Scholars of maritime history have examined a diverse number of subjects. In the past these have included military conflict, great leaders, ships, and those who inhabited and operated the ships that made up the maritime community. Until recently, however, most scholars understood naval history as a branch of military history rather than part of broader historical topics, such as labor history. Also, writers in the field, who often had no professional training, diminished the reputation of naval history as a real subject of inquiry.²

More progressive scholars in the field of maritime history have begun to call for greater integration of maritime history within history in general and the use of “different and complementary methods, levels, and approaches.”³

Essentially, a sailing ship was a place of work, no different than any other site of labor. Its labor force included those who managed and those who worked. At its core, the study of human relations aboard the ships of the maritime world is essentially a study of labor history. Areas of potential inquiry include class relations between those who commanded the ships and their working-class seamen, how the seamen understood themselves as laborers, and how they constructed their own occupational culture to understand, organize, and validate their role as workers. While military seamen had a unique labor agenda, the destruction of other workers and their ships, they were in essence no different than other workers.

To date, most interpretations about life at sea in the late eighteenth century have posited the seamen as a united working-class body, but defined class in two different ways. The first interpretation argues that class is primarily, if not exclusively, determined by the material base. According to this school of thought, life at sea was characterized by working-class unity and inclusiveness, as well as combative class relations between seamen and their ships' captains. Due to their similar exploitative experiences, the seamen's “occupational consciousness” promoted the development of class resistance throughout the Atlantic maritime community.⁴

This approach defines the seamen's maritime experience as one of exploitation and resistance based upon a near universal notion of working class consciousness and harmony.

The second interpretation defines class as a product of both the material base and cultural superstructure. This school is informed by E.P. Thompson's definition of class as both a “social and cultural formation.” While rooted in the material base of productive relations, class is experienced and defined culturally as a relationship between groups organized around common interests, social experiences, traditions, and value systems. Class is neither a structure nor “a thing,” but a relationship between two groups developed through a historical process which changes over time. Human, rather than structural agency, causes historical change.⁵

In other words, the material base does not determine culture but instead determines what cultural expressions are possible.⁶

Within maritime history, this second approach has begun to explore Sonya Rose's belief that, “what it meant to be a worker” was the product of historically contingent political struggles, and “not preordained by an abstract logical of capital accumulation.”⁷

The basic premise of this approach being that while material realities bound class definitions to some extent, working people exercised the agency to define themselves and contest ruling-class definitions of them. Greg Dening defined the interplay between material and cultural as, “We live in a world already made for us but also of our own making.”⁸ Seamen understood themselves to be more than simply slaves to a maritime capitalist system; instead they developed a maritime culture that gave meaning to their class position and defined their perceptions of themselves and their connection to the larger world. Class, therefore, is an interaction of material experience and cultural explanations of what that historically unique material experience means to those who lived it.

This second approach attempts to unify both material experience and cultural understandings offers the greatest benefit, but can be expanded with the integration of gender approaches, especially the study of the seamen's concept of a maritime masculinity. In terms of new approaches, gender is a mode of analysis that has not been fully integrated into the study of maritime culture. The idea of a male-female gendered division in the workplace is nothing new, but little research has been done to examine the seamen's definitions of their masculine identities, and the impact of gendered divisions between men in the shipboard homosocial environment. Most Anglo-American maritime historians have concentrated on issues of class conflict between the seamen and their officers while ignoring other forms of social stratification that divided sailors.⁹

Only recently have other scholars called for the integration of gender, race, and class into the discussion of maritime culture.¹⁰

A gendered approach to maritime labor history, really to any labor history, provides an understanding of many key concepts: how power was culturally defined amongst a ship's officers and seamen, amongst the seamen themselves, and how the seamen understood themselves as workers and members of their larger society. As Joan Scott has aptly noted, gender is “a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”¹¹

My own definitions of gender are premised on the belief that gender denotes not only historically and socially constituted power inequities between men and women based on cultural constructed notions of sexual difference, but also between men.¹² My definition of gender draws upon the ideas of Sonya Rose, that gender is a cultural construction through which historical actors construct meaning to their experience. Gendered understandings are not universal but historically produced.¹³ Thus, I will argue that the key to understanding the late eighteenth-century maritime labor force is an analysis of the seamen's own masculine gender identities. What it meant to be a seaman, and the contestation of that definition, motivated and limited the historical agency of seamen in the greatest labor dispute during the Age of Sail: the British seamen's Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797.

