"Mutinies tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the revolutionary era. While sans-culottes across Europe laid siege to the nobility and slaves put the torch to plantation islands overseas, out on the oceans naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck, formed committees, elected delegates, and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. Never before or since have there been as many mutinies on both sides of the front, as well as among many of the neutral powers, as during the French Revolutionary Wars. This dissertation, based on research in British, Danish, Dutch, French, Swedish, and US archives, traces the development of the mutinous Atlantic from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to its crescendo in 1797
The Battle of Camperdown on October 11, 1797 was one of the hardest fought victories the British Royal Navy won during the French Revolutionary Wars. In most major engagements, the British out-killed their enemies by a vast margin – from the First of June 1794 to the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, by a proportion of about six to one – but against the Dutch at Camperdown the losses were more evenly balanced.
2 Unlike French and Spanish gun crews who aimed for the masts and rigging in the hope of immobilizing enemy ships, the Dutch adopted the British tactic of pounding the enemy's hull with broadsides until there no longer were enough men left standing to return fire. The two sides battered each at other at close range for about three hours, until finally the Dutch were forced to surrender. Most of their sixteen ships were damaged beyond repair, their hulls shot through multiple times, masts and rigging destroyed. Some were on fire; three ships would eventually sink. Of the 7,157 men who sailed into battle, 620 now lay weltering in each other's gore across the blood-soaked decks, another 520 were already dead. They had sold their lives dearly. The British, who had entered the fight with 8,221 men, overall suffered 228 men dead and 812 wounded, many of them invalids for life. On some of the ships, those most closely engaged in the battle, the carnage was staggering. The Ardent alone, which had locked yardarms with the Dutch flagship Vrijheid, received 98 shots into her hull, lost 41 men dead and 108 wounded. The Belliqueux, counted 25 dead and 88 wounded.
The savage violence with which both sides had fought was received with much relief by naval and government officials in both Britain and the Batavian Republic. In the months leading up to the battle large-scale unrest had torn through both navies, leaving fears that those called upon to kill and die might refuse orders and turn on their own officers instead. In May, a British spy reported that the French "have so little confidence in the Dutch sailors and officers that they have shipped on board of every Dutch ship of the line such a number of French troops as they…"
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