No student of naval history is likely to forget Admiral Mahan’s famous line about the storm-tossed British warships that stood between Napoleon’s army and the dominion of the world. Britain stayed afloat during the desperate wars that followed the French Revolution largely because the British fleet did its long, hard job with such fidelity and confidence. The legend of Britain’s indomitable Jack Tar seems to get most of its substance from the two decades that began in the mid-1790’s.

Yet the record of those great years contains one very singular chapter that is too often overlooked. For in 1797, when Britain stood alone against a Europe dominated by France’s revolutionary armies—a moment of crisis just about as sharp as the one that followed Dunkirk, nearly a century and a half later—the British fleet mutinied. During the most critical weeks of the war, 50,000 British sailors manning more than 100 warships went completely out of control. The instrument on which the British nation relied for survival suddenly became unusable, and all that saved the day was that Britain’s enemies did not know what was happening.

James Dugan tells the story of this amazing episode in The Great Mutiny , a thoughtful, well-documented book that makes absorbing reading and casts a revealing light on the great legend of British sea power.

Heaven knows, the British sailor at that time had reason enough for mutiny. His pay was much too low, and in addition he rarely got it; his food was atrocious, his living conditions aboard ship were bad enough to cause a riot in a penitentiary, and he was subjected to a brutal discipline that makes what Captain Bligh did to the crew of the Bounty look mild. (As a matter of fact, it was mild: Bligh was skipper of one of the ships involved in the 1797 mutiny, and from the record it appears that he was one of the better captains in the fleet.) And so, at a moment when the French were preparing to invade either Ireland or England itself, and the hostile Dutch fleet was waiting its chance to come out and make an attack of its own, there came a crippling mutiny.

The first chapter came in the principal fleet anchorage at Spithead, just outside the great naval base at Portsmouth. It resembled a sit-down strike, and one is tempted to remark that as a mutiny it was typically British: that is, the crews showed no disrespect to their officers, there was no violence whatever, the mutineers even promised to drop everything and go back to work if the French fleet really put to sea, everything was very orderly, and the ships were kept in full readiness for action. But the Admiralty had lost every vestige of control, and after a lot of indignant hemming and hawing, the government finally buckled down to it and dealt with the mutineers just as