Britain's Bloodiest Mutiny

The captain of the HMS Hermione was a sadist even by the not-very-high standards of the British Royal Navy in the 1700's. He was a prolific flogger, subjecting his crew to the cat-of-nine-tails. It was hardly a surprise when his crew rose up and mutinied. Even if the British Navy couldn't for one second let them get away unpunished. This is the brutal and bloody story of Britain's most horrific mutiny, told by the one and only Dan Snow! This episode was edited by Anna Brant. The producer was Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX74ZgzrlyH29 Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  It is the night of the 21st of September, 1797, and the air aboard HMS Hermione is thick with tension. Men move silently through the darkness, hands tightening around knives and cutlasses. Every creak of timber threatens to give them away. Above them, Captain Hugh Pigott sleeps, unaware that his crew have reached breaking point. Now, within hours, one of the bloodiest mutinies in Royal Naval history will leave officers butchered, a warship handed to Britain's enemy, and an empire reeling. This is more than a tale of murder at sea, though. It's a story of power, brutality, and the moment discipline gave way to chaos.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  From the bloodstained decks of HMS Hermione, this is After Dark.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  And I'm Antony.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  And I hope you've brought your sea legs, listeners, watchers, friends, because we're going aboard HMS Hermione on today's episode, and it is a bit of a bloody and dark history.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  It is, and it is right at the end of the 18th century. You know, we love a bit of Georgian frivolity, but this is not very frivolous, but we love a bit of Georgian history nonetheless. And to help us guide our way through this dastardly, cruel history, actually, we have the one and only, of course, Dan Snow.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  Guys, could be back.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  You're back, you're back. If you haven't listened to Dan's other episodes that we have done with him this month, then go and listen to that. We just did.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  We've gone ship crazy.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  We've gone ship crazy this month, and Dan has helped us on our way. Now, Dan, we're going to get straight into this one because we've been talking about ships this month. So we have a little bit of background going on. Life in the Royal Navy at the end of the 18th century, walk me through it. Disaster or a greycrack?

• 3:14Speaker 05

  So the Royal Navy people, Winston Churchill called it rum, sodomy, and the lash.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Stop. Of course he did, yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  So that the implication is it's your kind of your morale's propped up by that tot of rum, which was true to some extent, but and then I'll impart the sodomy there, and you know what he meant by that. And then the lash, it refers to the fact that there's very, very strict discipline on board ships. So you're being physically beaten. There's something called the cat nine tails, about a metre and a half long piece of rope as big as your wrist. The last 60 centimetres of that piece of rope are, you've undone the strands into the smaller cords that make up a rope, and then you tie knots in those, and then you get a big, strong bosun's mate to lash the naked back of a miscreant. He's tied to the shroud or tied to a gun and for, you know, insubordination or in fact nearly anything you could think of,

• 4:07Speaker 05

  a man that can be flogged in that respect. So because that happens, it's brutal, it's bloody. Foreigners comment on it, the Chinese, we have Chinese sources who go, God, these Brits are wild. They're like thrashing each other. It's horrible. People have got, there's a big debate in the world of history. Like, was it awful to be on a Georgian ship? Or was it? And actually, the answer is it could be, and we'll discuss that today. The captains had a lot of latitude, so some captains were floggers, others weren't. And, and we are going to meet a really, really statistic captain today, who I think we can say was a horrible man.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  I went to the National Maritime Museum recently, and they do have a cat of nine tails on display. And when you get up close to an object like that, you can almost kind of feel the lick of it. It's, it's a really brutal thing, and obviously something that would do enormous damage to a human being. And people, people did die from this.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Laid your ribs and spine bare if you get enough lashes.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, which isn't great when you're on a dirty ship and you have a job to do and all of that. And of course, at the end of the 18th century as well, Britain famously fighting the Spanish, the French.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Everyone.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:10Speaker 05

