It’s April 1797. Britain’s war with Revolutionary France has just entered its fifth year. Britain’s greatest weapon, its navy, lies at anchor in Spithead near Portsmouth, and The Nore on the Thames estuary. Battered by cold wind and constant rain, the seamen, the “jolly Jack Tars” that protected Britain from French invasion, were planning a mutiny.
Life in the British Navy was miserable for sailors and seamen. While the officers preserved for themselves relative comfort and dignity, coming as they often did from noble stock, the seamen below decks were afforded very little of either. Indeed, many of the systems aboard ship seemed designed to strip the sailors of all but their humanity.