Mutiny on Trial: Law and Order among Seventeenth-Century Seafarers

This article offers a new interpretation of mutiny, and of the ways in which this concept was defined and implemented in maritime law during the seventeenth century. It particularly focuses on British seafarers and the evidence surviving in the papers of the English High Court of Admiralty, placed in a comparative perspective with reference to other states’ legal provision. Scholars of maritime social history have been particularly preoccupied with the idea of mutiny but have rarely provided a precise decision of it, or explored its legal intricacies, while generally basing their ideas on the increasingly punitive regulations issued by state navies. Some have presented mutiny as an essentially responsive action by which mariners expressed grievances and appealed to shared ideas of patriarchal justice. Others have found in mutiny the stirrings of a distinctively maritime tradition of political radicalism which fermented throughout the early modern period and ultimately contributed to the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Across this divide, most historians have concurred in presenting it as an extreme, and often violent, act of resistance to constituted authority. This article shifts our attention to the supposed origins of this authoritarian system in the seventeenth century and expands our analysis beyond the martial law of state navies, which applied only in a specific and limited number of ships. It begins by considering the fragmented nature of the multiple systems of national, municipal, military, and customary maritime laws which governed seafaring, arguing that even in naval law there was no consistent definition or prosecution of mutiny, and that the provisions of customary law (much more ubiquitous than naval law) were far less draconian than popular myth would suggest. The article then turns to the depositions of mariners presented in admiralty court cases to explore how seafarers themselves delivered narratives about their conduct at sea, countering accusations of mutiny levied by their employers. It is particularly important to take into account the legal purpose and context of these sources, which highlight disputes and divisions and where statements were strategically crafted – on both sides – to pursue certain objectives. Through this analysis of both legal codes and legal practice, this article demonstrates that authority and law at sea were not a simple matter of unconfined power meeting radical resistance, nor of acquiescence to established hierarchies. While conflict, mistreatment, and asymmetries of power were undoubtedly present in early modern seafaring, the evidence from the High Court of Admiralty shows that, even at sea, shipmasters’ and their crews’ actions were shaped by knowledge of maritime law. Moreover, seafarers and their employers (whether commercial or imperial) shared expectations about the limits of commanders’ power and about consensus and compromise aboard ship. Discussion and protest were only considered mutinous when a voyage failed and provoked recriminations over who should bear the fault and the cost: the consequences, more than the act itself, defined its legal status. This article therefore provides novel reflections on the social dimensions of maritime labour and the agency of early modern seafarers within imperial and legal systems.