The Black Ship

Rating:
Summary: An excellent story of mutiny
Review: A well written historical book that gives great insight into life in the British Navy during the Age of Sail. The mutiny itself is far more violent than the Bounty, and the images evoked linger far afterwards. Dudley Pope is as good a sea writer Ive read, including Forester.

Rating:
Summary: Ian Myles Slater on: A Most Irregular Affair
Review: By what seems to have been an odd working of coincidence, in 1963 two books were published on mutinies in the British Navy which took place in 1797. I will describe both events, because some earlier reviewers seem to have been rather unclear about the context of Dudley Pope's history of one them.

It must be remembered that these mutinies took place during the first round of war with post-Revolutionary France, while Napoleon Bonaparte was just one more ambitious general, and the English upper and middle classes were seriously concerned about home-grown Jacobins chopping off their heads. Both mutinies were causes of concern, at times amounting to hysteria, but for different reasons

James Dugan's "The Great Mutiny," apparently long out of print, was a detailed (although not completely satisfactory) account of the "Great" (very large scale) Mutiny on the ships-of-the-line (three-deckers mounting 74 to 120 guns) at their bases at Spithead and the Nore. Although widely feared (or assumed) by the public and politicians to be an act of sympathy with the French Republic, the real trigger for this generally peaceful refusal to obey orders was simpler. It was fury at the decision to raise the pay of the army (which had known nothing but defeat), and keep that of ordinary seamen (who had been winning battles) where it had been for about a century.

The mutineers, who did have a list of reforms they wanted, insisted on their patriotism, claiming that they would gladly obey orders to fight the French, or any other [provide offensive epithet] foreigners. Xenophobia was, it seems, a remarkably effective antidote to apparent self-interest, despite the efforts of some more radical elements.

It was immediately recognized that the crews of frigates (cruisers, mounting 22 to 44 guns), except for those anchored under the guns of the three-deckers, did NOT join in the mutiny. These seamen had the hope of prize money from captured merchantmen (something available to the main fleet only in the rarest of circumstances), and seemed to have less interest in a comparatively negligible increase in official pay. Frigate captains, at least, must have felt relieved.

In this context, therefore, it was a particular shock when, later in the same year, the crew of the frigate "Hermione" suddenly rose up, killed officers and a hapless midshipman, and took the ship into a foreign port -- not French and Republican, but Spanish and Catholic, which to some traditionalists must have seemed even worse.

This very different, and, in comparison, slightly paradoxical, rebellion at sea was the subject of Pope's 1963 volume, "The Black Ship." The book has been reprinted at intervals over the years, a tribute to, among other things, its literary quality. (Also, I suspect to Pope's continuing production of naval fiction and non-fiction.)

"The Black Ship" explains how the combination of an incompetent and unfeeling captain and Irish nationalism -- not the example of France -- produced a chain of events on "H.M.S. Hermione" which seemed to defy the conventional wisdom of the navy. Pope traces the career of Captain Pigot, the favored scion of a distinguished naval family, and makes it quite clear that hardly anyone else liked him.

Unlike Bligh, who was a superb seaman, Pigot must have inspired both fear and contempt from those serving under him with his shiphandling skills. (Pope gives examples, including Pigot's efforts to blame everyone else.) Again unlike Bligh, Pigot was genuinely malicious, not merely a (catastrophically) poor judge of the feelings of others. Even so, he might have lived out a routine career, or managed to fall victim to the "hazards of the sea" which accounted most of the Royal Navy's losses in the wars with the French Republic and Empire. (Quite possibly taking a ship and its crew with him....) Why something else happened is the burden of the first part of Pope's history of the miserable affair, and he provides a convincing explanation of just what went wrong.

The responses of His Britannic Majesty's Government and the Royal Navy make up the latter part of the story, which includes legal, political, and diplomatic issues. The recapture of the "Hermione" provides Pope with a chance to display a really good captain in action, in the same waters, with the same regulations and the same problems. The difference is remarkable, and that story, although secondary, is worth the price of the book by itself.

