When the Walls Shook

THE GREAT MUTINY by James Dugan. 511 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Britain's war against France was in its fourth year--and France controlled most of Europe. At Brest, the French were assembling a formidable invasion force. In London, King George III, the Admiralty and No. 10 Downing Street did not worry much. What power could possibly breach "the nation's legendary wooden walls," the scourge of the oceans, the British fleet? Then, in the spring of 1797, the wooden walls began to come apart.

James Dugan's fine, wry, if somewhat overlong story re-creates the greatest mass mutiny in maritime history. It began in the Channel fleet stoppering Brest, spread like an infection through the anchorages at Spithead and the Nore, up to the North Sea and down 6,000 miles to ships lying off the Cape of Good Hope. Before it sputtered out, the mutineers numbered 50,000, controlled more than 100 vessels, blockaded London, and laid their country naked to her foes. Dugan's scrupulously unemotional narrative does not conceal his conviction that the mutinous seamen were right and behaved, for the most part, like gentlemen, while the government, for the most part, behaved like mutineers.

Under the Orlop. "A ship," Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked, "is worse than a gaol. There is, in gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger." Johnson's opinion, uttered in 1776, was still relevant in 1797. Britain's infamous press gangs roamed the country, seized any able-bodied men that caught their eyes, and flung them aboard ships that, Dugan writes, were "not built to fit men; the men were warped to fit the ship." In fact, some of them were. In many a country town, an old sailor was readily identifiable by his severe stoop, the result of spending years in the orlop (overlap) deck, which sometimes offered no more than four feet of headroom.

Seamen were rarely paid and miserably fed. In 1796, His Majesty's government owed the crews $14 million in back pay, some of it three years overdue. In home port, after months at sea, only the officers set foot on land. Ship's cheese came adulterated with kitchen scourings, rancid fat and glue. Messes began with a ritual tattoo as men banged their biscuits on the table to shake loose the vermin.

Salted Wounds. Seamen's complaints about this hard life were redressed at the yardarm or, if the captain felt merciful, by the cat. One apparently incorrigible tar was flogged eight times in ten months. Sentences of 1,000 lashes were common. The man who survived his flogging got salt--the Royal Navy's antiseptic--to rub on his ribboned back.

It was against such intolerable conditions that the seamen struck. Better pay and decent food, shore leave, protection against brutality--these were among the modest demands of men who continued to show their deposed officers elaborate courtesy and swore unshakable fidelity to the Crown. After token conciliation at Spithead, the government set its chin. In the Nore anchorage at the Thames mouth, a troubled old admiral named Charles Buckner listened with some sympathy to the complaints presented by the elected "president" of the mutineers, Richard Parker, the son of a grain merchant who had once been an officer himself but got cashiered for insubordination. But the Admiralty overrode him, offered only a single term: "unconditional submission."

Lost Resolution. The government's obduracy was backed by a quarantine so effective that not even mail, much less provisions, came aboard the ships. The unity of the Nore began to dissolve; defecting ships cut their lines at night and drifted away; loyalist cells formed in the mutinous crews, and there were bloody fights aboard. By lune, the great mutiny was over, a victim of its own irresolution. The Admiralty briskly hanged Parker and 35 other mutineers with a minimum of legal niceties and got back to the wars.

The mutiny achieved results of sorts. In 1806, nine years after it was over, the navy raised an able seaman's pay one shilling a week. In 1808, for the first time in history, British crews received an issue of soap. In 1866, Parliament lowered the ceiling on flogging to 48 strokes, and in 1879 flogging was abolished in the fleet forever.

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