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The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore

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Title: The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore

Author: J. R. Hutchinson


        
Release date: October 1, 2004 [eBook #6766]
                Most recently updated: June 14, 2013

Language: English

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Produced by Steve Schulze, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. This file was produced from
images generously made available by the CWRU Preservation
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THE PRESS-GANG AFLOAT AND ASHORE

By J. R. Hutchinson




CONTENTS

I. HOW THE PRESS-GANG CAME IN.

II. WHY THE GANG WAS NECESSARY.

III. WHAT THE PRESS-GANG WAS.

IV. WHOM THE GANG MIGHT TAKE.

V. WHAT THE GANG DID AFLOAT.

VI. EVADING THE GANG.

VII. WHAT THE GANG DID ASHORE.

VIII. AT GRIPS WITH THE GANG.

IX. THE GANG AT PLAY.

X. WOMEN AND THE PRESS-GANG.

XI. IN THE CLUTCH OF THE GANG.

XII. HOW THE GANG WENT OUT.

APPENDIX: ADMIRAL YOUNG'S TORPEDO.

INDEX




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:



AN UNWELCOME VISIT FROM THE PRESS GANG.

MANNING THE NAVY. Reproduced by kind permission from a rare print in the
collection of Mr. A. M. BROADLEY.

THE PRESS-GANG SEIZING A VICTIM.

SEIZING A WATERMAN ON TOWER HILL ON THE MORNING OF HIS WEDDING DAY.

JACK IN THE BILBOES. From the Painting by MORLAND.

ONE OF THE RAREST OF PRESS-GANG RECORDS. A play-bill announcing the
suspension of the Gang's operations on "Play Nights," in the collection
of Mr. A. M. BROADLEY, by whose kind permission it is reproduced.

SAILORS CAROUSING. From the Mezzotint after J. IBBETSON.

ANNE MILLS WHO SERVED ON BOARD THE _MAIDSTONE_ IN 1740.

MARY ANNE TALBOT.

MARY ANNE TALBOT DRESSED AS A SAILOR.

THE PRESS GANG, OR ENGLISH LIBERTY DISPLAYED.

ADMIRAL YOUNG'S TORPEDO. Reproduced from the Original Drawing at the
Public Record Office.





THE PRESS-GANG.




CHAPTER I.

HOW THE PRESS-GANG CAME IN.



The practice of pressing men--that is to say, of taking by intimidation
or force those who will not volunteer--would seem to have been
world-wide in its adoption.

Wherever man desired to have a thing done, and was powerful enough
to insure the doing of it, there he attained his end by the simple
expedient of compelling others to do for him what he, unaided, could not
do for himself.

The individual, provided he did not conspire in sufficient numbers to
impede or defeat the end in view, counted only as a food-consuming atom
in the human mass which was set to work out the purpose of the master
mind and hand. His face value in the problem was that of a living wage.
If he sought to enhance his value by opposing the master hand, the
master hand seized him and wrung his withers.

So long as the compelling power confined the doing of the things it
desired done to works of construction, it met with little opposition
in its designs, experienced little difficulty in coercing the labour
necessary for piling its walls, excavating its tanks, raising its
pyramids and castles, or for levelling its roads and building its ships
and cities. These were the commonplace achievements of peace, at
which even the coerced might toil unafraid; for apart from the normal
incidence of death, such works entailed little danger to the lives
of the multitudes who wrought upon them. Men could in consequence be
procured for them by the exercise of the minimum of coercion--by, that
is to say, the mere threat of it.

When peace went to the wall and the pressed man was called upon to go to
battle, the case assumed another aspect, an acuter phase. Given a state
of war, the danger to life and limb, the incidence of death, at once
jumped enormously, and in proportion as these disquieting factors in the
pressed man's lot mounted up, just in that proportion did his opposition
to the power that sought to take him become the more determined,
strenuous, and undisguised.

