For Ireland, the year 1798 saw a major rebellion breaking out against rule from London, a time in which Britain was in its fifth year of a hard-fought war against revolutionary France. Set in motion by the Society of United Irishmen, an underground organization with links to Paris, the rebellion was eventually crushed by an overwhelming force of arms. In this new, dramatic account, Philip MacDougall shines a light on a little covered aspect of this history: the United Irish plot to capture a number of British warships and the planned use of those vessels in support of the rebellion that broke out in 1798. The means by which those ships were to be taken, not by direct external attack but by mutinous intrigue directed from on board, is fully explored. While ships blockading the French port of Brest returned to re-victual in Cawsand Bay, with many of the officers on shore leave, it was an ideal time for the plotting of mutinies. United Irishman alongside English and Scottish republicans could safely mix with those on other ships to develop a unified strategy. This book offers a micro study of how the planned mutiny plot developed and was co-ordinated. Personalities, cliques and idealists are seen as taking leading roles, with attention given to the motivating issues that lay behind those risk takers who knew that failure would result in likely hanging from the yardarm. Based on research from the National Archives, contemporary newspaper reports and the detailed hand written minutes of the courts martial held upon those identified as rebel leaders and some of their supporters (containing the actual words of the people of the lower deck) this is a full and balanced account of the plot which, if successful, would have re-written history.

The naval mutinies of 1797 were unprecedented in scale and impressive in their level of organisation. This volume focuses on new research, re-evaluating the causes and events which led to the seamen's revolts.

Reveals how poor governance and everyday forms of organization resulted in mutiny amongst seamen during the Age of Sail.

In 1797 the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy took place on the British frigate HMS Hermione off the coast of Puerto Rico. Jonathan Robbins, a reputed American sailor who had been impressed into service, made his way to American shores. President John Adams bowed to Britain’s request for his extradition. Convicted of murder and piracy by a court-martial in Jamaica, Robbins was hanged. Adams’s catastrophic miscalculation ignited a political firestorm, only to be fanned by Robbins’s failure to receive his constitutional rights of due process and trial by jury by an American court. American Sanctuary brilliantly lays out in riveting detail the story of how the Robbins affair, amid the turbulent presidential campaign of 1800, inflamed the new nation and set in motion a constitutional crisis, resulting in Adams’s defeat and Thomas Jefferson’s election as the third president of the United States. Robbins’s martyrdom led directly to the country’s historic decision to grant political asylum to foreign refugees—a major achievement in fulfilling the promise of American independence.

Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era’s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.