Maritime history and naval history have much in common. They both involve ships. They both involve lots of water— of the sort one drinks and the sort on which ships float. They involve nature. Practically nothing that happens on ships, whether below deck or above deck, happens without the intrusions of climate and various living things, great and small. In the age of sail, roughly 1400–1900, these commonalities were especially pronounced. With rare exceptions, ocean-going vessels were propelled entirely by natural phenomena—wind and currents. In the European Atlantic, armies of enslaved oarsmen familiar in the ancient Mediterranean had become a thing of the past, but ships had not dispensed with armies of men (and theirs was an overwhelmingly homosocial enterprise), many of them enslaved. And here, another important commonality of naval and maritime history. Both involve a species of human being freakishly impervious to discomfort and fear: the professional seafarer.

From the perspective of the naval historian, a seafarer is often someone involved in naval combat—or, more accurately, naval historians concern themselves with the combat in which seafarers engaged. In reality, seafarers were rarely involved in combat, even when they sailed on naval vessels. The Battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson's spectacular and improbable triumph over Napoleon's Franco-Spanish navy, lasted about five hours. Most of the seafarer's life, whether on a naval or mercantile ship, was enveloped in tedium. Hundreds of men, hailing from different regions of the Atlantic littoral, sustained on watered-down booze, hardtack, and salted meat, all packed together in heaving, leaking, stinking, vermin-infested wooden machines, facing months of dull, exhausting labor. What could possibly go wrong?

The answer, as Niklas Frykman details in his important new book, The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution, is surprisingly little. Naval historians will know that this is all the more surprising on state-owned war-making craft, especially in the years between the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic wars. Some of the men on those ships—the commissioned officers and midshipmen—were there at least in part by choice. But most of the ordinary tars who sailed these war-making behemoths were forced into service. Because tars could earn more while avoiding the risks of combat aboard merchant or fishing vessels, few volunteered for naval duty. European states, meanwhile, were engaged in a costly naval arms race. To satisfy their episodic but exponentially growing maritime labor needs, those states turned to the civilian maritime fleet. Because Europe's great powers all drew from the same reservoir of Atlantic seafarers, that labor was even more scarce in times of war. Only through that well-known form of state-sanctioned servitude, the press gang, could eighteenth-century navies fully satisfy their labor needs.

Hence, to all the usual scourges of shipboard life, navies added a degree of coercion that shared much with various eighteenth-century penal systems. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, “being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1 [1832]), 151)].). Amplifying the carceral nature of their circumstance, naval seamen faced the constant threat of the lash and countless other forms of ritual abuse. And yet, despite all of this, surprisingly little went wrong. Between 1755 and 1789, the British Navy experienced only six mutinies, none especially far-reaching or effective. The French and Dutch navies were similarly spared organized rebellion.

According to Frykman, European navies’ remarkable record of managing labor unrest came to a stunning end in the decade following the fall of the Bastille. “As ancient thrones came tumbling down,” he writes, “and plantation islands went up in flames, naval mutinies, which had been rare for nearly a century, suddenly tore like wildfire through one fleet after another” (42). Frykman's language skills allow him to range broadly, through Dutch, French, Danish, British, and Swedish archives, and the depth of his research affords a truly Atlantic perspective. Maritime historians have long recognized the transnational, trans-ethnic nature the eighteenth-century maritime labor force. While they have generally inferred an associated unifying political consciousness, none has gone as far as Frykman in anatomizing that consciousness, and what Frykman's research shows is the deep penetration of a form of republicanism similar to that E. P. Thompson and his many followers have identified among the Atlantic world's radicalized urban artisans.

Much as was once the case with slave rebellions, naval mutinies have long been viewed as crudely political eruptions brought by the interminable cruelties that preceded them. In fact, Frykman demonstrates, the signature mutinies of the 1790s were law-bound and ordered acts of collective rebellion, directed as much toward the ideological target of “authoritarian paternalism” (205) as toward more instinctual injustices in pay and working conditions. In this way, the mutineers of the 1790s reflected the constitutionalism of the Sans Culottes and other Painite radicals of Atlantic cities, although again, much like slave rebels, the precise ideological orientation of mariner radicalism is not always well-defined—some Dutch sailors, for example, showed Orangist counterrevolutionary sympathies. Clear enough, though, is that whether aboard French, Dutch, or British vessels, the mutineers of the 1790s reflected significant ideological commonalities. Class formation among maritime laborers may have begun before the rash of mutinies Frykman so elegantly surveys, but The Bloody Flag leaves little doubt that the convergence of great power militancy, scarce maritime labor, and the growth of radical republicanism account for a crucial phase in the formation of a cohesive Atlantic working class.