Mutiny was an ever-present threat on Bristol's slave ships. It was even written into the articles of agreement between owners and seamen. On the Sally, drawn up in July 1785, the crew promised to ‘faithfully and truly perform and do their several Stations and Services … without any Manner of Denial, Mutiny, or Resistance whatever.’ A template contract of 1787 said the same thing. What mutiny meant in this context was not entirely clear. It was a slippery term, applied most obviously to seamen who collectively took possession of a ship, merging in this context with piracy. We are all familiar with the mutiny on the Bounty. Yet mutiny could also apply to cuffing an officer, grabbing him by the lapels, maliciously complaining about poor provisions, and calling the officers ‘rogues’, as Justice Willes instructed the jury in a case involving a recalcitrant gunner in 1749; if, of course, such actions could be construed as inciting a general disaffection against the captain and ship's hierarchy. Simply refusing to obey orders and threatening to go on strike fell within its ambit, for these could be seen as ‘mutinous expressions’. The great mutiny at Spithead in 1797 was essentially a strike, although unlike a land-based one, the seamen commandeered the fleet, electing delegates to co-ordinate their resistance.

We will never know how many acts of mutiny took place on the high seas. Minor incidents were unlikely to be reported, especially if a captain handled the situation with any tact. On the Wasp, which sailed for Bonny and New Calabar, the captain charged the London bosun John Person of ‘mutiny’ in July 1794 and delivered him to the governor of Cape Coast Castle a month later. A chance entry in the muster rolls of the Mary, which set sail for Africa in the summer of 1789, reveals that the captain put John Walters, an able seaman from Cardiff, on board the Panama for ‘mutiny’ six months into the voyage. Later, when the ship reached Jamaica, Captain Edward Mentor put two Dubliners on board the HMS Centurion for the same reason. As John Newton remarked, removing truculent seamen to men-of-war was a well-worn tactic of slave-ship captains.

As you leave the archives and walk to the river's edge, you can sometimes see the tide turning. The tidal range of Bristol's River Avon is immense; at its highest point on the highest spring tide, nearly 50 feet. In 1830 it was reckoned to be 40, and in the late eighteenth century, before the construction of the floating dock, around 36. Pilots were needed to ferry ships up the river at full tide; indeed, pilots were needed to guide vessels from the stormy Bristol Channel towards Kingroad, the estuary of the Avon, where the ships would drop anchor and await a favourable wind and tide to take them seven miles to the city's centre.

This set of essays begins with the pilots, a body of men who lived at Crockerne Pill, close to the first natural harbour on the river at Hungroad. This closely-knit community created a dense cousinage to confront the dangers of piloting in the Bristol Channel. Aware of their importance to Bristol's commercial prosperity, the pilots were quite willing to carve some independence from the merchant oligarchy that officially regulated them and the Admiralty who sought to curb their willingness to help sailors escape the press. Pill became a haven for runaway seamen and illicit commerce, a thorn in the side of the city, the merchants, and the national government, who, for sound commercial and environmental reasons, had to tolerate its rambunctious disrespect for constituted authority.

Chapter one presents an indispensable link from the quay to the Atlantic. The other chapters zone in on different aspects of Bristol's broader maritime history. Although Bristol was always something of a metropolis of the west, an important market and distributing centre for goods made or grown in the West Country and Wales, overseas commerce was the lifeblood of the city. That commerce was diverse. Bristol had strong links with Ireland, trading with Dublin and the ports to the south such as Cork, Limerick, Kinsale, and Waterford. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, seventy vessels carried dairy produce, salted beef and pork, linen, leather, and timber to Bristol in return for manufactured goods and colonial products.

The Second World War as a Window

By the time of the Second World War, Dakar had become a city that coupled unique opportunities and specific barriers for those who lived there. Its fluidity, which frustrated officials, was an attribute that contributed not only to its diversity but also to the types of activities Dakarois pursued and the ways in which they did so. The war brought about two shifts in the dynamics of transactions in the colonial capital. War brought about shortages and rationing, which aggravated the “just enough” world in which Dakarois lived and catapulted the issue of daily needs to the forefront of city dwellers’ minds and actions. The terms of transactions and access to resources were central to urban everyday public discourse. The grievances of the urban population regarding their daily lives also moved into a new place of prominence in the state's spectrum of concerns. Wartime generated intensified surveillance, with greater attention to the happenings of daily life. The war thus serves as a window with a special view of the city; it permits an understanding of the depth and flexibility of the transactional culture. The state became more vigilant about tracking public sentiment and activity, raising their prominence in official documentation. Those sentiments and activities put even greater pressure on Dakarois in their transactional lives. As urgency set in, a growing range of unauthorized actions emerged in the city, and preexisting illicit practices became more prominent.