In April, 1795, Captain Philip Patton¹⁴

wrote to Earl Spencer, the First Sea Lord of the British Royal Navy, warning him “of the danger of general Mutiny,” and offering his solutions to heading off such a calamity. Patton feared that angry seamen might even defect with their ships to Britain's enemies. Such an event in time of war would be a disaster as ships took months to construct, and veteran seamen took years to replace. Patton suggested that the Royal Navy use the experienced seamen as a bulwark against mutiny. With greater material rewards and positions that formally recognized their importance to the navy, these men would then, in Patton's opinion, act to prevent other seamen from mutinying.¹⁵ Patton believed that because of their scarcity, the commissioned officers of a ship could not control their ship's company alone. The leading seamen, those who had the greatest influence over their ships' companies, were the key personnel in preventing mutiny. In his recommendations, Patton warned of the need for “a more liberal conduct” on the Royal Navy's part because “when a general disposition to mutiny takes place, it may be past remedy.”¹⁶ The Admiralty did not heed Patton's warnings.

Two years later on Easter Sunday April 15, 1797,¹⁷

the seamen of the British Royal Navy began the first of their two great mutinies during the era of the French Revolution. When Admiral Bridgeport ordered his Channel Fleet, anchored at the Spithead, near Portsmouth, to put to sea, the crews of sixteen ships of the line, refused. Almost ten thousand seamen were in a state of mutiny.¹⁸ These men demanded that the government redress material grievances such as pay, scale of provisions, types of food served in port, shore leave, and improved medical care. The Pitt government moved to meet these demands and the mutiny seemed to subside. But, on May 7, enraged by newspaper reports that government reforms to meet their demands would be blocked in the House of Lords, the seamen of the Channel Fleet mutinied again. They were joined by an additional nineteen ships with nearly four thousand seamen.¹⁹ Tensions between the seamen and the government increased after an incident of bloodshed on the London between many of the ship's company and their squadron commander, Vice-Admiral Colpoys. To prevent a continuation of the mutiny, the government forced Admiral Howe to return to Portsmouth to confirm the government's willingness to meet most of the seamen's demands. After a day of discussion with the mutineer delegates, Howe had won their confidence and the Spithead mutiny ended after thirty days on May 15, 1797.

A seemingly more confused mutiny occurred in the British North Sea Fleet as the Spithead mutiny ended. On May 12 a mutiny began near the mouth of the Thames on the Nore Anchorage's guard ship, the Sandwich. The seamen quickly spread their mutiny to the other ships at the anchorage. The spirit of mutiny continued to spread to Admiral Duncan's fleet off the coast of Holland. By early June, thirty-three ships with over 10,000 men were in a state of mutiny at or near the mouth of the Thames.²⁰

This mutiny took on a more French-inspired tone of republican revolution. At the Nore, the British government and the Admiralty took on a hardline policy, refusing to yield to the mutineers. After failing to gain redress to their grievances, the mutineer leaders plotted an escape to France, the Dutch Republic, Ireland, and America only to be thwarted by counterrevolution from within the ranks of the seamen themselves. Slowly, elements in the ships' companies who had rejected the revolutionary goals of the mutiny retook control of their ships from the mutineers and defected from the mutiny. By June 15, 1797, the collapse of popular consent among the majority of the seamen brought the mutiny to an end. Starting much like the Spithead mutiny as a protest against material conditions, the radical leaders transformed the Nore mutiny into a revolution against political and social inequality only to be suppressed by their fellow seamen who believed that their material goals had been met and that revolutionary activity was not the course of action to take.

