The naval mutinies of 1797 were unprecedented in scale and impressive in their level of organisation. This volume focuses on new research, re-evaluating the causes and events which led to the seamen's revolts.

Reveals how poor governance and everyday forms of organization resulted in mutiny amongst seamen during the Age of Sail.

Nothing is more terrifying to a seagoing captain than the specter of mutiny, and nothing more riveting than a tale of mutinous deeds. Here Leonard F. Guttridge provides a casebook of mutinies that have occurred over the past two hundred years-from the Magellan expedition to the U.S. aircraft carrier Constellation.--amazon.com

In 1797 the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy took place on the British frigate HMS Hermione off the coast of Puerto Rico. Jonathan Robbins, a reputed American sailor who had been impressed into service, made his way to American shores. President John Adams bowed to Britain’s request for his extradition. Convicted of murder and piracy by a court-martial in Jamaica, Robbins was hanged. Adams’s catastrophic miscalculation ignited a political firestorm, only to be fanned by Robbins’s failure to receive his constitutional rights of due process and trial by jury by an American court. American Sanctuary brilliantly lays out in riveting detail the story of how the Robbins affair, amid the turbulent presidential campaign of 1800, inflamed the new nation and set in motion a constitutional crisis, resulting in Adams’s defeat and Thomas Jefferson’s election as the third president of the United States. Robbins’s martyrdom led directly to the country’s historic decision to grant political asylum to foreign refugees—a major achievement in fulfilling the promise of American independence.

The author of How to Cook from A-Z disproves the myth of British navy culinary misconduct in “a work of serious history that is a delight to read” (British Food in America). This celebration of the Georgian sailor’s diet reveals how the navy’s administrators fed a fleet of more than 150,000 men, in ships that were often at sea for months on end and that had no recourse to either refrigeration or canning. Contrary to the prevailing image of rotten meat and weevily biscuits, their diet was a surprisingly hearty mixture of beer, brandy, salt beef and pork, peas, butter, cheese, hard biscuit, and the exotic sounding lobscouse, not to mention the Malaga raisins, oranges, lemons, figs, dates, and pumpkins which were available to ships on far-distant stations. In fact, by 1800 the British fleet had largely eradicated scurvy and other dietary disorders. While this scholarly work contains much of value to the historian, the author’s popular touch makes this an enthralling story for anyone with an interest in life at sea in the age of sail. “Overall this is an excellent examination of this crucial aspect of British naval power, and I’m certainly going to try out some of the recipes.” —HistoryOfWar.org

Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era’s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.

THE time is 1797. The armies of the French Revolution have swept over Europe, leaving Britain’s eight million people to stand alone against populations totaling more than fifty million. On the Continent an enormous invasion force is massing; while in England the country is nearly bankrupt and popular discontent is so widespread that the monarchy itself is in danger and the possibility of a British Republic looms. At the height of the crisis, the British fleet mutinies in protest against poor pay, impossible living conditions, short and inedible rations, brutality and impressment, leaving England completely vulnerable to her enemies. Over 50,000 men serving in 113 ships refuse orders, expel their officers and set up ship democracy in the longest and largest naval insurrection in history. Their revolt becomes both a symptom and a cause of the internal dissension that wracks their country and in THE GREAT MUTINY, provides the focus for a panoramic view of Georgian England. Here are the great names of the time: mad George III, gobbling his breakfast oatmeal and embarking on a twenty-mile stag chase while half his fleet was lowering the royal standard: his Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger; the opposition leader in Parliament, Charles James Fox; Captain William Bligh of Bounty fame; the young Bonaparte; and Winston Churchill’s great-great-grandfather, the Second Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty.

The naval mutiny of 1797 is the most astonishing recorded in British history; by its management rather than by its results. Though it shook the country, it was largely ordered with rigid discipline, a respect for officers and an unswerving loyalty to the King. Moreover, it was so rationally grounded that it not only achieved its immediate end, the betterment of the sailor's lot, but also began a new and lasting epoch in naval administration.

Mutiny on the Spanish Main tells the dramatic story of HMS Hermione, a British frigate which, in 1797, was the site of the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history, which saw the death of her captain and many of her officers. Though her crew handed her over to the Spanish, Hermione was subsequently recaptured in a daring raid on a Caribbean port two years later. Drawing on letters, reports, ship's logs, and memoirs of the period, as well as previously unpublished Spanish sources, Angus Konstam intertwines extensive research with a fast-paced but balanced account of the mutiny and its consequences.