Particularly was this true of warlike operations upon the sea, for to
the extraordinary and terrible risks of war were here added the ordinary
but ever-present dangers of wind and wave and storm, sufficient in
themselves to appal the unaccustomed and to antagonise the unwilling.
In face of these superlative risks the difficulty of procuring men was
accentuated a thousand-fold, and with it both the nature and the degree
of the coercive force necessary to be exercised for their procuration.

In these circumstances the Ruling Power had no option but to resort
to more exigent means of attaining its end. In times of peace, working
through myriad hands, it had constructed a thousand monuments of
ornamental or utilitarian industry. These, with the commonweal they
represented, were now threatened and must be protected at all costs.
What more reasonable than to demand of those who had built, or of
their successors in the perpetual inheritance of toil, that they should
protect what they had reared. Hitherto, in most cases, the men required
to meet the national need had submitted at a threat. They had to live,
and coercive toil meant at least a living wage. Now, made rebellious by
a fearful looking forward to the risks they were called upon to incur,
they had to be met by more effective measures. Faced by this emergency,
Power did not mince matters. It laid violent hands upon the unwilling
subject and forced him, _nolens volens_, to sail its ships, to man its
guns, and to fight its battles by sea as he already, under less overt
compulsion, did its bidding by land.

It is with this phase of pressing--pressing open, violent and
unashamed--that we purpose here to deal, and more particularly with
pressing as it applies to the sea and sailors, to the Navy and the
defence of an Island Kingdom.

At what time the pressing of men for the sea service of the Crown was
first resorted to in these islands it is impossible to determine. There
is evidence, however, that the practice was not only in vogue, but
firmly established as an adjunct of power, as early as the days of the
Saxon kings. It was, in fact, coeval with feudalism, of which it may be
described as a side-issue incidental to a maritime situation; for though
it is impossible to point to any species of fee, as understood of the
tenure of land, under which the holder was liable to render service at
sea, yet it must not be forgotten that the great ports of the kingdom,
and more especially the Cinque Ports, were from time immemorial bound
to find ships for national purposes, whenever called upon to do so, in
return for the peculiar rights and privileges conferred upon them by
the Crown. The supply of ships necessarily involved the supply of men
to sail and fight them, and in this supply, or, rather, in the mode
of obtaining it, we have undoubtedly the origin of the later impress
system.

With the reign of John the practice springs into sudden prominence.
The incessant activities of that uneasy king led to almost incessant
pressing, and at certain crises in his reign commission after commission
is directed, in feverish succession, to the sheriffs of counties and the
bailiffs of seaports throughout the kingdom, straitly enjoining them
to arrest and stay all ships within their respective jurisdictions, and
with the ships the mariners who sail them. [Footnote: By a plausible
euphemism they were said to be "hired." As a matter of fact, both
ships and men were retained during the royal pleasure at rates fixed by
custom.] No exception was taken to these edicts. Long usage rendered the
royal lien indefeasible. [Footnote: In more modern times the pressing
of ships, though still put forward as a prerogative of the Crown, was
confined in the main to unforeseen exigencies of transport. On the fall
of Louisburg in 1760, vessels were pressed at that port in order to
carry the prisoners of war to France (_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1491--Capt.
Byron, 17 June 1760); and in 1764, again, we find Capt. Brereton, of the
_Falmouth_, forcibly impressing the East India ship _Revenge_ for
the purpose of transporting to Fort St. George, in British India,
the company, numbering some four hundred and twenty-one souls, of the
_Siam_, then recently condemned at Manilla as unseaworthy.--_Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1498--Letters of Capt. Brereton, 1764.]