  Napoleonic revolutionary wars against France. So for the previous hundred years, Britain has been fighting France, sort of pretty much sort of global mastery. And there's been a series of wars which we have discovered and have talked about, and people will be familiar with, and they, and the American Revolutionary War comes in the 1770s, then we get the French Revolutionary War, 1790s. And they are clashing in all the oceans of the world. Britain, Britain's launching military expeditions to Cape Town, into the Caribbean, which are very important. Sugar grown on those islands is the super commodity of the time. And ships are going out, they're little isolated worlds. They are very, they no contact with home, the captain is second unto God. So the captain and the officers will sort of determine the nature of that ship, how happy it is or unhappy.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Very interesting story because if the Royal Navy, it can't be as bad as everyone says, as people might think, because there are very few mutinies in the Royal Navy in the 18th century. Interestingly, there's very few times when the crew rise up and just kill the captain. The times they do happen are super famous. We know about Mutiny on the Bounty. There are the very, there are the interesting mutinies in the 1790s in Britain, which are around paying conditions. So sort of park them slightly. They're around the sailors not getting enough money. There was never a question that, it's not thought they were kind of political, radical, revolutionary. It was like, you're not paying us enough. We're annoyed about this.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Spithead and nor.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  Spithead and nor. Really interesting stories. You guys do them, and terrifying. I mean, that almost is the moment, that's almost Britain's sort of Russian Revolution moment. If those had spiralled out of control.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. I always want to want to make a film of those, but because they take place just off the coast of Britain, they're not very cinematic necessarily, but.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  And they're just, yeah, they're an interesting time and place. But, but in terms of a sort of a ship that rises up against an unpopular captain because he's an absolute dick, there's very few of those, and that's what's so interesting about what we're going to talk about today.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Well, we have one of those to discuss today. Antony, do we know much about Captain Hugh? Because this is your episode.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Dan, you tell us all about Captain Hugh.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  Well, his dad was an admiral, so it's again, one of these families where naval, there's a naval tradition in the family. But it doesn't mean it's sort of, you just get parachuted into important positions. As we've talked about in previous podcasts, you have to know what you're doing in the Navy. So that gives you kind of an entrance. It gets you work experience. It doesn't, and it helps your career, of course, but it's not everything. So you get aged 13, his dad's influence gets him a spot on a ship, but he has to sort of work his way up and prove himself. And he does prove to be, on the whole, Britain produces unbelievably good sailors at this point. There's a sort of vicious learning, because you're either, you know, and perhaps as Captain Pigott shows, you're fighting the elements, you're fighting disease, you're fighting the French and Spanish.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  You've got to, if you're not good, it's kind of a bit Darwinian. If you're not good, you're going to.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  It either makes you or breaks you, right?

• 8:05Speaker 05

  It does. And in fact, that's what we're going to find out. He does survive a few early breaking opportunities. He drives his ship into other ships twice and blames the other captains, which is perhaps forgivable. So there are some question marks around his aptitude. He does, though, keep getting appointed to command. Now, possibly that's patronage, a sign of kind of corruption. But, you know, but, but also he may be decent. And but what's clear from the beginning is he's a flogger. He flogs, like he orders his, something like half his ship's company to be whipped. And for comparison, historians looked at a wider sort of sample of a particular fleet in this period, and he thinks about nine percents of sailors would be flogged in this period. So half is crazy.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  So he's got, he looks like he's a bit incompetent. He's not quite good enough, and he looks like he's a bit brutal. It's difficult for us to say at this range. And that therefore, it's not, it's not, it's not a surprise that this mutiny will happen under his command.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, discipline's very important aboard these ships. And we've looked at things like mutiny on the bounty. We know that when this command structure breaks down, things can go terribly wrong. But even so, I mean, he's an extreme case.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  He looks like he's on the, he's an outlier. He's got a sort of, he's these topmen, the people called topmen who go up to the, way up into the masts, they're young, very keen, very agile boys and men. And they set the sails and, you know, sometimes in a storm, the ship's going like this in the waves and they are up there fighting, trying to get, so can you imagine the angle they're going through up there on the top of the masts?

