*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts of the mutinies
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
Mention the 18th century Royal Navy and visions come to mind of swashbuckling sailors swinging from rope to rope while a red-faced captain in an even redder coat and a powdered wig shouts order and pitches fits. Such visions, largely shaped by Hollywood pictures such as the popular Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, naturally fail to do full justice to a group of men who functioned, with little direction and even less support, on the seas for years at a time. Disney may enjoy portraying them sitting down to sumptuous feasts or cavorting with scantily clad native girls, but the opposite was true; the men were almost always hungry, with even the best meals consisting of little more than bread, beans, and a bit of meat on the side if the voyage was still in its early days. Likewise, those stranded on islands were not met by pretty native girls bearing coconut cream pies but instead cold and wind and an unremitting surf that drove away both flora and fauna. Those who doubt this reality or unfamiliar with it need only consult the journals and records of the officers and crew of the HMS Wager, who sailed from England to fight the Spanish in 1741 and instead ended up fighting for their lives.
The Mutiny on the Bounty is one of those great stories in history that most people have heard of but few people know much about. In fact, those who think they know what happened are likely to have formed their opinions from what they saw on a movie screen than what they read in a book. Fortunately, the true story itself is every bit as exciting as anything Hollywood could dream up. In April 1789, the HMS Bounty was conducting operations in the Pacific when about half of the crew put in action a plot to take control of the ship from its captain, William Bligh. Along with Bligh, most of the rest of the crew that remained loyal to him were cast adrift while the Bounty sailed off. The mutineers sailed to Pitcairn Island, and they scattered on that island and in Tahiti before scuttling the Bounty itself, but in the meantime, Bligh and his loyal crew were managing to successfully travel over 3,000 miles and reach the Dutch East Indies.
In 1839, the Amistad was loaded in Havana with Africans who had been brought across the ocean to be made slaves, but after the ship left Havana for another location on Cuba, the Africans escaped their shackles, killed the captain, and took over the ship. When they demanded to be taken back to Africa, the ship's crew instead sailed north, and the ship was ultimately captured off the coast of Long Island in New York by the USS Washington. All of this resulted in one of the most famous maritime cases in history, and one that affected not just the international slave trade ban but also how jurisdiction over such a case was determined. While the British were interested in enforcing the ban on the slave trade, Spain wanted to protect its own rights by asserting that their property (crew and ship) could not be subjected to American jurisdiction, and that since slavery was legal in Cuba, a foreign country had no right to determine the legal status of the Africans aboard the Amistad. On top of that, both the Spanish slave traders intending to sail the ship around Cuba and the American captain who seized the Amistad claimed ownership of the Africans.
Despite Russia's imposing image in the world, less apparent weaknesses within the tsarist government threatened the country's stability. The accumulated unrest throughout the country could provoke a more organized message within the confines of a single warship, and indeed it eventually resulted in the first far-reaching eruption in the Black Sea Fleet aboard the battleship Potemkin.
