it is to the inner life of one particular ship and the career of
an individual sailor.
    It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occurred the
commotion at Spithead, followed in May by a second and yet more serious outbreak
in the fleet at the Nore. The latter is known, and without exaggeration in the
epithet, as the Great Mutiny. It was indeed a demonstration more menacing to
England than the contemporary manifestos and conquering and proselytising armies
of the French Directory.
    To the Empire, the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would
be to London threatened by general arson. In a crisis when the Kingdom might
well have anticipated the famous signal that some years later published along
the naval line of battle what it was that upon occasion England expected of
Englishmen; that was the time when at the mast-heads of the three-deckers and
seventy-fours moored in her own roadstead - a fleet, the right arm of a Power
then all but the sole free conservative one of the Old World, the blue-jackets,
to be numbered by thousands, ran up with hurrahs the British colours with the
union and cross wiped out; by that cancellation transmuting the flag of founded
law and freedom defined, into the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded
revolt. Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet
had been ignited into irrational combustion as by live cinders blown across the
Channel from France in flames.
    The event converted into irony for a time those spirited strains of Dibdin -
as a song-writer no mean auxiliary to the English Government - at this European
conjuncture, strains celebrating, among other things, the patriotic devotion of
the British tar -
 
»And as for my life, 'tis the King's!«
 
Such an episode in the Island's grand naval story her naval historians naturally
abridge; one of them (G.P.R. James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he
pass it over did not impartiality forbid fastidiousness. And yet his mention is
less a narration than a reference, having to do hardly at all with details. Nor
are these readily to be found in the libraries. Like some other events in every
age befalling states everywhere, including America, the Great Mutiny was of such
character that national pride along with views of policy would fain shade it off
into the historical background. Such events cannot be ignored, but there is a
considerate way of historically treating them. If a well-constituted individual
refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the
like