• 9:34Speaker 00

  I mean, the physical fitness, you would need to do that and to not die.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Sexuality, fitness, bravery. And then he, but he goes, they're doing an exercise or a training and the last of them to get back down the deck, he orders to be flogged.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  Which is wild.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  We're in September 1797 now, and we have, some of those topmen have already died from falling as well.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  Yes, we should say, so that suddenly you get accidents because they're desperate, they're falling.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it also says something, which I think is really interesting and so easy to overlook about the expectations of responsibility of these captains on board here. You're talking about, you know, it should have been in and around nine percent that that's being flogged and, but we're looking at 50% here. And already that's causing upset and concern and unhappiness on board. So there's this perfect storm starting, these three young boys are falling, they're dying, the crew is, and this is a world, their world, their wooden world at sea is being upset by the attitude of this captain. And that's unacceptable to the crew in many ways.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Because the whole thing does, there is a contract here, isn't there? Which is the captain will, the Hollywood version of the captain's like a mad tyrant. It makes sense. The captain depends for his survival and career progression on the crew being good at what they do. And there's a sort of mutual understanding. And actually, I think a lot of the time, they would have been real communities, these crews. And what do you do when, look, what do we all do when we're in a tyrannical situation? When the person in charge of us, with life and death power over us, is an incompetent sadist? That is a scary moment for us all. And there are these, these chapters, it wants, it's kind of, the turning point seems to be when he humiliates another officer, which is interesting. It tells you about the hierarchy.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  I mean, this just shows that he fundamentally doesn't understand his position and how to maintain it right. That he is not only having people much lower down the scale from him flogged in this brutal routine way and making that sort of ordinary in terms of his command, but then he's also trying to undermine people who hold power on the ship as well. It's wild.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  You guys have got, you guys are eating so special, you probably know better than me. So like socially, it does, it's another transgression when you humiliate, you tried, he tries to get another, the most junior officers on board effectively, who are very young, but they're often would be, I think socially regarded as kind of equals.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  He humiliates him in front of the rest of the crew.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Well, he tells him to get down on his knees, doesn't he?

• 11:58Speaker 05

  Get down on his knees, beg for forgiveness, he strips him from his command. And again, you guys probably understand that better than me, but that is again, a sort of line is crossed. And amazingly, the men, the sailors seem to be, yeah, that he's awful and horrible to them, but it's, it's, it's when he's turning against some of his own kind, they go, this guy is, wow.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  And that transgression upsets, it says something about how this midshipman, whose name was David O'Brien Casey, that he starts to represent order on this ship, this middle person. And as soon as he, so he's asked to get down his knees and apologize for this, you know, relatively.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  And he refuses, right?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  He refuses twice, and he is lashed then 12 times for that. And this is seen as the transgression. So this is all building, this unhappiness is really, really growing. I love this idea of a contract, Dan, that you were mentioning there, this invisible contract. That's now been broken essentially. And what happens next, which we'll find out after the break, is the mutiny that we've come here to talk about. Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way, same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

• 13:42Speaker 05

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• 14:45Speaker 01

  By the way, we should probably say, Dan, we're on HMS Hermione here. It is 1797. We've had this unhappy, this unhappy lot on the Hermione. Bring us to the group that's led by a man called Thomas Nash. There is a lot of unhappiness on board.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  It's an unhappy ship. They are in a cauldron of heat, they're in, they're on the Spanish main, which is the coast of central, south central and up into, you know, the Mexican coast. It's a tough place to be, there's disease, it's hot, it's sweltering. You're real, that you've lost respect for the command structure and therefore the ship's just going to fall apart. You know, the whole thing operates on, you've got to trust the person above you, that you think he knows what he's doing. And if you come to that decision, I mean, I can't imagine how intense that cauldron, you're bumping shoulders with each other all the time. You're like, you're in a football crowd with these officers. You know their smell, you know, so, and, and a group of men decide that enough is enough