Mutiny has been one of the great dramas of maritime history. While mutinies represent a loss of military command and control, especially those carried out by seamen, they are also sites of labor disputes. In most cases, mutinies in the British Royal Navy of the eighteenth century were motivated by grievances over poor pay or working conditions that seamen considered unacceptable. As Nicholas Rodger has noted, mutinies acted as a system through which seamen could voice their grievances. Mutinies were “an effective working compromise” and “a means of reconciling” the Navy's needs and individual seamen's grievances.²¹

Mutinies that operated under the rules sanctioned by maritime tradition were the seamen's version of the labor strike.

The Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797 were essentially class-based labor disputes. However, the differing actions taken by seamen in each mutiny promote many questions that no approach to date seems to answer. What grievances had animated the seamen to mutiny? How did similar underlying grievances lead to two different courses of action as the Spithead Mutiny appears to have been an eighteenth-century workers' protest while the Nore Mutiny bears all the signs of a working-class revolution? Most importantly, why were there such violent divisions amongst seamen who came from a homogeneous background in terms of class and race?²²

The historiography of the mutinies offered a variety of explanations, none of which seemed to answer the all of the above questions. Scholars have identified two basic causal factors for the mutinies of 1797. The first sees material grievances as the root of the mutinies. Proponents of this view argue the seamen were motivated either by an effort to regain lost material rights or portray the seamen as forward looking strikers attempting to throw off the worker-unfriendly past in an attempt to gain new material rewards for their work.²³

Scholars promoting his interpretation generally see the seamen in a positive light as this thesis maximizes the seamen's moral right of redress while also emphasizing their loyalty to the crown and nation; often dismissing the role of political influences in the Nore Mutiny.²⁴ Overall, supporters of the materialist interpretation have posited that material grievances were the root of discontent, that political motivations were rare amongst the experienced seamen, and that while the mutinous seamen were correct in their strike for better pay, food, and conditions, they remained loyal to Britain.

Sometimes running as a counter to the materialist thesis and occasionally as a secondary cause has been the belief that political ideas promoted mutiny, especially as seen in the Nore mutiny. The political thesis portrays the seamen as being animated by republican and revolutionary political ideas. Promoters of this interpretation understand the mutinies of 1797 not as workers' strikes, but as revolutionary activity. Within this school of interpretation scholars disagree about the source of revolutionary ideas. One group has argued that the ideas were promoted through outside agitators either from France or by radicals amongst the landsmen brought into the Royal Navy by the Quota Acts of 1795. These men infused the simple apolitical seamen with revolutionary republican ideas.²⁵

The second wing of this interpretation views the seamen themselves as taking an active lead, and motivated by republican values that they encountered ashore.²⁶ Overall, this school of thought argues that the republican ideas of the time either fanned the flames of discontent, or introduced the germ that infected the body politic.

None of these interpretations have adequately answered the question of how the Spithead Mutiny could appear to be an orderly mutiny, driven by the eighteenth-century traditions typical of naval mutinies and the patrician-plebeian society, while the Nore Mutiny was seemingly unfocused on any new material demands and politicized to the point of becoming a revolution. Within the two mutinies, there existed both demands for material redress and political ideology. Substantial evidence exists to support both causal factors, and taken together they produce a picture of the mutinous seamen best described as schizophrenic; at times ardently loyalist strikers, while in other times revolutionaries demanding greater levels of political and social equality. No approach to date has satisfactorily explained how two mutinies of different motives and actions could have been executed by the same body of seamen.

In contrast, an examination of the mutinies that focuses on the seamen directly, especially on their masculine identities, offers new understandings and explanations about the mutinies of 1797. Seamen understood their world at a personal level in terms of what it meant to be a man, specifically a seaman. Maritime masculine values, however, were not created in a vacuum, but rather were influenced by both the hierarchical worlds at sea and ashore that the seamen lived in, as well as occupational specific qualities such as maritime skill, bravery, and loyalty.

In 1797 the seamen, like many Western Europeans, faced a potential period of transition. While many seamen clung to the past, others turned toward a revised vision of masculinity based on the revolutionary ideals of equality of opportunity and political rights. The seamen were not a horizontal fraternity, but two factions united at times by their class-oriented material demands, and divided at others by their gendered self-identity. While the seamen struggled with their political and social leaders above deck for redress of their economic grievances, below deck they fought an interclass civil war about how to achieve their goals, and in consequence, what it meant to be a man. These were men participating in the making of their class.

While there were class divisions between the seamen and their officers, a seamen-focused examination disputes interpretations that see the seamen in the Atlantic World as possessing a sense of interclass equality.²⁷

While the seamen of the Royal Navy found unity in their class-based material grievances, they were in turn divided by gendered notions of inequality that drew upon the hierarchical world that surrounded them in their maritime experience. The maritime environment did not create a unique culture, one free from the inequalities found ashore. Rather, the social organization, developed and contested by both the seamen and their officers at sea, drew upon the hierarchical structure found in British society in general, and adapted the multitiered system of power to meet the specific needs of their profession. The hierarchical nature of eighteenth-century society promoted gradients of power.²⁸ While there were those who ruled and those who were ruled, within their class, seamen possessed varying levels of power based on their individual level of maritime skill, both officially sanctioned and informally demonstrated.²⁹ The seamen defined skill as delineating informal power, a concept which informed a significant part of their gendered understanding of themselves as men. While the seaman possessed a sense of a brotherhood of the forecastle, not all men in that brotherhood were equal.

The seamen's daily experience of both the skill and class hierarchies that permeated their lives at sea fundamentally influenced their understanding of themselves as men.³⁰

The seamen drew upon the hierarchical structures ashore and at sea to develop an intraclass hierarchy based on maritime skill; one that generally mirrored the skill hierarchy defined by the men's rank or rating as well as their watch. In the seamen's world, a man's position in the gendered hierarchy, his manliness, depended primarily on his maritime skill.³¹ This was consistent with land-based professions in which skill and masculinity were mutually constructed.³² Even men of non-European background could gain great masculine status through their demonstration of high levels of maritime skill.³³ Unlike modern understandings of gender which dichotomize it into male or female, most in the late eighteenth-century still envisioned gender as a hierarchy and not as a male-female bipolar opposition.³⁴

Bravery in battle was another masculine trait collectively constituted. Individual bravery marked a man who could be counted on in combat, an important trait given the collective nature of maritime combat.³⁵

Finally, in an attempt to fulfill their part of the patrician-plebeian contract and gain the right to make material demands on their patrician leaders, the seamen ranked national loyalty as the third leg of their identity.³⁶

Shaped by their understandings of both skill and class, the seamen's class-based vision of masculinity defined their understanding of themselves as workers and men. These gendered norms of the seamen's occupational identity defined actions they considered acceptable and those considered deviant. Thus, the seamen experienced occupational “blinkers” that supported and coexisted with class-defined boundaries of legitimate agency as plebeians.

At the heart of the 1797 mutinies lay the seamen's demands for relief from the Admiralty for their material privations. The uneasy British patrician-plebeian social equilibrium operated at sea in the seamen's use of a maritime version of the social compact, derived from the negotiated relationship between the patricians and plebeians found ashore.³⁷

The seamen simply demanded that the patricians redress their plebeian grievances through both material and symbolic relief.

By the late eighteenth-century, this model of social hegemony seems to have been under great strain as the relationship moved to the advantage of the patricians at the disadvantage of the plebs.³⁸

In the navy, the plebeian seamen believed that they were not receiving the reciprocal grants that the Admiralty owed them under the maritime version of their social compact. While accepting as inescapable some negative aspects of life at sea, most of the men involved in the mutinies of 1797 harbored material grievances that included low pay, inequality of bounties, scale and, in some specific cases, type of provisions, deficiencies in medical treatment and stoppage of pay while wounded, as well as the less material but equally class-based complaints regarding the absence of shore leave.³⁹ These material grievances dominated the Spithead Mutiny and acted as a spark to the more politicized mutiny at the Nore. Had there been no material grievances, neither mutiny would have taken place.

In the seamen's understanding of their reciprocal relationship with their patrician officers, the officers had obligations to meet some of these material needs and to demonstrate their support through the public theater of symbolic gestures. When the patricians failed to respond, the seamen followed the general plebeian mode of action; they resorted to their own counter-theater which began with the anonymous threat, the petition, and grew to the “theatre of threat and sedition” better known as mutiny.⁴⁰

While most seamen had come to believe that the patrician class was no longer living up to their obligations implied in the social contract, by 1797 a minority of experienced British seaman sought a new solution to the problem. Influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and success of the French Revolution, these men rejected traditional methods of protest to gain redress for their material grievances, seeking instead to cancel the social contract between the patricians and plebeians. They worked to establish a new system that emphasized the political equality of all men. In doing so, these radical seamen rejected the existing seamen's masculine values of loyalty to the monarch and nationalism. Inextricable from these new political ideas was a different vision of manhood which rejected the political subordination implicit in the plebeians' acceptance of the social contract. Like the French revolutionaries, they denounced both monarchy and privilege in general. They envisioned a society in which all men would have an equal voice in politics.⁴¹

While pursuing a new political course that proposed a new manhood, one based on the political equality of all men, the evidence suggests that the radical seamen did not envision a society of pure equality for all men. Instead they sought to collapse the various class-based masculine hierarchies into a single hierarchy in which all men would compete. Their vision did not entail a complete equality of all men, but rather the end of special privileges for the ruling classes.

Their rejection of the social compact and the plebeian seamen's masculine commitment to nationalistic loyalty brought the two factions of the seamen into conflict, often violent and occasionally lethal. While the patricians' neglect and use of violence, which temporarily negated the social compact, made many men consider the radical option, especially during the Nore Mutiny. In the end the radicals failed due to their inability to convert enough seamen to their counter-hegemonic vision of which a radical shift in gender identity was a critical element. At the heart of the mutinies of 1797 lay a contest to determine the masculine identity of the British seamen and in turn to determine the future political organization of British society.

Gender dynamics also determined who would lead the seamen during their mutinies. Examinations of the leadership of both mutinies shows that those who planned and directed both of them were generally, if not almost exclusively, experienced seamen, those who commanded the respect among their peers due to their high levels of skill. The leaders of both mutinies were experienced seamen rather than the landsmen brought in through the quota system. Contemporary sources indicate that the leaders of the Spithead Mutiny were considered “the leading and prime seamen,” skilled men whose masculine status earned them their peers' respect.⁴²

The account of a seamen present at the mutiny, Mathew Barker, agreed, “There warn't so many let into the secret of the mutiny as was at first imagined; but then they were chiefly petty officers and able seamen, who possess a strong influence over all hands, fore and aft.”⁴³ Using privileged spaces on their ships to which no officer ventured, such as the tops and “bay of the between decks,” these experienced seamen determined the initial course of the mutiny.⁴⁴ They were able to manipulate the informal gender hierarchy of power amongst the seamen to claim outright leadership in the mutiny, thus excluding any potential voices from rival radical. Of the thirty-three delegate leaders of the Spithead Mutiny, everyone held a position that required considerable skill and experience: midshipmen, petty officers without warrants, and able seamen or their equivalent.⁴⁵ Absent from the leadership among the Spithead mutineers were any landsmen who lacked experience and skill. The seamen's masculine hierarchy had excluded them.

