Books: When the Walls Shook

THE GREAT MUTINY by James Dugan. 511 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Britain's war against France was in its fourth year—and France controlled most of Europe. At Brest, the French were assembling a formidable invasion force. In London, King George III, the Admiralty and No. 10 Downing Street did not worry much. What power could possibly breach "the nation's legendary wooden walls," the scourge of the oceans, the British fleet? Then, in the spring of 1797, the wooden walls began to come apart.

James Dugan's fine, wry, if somewhat overlong story re-creates the greatest mass mutiny in maritime history. It began in the Channel fleet stoppering Brest, spread like an infection through the anchorages at Spithead and the Nore, up to the North Sea and down 6,000 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.

Under the Orlop. "A ship," Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked, "is worse than a gaol. There is, in gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger." Johnson's opinion, uttered in 1776, was still relevant in 1797. Britain's infamous press gangs roamed the country, seized any able-bodied men that caught their eyes, and flung them aboard ships that, Dugan writes, were "not built to fit men; the men were warped to fit the ship." In fact, some of them were. In many a country town, an old sailor was readily identifiable by his severe stoop, the result of spending years in the orlop (overlap) deck, which sometimes offered no more than four feet of headroom.

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.