• 15:48Speaker 05

  and they're going to kill him. Now this guy, this is an Irishman, he's a bosun's mate, he's a professional, bosun's mate is one of the more kind of professional backbone of real, like tough salts on board, veteran sailors probably. And he takes it upon himself to lead a group of men and they're going to kill the captain. And this is obviously a hanging offence, this is mutiny, this is very rare, this is, this is, it shows how intense things have got. And they break in, the stern area of the ship is where the officers, officers sleep. They're separated from the rest of the ship's company by marines, by soldiers at sea for their own safety. So these contingencies are planned for, but they get some Dutch courage, they break into the stores, they get drunk on rum.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  And then they overpower the marine sentry at the captain's door and they stab the captain to death.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  It's such a remarkable moment, isn't it? Because like you say, Dan, it's the extreme situation that has arrived on board that has led them to make this decision. This is, as you say, it's a hanging offence. This is not a decision that's taken lightly.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  No, it's, no, it's not. And what I don't know about is that, what's interesting is that 11 officers are killed on board as well. So I think the officers have to make a snap decision at this moment. Do they know the captain's a nightmare? Some of them were probably picked by, some of them are probably loyalists, others have to immediately choose in the middle of the night, as a drunken crowd of sailors are rampaging through the ship, they've thrown the mortally wounded captain overboard.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they throw him over before he's actually quite dead, right? Which is just so, pretty grim.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  And they have to make an immediate decision because the minute they go, well, they did have a point, they are complicit in high tree, you know, they're complicit. So they, a lot of them are killed. And you can imagine that would have been heartbreaking, that violence begets violence. And I imagine a lot of them were like, I, unfortunately, even though I hated that captain, I now have to fight back against these mutineers.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  What I think is interesting in this kind of, as you say, crazed moment, everyone is drunk, everyone's making these snap decisions, is the kind of decisions that are made. So I think I'm right in saying that Casey himself, who is humiliated and made to go down his knees, that, you know, is one of the reasons why this happens in the first place, is spared when the officers are killed. But they kill people like that, kill the ship surgeon. That doesn't seem very smart when you're floating around the Caribbean at this point.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  I just think, I think it's in the side of the intensity and the red mist and the frenzy and the chaos and the misunderstanding, you know, the surgeon comes out of his cabin door with a loaded pistol and gives his noises, I mean, what, you know, what?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  It's also transgression, right? Because if it was, the captain was the problem and they decide to mutiny against him, getting rid of him is one thing, but then killing the 11 officers starts to transgress. Again, it's this unwritten, and this is fascinating about life at sea at this moment in time. There are written rules, very clearly so, but then there are unwritten rules and killing those 11 officers. Is one of the unwritten rules where he starts to go, Nash and his comrades start to go beyond what potentially would be somewhat acceptable based on, on the, on Piggott's behaviour. But we now don't have a captain. So Nash takes control. What happens next?

