Mutiny Law: Hudson Set Adrift, HMS Hermione, and the Revolt of the Lash

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In the winter of 1611, trapped in pack ice with no rations left, the crew of the Discovery set explorer Henry Hudson and eight others adrift in a small boat and sailed away. That is mutiny at its starkest, the moment a hierarchy loses the collective obedience it depends on. Article 94 of the US Uniform Code of Military Justice separates mutiny, the intent to usurp military authority, from sedition, the intent to overthrow civil authority, and makes failing to suppress or report a mutiny a crime of equal weight. In England, military discipline once rested on the monarch's Articles of War, valid only in wartime, until the Mutiny Act of 1689 handed it to Parliament. Because a peacetime standing army was illegal without parliamentary consent, even the Army Act of 1881 had to be renewed every year, giving Parliament a standing veto over the army.

The UK kept the death penalty for mutiny and for failing to suppress it until the Human Rights Act of 1998. After the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and again after the My Lai massacre, soldiers were bound to obey only lawful orders, which means refusing an unlawful one can still bring a court martial. History shows mutinies grow from systemic abuse or catastrophic leadership, not small complaints, and the line between mutiny and revolution is often only scale and success, as the 1905 Potemkin mutiny and the 1918 Kiel mutiny that sparked the German Revolution show.

• On HMS Hermione in 1797, the Royal Navy's bloodiest mutiny, sailors killed Captain Hugh Pigot and other officers, then handed the ship to Spain.
• The trigger came when three men fell to their deaths racing down the rigging to avoid Pigot's threatened flogging.
• In Brazil's 1910 Revolt of the Lash, Afro-Brazilian sailors seized modern dreadnoughts after a sailor was sentenced to 250 lashes and aimed their guns at Rio de Janeiro.
• Their demands were better conditions, amnesty, and an end to the whip in the navy.
• In 2022, soldiers of Russia's 37th Motor Rifle Brigade reportedly ran over their commander, Colonel Yuri Medvedev, with a tank.