The opportunities to undermine the ordained order also occurred as the result of the failure of expectations held both by the officers and the lower deck. Both expectancy and role theory stress the importance of the expectations people hold, and the perceptions of those expectations being confirmed, or denied, by experience, in shaping subsequent behaviour. The expectations of both the officers and the men determined their anticipation of what ought to happen and how they were to behave in any given situation. As Joel Hamby noted, prior experience, social group membership, instruction and their own beliefs about a situation help to create the expectations people hold and influence their subsequent behaviour. Factors such as knowledge of the political circumstances in which the mariners and ships functioned (war, peace, or neutrality), and beliefs about the appropriate relationship between officers and men, formed expectations. The seaworthiness of the vessels and the fighting abilities of the ships’ crews helped establish expectations, as did sobriety or drunkenness. If events reinforce expectations as being true, then people will retain those expectations and, most likely, the behaviours which follow from them. Similarly, if events counter the expectations, then the expectations may change along with subsequent behaviour. In the latter instances the wooden world could turn topsy-turvy. Deference might give way to rejection of the legitimacy of authority to dominate, bringing about efforts to negotiate as equals, or leading to desertion, and the outright failure to comply. This chapter explores the creation of ‘disorder’ by contextual conditions that alter the expectations held by people under the following circumstances: the unknown onset of war, shipwreck, defeat, and drunkenness.

The Unknown Coming of War

The following incident highlights the impact of the sudden change from peace to war on a captain and his crew as they unknowingly sailed from one state into the other. As Captain Charles B. Comb, of His Majesty's Brig Bloodhound, approached Cape Henry, he signalled for a pilot to come out and take his vessel up the Chesapeake to Annapolis. The date was 16 July 1812, but since departing England, Comb had not heard the news that the United States had declared war on Britain. The American schooner Corsair France came out with an officer to inform Comb that his ship was now a prize and his crew prisoners of war. The Corsair France escorted the Bloodhound into Norfolk.

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.

The overall picture aboard the ships of the Royal Navy on the North American and West Indies Station during the War of 1812 is one of relative order, established and maintained by the officers representing naval authority, as directed from the Admiralty in London. The methods used to establish order created a multi-layered system of written forms and physical practices. Much depended on the officer's individual response to his situation, including the ship's crew, the ship and the system itself. Within the relatively smooth operation of the navy, a series of actions undermined the order established by authority. This final chapter draws conclusions in three areas: the means by which order was established and maintained; the nature and extent of ‘disorder’, and authority's response to attempts at undermining order.

Establishing Authority's Order

The Admiralty continued to extend its control over the operation of the Royal Navy throughout the War of 1812. The Regulations and Instructions of 1806/8 did not simply represent an effort to increase financial accountability for the great expenditure that the navy constituted, as suggested by Lavery, nor were they simply an infusion of Christian morality into shipboard life. The 1806 revision had a more developed set of rules and procedures that provided a set of standards concerning the operation and organization of His Majesty's ships and vessels. Mistakes, oversights, and efforts to skirt the requirements brought a swift response, seeking prompt correction, often with the section and article cited from the omnipotent Regulations and Instructions. With so many written directives, most captains, if not all, would eventually run into some problem with their superior officers over their instructions. The Regulations and Instructions and the Admiralty's additional orders and instructions demonstrate the continued bureaucratization of government at this time in British history. This supports the notion of the expanding central control of naval administration advanced by Wilkinson, Brewer, Morriss, Davey, Baugh and Knight.

One significant area of centralization was the Admiralty's domination over the patronage system of the local flag officers and their junior commanding officers. Chapter 2 demonstrated the heavy assault on the old patronage system throughout the War of 1812. Officers could seldom place their followers without the proper backing of the Admiralty in London.

In the fall of 1943, the Red Army advanced on Kyiv. Ahead of it, Stalin's secret police studied the population about to come under their control. At the end of September, Sergei Savchenko, the head of the Ukrainian People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB), wrote to his counterpart in the Ukrainian NKVD, Vasilii Riasnoi, about the Nazis’ arrests of Soviet citizens in Kyiv as well as their preparations to evacuate ethnic Germans. Two weeks later, Savchenko reported that the evacuation had begun. The Germans were sending whole enterprises and their workers out of Kyiv, and the roads to Zhytomyr and points west were jammed with cars and trucks. Then, a few days later, he reported, “Based on a message from the operative group of the Fourth Directorate of the Ukrainian NKGB ‘Eagle’ now active in the enemy's rear … Kyiv's population is being led away to the west. In the city, only German military units remain.”

Later that winter, high-school teacher Viktor Tverskii explained to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ “Commission on the History of the Patriotic War in Ukraine” how he had avoided the evacuation:

Another person told neither of fleeing from nor evacuating with the Germans.

