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Men of War: the Seamen of HMS Mars and the Revolutionary Era

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Men of War: the Seamen of HMS Mars and the Revolutionary Era Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University History Theses Department of History 4-22-2008 Men of War: The Seamen of HMS Mars and the Revolutionary Era Harold Hansen Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_theses Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Hansen, Harold, "Men of War: The Seamen of HMS Mars and the Revolutionary Era." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2008. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_theses/27 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MEN OF WAR: THE SEAMEN OF THE HMS MARS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA By Harold Victor Hansen Under the Direction of Christine Skwiot ABSTRACT The late eighteenth century witnessed dramatic changes in the social, economic, and political fabric of the Atlantic World. The Sailors of the HMS Mars fully participated in this transition to modernity. Over the course of their naval careers, the men laboring on the Mars felt the pull of four distinct, but interlocking cultures. Working class, maritime, naval, and British culture all played a part in the sailors’ identity construction. As a result of these myriad influences the sailors could have chosen to join the emerging trans-national maritime working class, but instead the Mars’ seamen fought to gain full British citizenship and acceptance. From 1794 when she first entered commission, to 1798 when she returned victorious from battling the French l’Hercule, provides numerous examples of the sailors’ identity construction process. Moreover, an examination of the seamen’s whole journey also illuminates how the larger processes of the Revolutionary Era functioned. INDEX WORDS: British History, Naval History, British Sailors, Maritime History MEN OF WAR: THE SEAMEN OF THE HMS MARS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA By Harold Victor Hansen A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia Stat University 2008 Copyright by Harold Victor Hansen Jr. 2008 MEN OF WAR: THE SEAMEN OF THE HMS MARS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA by Harold Victor Hansen Jr. Committee Chair: Christine Skwiot Committee: Denise Davidson Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2008 DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my grandfather, Joseph Noyes. I never got to meet you, but you have nonetheless passed on your love of the sea. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my family, Mom, Dad, Sally, Christopher, Ginny, Kacey, Blanton, Joe, Ann, Lucy, Woody, and Jim and Kathy Wallace. Thank you to Christine Skwiot and Denise Davidson for serving on my committee, and putting up with my sloth, stylistic errors, run-on sentences, and general confused nature. Thank you to Casey Cater and Brian Miller for reading various drafts. Thanks to Dr. Hudson and Dr. Reid for providing such great examples of what a historian can become. Last but not least, eternal gratitude goes to my wife Jan, without whose love and support I never could have finished. v TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v LIST OF FIGURES vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 8 Four Cultures, One Identity 13 Historiography, Sources, and Methodology 27 2 THE CULTURAL ANATOMY OF THE HMS MARS 38 Designed with a Purpose 41 Modern Work for More Efficient Destruction 47 Modern Workers, Modern Benefits 63 The Use and Custom of the Sea 71 Moving In, Moving Up and Moving Out 85 Conclusion 100 3 HMS MARS AND THE BATTLE FOR BRITISH IDENTITY 105 Revolutionary Seas 108 Oh, What an Easter Surprise! 126 Redemption off Brest 146 Conclusion 168 4 CONCLUSION, A NEW KIND OF CITIZEN? 171 BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The Death of Captain Alexander Hood, by James Daniell 148 Figure 2: The Death of Nelson, by Arthur William Devis 149 vii Chapter 1: Introduction On 15 April 1797, the sailors of Britain’s elite first line-of-defense, the Channel Fleet, mutinied en masse to protest the conditions in the service. In an act of bold defiance, the seamen, including those on the Mars, informed their superiors that they would not put to sea until the state addressed their grievances. The mutiny lasted a month, and in the end the sailors emerged victorious with a pay raise and an improvement in the benefits provided by the navy. Contemporaries and later historians dubbed the event the Spithead Mutiny, but in reality, it more closely resembled a labor strike with the admiralty playing the role of management and the sailors that of modern workers. The Spithead strike demonstrated for the entire British nation the sailors’ class solidarity. The work experience of the sailors generated a broad-based collective identity based on the alienation caused by unequal productive relations.1 The sailors shared this experience with the rest of the emerging Atlantic World working class, which had maintained a century-long revolutionary tradition of resistance to aristocratic and capitalist colonial exploitation.2 Within this tradition, the sailors, as a part of the maritime proletariat, acted as a primary communications relay for the radical underground. The seamen transmitted the revolutionary fever wherever they touched land or interacted with other marginalized people.3 The free-flow of 1 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 149-150, 243-244. 2 Patrick O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53-57. 3 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 173. 8 Enlightenment ideas on the rights of man and just government culminated in the late eighteenth century with the French and American Revolutions. Several scholars have tried to fit Spithead into this radical, revolutionary tradition.4 A closer examination of the Spithead Mutiny reveals that the sailors did not act like revolutionaries trying to bring down an unjust system. Instead the sailors made use of the existing system to demand better treatment, both material and meta-physical. The sailors’ language, tactics, demands, and behavior drew more from the conservative British revolutionary tradition of 1688 than the radical French one of 1789. The seamen’s demands and behavior also grew out of naval and maritime traditions, not just working-class experiences. Thus, factors other than class- consciousness must have been at work on the seamen to motivate them to act the way they did. The Mars’ sailors’ life experiences placed them at the epicenter of the social, economic, and political transformations that accompanied modernity. Historians have addressed these transformations in great detail, but the Royal Navy seamen have largely been ignored despite the fact that the Mars’ sailors’ lives touched on many issues crucial to contemporary scholarship. Since the professionalization of history in the late nineteenth century, naval history has existed separately from mainstream historiography. The geographical segregation of sailors and their ships, naturally enough, seems to remove them from the larger historical picture. Moreover, since history from the bottom up came into vogue, military and naval affairs have long been seen as the purview of Whig historians clinging to outdated conceptions of meta-narratives and the importance of great (white) men. While this larger trend in history from the bottom up has 4 James Dugan, The Great Mutiny (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1965), 15, 29, 31, 451, 467, W.J. Neale, History of the Mutiny at Spithead and the Nore. With an Inquiry into its origin and suggestions for the prevention of Future Discontent in the Royal navy (Philadelphia: G.B. Zeibler & Co., 1842), 19-20, 25, 91, 121, 173, Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 277, and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 167-168. 9 revealed the agency and awareness of previously marginalized actors, its prejudices against military matters and the elites who guided them have also forced the real importance of military and particularly naval affairs to the margins and footnotes of contemporary scholarship. Along with the admirals and fleets went the sailors as well, and this marginalization of them obscures the fact that the eighteenth-century Royal Navy seaman acted on the same stage and experienced the same upheaval as the rest of the Atlantic World during the Revolutionary Era. Historians have ignored the naval worker despite the fact that the navy represented the single largest industry and employer in Britain. The purpose of this thesis is to re-integrate the Royal Navy’s sailors back into the mainstream of contemporary historiography. Towards that end, it will bring specialist naval history, maritime history, and mainstream historiography into conversation with each other to demonstrate how the late eighteenth-century Royal Navy sailors can be read as an example of the emergence of a politicized working class that made use of and struggled with the existing system to secure recognition and respect from the nation. The Royal Navy of the late eighteenth century provides numerous avenues for social and cultural analysis. The Mars’ sailors rejected the lure of revolutionary change and instead opted to work within the existing system to better their own positions. In this vein, their example provides a better field for analysis than out-right rebellious peoples because the seamen’s embrace of the existing order mirrored that of the majority of their fellow Britons.
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