Mutinous Behavior on Voyages to the South Seas and Its Impact on Eighteenth-Century Civil Society

This paper pays special attention to incidents first reported in the revolutionary decade of the 1790s, contrasting the mutiny experienced by the merchant captain John Meares, on his trading venture to Nootka, with that suffered by William Bligh of the Royal Navy on the Bounty. These voyages reveal complementary aspects of Britain's imperial ambitions in the Pacific. The reports of each mutiny, which reached London within months of each other, illustrate the difficulty contemporaries experienced in openly writing about insurrection at sea, and also reveal how an exotic South Sea location could focus the public's attention on the issue of "liberty." Previous commentators have examined the Bounty mutiny chiefly to discover its cause and, in the process, to analyze the complex personalities involved.¹ This article, however, considers the impact of the Bounty mutiny on civil society and the arts, draws on parallels in the Meares and Bligh accounts, and contextualizes the Bounty episode within the long recorded history of mutinous behavior during South Sea voyages.

The frequency of mutiny on the South Seas was a source of anxiety to sponsors of exploratory voyages, and to financiers intent on commercial exploitation. Commanders who avoided open mutiny in the 1760s were praised; Meares, who successfully overcame mutiny, praised himself. The Bounty mutiny shocked an establishment that was particularly anxious to maintain social stability and that took swift action to mitigate the disaster, although, ironically, the public's enduring interest in the mutiny led to debate challenging the very social order that supporters of enlightenment and commerce were trying to protect. Two kinds of liberty are at issue: liberty under the law, implying duty, self-restraint, hierarchy, and so forth, and the kind of liberty that entailed sensuous indulgence, unfettered appetite, and indolence, which had radical connotations.² Mutiny in the exotic Pacific clearly presented these alternative liberties in concrete form.

If we look at the early commercial exploitation of the Pacific, particularly at British attempts to open up trade with America's northwest coast, we discover that mutiny proved a severe obstruction that had to be sensitively represented in published accounts. In 1788, when merchants instructed John Meares to take two ships from China to Nootka, his crews became turbulent. He published his account of this trading venture in 1790 expressly to improve navigation and to extend the commerce of the British Empire. At this point, he needed to present himself as an enlightened and competent leader and to explain the paradox that his crews nonetheless rebelled against him. He also had to appear a patriotic and disinterested captain, publishing only as a form of public service rather than to promote his career or to make money. These conflicting pressures affect the way in which he describes how he combated mutiny: what might be taken for signs of incompetence or inhumanity have to be narrated as the opposite. The first incident occurred three miles off Panay, when a conspiracy was discovered onboard one of his ships, but was quelled before the whole crew knew of it. Meares insisted that every circumstance be entered in the ship's logbook, in order to attach particular disgrace to mutiny that would act as a deterrent. (The log would be scrutinized by those who paid the seamen's wages, who would welcome any reason to pay troublemakers less.) Meares didactically advises that on long voyages all misdemeanors ought to be recorded in the log, because shame and the threat of losing wages are more likely to deter rebellion than is corporal punishment. Flogging, he wrote, gave only temporary pain that hardened seamen treated with contempt.

Meares, a naval officer before turning trader and explorer, criticized the poor discipline that generally operated on merchant ships and threatened commercial gain. The merchant captain's authority was undefined by statute, although subject to the law. Meares argued that Britain should emulate other nations by including merchant ships in the general legislation dealing with discipline at sea, which would provide a legal code that would help govern all seamen, "a class of men...