ors worse than beasts of burden came near to wrecking the kingdom.
In 1797 the crews {335} of very many of the King's ships were
exasperated by ill-treatments and injustices of many kinds, exasperated
most of all by the fatal folly of long arrears of pay--a folly which in
France, but eight years earlier, had been one of the most powerful
factors in aiding the spread of the Revolution. There came a point
when the sense of injury seemed too hard to bear, and England was
startled by the news of a mutiny at Spithead. But the mutiny, if
alarming, was kept within moderate bounds and under control by the
mutineers; it was temperately met and temperately dealt with by Lord
Howe, and it soon came to an end. It was immediately followed by a far
more alarming mutiny which broke out among the ships at the Nore. This
mutiny, headed by a seaman named Parker, who proved himself a bold and
daring spirit, swelled swiftly to serious proportions. Londoners saw
the mouth of their river blockaded by the war-ships of England, saw
their capital city fortified against the menaces of the men they relied
upon as their saviors. Admiral Duncan, busily engaged in keeping a
Dutch fleet cooped up in the river Texel, suddenly beheld almost the
whole of his squadron desert him and sail away to join Parker and his
fellow-mutineers at the Nore. It was one of the gravest crises in
English history, one of the greatest perils that England had to face
during the whole of the French war. But the danger was weathered, the
peril overcome. The Government faced the dangers of mutiny as firmly
as they had faced the dangers of the war. Whatever the provocation,
mutiny at such a moment was a national crime. It flickered out as
tamely as it blazed up fiercely. Parker and some of his
fellow-conspirators were hanged, strong men dying unhappily, and once
again England had only her foreign foes to reckon with. Over away by
the Texel stout-hearted Duncan, with only his flagship and two frigates
to represent the sea power of England, met the difficulty with a
shiftiness worthy of Ulysses. Through all his long hours of loneliness
he kept on gallantly signalling away to an imaginary fleet, and the
Dutchmen in the Texel little dreamed that they were held in check by a
deserted admiral {336} upon a desolate sea. When at last they emerged,
Duncan's danger was over; his faithless vessels had returned to their
faith, and the crushing victory of Camperdown consoled on