mutiny

mutiny, a resistance by force to recognized authority, an insurrection, but applied particularly to any form of sedition in any naval or military force of a nation. In its strict legal sense the term implies the use of force, but by long custom a refusal to obey a legal order of a superior officer is considered to be mutiny. It is not necessarily restricted to naval and military forces: a crew which rises against its officers or a crew member who strikes a superior officer or refuses to obey a legal order is just as guilty of mutiny in a merchant vessel as in a naval ship. Mutiny in a naval or military force is always tried before a court martial, in a merchant ship before a civil court.

Those taking part in the early voyages of exploration by sea frequently suffered mutinies among their crews, Drake, Magellan, and Hudson being just three examples. Often blood was spilt, though the massacre of passengers and crew that followed the shipwreck of the Dutch East Indiaman Batavia, was exceptional. Those who mutinied and escaped often resorted to piracy and any that were caught were hanged from the yardarm without further ado. However, in the case of Magellan not only did one of the principal mutineers, Juan Sebastián del Cano (c.1476–1526), escape punishment—as a pilot he was too valuable to be hanged—but, as the commander of the only ship to survive the expedition, he was honoured, faute de mieux, by the King of Spain with a coat of arms and a pension. A statue to him was also erected, a signal honour for a mutineer.

During the days of sailing navies, the penalty for mutiny in all navies was invariably hanging at the yardarm; when an entire ship's company mutinied, the ringleaders were hanged. However, in the naval mutiny at Spithead in 1797, when all the ships of the Channel Fleet were in mutiny against the pay and conditions of naval service, there were no victims, and indeed no one was brought before a court martial as it was considered that the men were justified in their complaints. However, in the mutiny at the Nore which immediately followed that at Spithead, a number of the ringleaders were hanged, since all the demands of the seamen had already been met at Spithead and there was, in the eyes of the Admiralty, no justification for the mutiny.

One of the best known of all naval mutinies was that on board HMS Bounty in 1789; another was the mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin in 1905; and a third was the mutiny in the German High Seas Fleet in 1918, which led directly to the defeat of Germany in the First World War (1914–18). Another 20th-century naval mutiny occurred in the British Home Fleet at Invergordon in 1931 when the pay of naval seamen was reduced as a result of a crisis in Britain's economy. A proportion of crew members of several warships mutinied by refusing to obey orders and gathering on the foredeck of their ships, but quick action by the Admiralty in rescinding the pay cuts brought the protests to a swift end.