In their book, The Many-Headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker place seamen at the core of resistance to authority and capitalism in the Atlantic world, the ship being a fulcrum of new identities. As mentioned in the Introduction, they have suggested that a large contingent of radical Black seamen in the ships’ complements created a dynamic impetus for resistance. Other historians have not made such large claims, but they have sometimes suggested that foreigners, or unruly Celts, could form nodes of resistance. Lewis and Lloyd have estimated that fourteen to twenty percent of crews (respectively) were foreigners and that this element created disorder aboard ship. N. A. M. Rodger has argued that as the navy rapidly expanded during the French Revolutionary Wars, it was forced to use unruly and unskilled Irish and Scots. If their argument holds, then finding any or all of these groups in a demographic analysis of the ships’ complements is an essential preliminary step to addressing the resistance of crews. With race and nationality established, the chapter explores five ways in which resistance was expressed in the Royal Navy on the North American and West Indies Station during the War of 1812.

Race and Nationality of the Crews

In examining the race and nationality of the crews within the North American and West Indies Station it is necessary to begin by looking at the vessels and ships serving on the ocean separately from those serving on the Great Lakes. The nature of the information available for the Great Lakes portion of the larger station presents a slight challenge, which needs to be addressed, before the results there can be combined with those from the ocean portion. The ships sampled from the Atlantic and West Indies will be examined first.

The muster tables for the thirty ships involved in the current study which plied the ocean portion of the station listed a total of 12,493 men, with birth places provided for 11,029. An analysis of the muster tables found the overwhelming majority of the complements haled from Britain, on average 76.4 percent, with a range from 46.7 to 85.4 percent (Table 6 column A). The breakdown for English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish reveals a shift from Rodger’s finding in terms of the Irish, falling by more than half. Rodger's data for Scottish seamen is nearly identical with the present findings.