MUTINY AT THE NORE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 230, 28 September 1935, Page 8 (Supplement)

MUTINY AT THE NORE.

THE NAVY IN 1797. UNBELIEVABLE CONDITIONS. "PRESIDENT OF THE FLOATING REPUBLIC." England in 1797 was war-weary. After four years in arms, all her allies had. faded from lier, leaving her alone against revolutionary France. Pitt had tried to make peace, but the French thwarted him by refusing to restore I Belgium to its rightful owner—moreover, they were aggressively intoxicated by the recent successes of their rising young general, Napoleon Bonaparte. Cut off from foreign trade, burdened with a huge national debt and increasing taxation, and gloomily fearful of possible defeat, the English people found only one source of comfort —the British Navy was mistress of the seas. Then, without warning, the foundations of all security seemed to crash. The nation suddenly learnt that when, on April 10, Lord Bridport had ordered the Channel Fleet to put to sea, the sailors had refused point-blank. It was like the crack of doom. The Navy in open mutiny! The Navy disloyal! With its right arm paralysed, the country was lost, its doors flapping open'to its triumphant enemies! Horrible Conditions Of Life. The story of "the breeze" at Spithead and the subsequent mutiny at the Nore is told with dramatic intensity, though with documented authority of research, by Mr. G. E. Man waring and Mr. Bonamy Dobree. The causes of discontent among the sailors are graphically summarised. The punishment of flogging was merciless; one ship's petition complained that "we are noekt about so that we do not no what to do," while tln> lieutenant of another, when drunk, amused himself <r by making us strip and seizing us up to the riggin and beating us with the end o rope till we almost expire."

The sailor's life was "brutalising, cruel and horrible."

Cooped up in a fetid atmosphere, often for days together when the weather was foul, and drenched with salt water as well; huddled with tho dregs of the gaols, or men who had been shipped as l>oys, probably for some trivial olTence, and had never known a different life; pestered with thieves from whom their small belongings were not safe; never free from the fiendish bullying of officers high or petty, they lived a life without hope. There was no leisure, no leave, no books to qualify their miserable existence.

They were fed on disgusting food, their wounds were treated by inexperienced surgeons, who sometimes used carpenters' tools for operations, and the badly maimed were simply thrown overboard. During the war years, the naval muster was vastly increased by conscripts; every county had to supply its quota, and those recruits included men accustomed to a hotter condition of life and disinclined to acquiesce in the existing misery, while a spirit of rebellion was fostered by those who had been conscripted against their will.

The seamen's organisation was necessarily secret, but carried out with a perseverance and thoroughness reminiscent of the methods of revolutionary propaganda described in M. Isaac Don Levine's biography of Stalin. Separate petitions, excellently phrased, were addressed simultaneously by several ships to Lord Howe, the naval hero of the Seven Years' War, idolised by his men as "Black Dick."

Howe's scrupulous justice is emphasised by the fact that, in spite of wrongly believing that the petitions were forgeries of a solitary clever malcontent, lie instituted inquiries and handed the documents to the Admiralty. Unluckily the inquiries were met with complacent assurances from commanders, unaware of the men's secret proceedings, that their crews were normally docile, and these the Admiralty eagerly accepted, because they thought that the men's grievances could only be appeased by higher pay, and Parliament would frown upon an increased naval estimate as an addition to taxation. The men conceived that Howe had failed them, and the result was "the breeze" at Spithead, when the Admiral's orders to sail were ignored. Fever-stricken Ships. The Spithead affair followed modern trade union lines, disregarded appeals being succeeded by a strike; but tlio j mutiny at the Nore, occurring almost simultaneously with" the settlement of the trouble at Spithead, was the rebellious work of a single agitator.

| The son of a baker, Richard Parker had done well a't sea until illness interfered with his career.

He had transferred from the Royal Navy to the merchant service, gone to Africa, to India, where he had engaged in trade; returned, married and then, as though the sea must have him, had re-entered the Royal Navy once more as a midshipman. Unluckily, in 1793, he had been goaded into a very trifling acjt of insubordination by a superior officer, and though God knows the provocation had been bitter enough, his reaction of the mildest, he had been court-martialled and disrated.

I Ho then again fell ill, was discharged as incurably rheumatic, with a suggestion of mental disorder, and his attempt 'to make good in civil life landed him in a debtor's prison before war-time urgency made him a naval conscript. | He was appointed to the Sandwich, once the proud flagship of Admiral Rodney, but now "an old corpse," which ! "stank with decay." According to the i report of the ship's doctor, the crew jwas "very dirty, almost naked, and in ■general without beds." and many were j suffering from fever and ulcers. Other ships at the Nore were in little better case, and their crews were ripe for - trouble on hearing the news from Spithead. Seizing their opportunity when their officers were attending a courtmartial aboard another ship, the crew 'of the Sandwich took command, and I lowered boats to convene a meeting of I delegates from other Ships. The mutiny 'became general, and by evening the mutineers were in possession of the Fleet. Leader Of The Mutineers. The ultimatum issued to the Admiralty by the committee of delegates was signed "Richard Parker, President," and from the first he was identified as the ringleader. But he lacked the reckless courage of a buccaneer, and hesitated to take any direct aggression. He wasted time in negotiations and petitions, while the mutineers' food supplies ran short. When the authorities refused to supply them with food. Parker retaliated with a blockade, which immediately alienated the sympathies of the commercial classes ashore. He conducted a little guerilla warfare, waylaying store ships and organising sheep stealing raids on the coast, but when he realised that negotiations would lead nowhere and his only resource lay in a bold stroke, his own ; supporters were concerned only about securing their pardons in the event of surrender. Attack then came from the side of authority, and what might have been civil war petered out in a mere i skirmish, followed by Parker's exccu-1 'tion.