• 19:01Speaker 05

  Nash has now taken over control of one of the king's ships and has killed the officers on the cap. So he is now going to die if the British Empire get their hands on him. Most of the crew are now guilty by association. They either were absolutely involved or they didn't fight back against the mutineers.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Because there will be an expectation, right, that they should have stood up for the officers and fought back.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  So they, everyone's got a big problem, but in a way that makes the decision for them. So they just have to sail to the nearest enemy port and hand the kingship over to the enemy because my enemy's enemy is my friend here. And so they sail into a Spanish port. Imagine that. Spanish could not believe their luck.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  So they sail into Venezuela, which is, as you say, under the control of the Spanish. And the Spanish give the mutineers $25 each in return for the ship, which seems like a pretty miserly amount for the prize that they're handing over and for the, the risk that is taken and the, the kind of, I suppose, the punishment that is floating over their heads should they make it home.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  It's also something to be said about the fact that we're talking about mutiny, right? But they've crossed a barrier again from mutiny now into treason.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  So the crimes are, the, the death crimes are adding up here. They are not doing themselves any favour, although I totally appreciate what you're saying then in terms of my enemy's enemy is my friend. And I will also point out, as the Irishman on the podcast would probably, this is 1797. Nash is Irish. I have a feeling Casey was probably Irish too, based on that name. Piggott's also another very strong Irish name. So I don't know how Irish this is. But 1798 in Ireland is the year of attempted revolution, turns out to be a failed rebellion. So Irish sentiment in terms of its identity amongst the British. So we talk about this being treason, but if you're Irish, I wonder how that sits with you and, and where you're, where on the treason line you're, you're.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a really good point. And that's what they, what they, the British would worry about that all the time. And what they would, that's the great mutinies in British home waters. There was, yes, they, they often begin triggered by pay conditions, terms, an officer being a dick. But there's always a terror that once, once you taste that sweet, sweet revolution, that freedom, you, you go, yeah, by the way, another thing.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  And, and that's when, and that's when you, you get so-called agitators emerge with a more political bent and go, well, while we're complaining, should we kind of get some Thomas Paine going in here and say, why do we, why have we got a king anyway? You know, so that's the kind of the danger of these, these moments. And so I'm sure you're right that it, it begins with this kind of, is that there's a crisis, but quite, it, it's easy for these things to take on a dangerously revolutionary or political bent and, and where an Irishness or around class consciousness as well.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  And there is real fear about this. So the navy do get wind of it, as you would imagine. The news does travel back. And there are survivors who don't stay with the Spanish, who end up making it back into British held territory. And the narrative that is given back to the British is, I mean, I have a quote here from one of the survivors saying, this had been in their, meaning the, the mutineers, this had been in their minds for months before it happened. So there's a sense that certainly this, this version of, of events that the mutineers meant to do this, that it was this planned thing that was against, you know, king and country, against the might of the British navy and not a sort of reaction to Piggott in real time in that kind of, you know, the heat of that melting pot that

• 22:30Speaker 00

  you talked about. Do you think there's a, a sort of discrepancy there in terms of how that story's been told?

• 22:35Speaker 05

  It's hard. And so the people that, the loyalists, if you like, so there's people like the carpenter who go, well, I never wanted to be part of it. They made me, they made me come along. And the minute I got to Spanish territory, I, I escaped and I made my way back to British territory. And they tend to get a kind of, they tend to, and they get a good hearing, I think, when they get back. And everyone is trying to sort of justify this disaster and trying to kind of wash their own reputations. I, I, yes, they were just to come back to, if you get back to Jamaica and you, you've survived this mutiny and you're back, you don't go, yeah, look, I didn't want to be part of it, but the captain was a real nightmare. So what you're probably more like to say is, yeah, they're total wrong and they just totally go, we went, it was all fine. You know, you can understand why some of the survivors are desperate to clean their reputations, get

• 23:19Speaker 05

  back in British good books, survive to get on with their lives.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  And it's quite easy to throw mutineers under the bus. And if the authorities are like, the authorities want to hear that there was just a bad, a bunch of bad apples. It's embarrassing for the authorities to hear that there was a sadistic captain who had it coming to him. Even if, by the way, the authorities sort of know that. And there are other examples of collective action that fall probably slightly short of mutiny, where it is, the men are not punished, quietly officers are removed. Like these naval officers, people know what's going on. Admirals have served on ships. They know about all this stuff. They have, it is a gossipy, smallish organisation. You know that so and so served with so and so and he's an absolute nobend. So, but, but I think in public facing terms, you just want to hear there were a group of naughty, naughty men on board.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  And who disrupted the, the, the running of His Majesty's vessel. And that's kind of easier to deal with, I think.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you get that in the famous mutiny on the bounty, don't you, that Captain Bligh is kind of crap. He's petty. He's, you know, there are lots of issues.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Exactly. And, and yet the narrative that is told there is, again, it's a selection of bad apples.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  The official narrative.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And much like the bounty though, the mutineers are not going to be allowed to get away with it. Obviously, in the case of the bounty, some of them do escape and found their own colony. Piggott is dead. The mutiny has happened. The mutineers have thrown themselves on the mercy of the Spanish, but they cannot be allowed to be walking around the, the world, having committed this crime against the navy. There's a bit of a manhunt now, isn't there?