In the carrying out of the royal commands there was consequently, at
this stage in the development of pressing, little if any resort to
direct coercion. From the very nature of the case the principle of
coercion was there, but it was there only in the bud. The king's right
to hale whom he would into his service being practically undisputed, a
threat of reprisals in the event of disobedience answered all purposes,
and even this threat was as yet more often implied than openly
expressed. King John was perhaps the first to clothe it in words.
Requisitioning the services of the mariners of Wales, a notoriously
disloyal body, he gave the warrant, issued in 1208, a severely minatory
turn. "Know ye for certain," it ran, "that if ye act contrary to this,
we will cause you and the masters of your vessels to be hanged, and all
your goods to be seized for our use."

At this point in the gradual subjection of the seaman to the needs of
the nation, defensive or the contrary, we are confronted by an event
as remarkable in its nature as it is epoch-making in its consequences.
Magna Charta was sealed on the 13th of June 1215, and within a year of
that date, on, namely, the 14th of April then next ensuing, King John
issued his commission to the barons of twenty-two seaports, requiring
them, in terms admitting of neither misconstruction nor compromise,
to arrest all ships, and to assemble those ships, together with their
companies, in the River of Thames before a certain day. [Footnote:
Hardy, _Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum_, 1833.] This wholesale embargo upon
the shipping and seamen of the nation, imposed as it was immediately
after the ensealing of Magna Charta, raises a question of great
constitutional interest. In what sense, and to what extent, was the
Charter of English Liberties intended to apply to the seafaring man?

Essentially a tyrant and a ruthless promise-breaker, John's natural
cruelty would in itself sufficiently account for the dire penalties
threatened under the warrant of 1208; but neither his tyranny, his
faithlessness of character, nor his very human irritation at
the concessions wrung from him by his barons, can explain to our
satisfaction why, having granted a charter affirming and safeguarding
the liberties of, ostensibly, every class of his people, he should
immediately inflict upon one of those classes, and that, too, the one
least of all concerned in his historic dispute, the pains of a most
rigorous impressment. The only rational explanation of his conduct is,
that in thus acting he was contravening no convention, doing violence to
no covenant, but was, on the contrary, merely exercising, in accordance
with time-honoured usage, an already well-recognised, clearly denned and
firmly seated prerogative which the great charter he had so recently put
his hand to was in no sense intended to limit or annul.

This view of the case is confirmed by subsequent events. Press warrants,
identical in every respect save one with the historic warrant of 1216,
continued to emanate from the Crown long after King John had gone to his
account, and, what is more to the point, to emanate unchallenged. Stubbs
himself, our greatest constitutional authority, repeatedly admits as
much. Every crisis in the destinies of the Island Kingdom--and they were
many and frequent--produced its batch of these procuratory documents,
every batch its quota of pressed men. The inference is plain. The
mariner was the bondsman of the sea, and to him the _Nullus liber homo
capiatur_ clause of the Great Charter was never intended to apply. In
his case a dead-letter from the first, it so remained throughout the
entire chapter of his vicissitudes.

The chief point wherein the warrants of later times differed from those
of King John was this: As time went on the penalties they imposed on
those who resisted the press became less and less severe. The death
penalty fell into speedy disuse, if, indeed, it was ever inflicted at
all. Imprisonment for a term of from one to two years, with forfeiture
of goods, was held to meet all the exigencies of the case. Gradually
even this modified practice underwent amelioration, until at length
it dawned upon the official intelligence that a seaman who was free
to respond to the summons of the boatswain's whistle constituted an
infinitely more valuable physical asset than one who cursed his king and
his Maker in irons. All punishment of the condign order, for contempt
or resistance of the press, now went by the board, and in its stead the
seaman was merely admonished in paternal fashion, as in a Proclamation
of 1623, to take the king's shilling "dutifully and reverently" when it
was tendered to him.

In its apparent guilelessness the admonition was nevertheless woefully
deceptive. Like the subdued beat of drum by which, some five years
later, the seamen of London were lured to Tower Hill, there to be seized
and thrown bodily into the waiting fleet, it masked under its mild
exterior the old threat of coercion in a new form. The ancient pains and
penalties were indeed no more; but for the back of the sailor who was
so ill-advised as to defy the press there was another rod in pickle. He
could now be taken forcibly.