The return of Soviet power to Kyiv, Ukraine, to rule over the city's formerly occupied population during the Second World War came at a time when the Stalin regime was single-mindedly focused on defeating the Nazis. Thus, the Ukrainian NKVD's massoperatsii worked to find men for the Red Army rather than cleanse Kyiv of the “socially dangerous” as in the past, while returning party officials worked to build trust with the formerly occupied so the latter would start contributing to the needs of the front and begin reconstruction. Meanwhile, the allpowerful Moscow-based GKO began to shield Kyiv's population and, eventually, even Kyiv Oblast's agriculture-based population who lived surrounding the capital, from most of the horrors of orgnabor in hopes that they would also help.

Before acknowledging that housing reconstruction was a far-fetched idea given the lack of resources, the Stalin regime also allowed the forced mobilization of young Ukrainian adults to Kyiv in 1944. But when orgnabor desertion in the Donbas and war with the Ukrainian nationalists to the city's west left the republic's “defense-related” industries short of people, this idea was curtailed. By the end of 1944, the Stalin regime had changed to mobilizing primarily German POWs toward Kyiv. Even then, when these prisoners ended up on the production floor of the city's labor-starved industries instead of building the living premises necessary to attract and keep orgnabor laborers, the city's housing reconstruction almost ground to a halt. That Kyiv was to be essentially ignored after the occupation in terms of centrally mandated allocations of labor power and materials was something its Communist leaders only belatedly realized.

They did, however, realize that the resettlement of huge numbers of unorganized returnees from the east might challenge their ability to successfully lead the city after the occupation. By the time the Stalin regime announced the Fourth Five-Year Plan in March 1946, such resettlement meant Kyiv's postoccupation population had tripled to 600,000 with a Jewish minority almost as large in percentage terms as it had been before the war. The Stalin regime's wartime insistence on keeping the partially destroyed Ukrainian capital open for resettlement by members of its victorious armed forces trumped local Communists’ desire for it to be closed off from the world.

On October 28, 1944, a Red Army officer named Kostenko wrote to the leaders of Soviet Ukraine's Communist government, and stated:

Unfortunately, Kostenko's request had landed on deaf ears. After the Nazi occupation's end on November 6, 1943, the Ukrainian Communists watched helplessly as ordinary people ignored formalities, and returned by any means possible to resettle a depopulated Kyiv, still a “regime city of the first category” according to Joseph Stalin's guardians of state security—the All-Union People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) headquartered in Moscow. As a result of the Ukrainian Communists’ management of this reassembling population, Stalin's regime stealthily adjusted its rule to satisfy the anti-Semitic interests of Kyiv's Ukrainian majority—to the detriment of its Jewish minority. And in a situation where scarcity on all fronts ruled, the Ukrainian Communists’ best means of relegitimizing Soviet power were by capitalizing on Moscow's public call for ideological vigilance in 1946, and arguing for their own indispensability as the leaders of a damaged—but still popular—state.

From Sverdlovsk Oblast (RSFSR) in the heart of the Ural Mountains, thirteen employees of Kyiv's evacuated Gorky Textile Factory wrote these lines to Nikita Khrushchev in September 1944:

The workers’ alarm made sense: the All-Union NKVD's Main Directorate of the Militia had just noted a “significant rise in the death rate” in the Urals compared to the year before. In response, Khrushchev pressed Moscow for the workers’ reevacuation just as unorganized return was becoming the rule in the Soviet Union's rear.

On October 21, 1944, however, the All-Union People's Commissariat of Machine Building replied to Khrushchev that such a reevacuation was impossible. According to the commissariat, the workers in Kizel’ were now part of a highly successful factory collective. The rebuilding of the Gorky Textile Factory would have to be done “on account of the transfer of a certain number of qualified workers and technicians from other machine-building factories and the mobilization of workers from the local population.” Conditions in the Urals, though, were not improving. By 1944's end, the All-Union NKVD noted again a rising death rate there from dystrophy, pellagra, and “exhaustion.”

The Ukrainian Communists’ understanding of Kyiv's place within the Soviet state improved once they learned that the reevacuation of skilled workers was so difficult. But what did they learn after all those mobilized rural Ukrainians discussed in chapter 1 reported to their construction sites? The Stalin regime's choice to settle German POWs in Kyiv certainly did not lead to housing reconstruction there.

On November 20, 1943, the Kyiv Obkom established a “Commission of Assistance” to aid the All-Union “Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices” in its work in the Ukrainian capital. At the former commission's first meeting ten days later in Kyiv, the Extraordinary State Commission's newly arrived leader, Aron N. Trainin, said:

After noting the Germans’ export of raw materials bound for Kyiv's industries, their opening of numerous brothels in the city, and their payment of starvation wages to those who worked for them, Trainin said what concerned him most was the massacre at Babyn Iar.

Trainin intended to write a report explaining why the Germans had murdered over 200,000 people in Kyiv, “something far above what we had for Smolensk and other cities.” After noting Kyivans’ resistance to Nazi efforts to transport them to points west, and suggesting that the city's experiences should be documented for all to read, he concluded: