Word: seamens
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...GREAT MUTINY, by James Dugan. The British fleet in 1797 may have seemed invincible to the French, but 50,000 of His Majesty's seamen, fed up with being underfed, underpaid and too often flogged, took control of 100 vessels and blockaded their own country in the biggest mass mutiny in maritime history...
...miles to ships lying off the Cape of Good Hope. Before it sputtered out, the mutineers numbered 50,000, controlled more than 100 vessels, blockaded London, and laid their country naked to her foes. Dugan's scrupulously unemotional narrative does not conceal his conviction that the mutinous seamen were right and behaved, for the most part, like gentlemen, while the government, for the most part, behaved like mutineers...
...Seamen were rarely paid and miserably fed. In 1796, His Majesty's government owed the crews $14 million in back pay, some of it three years overdue. In home port, after months at sea, only the officers set foot on land. Ship's cheese came adulterated with kitchen scourings, rancid fat and glue. Messes began with a ritual tattoo as men banged their biscuits on the table to shake loose the vermin...
Salted Wounds. Seamen's complaints about this hard life were redressed at the yardarm or, if the captain felt merciful, by the cat. One apparently incorrigible tar was flogged eight times in ten months. Sentences of 1,000 lashes were common. The man who survived his flogging got salt-the Royal Navy's antiseptic-to rub on his ribboned back...
...against such intolerable conditions that the seamen struck. Better pay and decent food, shore leave, protection against brutality-these were among the modest demands of men who continued to show their deposed officers elaborate courtesy and swore unshakable fidelity to the Crown. After token conciliation at Spithead, the government set its chin. In the Nore anchorage at the Thames mouth, a troubled old admiral named Charles Buckner listened with some sympathy to the complaints presented by the elected "president" of the mutineers, Richard Parker, the son of a grain merchant who had once been an officer himself but got cashiered...