• 24:51Speaker 05

  It's difficult to exaggerate the threat that this, this represents the navy. If, if crews rise up, take control of naval ships, the most precious, expensive items that His Majesty's government has purchased and hands that over to the enemy and then flaunt it. That's not, that is not going to work. You cannot allow that. That is an existential threat to the navy. That's more important, I think, almost than, so they launch a massive manhunt. They need to, they, they, the British need to tell their own workforce, they're like, you will be hunted down and exterminated if you do this. And, and indeed, we, and we will, if we can, we're going to capture that ship back as well till the stain on our honour is, is erased. So there is a sort of enormous manhunt. They're marked men.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  They disappear. They change names. They go and live in the United, the, the young, the new republic, the United States of America. But the British make that a top priority. They're hunted down. And indeed, they make it a top priority to get their hands back. They can't have the Spanish colours flying at the mast of this British ship. That is just humiliating.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  I think it says so much about how much the navy would not allow this, how much of, as you say, an existential threat it was, right? That even in a time of global warfare, when the navy is engaged in fighting, you know, on all fronts, they're still prepared to give resources to hunting down mutineers.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  But it shows, doesn't it?

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  It shows how important it is. And he is hanged from the rigging of a Royal Navy ship. You know, you couldn't, you couldn't have more a statement of that. The fleet would have, it's like raising a flag. I mean, the fleet would have seen a corpse swinging in the shrouds. They'd have seen him, they'd have seen him kick. They'd have seen life drain from him and then have seen his lifeless corpse hanging up there. And that was deliberate. They wanted the whole fleet. Anyone in harbour would have seen it. And they'd of course told. That news would have spread like wildfire through, through ships, crews over, over the months and years that followed. And indeed, I think about 30, there's just some mid 30, it's about 30 something people are recaptured, of which 25 or so are, are killed. Crews are moving around all the time. Everyone knows each other. There's powerful links. You're

• 26:52Speaker 05

  coming into harbour, you're drinking with each other. Those stories, people, the navy need everyone to know what happened to those mutineers. Can you imagine that? When news that mutiny gets to your ship and you're sort of lying in your cot at night thinking, on a hot night in off the Spanish main, thinking, are they going to, is my crew going to come for me? I mean, it's very, very destabilising. You want to be able to focus on the enemy, the weather. There's lots of things that can kill you at sea. And you're really load that, you're really hoping that on that list is not your own lads.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  Because that just makes it intolerable. If you can't trust your own men, you, none of this works.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  What I love about this, love is a strong word, is the idea of the mechanism of empire, even at this point. So you're talking about a manhunt that's essentially being operated from mainland Britain, but now is reaching other parts of the globe. And we're talking about, of course, print culture here, that this has to spread the word. We're talking about word of mouth. We're talking about other ships carrying the news of this mutiny and therefore, and then resulting treason around the globe with them. And so it, it tells, it gives this idea of, of storytelling and how storytelling can knit the navy together.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  Even over those vast distances.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  In this really remarkable way that, that means that these men are on the run. Talk to us about the recapture of the HMS Hermione then done, because as you say, this is a matter of national pride now. So what are the, what are the, what's the situation in which that they managed to get this back?

• 28:19Speaker 05

  The Hermione's recaptured off the coast of Venezuela and it's just a classic, it's a cutting out expedition, they're called.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 28:25Speaker 05

  Very, very gallant and dashing. You have a ship anchored off the coast and you, at night, you go in and you kind of clamber aboard, take it by stealth, under the guns of the enemy, you know, enemy forts, you cut the anchor cable and you sail it back out. And it's, it's a classic French Revolutionary War and a Polynesian War Royal Navy operation.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Someone needs to make a film of H O S M I N E.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  They do, actually.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. How has this not been done yet? This is so cinematic.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  Film featuring us where the establishment Royal Navy wins at the

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  It's classic Hollywood. I could see that falling over themselves to make that. The heroic Irish mutineer.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  You know they're gonna

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Horribly hard. Oh dear, yeah, maybe not. What do you think the legacy of this mutiny is? Because we, we have, you know, a handful of really famous mutiny stories in this period, and we know how important discipline is to the British Navy, the extent to which they're prepared to go to meet up punishment and to warn people off doing this in the future. What's the legacy of this particular case?