In contrast to the Spithead Mutiny, whose leaders attempted to gain redress by following the patrician-plebeian social contract, the leaders of the mutineers at the Nore attempted a more revolutionary solution. Despite their different political views, both the most active mutineers and the leaders of the Nore Mutiny were also generally experienced seamen rather than landsmen new to the navy. After the collapse of the Nore Mutiny, naval officers worked to identify those men who were active mutineers or leaders of the mutiny. While ultimately only 105 men were tried, the naval officers identified 632 as active mutineers, 182 of which were further identified as leaders. The lists of mutineer leaders and activists sent in by captains, findings from investigations, and the records from the courts martial when cross referenced with muster book entries provides a clear examination of who led this mutiny.⁴⁶

Contrary to the belief that radical landsmen outsiders brought through the quota system instigated the revolutionary Nore Mutiny, for the most part the radical mutineers were petty officers without warrants, noncommissioned officers from the marines, and able seamen; the most skilled and experienced men in the fleet. In contrast, the less skilled men, ordinary seamen and landsmen, were underrepresented among the radical mutineers. Landsmen, often cited as the most radical element in the ships' companies, were among the least likely to be active mutineers. The Nore Mutiny's leadership followed a similar pattern except that the representation of ordinary seamen and landsmen was even lower. Despite the probable radicalization of many landsmen new to the navy, the skill-based masculine hierarchy that existed among the ships' companies excluded them from full participation in the leadership ranks as the experienced seamen regarded them as less masculine due to their limited maritime skills, and, hence, less able to lead them.

During the mutiny at the Spithead anchorage near Portsmouth, gender dynamics shaped the seamen's actions. The leaders and the majority of the seamen involved in the Spithead Mutiny acted within the forms and conventions of the traditional plebeian maritime masculinity. They sought not to reinvent British society in some enlightened model, but instead to force their rulers to live up to their end of the patrician-plebeian social contract. The seamen put forward non-revolutionary demands through which they sought a public validation of their worth as plebeian men from their rulers through the patricians' granting them minor material concessions.⁴⁷

Following the traditions of plebeian protest, the actions of the mutineers were peaceful and without acts of class-based violence.⁴⁸ Officers were left in command, but the men refused to accept any order to sail from Portsmouth.⁴⁹ Acknowledging the merit of these demands and their consistency with the patrician-plebeian social contract, the British government moved to grant them and the mutiny seemed to subside. For the skilled men who supported the existing maritime masculinity and its emphasis on an acceptance of the social compact with their rulers this was a double victory. They had forced their patrician rulers to accede many of their demands while also renewing the belief that skilled men alone had a right to speak for the seamen. However, the British Parliament's slowness in passing the statutes required to redress the seamen's demands caused the near collapse of the social compromise at sea, in consequence bringing to the surface the forces of the radical element within the seamen.

During the second phase of the Spithead Mutiny, the plebeian oriented seamen nearly forfeited their control to the more radical element of experienced seamen. While waiting for Parliament to pass the new statutory changes, many seamen became enraged by newspaper reports that statues needed to meet their demands would be blocked in the House of Lords.⁵⁰

On May 7, the seamen of the Channel Fleet, still located at the Spithead anchorage, mutinied again in an effort to force Parliament to pass their statutes. They were joined by an additional eighteen ships and over three and a half thousand seamen. Tensions between the seamen and the government increased after an incident of bloodshed between many of the ship's company of the London and Vice-Admiral Colpoys. In the exchange of gunfire between the seamen and their officers, six seamen were wounded and one was killed.⁵¹ The patrician officers' use of lethal force violated the maritime social compact. This action and the lethargic pace of Parliament allowed the revolutionary seamen within the Channel Fleet to gain in influence among their mutinous peers and to challenge the leadership of plebeian seamen leaders.

Here again, masculine power changed the course of the mutiny; gendered notions of power and authority, and not force, decided the issue. After a violent struggle between the officers and men of the London, Vice-Admiral Colpoys and his officers found themselves surrounded by armed and angry seamen, whose cry of “Blood for Blood” illustrated the sudden collapse of the maritime contract amongst many seamen and their conversion to the radical cause.⁵²

Despite the imminent danger, Captain Griffith, the London's commander, walked forward and pushed away the muskets aimed at the officers, temporarily awing his subordinates through both class and gender-based forms of power.⁵³ The issue remained unresolved, however, until Valentine Joyce, the senior mutineer delegate and an experienced seaman, stepped forward and gave a passionate speech, which drew upon all his masculine stature amongst the seamen. Joyce's speech rallied the seamen of the London back to the plebeian cause, thus effectively ending the radical's influence amongst the mutineers.⁵⁴ Those who supported the existing social contract, both the plebeian seamen leaders and the government, quickly worked out a compromise in which the seamen would accept modest material gains in return for a public demonstration of the patricians' recognition of the seamen's worth as men and members of British society. After thirty days, the Spithead Mutiny ended on May 15, 1797.

Gender dynamics continued to shape the struggle between the seamen and the government and amongst themselves during the Nore Mutiny. The defeat of the radical seamen by the combined efforts of their plebeian peers and the government during the Spithead Mutiny did not end mass revolutionary efforts within the British Navy. Signs of discontent, both in plebeian oriented material demands and radical attempts at revolution, exhibited themselves in the North Seas Fleet and other elements of the Royal Navy stationed at the Nore Anchorage, located at the mouth of the River Thames. While rumblings of dissatisfaction had begun in early May in the North Sea Fleet, commanded by Admiral Adam Duncan, the major eruption of mutiny took place on May 12, 1797 at the Nore Anchorage, near the mouth of the River Thames. Over the next month, almost all of Duncan's fleet deserted him at sea and returned to the Nore to join the mutiny. By early June, thirty-three ships with over 10,000 men were in a state of mutiny at or near the mouth of the Thames.⁵⁵

Experienced seamen who favored the new revolutionary masculinity took advantage of the chaos to gain control of their crews, and to force other ships' companies to join the mutiny. Unlike the Spithead Mutiny, the experienced seamen who led the Nore Mutiny aspired to destroy the old social contract and replace it with a society based upon the political equality of all men.

The seamen's divided visions of maritime masculinity, especially their notions of the rights and equality of working-class men in society, animated and directed the course of the Nore Mutiny. Rejecting the compromise reached during the Spithead Mutiny, the Nore mutineers' revolutionary leaders made more radical demands which challenged the ruling class' privileges at sea by demanding the abolition of many class-based privileges of the officers. The British government's refusal to negotiate these new demands, and the mutineers corresponding inability to directly threaten the government ashore created a stand off.⁵⁶

The radical seamen leaders then tried to enact their only remaining option, defection to foreign ports, some of which were enemies to Britain.⁵⁷ This decision would determine the outcome of the Nore Mutiny.

Amongst the mutineers an interclass civil war erupted, in which the seamen found themselves divided amongst lines of masculine identity.⁵⁸

The diametrically opposed choices of surrender to the government or defection to the enemy forced most seamen to take a stand and support one of the two masculine visions, the wide spectrum of views was quickly reduced to two poles. Surrender meant support of the existing maritime masculinity with its notions of loyalty to the crown and acceptance of working-class masculine inferiority contained in the social contract, while defection entailed a complete acceptance of the revolutionary ideas of masculine equality of opportunity and a rejection of political privilege. The very question at hand asked what it would mean to be a working-class seaman.

