British Naval Officer. Key figure in the bloodiest mutiny in Royal Navy history. The son of Admiral Hugh Pigot (1721-1792), he was predestined for a naval career and was promoted to Captain at age 24, more from family influence than ability. Stationed in the West Indies, Pigot immediately gained a reputation as an arrogant sadist who inflicted excessive and often arbitrary punishment on his men. Records of his abuses are incomplete, but during a nine-month period at the helm of the HMS Success (1794 to 1795) he ordered at least 85 floggings, the equivalent of half the crew; two of his victims died from their injuries. In February 1797 Pigot was given command of the HMS Hermione, a 32-gun frigate, and sent to patrol the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. There his increasingly vicious behavior drove his men past the limits of physical and emotional endurance. On September 20, 1797, the Hermione was hit by a sudden squall and Pigot ordered the topsails reefed, adding that the last man down from the rigging would be whipped. In their haste to avoid punishment three teenaged sailors slipped and fell to their deaths. Pigot contemptuously had their bodies thrown overboard, and when a dozen or so men murmured their disbelief they were all beaten. This sealed the Captain's fate. Around 11:30 PM on September 21, six men burst into Pigot's cabin, attacked him with hatchets and bayonets, and threw him into the sea to drown. As word of Pigot's death spread the mutiny turned into a grudge match, with drunk and vengeful sailors settling scores against their unpopular superiors. By morning nine more officers had been murdered. The mutineers then sailed to Venezuela and handed the ship over to the Spanish government. Of the 62 men involved in the mutiny, 33 were eventually captured and 24 executed, their bodies left to rot on gibbets as a warning to others. The Hermione was retrieved by the British in a daring 1799 raid and renamed the HMS Retribution; the ship was decommissioned in 1802 and scrapped three years later. The HMS Hermione incident was the gory climax of a string of mutinies that struck the British Navy in 1797, largely in protest against brutal commanders, though Captain Pigot was obviously an extreme case. In his book "The Black Ship" (1963), Royal Navy authority Dudley Pope concluded that Pigot was "possibly the cruellest Captain in the history of the service".