AbstractIn the spring of 1797, when French invasion appeared likely, the Spithead and Nore mutinies successively immobilized the two Royal Navy fleets responsible for home defence. The Spithead mutineers gained more pay and greater food rations for all Royal Navy sailors, and a general pardon for themselves. The Nore mutiny ended in collapse, courts martial, and the execution of approximately twenty-eight prominent mutineers. In their scale and potential danger, these fleet mutinies rank among the most serious manifestations of collective resistance in eighteenth-century Britain. In complexity, they far exceeded single-ship mutinies like the Bounty or Hermione. The mutineers deliberately subverted symbols of the legitimate rule of officers and deployed them in support of their own rival regime. “Counter-theatre” allowed the mutineer leaders to perpetuate their rule with minimal recourse to coercion by combining familiar symbols of naval order, new mutineer power structures, and sailors’ traditions of resistance. As such, the mutinies speak to wider literatures: to histories of the age of revolutions, to the revolutionary Atlantic, and to histories of popular protest and resistance.
Counter-Theatre during the 1797 Fleet Mutinies
