A matter of 'good usage': towards a new interpretation of the 1797 Fleet mutinies at Spithead and the Nore

The Spithead and Nore mutinies were the largest in the history of the Royal Navy and represented Britain’s most dangerous moment during the ‘Age of Revolutions’.

These remarkable events have received considerable attention, but historians have not yet fully unpacked their significance or explained the contradictions apparently inherent to their character. One day the sailors’ sentiments might seem to convey loyalty, and the next something close to treason. 

Most confusingly, this was not merely a case of different sailors holding divergent views — which ought to be expected — but of diametrically opposing opinions expressed at different times by the same individuals.

In this talk, Dr Callum Easton will present a fresh perspective on these monumental mutinies. It will move beyond the debates about their causation to consider the mutinies in their full complexity.

About the speaker: Dr Callum Easton

Callum Easton is a social, economic, and maritime historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. This talk is built on his doctoral research, which was completed as part of the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Royal Museums Greenwich and the University of Cambridge. His findings will soon be published in his first book The Naval Mutinies of 1797 and Popular Protest in Britain. Callum’s current research, begun during a Caird Research Fellowship, investigates Greenwich Hospital and the Greenwich pensioners. 

Header image: The Delegates in Council of Beggars on Horseback (PAG8535) © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London