Introduction
Death masks were once popular mementos cast from the fresh corpses of eminent personages. They were also collected by early 19th century scientists investigating the believed physiognomic attributes of more notorious citizens. Several masks can be seen on display at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, including one labelled ‘Parker the Rear-Admiral of the Mutiny at the Nore in 1797’. This refers to the disgraced Royal Navy seaman Richard Parker The Soane mask is in fact mislabelled; it is more likely a ‘life-mask’ of Oliver Cromwell. The true death mask is in the possession of the nearby Hunterian Museum. John Hunter was an anatomist and surgeon with a penchant for collecting miscellanea as strong as that of his architect neighbour Soanes. Hunter died in 1793 but his work was carried on by his loyal understudy William Clift, and it is presumably Clift who was the spurious authority behind the casting of the Parker mask. The word ‘mutiny’ in the British context is invariably associated with HMS Bounty. However, the Mutiny at the Nore was a far more serious incident involving a fleet of His Majesty’s warships stationed at an anchorage in the Thames Estuary. The Nore Mutiny, for which Parker became the assumed figurehead, was part of the so-called ‘Great Mutiny’ that took place in the Royal Navy in 1797, itself a product of the wider European turmoil resulting from the seismic events of the French Revolution.
Parker and his Times
Richard Parker was believed born in Exeter in 1767. He was the son of a prosperous baker and corn merchant, whose relative prosperity begot the younger Parker an education at a local grammar school. However, at the age of twelve, Richard left home and school to become a midshipman in the Royal Navy. As a ‘young gentleman’, a midshipman was given training in navigation, seamanship and occasional command of small boats and other small parties of sailors. After serving on a number of ships, Parker was made Master’s Mate. This rank was often taken on by midshipmen who had passed their examinations but were awaiting a commission as lieutenant. Parker was serving probation in this rank on board the frigate HMS Assurance in December 1793, when he was court-marshaled for an alleged act of subordination. This rebellious act, evidently not his first, resulted in his discharge from the navy the following year.
In 1791, Parker had married Anne McHardy; a Scottish farmer’s daughter who was then residing in Exeter and with whom he had two children. After leaving the navy, Parker moved his family to Scotland, where some unsuccessful ‘mercantile speculations’ led him swiftly into debt for which he served some time in prison. However, his debt proved small enough to have it cleared by reenlisting in the navy as a common seaman. The Royal Navy was at this time facing a desperate shortage of fighting men with which to oppose the grave military threat arising across the Channel in Revolutionary France, and to this end offered a bounty of £20 to willing recruits. The year 1797 found Richard Parker serving below decks as a supernumerary; an able-seaman without specific role, aboard HMS Sandwich, then employed as guard-ship at the Nore, home to the North Sea Fleet.[1]
Volunteering was just one of several methods the Royal Navy had in the late 18th century for relieving its acute shortage of manpower. By the start of the war with revolutionary France in 1793, the Admiralty had over 600 vessels and 14,000 cannon to man [1]. A navy requirement estimated at 45,000 new sailors in 1793 had risen to 120,000 by the turn of the century [1]. A second method of recruitment was through the Quota Acts passed in 1795 and 1796 under the direction of William Pitt. This law required the governing authorities of every English county to supply the service with a number of recruits commensurate to their population size and number of seaports. In Yorkshire, for example, this number amounted to more than 1,000 men, while London was tasked with raising a total of 5,700 [1]. Inevitably, few individuals willingly came forward, so authorities turned to the assizes and county jails, where condemned and convicted men were given the opportunity to serve their sentences aboard a man-of-war in lieu of hanging or deportation to Australia. Then there was always the extreme measure of impressment. Press gangs worked every port in Britain during the French revolutionary era. The ‘gangers’ themselves were thugs hired by the Regulating Officer; the Navy’s local man on the spot. Merchant seamen on shore leave and returning prisoners of war were prime targets.
Thus, the pre-Napoleonic Royal Navy consisted in large part of criminals, convicts, debtors and victims of coercion. From these malcontents, ships’ commanding officers had somehow to fashion a disciplined and dutiful fighting force capable of resisting revolutionary French dreams of Europe-wide conquest, not least the invasion of the British Isles. The notoriously harsh conditions of navy life in the 18th and early 19th centuries thus arose partly from the shortcomings of naval recruitment consequent to the pressures of war.
Life at sea in the 18th century is largely remembered for the cat o’ nine tails and other punitive acts routinely inflicted on the lower decks by their disciplinarian commanders. Floggings were indeed common, occurring on average once every 14 days by one estimate [2]. Men were often flogged until their bones protruded, and in some cases even after they had expired from the ordeal [2]. However, the rigours of Royal Navy service were not limited to degradations of punishment; there was also the simple daily grind of shipboard life.
First, was the extreme physical labour of working the sail, rigging and other toilsome fixtures of a large warship, not forgetting the repeated holy-stoning of decks [2]. Navy ships differed from trading vessels in being ‘excessively overmanned’ [2], the excess being required for manning up to a hundred guns and, when necessary, boarding the enemy. The ‘unceasing rounds of never-ending labour’ crews were subjected to constituted ‘the primary mechanism for social control’ [2]. For the ship’s officers, a crew at leisure was an alarming prospect for at such moments the men were likely to reflect on injustices and share conspiratorial notions. By exhausting the lower decks with endless ‘make-work’, it was thought that a querulous crew could be pacified.
Secondly, there was the poor quality diet for ordinary seamen, exacerbated by the corrupt activities of pursers and provisions contractors who conspired to ‘belly-pinch’ all but the officer class [3]. Finally, there was the very real prospect of being killed or maimed far from home by accident, disease or war. Thankfully, one common source of mortality at sea had been eradicated by the 1790s; that of scurvy.
