The Seventeen Bright Stars
On April 15, 1797, the seventeen ships of the Channel Fleet at Spithead, an anchorage near Portsmouth, England, refused Admiral Lord Bridport’s signal to weigh anchor. It was an act of mass defiance almost without precedent in the Royal Navy. The sailors’ grievances were real and longstanding: pay had been frozen at roughly 19 shillings a month for over a century, provisions were meagre and often adulterated by dishonest pursers, and shore leave was almost nonexistent. Delegates from each ship met aboard the flagship Queen Charlotte to present their demands, while the crews manned the yards and cheered in a show of disciplined solidarity.
The government panicked. Prime Minister Pitt and Henry Dundas, Treasurer of the Navy, sent Lord Spencer to negotiate, but his initial promises were not trusted. It was only when the popular Admiral Lord Howe arrived as the king’s representative that a settlement was reached: a full pardon for all mutineers, a pay increase to a shilling a day, and better victualling. It remains one of the few mutinies in Royal Navy history that actually succeeded, and the only one in which the mutineers were celebrated rather than hanged.
The forecastle song The Seventeen Bright Stars commemorates the event with unmistakable sympathy for the sailors’ cause, toasting Lord Howe “in a full flowing glass” while wishing “confusion to Pitt and likewise to Dundas.” The “seventeen bright stars” of the title are the seventeen ships whose crews stood together.