As the seat of the government of colonial French West Africa, Dakar took on particular roles during World War II. It served as a strategic base and, with the regime change in France, as a Vichy stronghold outside of France.1 Dakar became entrenched in the political and military struggles of the war, especially as it became a target of Allied and Free French efforts to erode Axis power in Africa.2 Amid a global war, France also relied on its African colonies to bolster its forces, bringing about new experiences for African servicemen and shifting dynamics between soldiers and the French colonial state.

The War that Britain fought between 1739 and 1748 has not been considered one in which the strategic, operational, or tactical abilities of its statesmen and military leaders blossomed. In London, Sir Robert Walpole, the duke of Newcastle, the earl of Carteret and almost all their colleagues in the highest positions of state, are usually seen as ill-informed, misguided, and fractious. On the battlefields the likes of the duke of Cumberland, the earl of Stair, Sir John Cope, Henry Hawley, seem to have little grasp of the broader purpose of their campaigns. At sea, Edward Vernon, Thomas Matthews, Charles Knowles, Henry Medley, and John Byng were unable to make good use of Britain's greatest strategic advantage – sea power. At best the war, which for Britain ended with the status quo ante, was solid training for those lights were going to burn brightly eight years later in the Seven Years War – most obviously, the secretary of state for the Southern Department, William Pitt, but also the illustrious commanders, George Anson, Jean-Louis Ligonier, Edward Hawke, Edward Boscawen, Jeffrey Amherst, and James Wolfe.

The transformation of Britain's performance in the two wars has long been associated with the emergence of this new generation of leaders. That they played important roles in the victories is undeniable, but locating the causes of success almost exclusively in the characters of the leaders, throws much else into the shade.

This chapter will focus less on the performance of individual leaders than on the social process of leadership itself. This way of looking at leadership shows that it is not rigidly hierarchical, nor bureaucratically determined. Nor are its outputs the product of a purely scientific rational process. It is not confined to formal organisational ‘commanders’ nor the preserve of a single brain. Leadership at all levels is a social process that exists between people – the leaders and the led – who are in a constant process of renegotiating that relationship and may be changing roles at any time. Even the output of the strategy formulation process – strategic policy – is only one step in actual performance of the organisation.

Urban Spaces and Selves: The Cape Verdean Community of Dakar

Urban life in colonial Africa involved forging selves and opportunities. Carving out economic spaces in which to operate was critical to the task. In a colonial context that foregrounded questions of race and identity, deployment of those concepts was inherent to the process of creating and maintaining economic opportunities. The jobs people occupied were significant motors of urban growth, and the holders of a vast number of such jobs were not autochthonous Dakarois. In the capital of FWA, wage earners and merchants came not only from Senegal and the larger colony but from other colonies, particularly the nearby Portuguese holdings, and from other zones of French control, such as Syria and Lebanon. Whereas those from Senegal and its region often built Dakar into a wider network of geographies of work and residence, those from Portuguese colonies and the Levant were immigrants whose intent was to stay. In many ways, the creation of permanent immigrant communities in Dakar stood in contrast to the city's tendency toward transience while contributing to the expansion of the city through the arrivals of people from elsewhere.

The transactional culture of colonial Dakar relied on factors such as proximity, origin, trust, opportunity, movement, and flexibility, and communities coalesced around those. It also was shaped by the attitudes and actions of the colonial state. Cape Verdean success in Dakar has much to reveal about colonial urban niche economies and the dynamics of categorization that existed under colonialism. Most important is the simultaneous prominence and pliability of colonial exercises in identity definition. In his study of colonial Dar es Salaam, James Brennan has pointed to a “particular ambivalence at the heart of British interwar policy” as pertained to understanding what the colonial state perceived as native and nonnative identity categories. He argues that application of categories was neither consistent nor well defined and that “the process of identity formation had multiple if unequal participants” whose motivations varied in nature. The dynamic he describes was present across colonial contexts as the very act of seeking to know, define, and control identity was one that could only be fraught with assumptions and unintended consequences. Steven Fabian argues that the specificity of place is a significant factor to consider in any analysis of urban identity formation and self-perception.

The Index of Middle English Prose project was launched at a conference in Cambridge in 1978 on the initiative of A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Brewer. At its inception, the aim of those involved was a publication analogous to Carleton Brown and Rossell H. Robbins's Index of Middle English Verse. But when Brown and Robbins published their seminal volume, more than three decades of manuscript study and indexing lay behind it; the editors, whatever the limitations of their product, had a hands-on knowledge of the materials they presented. At the time when a comparable index to present Middle English (ME) prose was conceived, such work had scarcely begun in this area.