The division amongst the seamen came to a head when on June 9, Richard Parker, the “President” of their mutiny, gave the order to set sail for foreign ports.⁵⁹

Starting with the crew of the Leopard, ships' companies began to defect from the mutiny. However, in most cases this decision was only reached after intercrew debate and often violent struggle amongst the seamen themselves. For example, the plebeian section of the crew of the Leopard had to first take the ship back from the radical element of the mutineers by force, and in their defection they endured a half hour bombardment by ships still controlled by mutineers.⁶⁰ During their defection, the crew of the Repulse also suffered a two hour bombardment by several ships loyal to the mutiny.⁶¹ Despite the radicals' use of lethal force against defecting ships' companies, support for their cause amongst the seamen dramatically waned; the last ship's company, that of the Belliqueux, surrendered on June 15.⁶²

The radical cause failed as its proponents failed to overthrow the existing maritime masculinity, whose belief that masculine virtue included loyalty to the crown. For the rest of the wars against both Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the older plebeian model of maritime masculinity would prevail. Its emphasis on skill, bravery, and national loyalty would help the British Royal Navy win all of their major engagements at sea, ultimately contributing to the defeat of the enlightened revolutionary Napoleon Bonaparte.

In conclusion, the application of gender as a mode of analysis illustrates the division amongst the working-class seamen in their vision of what it meant to be a worker, specifically a maritime worker, in late eighteenth-century Britain. The two visions of maritime masculinity and the political agendas they supported were mutually reinforcing. Those who favored the existing social contract accepted a society based on inequality, even amongst men, but in return demanded that their contributions as workers and as men be acknowledged by their rules through both material and symbolic rewards. Similarly, the seamen who sought a more revolutionary solution sought rewards for their masculine contributions. Their demands, however, included acknowledgement of their roles as workers and rights as men through political equality, a vision not achieved in Britain until the late Nineteenth Century. Despite their differences, both factions of seamen saw their role as workers and as men as under-rewarded by the society they labored for. There was no separation between their roles as workers and as men.

Not surprisingly then, power and leadership in the maritime workplace, both by commissioned officers and seamen, was based upon a hierarchy of masculine power. Successful leadership in the maritime workplace depended on a leader's ability to use gendered forms of power to build consent for his authority rather than rule by force alone. Amongst the maritime community, skill and experience translated equaled power and the right to lead. Seamen who demanded rewards for their own successes as workers envisioned their most successful peers and leaders as worthy of the one reward they could give: respect, which in turn equaled the right to lead. Men without maritime skill found themselves marginalized as leaders by the power of the maritime hierarchy. Even in the “world turned upside-down” world of mutiny, success or failure in leading men at sea depended on an individual's ability to build consent for their rule through gendered forms of cultural power. As many commentators noted, seamen could be led but rarely driven.

By examining the seamen through a gendered lens, their agency during the mutinies of 1797 emerges. No longer can they be regarded as passive participants in history. They produced competing understandings of themselves and their role in society in an effort to maximize their power as men and validate their worth within their own professional subculture and British society in general. When the larger social contract appeared to fail them, the seamen contested the boundaries and direction of their masculine virtues. They struggled amongst themselves to determine what it meant to be a man, and specifically what it meant to be a seaman.

The mutinies of 1797 marked a failed moment of transition, both in gender and class vision, amongst the seamen of the Royal Navy. They would continue on in the eighteenth-century model based on class inequality rather than transition to the late nineteenth-century vision of the equality of all men. While the government's actions shaped the parameters of the seamen's struggle, their final decision was reached through contestation, at times fratricidal, of the meaning of British tars' manhood. The impact of seamen's gendered identities in the mutinies of 1797 is inescapable. Differing ideas of masculinity drove a wedge between the two groups of seamen and split their class solidarity. Scholars who have sought the sources of the mutinies in external agitation or promoted a vision of universal class solidarity have failed to understand the seamen's divided masculine visions that separated them into antagonistic wings of the same class. The power of internalized gendered definitions to define who historical actors understand themselves to be may be the greatest obstacle to achieving who they could become.