• 29:29Speaker 05

  Well, the, the immediate legacy, yes, is that the, the British Empire asserts itself and control and is, it leaves no ambiguity around what will happen to people that do this. But there's a longer, more subtle legacy, which is these people are not monsters. And they realise that to have an effective Royal Navy, you can't rule by fear. There has to be that, those contracts have to be observed. You, you, you know, you are only as good as your crew, who will sail and fight the ship. You are asking them to risk their lives on a daily basis, sometimes, to storm ashore an enemy ship following you. You know, Nelson didn't ever look round, check if men were following him. When he, when he, on Valentine's Day at the Battle of Capes and Vincent, when he attacked not one but two Spanish ships, he just leads his men. He knows they're behind him. Because

• 30:10Speaker 05

  they, he looks after them. He's, Nelson's letters are full of discussions of food and water and cleanliness of his ships, you know. So the, I think the longer term is that you do see a real discussion around flogging. This, this is part of that. Within a generation or two, flogging will be, will be ruled out of Royal Navy ships. Even corporal punishment under flogging. So starting, there was this sort of knotted little rope that some people had, just whack people occasionally as they go past, which as a parent, I must say, I started to

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Quite fun to that.

• 30:42Speaker 05

  I do not do that, but I can understand why. It might have been a useful kind of crowd control mechanism. And, and so things like that become, there's more regulations put in until inevitably that's kind of phased out as well. So I think, yes, the, the, the short term consequence is smash, they are crushed. This is the Royal Navy making a statement. But long term, the Navy are learning and thinking and discussing with like this. We can't let sadists do this to the men. And, and there's a sort of jet, there's a, there's a slower, decades long shift.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  I want to, as a kind of a reflection over the last two episodes that we've done together, Dan, just talk a little bit about Captain Anson again now. So this is from previous episode we did with Dan, where we asked, was it the most disastrous Royal Navy expedition that had ever happened? And actually, what's more remarkable now that we've spoken about Piggott and the fallout of that, is actually how incredibly gifted a captain Anson must have been, given the conditions that that fleet endured, to hold those men together. Because that's all disaster. Well, on the surface of it, that looks disastrous too. We have scurvy, we have storms, we have all of this, but they stick with him. And

• 31:53Speaker 01

  they come, those who are left alive, not many in the end, but 180, whatever it is, but they come back with him. And he has another fleet, as you say, that's again, very successful. I think it might be really easy in some ways to, if you just centre the heroism of these men, to go, oh, swashbuckling, blah, blah, blah. But actually, the psychology behind somebody that's Anson successful, and the interpersonal skills that he has to have, and you're talking about Nelson and talking about provisions, actually, what it comes down to is that you're a bloody good administrator in some, in some capacity.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Anson was one of the greatest administrators the Navy has ever had. He, in, as he did in the Seven Years' War, he transforms the supply of ships at sea, the health and welfare of the men. And he's doing that. Yes, I think they're doing that because there is a sense that, that, that it's sort of the right thing to do, to keep men alive under your command. But of course, they're also doing that because that is your greatest resource. You can more effectively take the fight to the French. If your men are healthy, if they've got some energy in them, if they're having a decent diet, if they, they're not coughing up blood in the scuppers. So it, it, the Royal Navy, its reputation is of a kind of violent, tyrannical organisation, but it wouldn't have been as effective if that was true. And there are

• 33:10Speaker 05

  hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ships, and many of them get into the most unimaginable scrapes, terrible examples throughout history. And 99% of the time, the crew do not rise up and kill their officers. 99% of the time, they work together and get themselves out of that scrape. And that is really very striking.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Dan, thank you so much for sharing this history with us. If you are out there and you're a filmmaker and you want to make the film of H O S M I N E, get in touch. We will, you know, maybe rewrite some of the histories.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't have time. You can, I'm not.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  I'll do it. Get in touch with me. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to be in touch, if you want to suggest more ship histories to us, then you can do so at [email protected]. See you next time.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Dear honeys, this is goodbye.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts.