ABSTRACT
Just before midnight on 21 September 1797, a violent mutiny broke out on HMS Hermione, at anchor in the West Indies.1 The mutiny is still the ‘bloodiest uprising ever to take place in the British Navy’ (Jeans 168). The mutineers butchered the tyrannical captain, Hugh Pigot,2 and killed nine other officers, including a boy, a midshipman named Smith. Pigot had held violent sway over the Hermione’s crew for two years; the final acts of cruelty that instigated the sailors’ rebellion were Pigot’s threats that he would flog whichever of the crew came down last from the rigging. In their haste not to be flogged, three young sailors fell to their deaths. Pigot allegedly scoffed at their corpses lying on the deck, and commanded that the sailors’ bodies be unceremoniously thrown into the sea. The sailors responded later that same day by brutally hacking Pigot and his officers to death with swords and hatchets. Even officers who had acted fairly to the mutineers
were slaughtered, despite their desperate entreaties for mercy.3 The mutineers then sailed the Hermione to the Spanish Main and handed her over to the Spaniards, France’s ally in England’s war against Napoleon. In the 10 years following the mutiny, 33 of the mutineers were hunted down or gave themselves up, and 24 were hanged at the yardarm by the Royal Navy. More than 100 of the ‘Hermiones’ escaped retribution, however, and ‘with changed names and silent prayers no one would recognize them, found their way into U.S. warships and were serving there during the pre-1815 years’ (McKee 255).4 The Hermione was recaptured in October 1799 in a daring raid by HMS Surprise under Captain Sir Edward Hamilton. After the Hermione mutiny, as Christopher McKee states, the spectre of mutiny was more horrifying, ‘the bloody phantasm of the Hermione close to the surface of the collective memory’:
In her Condition-of-England novel North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell reimagines this violent mutiny in the dramatic sub-plot that tells of the ‘passionate’ (108) mutineer Lieutenant Frederick Hale, brother to the novel’s heroine, Margaret. Margaret Hale in the main plot of North and South, like her sailor brother Frederick, involves herself in disputes between oppressed workers and those in authority over them. Unlike Frederick, however, Margaret does not support violent insurrection, but rather models a nonviolent politics of resistance amidst mob fury. Through her story, the politics of tolerance and nonviolent protest evolve against a backdrop of the real bloodshed of the Hermione mutiny, the unstated but implicit violence of the fictional Orion mutiny and the strikers’ angry riot.5
