Never has a man more deserved a savage doom than Captain Hugh Pigot. Under cruel command of a sadistic tyrant who towered above the run of the mill tyrants of the savage British Navy, the men of the HMS Hermione staged a mutiny off of Puerto Rico on 22 March 1797, turned the ship over too Spanish authorities—a nation Britain was currently at war with—and the man went on their way with small rewards from the Spanish.

With numerous illegally captured American sailors on board, many of these made their way back to their homes in the freshly minted United States. One of these, a man named Roberts, was the subject of an extradition request by the British navy, a request that Traitor President John Adams honored, sending Roberts to his death on a British gallows.

Note that it is currently in vogue to treat the British navy as a model of humane military treatment and to cite men such as Pigot and Bligh as exceptions to the gentlemanly carriage of a British naval officer and his class. These are revisionist fantasies rooted in our current understanding of the British upper class as feminized, polite to a fault and affected, where in fact Brits Naval vessels of the Age of Sail were floating penitentiary-killing machines, designed to simultaneously impose British will on enemy nations and sweep clean the gutters of the nation of possibly restive men. The sailors who sailed under Admiral Nelson and saved Britain from Napoleon would mostly starve and freeze to death in gutters and beside country lanes once they were no longer needed to man these killing machines in such numbers. [1]

1. The Slaves That Conquered A World

A Partial Exhumation of the American Dream