ABSTRACT
The battle of 1 June 1794 was fought some 400 miles west of Ushant between the British Channel Fleet under the command of Lord Howe and the French Atlantic Fleet, led by Admiral Villaret de Joyeuse. Lord Howe, nominally in command of the Channel Fleet although ill, received a series of petitions through the post in February and March 1797. On Easter Sunday, 16 April 1797, crews of the Channel Fleet's ships refused the order to sail from Spithead, their anchorage off Portsmouth. Like The Floating Parliament, two other ballads without imprint seem to date from the end of the first phase of the Spithead mutiny in late April. The spread of The Death of Parker across the Atlantic, in print and in oral tradition, owes something to seamen, and thus furthers the arguments of the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker concerning the role of sailors in creating even a revolutionary Atlantic space, drawing on popular traditions of resistance.
