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ORDER IN THE FLEET 115
But behind this pretentious exterior the delegates were
doing serious work and encountering difficulties not
without skill and success.
It is a tribute to the ability of the leaders and the
steadiness of the men as a whole that the mutiny in its
early stages was administered with so little trouble. If,
as some writers have supposed, the majority of the
seamen had mutinied merely in order to be free from
discipline, the fleet would have been in a state of
confusion and the men who jdid not desert would have
been riotous and dissolute. 1 It is proof enough of a
principle underlying the mutiny, that the routine of the
fleet was carried on in almost every respect as it would
have been if the Articles of War had still been in force.
There was no one motive common to all the seamen.
Some of them only joined the mutiny under compulsion.
But the majority certainly believed that the Admiralty
were treating them unfairly, and that justice would not
be done until the government had been forced or
frightened into compliance with their demands. They
had learnt to mistrust their rulers ; but they had not
realized—for the good news was suppressed by their
ringleaders—that nearly all the grievances against which
they were clamouring had been removed by Parliament
or were about to be removed by the Admiralty. With
such convictions they entered whole-heartedly into the
mutiny, determined to reject the authority of the officers,
but determined to do their duty in every other respect,
as became honest and loyal men.
The seamen as a whole were not moved by a spirit of
mischief, by a simple desire to taste for themselves the
pleasures of mutiny. There was undoubtedly a turbulent
element in the fleet, and a disloyal element as well. And
these two sections would naturally supply the most active
1. E.g., James says : "The mutineers at the Nore had no solid nor
even plausible ground of complaint. They appear to have been actuated
by a mere mischief-making spirit, with scarcely a knowledge of the
.
object they had in view."