Abstract

The mutiny on the Hermione in September 1797 was the bloodiest ever to explode onboard a warship of the British Royal Navy. And only as such, unfortunately, has it been remembered. By treating it as an exceptional event, historians have isolated the Hermione from the history of the mutinous Atlantic, and the age of revolution more broadly. The present article seeks to return it to that context by tracing in particular the many paths by which the crew – a typical hodgepodge of at least twelve nationalities from two or three continents – found its way onto the ship, was pushed to the point of insurrection by the experience of brutal West Indian warwork, and afterwards disappeared again into the vast and complex, transnational networks of the revolutionary Atlantic.

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