Sailors’ pay and shore leave little compensated for these hardships. As the 18th century drew to a close, navy pay was reckoned to be little more than it had been under the reign of Charles II, over 100 years earlier. Moreover, war with France created inflationary pressures that further reduced its value in real terms. Also, it was common practice to withhold sailors’ pay to guard against desertion; sometimes these wage arrears could be measured in years. Such arrears not only distressed the sailors but also their family members ashore, many of whom were left indigent.
The practice of coppering sailing ships, a process undergone by all the major fighting ships of the Royal Navy in the 1780s, reduced the problem of fouling, thereby increasing the time that ships could spend at sea without the need for an overhaul. In addition, as tensions rose between Britain and continental powers in the late 18th century, the tedious practice of blockading European ports became the primary British naval strategy. Thus, not only were sailors of the late 18th century earning less than those of earlier generations, they were also working longer stints at sea. And even when ships did reach port, crews were often prevented from going ashore for fear they would not return. Desertion was a constant concern; Nelson estimated 42,000 British seamen took what was disparagingly termed ‘French Leave’ between 1793 and 1802 [2].
The most famous mutiny in the British history of sail; that of HMS Bounty in 1789; is remembered as a one-off act of defiance. Though by no means the first of its kind, ‘The Mutiny on the Bounty’ heralded a period of naval insubordination that would reach its zenith in 1797 in what has become known as ‘The Great Mutiny’. Mutiny remains a pejorative term in that it implies an illegitimate rebellion against authority. But what historiography has engraved as such could alternatively be viewed as a pre-industrial form of strike action [2]; [4].
Beginning in 1793, several Royal Navy ships were afflicted by ‘armed strikes’; with the men of the lower decks turning their cannon on the officers’ quarterdeck; in pursuance of improved working conditions. Crews of HMS Culloden and HMS Winchelsea demanded better ships; the men of HMS Terrible and HMS Defiance struck for better provisions [2]. In each case, the men did not attempt to seize the ship but looked to preempt an armed response from the marine contingent on whom the officers counted for their protection. In each case, the ship’s command refused to negotiate, the strike was broken and the ringleaders dealt with in the merciless way dictated by the Royal Navy’s Articles of War, with hangings from the yardarm or ‘floggings round the fleet’ [2].
Mutiny was by no means a British disease. In revolutionary France prior to ‘The Reign of Terror’, the lower-decks of the navy routinely disobeyed orders, demanded higher wages, engaged in riotous behaviour ashore, wandered on and off ships at their leisure, sabotaged ships’ equipment and refused to put to sea [2]. Efforts to re-impose discipline included the spectacle of a floating guillotine. It was the great fear among the governing aristocracy in Britain in this period that revolution was a disease the British peasantry was in danger of catching from the continent. The French Revolution was not the only grand-scale social upheaval during this period; the American Revolution had occurred but a decade earlier; but whereas the latter had been a revolt against colonial rule, the former was a revolt against itself:
‘…alone of all the revolutions which preceded and followed it, a mass social revolution, and immeasurably more radical than any comparable upheaval.’ [5]
It is for this reason that the British government willingly supported the counter-revolutionary armies of the First Coalition with naval operations. This included the initiative of Admiral Samuel Hood, who was called upon by French royalists to occupy Toulon, an act which led to the destruction of 14 French men-of-war, but criticism it had not been more. And there was the action of the ‘Glorious First of June’ in 1794, orchestrated by Admiral Richard Howe, which dealt a further blow to the French navy but failed to stop a large shipment of grain from the country’s American colonies reaching the famished First Republic. Notwithstanding these modest triumphs at sea, the First Coalition collapsed on land in 1797, leaving the French in possession of most of Western Europe, with Britain, by virtue of its naval superiority, standing alone against Napoleon’s expanding military empire. It is within this context that the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore must be considered.
1797 had begun with an audacious attempt by a French armada to land a 15,000-strong invasion force on the southern coast of Ireland in support of Tone Wolfe’s United Irishmen, an initially moderate organisation radicalised after being outlawed by the British government in 1793. Fortunately for the British, a fierce storm in the Atlantic shattered this Expédition d’Irelande before it could land a single man, resulting in the loss of twelve French ships and around 2,000 soldiers and sailors. A smaller, diversionary invasion force did affect a landing at Fishguard in North Wales but was quickly surrounded and forced to surrender. Nevertheless, these events underlined the very real threat posed by revolutionary France to the integrity of the British Isles, and led to the replacement of Rear-Admiral John Colpoys as commander of the blockade at Brest, from where the invasion fleet had sallied forth undetected.
Within weeks, however, the Royal Navy managed to foil the prospect of another invasion by triumphing at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. Once again, winter weather played a role in British fortunes. In an effort to link up with the main French fleet at Brest, a Spanish contingent of 25 ships-of-the-line set sail from the eastern port of Cartagena, aiming initially for Cadiz.[2] However, a powerful Levantine wind took hold of the Spanish sail and carried it out into the Atlantic. Alerted to this fleet’s position by a young Commodore Nelson, the Mediterranean Fleet; then based in Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Jervis; was able to intercept some of the Spanish vessels before they could safely reach port, resulting in the capture of four warships and the bottling up of the surviving demoralised Spanish units in Cadiz harbour.[3] By the spring of 1797, the Royal Navy was pursuing a largely successful blockade of enemy ports with Jervis’s Mediterranean Fleet keeping close guard outside Cadiz, units of the Channel Fleet, under the command of Lord Bridport patrolling off Brest, and Admiral Duncan’s North Sea Fleet blockading the Texel, where warships of the France-allied Batavian Republic were massed.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 