Hence, as a first step, a number of scholars, working independently, undertook to identify relevant materials on a collection-by-collection basis. The results of these investigations, a listing of all ME prose items uncovered after careful searching, were to be presented in a sequence of stand-alone volumes or ‘handlists’ published by Boydell & Brewer. The first appeared in 1984, and the present volume is the 25th in the series. The main body of text in each volume identifies and contextualises, manuscript by manuscript, the ME prose material found in a given collection or collections. At the back of each volume are indexes derived from these descriptions. Those indexes will form the basis of the final, combined Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP).

The IMEP is concerned with material composed between c. 1200 and c. 1500. For the terminus a quo this means as a general rule that if a manuscript is not included in N. R. Ker's Catalogue of MSS Containing Anglo-Saxon, it is considered to be ME. In addition, we aim to include all later transcriptions of ME texts produced before 1600.

There have been adjustments in detail over the years, but the handlists now follow an established format. Each volume contains an introduction with a general account of the history, development and scale of the particular collection or collections described. This is followed by a summary list of the ME prose contents of the volume.

The relevant materials discovered in the manuscripts are presented in the order of the shelfmarks of the collection(s) described. Each entry begins with references to published descriptions of the manuscript in question. The ME prose items in the manuscript are then numbered and presented in sequential order.

In 1783, after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the American Revolution (1776–1783) to an end, the land area of Spain's possessions in the Americas was larger than at any other point in history. Covering more than 16 million square kilometers, the Spanish Empire included a large part of both the North American and the South American continents. It extended all the way from California in the north Pacific, through the powerful viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, to Tierra del Fuego, and the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in the south Atlantic, and included the provinces of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida; the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada and several captaincies general; and the large Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, in addition to the archipelago of the Philippines.

However, in spite of all it had achieved, after the war this huge empire was faced with a number of challenges. Historians today point to the end of the reign of Carlos III (1759–1788) as the beginning of a period of crisis for the Spanish monarchy. The Bourbon Reforms, as they are known, were reaching their limits. This was due in part to factors internal to the Spanish monarchy. But there was a later phase characterized by renewed attempts at reform. This is the period between 1783 and 1792, during the tenure of the Count of Floridablanca as secretary of state – the most powerful position in the government – which coincides with the creation of a new political institution: the Junta de Estado (1787–1792), a council of state that functioned as a true cabinet.

In the present chapter, I focus on the aspects of reform that involved the navy. I attempt to analyze the importance of the support given by Floridablanca to the secretary of the navy, Antonio Valdés (1783–1795), a naval commander who played a leading role in the junta.

In a society based on privilege, like Spain's in the eighteenth century, in which there was no separation between the public and private spheres, power networks were vital. This was true for the exercise of political governance as well as naval leadership. It is important to keep in mind that the court in Madrid, as the embodiment of the absolute monarchy, was the epicenter of power relations between the ruling elites in Spain and its overseas empire.

‘Everyone that enters upon it’ wrote Henry Laurens of the slave trade, ‘should fortify themselves against misfortune.’ There were many who would concur. William Snelgrave, a London-based slaver of the 1720s, alert to the dangers, zoned in on African mutinies aboard slave ships, which he designated the ‘chief subject’ of his Account. Seventy years later, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson addressed the same issue in a letter to one of the early leaders of the French Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau. There was an ever-present threat of rebellion aboard ship, he told this progressive aristocrat, and all too frequently the insurgencies of slaves were ‘industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a Trace, if possible, may be found’. Clarkson cited the case of the Britannia, a Bristol ship skippered by James Bruce, where shackled slaves besieged the ships’ barricade and overran the quarterdeck only to be suppressed by superior firepower. Confronted by defeat, some of the militants ‘cast themselves into the Sea, with masks of Joy in their Countenance, and of the most perfect Contempt for their oppressors.’ Or, so it was reported. Of the 190 slaves who boarded the vessel on the Windward coast, only ninety reached Barbados.

The revolt on board the Britannia was far from exceptional. A seaman who had sailed on three Bristol slave voyages during the 1760s told Thomas Clarkson that the predicament of capture was ‘so very intolerable and grievous’ that Africans ‘will do anything to extricate themselves from it’. Historians who have trawled through the relevant sources for the long eighteenth century have discovered roughly 500 acts of collective violence by Africans caught up in the British, Dutch, and French slave trades: nearly 100 by free Africans who attacked boats and vessels from the shore, often as reprisals against malicious trading; and about 400 shipboard mutinies. These are conservative estimates, for Clarkson was right to note that slaveship captains were reluctant to chronicle many intended revolts because they would reflect badly on their reputations.