4 - Seizing the Ship

Summary

Mutiny enabled lascars to take control of their workplace and transform the way in which it was organised. The shipboard regimes they established were, by nature, improvised and temporary. They seldom lasted longer than a few weeks and most were directed towards the narrow aim of reaching a safe coastline as quickly as possible. They are nonetheless worthy objects of study since they involved radical changes to the established social relations of the ship. They also exhibited many useful parallels with similar regimes established by sailors, slaves and convicts in other contexts.

Our only means of reconstructing these momentous events is through the depositions made by captains, officers, lascars, passengers and enslaved men and women who survived mutiny. The first section of this chapter examines some of the problems associated with reading these problematic documents. They provide an invaluable source of information on a largely illiterate group of people but it is essential to understand the many ways in which they were shaped during production by the interrogators as well as the interrogated.

The second section explores the position of white sailors who served in the Indian Ocean. There is a growing literature on these men and the disorder they could cause once ashore. As Harald Fischer-Tiné states, such men were ‘indispensable for the imperial project and yet at the same time threatened to undermine it’. Little is known about their interaction with lascars or the problems it could cause captains. Mutiny provides a unique opportunity to examine this aspect of racial politics at sea.

The third section focuses on the ways in which lascars reordered ships once they had taken control. It examines the extent to which key aspects of the wooden world – such as rank, privilege, space and labour – were reconfigured on board commandeered vessels. As Marcus Rediker has argued in the case of Atlantic pirates, mutiny thus provides a rare glimpse of ‘the kinds of social order […] forged beyond the reach of traditional authority’.

The final section examines some of the gendered aspects of mutineer regimes. Women are easily written out of mutiny, yet they often played an important part in shipboard uprisings. The available source material enables us to reconstruct the experiences of wives, mistresses, maidservants and enslaved women who found themselves aboard commandeered vessels.