Some readers will probably know that bits and pieces of "The Black Ship" (and the events of the "Great Mutiny") show up in Pope's novels about Lord Ramage, written later in his career. In addition, a renamed double of Captain Pigot makes an offstage appearance in one of Northcote Parkinson's novels of the Napoleonic Wars ("disguised" by a transfer to the Indian Ocean, and a very different resolution to the mutiny).

Rating:
Summary: Deadly Dudley Dull
Review: With Dudley Pope's whole ouvre of 15 Ramage novels, plus a couple of others of his fiction, under my belt I opened The Black Ship with much anticipation of good writing and telling narrative. I was wholly disappointed. His scrupulous reliance on documents made for accuracy I'm sure, but the same story could have been told much more effectively, with no loss of accuracy, in the form of s novel. Pope was an eminent naval historian but he went seriously off base trying to analyze Captain Pigot's personality to explain his cruel and inconsistent discipline, and it just didn't come off with a ring of truth. His "evidence" was sparse and episodic; he had to see Pigot's uncle as more influential on the boy than the father to make even a ghost of a case, and even if Pigot was the worst-ever captain it wasn't by very far: There were other captains, even discussed by Pope but not in context with Pigot, whose discipline overmatched Pigot's arbitrariness.
Having failed to persuade me that Pigot was just a spoiled brat who couldn't stand to be crossed, Pope went on to fail to persuade me that his behavior was the sole cause of the mutiny. The whole naval system of the day -- Pope gives you enough of it to see (for yourself) other contributing causes -- was rotten with injustice and oppression, and the Hermione incident, if the bloodiest, was still only one of a rash of mutinies that came down on the heads of the Admiralty during the Napoleonic War. Which reminds me, I was annoyed and am still puzzled by Pope's persistent refusal to use the name "Napoleon," referring only to "Revolutionary France" where any reasonable person would have said "Bonaparte."
The best chapter in the whole book was the last one, about an unrelated cutting-out of the Hermione (the mutinied ship) long after the events which were the explicit subject of the book. I only hope that Pope's Decision at Trafalgar, which I've also bought but not yet read (I need a breath of fresh fiction!), will prove more interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Deadly Dudley Dull
Review: With Dudley Pope's whole ouvre of 15 Ramage novels, plus a couple of others of his fiction, under my belt I opened The Black Ship with much anticipation of good writing and telling narrative. I was wholly disappointed. His scrupulous reliance on documents made for accuracy I'm sure, but the same story could have been told much more effectively, with no loss of accuracy, in the form of s novel. Pope was an eminent naval historian but he went seriously off base trying to analyze Captain Pigot's personality to explain his cruel and inconsistent discipline, and it just didn't come off with a ring of truth. His "evidence" was sparse and episodic; he had to see Pigot's uncle as more influential on the boy than the father to make even a ghost of a case, and even if Pigot was the worst-ever captain it wasn't by very far: There were other captains, even discussed by Pope but not in context with Pigot, whose discipline overmatched Pigot's arbitrariness.
Having failed to persuade me that Pigot was just a spoiled brat who couldn't stand to be crossed, Pope went on to fail to persuade me that his behavior was the sole cause of the mutiny. The whole naval system of the day -- Pope gives you enough of it to see (for yourself) other contributing causes -- was rotten with injustice and oppression, and the Hermione incident, if the bloodiest, was still only one of a rash of mutinies that came down on the heads of the Admiralty during the Napoleonic War. Which reminds me, I was annoyed and am still puzzled by Pope's persistent refusal to use the name "Napoleon," referring only to "Revolutionary France" where any reasonable person would have said "Bonaparte."
The best chapter in the whole book was the last one, about an unrelated cutting-out of the Hermione (the mutinied ship) long after the events which were the explicit subject of the book. I only hope that Pope's Decision at Trafalgar, which I've also bought but not yet read (I need a breath of fresh fiction!), will prove more interesting.