Sheerness on the 10th of May was expected to subside of itself, when the accounts of what had occurred at Portsmouth on the 15th should have reached the malcontents. Unfortunately the news seemed to fan, rather than extinguish the flame ; and, by the 20th of the month, many of the ships lying at the Nore, and soon afterwards, nearly the whole of those belonging to the North-sea fleet, hoisted the flag of defiance. The complaints of the Portsmouth mutineers having been, for the most part, founded on justice, the sympathy of the nation went with them: and very few persons throughout the kingdom did or could grudge the additional allowances, (many of them a mere exchange of the real for the nominal,) which the British sailor, after a hard struggle, got permanently secured to him. On the other hand, the mutineers at Sheerness and Yarmouth had no solid, nor even plausible ground of complaint. They appear to have been actuated by a mere mischief-making spirit, with scarcely a knowledge of the object they had in view. The nation, therefore, although it naturally felt some alarm at the magnitude and growing extent of this second eruption, came at once to the resolution of making a firm stand against it ; a resolution that instantly rid the evil of more than half the terrors which its first appearance had inspired.

The same motives, that actuated us in abridging the details of the Portsmouth mutiny, operate, in full force, on the present occasion. And if we decline, any more than we can avoid, to mention by name the individual ships whose crews were disaffected, it is because the mere naming of a ship, as connected with so disgraceful a proceeding, may tend to cast an undeserved stigma on a future ship of the same name, or even on the same ship, with a new and very differently disposed ship's company.

The mutineers at Sheerness, in imitation of those at Spithead, chose two delegates from every ship, but went further, by appointing, as a president over them, a man of the name of Richard Parker. On board each ship was also a committee, consisting of 12 men, who decided, as well upon all affairs relative to the internal management of the ship, as upon the merits of the respective delegates. On the 20th of May the seamen prepared a statement, which they required Vice-admiral Charles Buckner, whose flag was on board the 90-gun ship Sandwich, to transmit without delay to the admiralty. With the terms of it, they peremptorily demanded compliance, as the only condition on which they would return to obedience. The statement contained as many as eight articles, of which the first betrayed greater ignorance than one could suppose existed among men capable of discussing and drawing up such a document. It demanded, "that every indulgence granted to the fleet at Portsmouth should be granted to his majesty's subjects serving in the fleet at the Nore and places adjacent." Had this been the only item of the statement, the obvious answer that followed would

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