Martin Steady must have been made of sturdy stuff. A Corkman, just over 200 years ago he had the misfortune to be serving in HMS Hermione, under the command of the cruellest captain in the Royal Navy in cruel times indeed. Hugh Pigot was a truly abominable man, the sort of person who should never be allowed access to power; and what made his power in Hermione so very terrible was that his senior officer, Vice Admiral Hyde Parker, was similarly disposed.
Pigot was a flogging captain. Just 27, he kept a log of the punishments he meted out, and he recorded that Martin Steady was flogged on eight occasions between November 1794 and the following September. Researches by the writer the late Dudley Pope show that the cat o' nine tails could break a wooden floor-plank with a single stroke. What it did to the back of Martin Steady we can never know. He received 12 lashes for "neglect and contempt" - whatever that might mean - in his first recorded punishment. He went three months before the next punishment, then was flogged 12 times on March 5th and 24 times 18 days later, long before his back could have healed. Eight days later, he received a further 24 lashes for "disobedience.
Flogged again
The next month he received 12 lashes, and 13 days after that he received another 24. Early in August he and Jeremiah Walsh were flogged, and on September 11th both were flogged again, this time for drunkenness. Walsh died of his injuries.
Maybe Pigot hated Irishmen: certainly, a disproportionate number of his flogging victims were Irish, as was the only officer he had flogged - a quite extraordinary departure from naval rules. That man, a teenage midshipman, was David O'Brien Casey from Kinsale, and he was perhaps the greatest hero of the entire squalid affair of HMS Hermione and the mutiny which tyranny such as Pigot's was bound to provoke.
Casey received his flogging for refusing to go on his knees before the entire ship and beg forgiveness for a missing stay on a sail; his messmates pleaded with him to do so, but he was unyielding. He certainly apologised, but he would not abase himself. He knew flogging was the certain consequence and he faced it bravely, as bravely as he faced his demotion to the ranks.
It was while in the ranks that he showed his greatest courage and greatest wisdom. Pigot had ordered that the last man down from the sails would be flogged; in the stampede to get to the decks, three men fell from the rigging. "Throw the lubbers overboard," Pigot ordered on seeing the broken bodies on the deck. They were. That night the crew erupted in mutiny.
They killed Pigot; but as in the way of such things, the killing became uncontrolled. The harmless bosun was dragged from his bed and murdered, and his killer then got in bed with the bosun's wife, who most unusually had been accompanying her husband on the voyage. He did not emerge until daybreak. Elsewhere on the vessel, an orgy of killing followed, even consuming a marine officer who was dying of yellow fever.
"Infamous character"
Prominent in inciting the sailors was a the surgeon's mate, a literate and intelligent Belfastman called Lawrence Cronin, whose speech to the crew was promptly followed by the butchery of the surgeon he worked with. Cronin's description of himself was that he was a republican; his fellow Irishman, David Casey, thought him "a treacherous, drunken, infamous character; he was in many instances worse than the worst of the mutineers."
The reach of consequence is long and lethal. How immune the Pakenham family of Westmeath might seem from this affair. But another Irishman prominent in the mutiny was Thomas Nash from Waterford, who was directly responsible for the fatal attack on Pigot; and it was his later extradition from the USA - where he had pretended he was American - that caused uproar over the extradition of this "American". The matter poisoned Anglo-American relations and helped fuel the American animosity which finally erupted in the war of 1812, in the last battle of which, at New Orleans (actually after the peace had been signed) General Pakenham was killed leading his men to truly futile slaughter.
Spanish-held harbour
Throughout the murderous mutiny, David Casey was offered his life if he went over to the mutineers; as he was a cadet-officer of recent standing, many of the mutineers wanted to murder him. But as he had refused to submit to a tyrannical captain, now he refused to submit to a tyrannical mob; and I'm happy to say he survived.
The mutineers sailed the Hermione into a safe Spanishheld harbour in what is now Venezuela and dispersed. The Hermione was recovered from there for the Royal Navy in a legendary cutting-out operation led by Edward Hamilton, who was almost as brutal a disciplinarian as Pigot had been. The British authorities were determined to hunt down and kill the mutineers, and over the following decade they found and executed two dozen of them. But they never found the man who provided the ideological inspiration for the mutiny, Lawrence Cronin. He settled in Caracas, and vanished from history, as did the bosun's wife, Mrs Martin, and, as in time, did the one man to emerge from the affair with honour: David O'Brien Casey of Kinsale.