Abstract/Summary

This article offers a new interpretation of mutiny, arguing that analysis of everyday practices of ordering can move us past rigidly dichotomous interpretations of social order at sea. It focuses on British seafarers during the seventeenth century and their litigation in the English High Court of Admiralty, while placing that evidence within a comparative perspective on imperial and maritime law. Whether they interpret mutiny as an appeal to paternalistic authority in response to specific grievances, or as the stirrings of a distinctively maritime tradition of political radicalism, scholars of maritime social history have concurred in presenting mutiny as an extreme, collective, and often violent, act of resistance to constituted authority. This article shifts attention to ‘mutiny’ not as an act in itself but as an accusation deployed in legal proceedings, to explore the connections between ordering in law and ordering at sea. It begins by showing that, due to the fragmented nature of the multiple systems of national, municipal, military, and customary maritime laws which governed seafaring, there was no consistent definition of mutiny or procedure for its prosecution, and that customary maritime law, articulated by seafarers themselves, was key to contemporary understandings of mutiny. The article then turns to the depositions of mariners presented in admiralty court cases, to explore how seafarers delivered strategically crafted narratives about their professional conduct at sea, articulating their ideas and expectations about social order and their own roles within it. Finally, the article considers the implications of this legal evidence for social life at sea, arguing that seafarers were active participants in everyday practices of ordering, and that ships are best understood as matrix organisations consisting of complex social triangulations. This article therefore provides new reflections on the social dimensions of maritime labour and the agency of early modern seafarers within imperial and legal systems.