession were acts of 'brutal \ iolence and tyranny so common.' As in the Russian service to-day, the inferior quality and insufficient quantity of the food stood in the head and front ofl Jack Tar's indictment, side by side with the biutal and tyrannical conduct of many of the officers. A revolt was secretly planned. 'It was,' says a historian of the period, ' .so perfectly concerted that the whole Channel fleet, on which the security of the English coast mainly depended, passed without a blow into the hands of the mutineers, and it remained in them from the fifteenth to the twenty-third of April, 1797.' Like the Russian naval mutiny, it took place while the country was in the throes of a long-drawn and anxiouswar. The Admiralty had no choice but to negotiate. Submission was purchased by a free pardon and the concession of the principal demands of the mutineers. Then a storm of doubt and suspicion as to the Admiralty's sincerity passed through the fleet. The mutiny broke out again. Again (this time through Admiral Howe, whom the sailors lo\ed) the treaty was patchdd up. But, like the Russian naval upheaval, the contagion of revolt spread It broke out at St. lielen's, and then at SheiTiiess. At Sheernes'i it was headed by one Parker, an educated sailor. As at Odessa, he, too, raised the red flag of revolution. Then he sailed fo.r the Nore at the head of four-<and-twenty ships, blockheaded the mouth of the Thames, seized passing merchant vessels, and scared the wits out of 'the inhabitants of the coast towns with the promised terrors of a bombardment.

At this stage the Government woke up and shook itself, took off its coat, and got to work. Improvised gunboats were got together. Volunteers got their warpaint on and marched with the regulars to the threatened towns on the coast. Batteries were planted where they were likely to 8o most good, and (profiting by the lessons of the last siege of Gibraltar) furnaces were constructed for the purpose of enabling the artillerymen to treat the mutinied ships to doses of redhot shot. Intercourse, even by letter, with the mutineers was made punishable by the hangman's noose. Parser and his men ran the risk of starving for want of provisions. The mutiny gradually fell to pieces. Parker and a few other ringleaders were hanged at the yard-arm. The mutiny lasted thlrtyr-five days. The authorities learned the lesson and redressed the graver grievances that had made a living hell of a life on the ocean wave in King George's ships. And then began the golden era of the British army. But to this day traces of the old barbarism still exist (as was recently proved in Parliament) in the brutal floggings that are in'iittei for all sorts of trifling pretexts on >o..ng men in /the King's na-vee. The rule of the goldbiaidcd savage is not yet quke dead. But the Odessa lesson may shorten its days for other coi ntnts as well as for Russia.