For side by side with the negative change involved in the abolition
of the old punishments, there had been in progress, throughout the
intervening centuries, a positive development of far worse omen for the
hapless sailor-man. The root-principle of direct coercion, necessarily
inherent in any system that seeks to foist an arbitrary and obnoxious
status upon any considerable body of men, was slowly but surely bursting
into bud. The years that had seen the unprested seaman freed from the
dread of the yardarm and the horrors of the forepeak, had bred a new
terror for him. Centuries of usage had strengthened the arm of that
hated personage the Press-Master, and the compulsion which had once
skulked under cover of a threat now threw off its disguise and stalked
the seafaring man for what it really was--Force, open and unashamed. The
_dernier ressort_ of former days was now the first resort. The seafaring
man who refused the king's service when "admonished" thereto had short
shrift. He was "first knocked down, and then bade to stand in the king's
name." Such, literally and without undue exaggeration, was the later
system which, reaching the climax of its insolent pretensions to
justifiable violence in the eighteenth century, for upwards of a hundred
years bestrode the neck of the unfortunate sailor like some monstrous
Old Man of the Sea.

Outbursts of violent pressing before the dawn of the eighteenth century,
though spasmodic and on the whole infrequent, were not entirely unknown.
Times of national stress were peculiarly productive of them. Thus when,
in 1545, there was reason to fear a French invasion, pressing of the
most violent and unprecedented character was openly resorted to in order
to man the fleet. The class who suffered most severely on that occasion
were the fisher folk of Devon, "the most part" of whom were "taken
as marryners to serve the king." [Footnote: _State Papers_, Henry
VIII.--Lord Russell to the Privy Council, 22 Aug. 1545. Bourne, who
cites the incident in his _Tudor Seamen_, misses the essential point
that the fishermen were forcibly pressed.]

During the Civil Wars of the next century both parties to the strife
issued press warrants which were enforced with the utmost rigour. The
Restoration saw a marked recrudescence of similar measures. How great
was the need of men at that time, and how exigent the means employed
to procure them, may be gathered from the fact, cited by Pepys, that in
1666 the fleet lay idle for a whole fortnight "without any demand for a
farthing worth of anything, but only to get men." The genial diarist
was deeply moved by the scenes of violence that followed. They were, he
roundly declares, "a shame to think of."

The origin of the term "pressing," with its cognates "to press" and
"pressed," is not less remarkable than the genesis of the violence it
so aptly describes. Originally the man who was required for the king's
service at sea, like his twin brother the soldier, was not "pressed"
in the sense in which we now use the term. He was merely subjected to a
process called "presting." To "prest" a man meant to enlist him by
means of what was technically known as "prest" money--"prest" being the
English equivalent of the obsolete French _prest_, now _prêt_, meaning
"ready." In the recruiter's vocabulary, therefore, "prest" money stood
for what is nowadays, in both services, commonly termed the "king's
shilling," and the man who, either voluntarily or under duress, accepted
or received that shilling at the recruiter's hands, was said to be
"prested" or "prest." In other words, having taken the king's ready
money, he was thenceforth, during the king's pleasure, "ready" for the
king's service.

By the transfer of the prest shilling from the hand of the recruiter to
the pouch of the seaman a subtle contract, as between the latter and
his sovereign, was supposed to be set up, than which no more solemn or
binding pact could exist save between a man and his Maker. One of the
parties to the contract was more often than not, it is true, a strongly
dissenting party; but although under the common law of the land this
circumstance would have rendered any similar contract null and void, in
this amazing transaction between the king and his "prest" subject it was
held to be of no vitiating force. From the moment the king's shilling,
by whatever means, found its way into the sailor's possession, from that
moment he was the king's man, bound in heavy penalties to toe the
line of duty, and, should circumstances demand it, to fight the king's
enemies to the death, be that fate either theirs or his.

By some strange irony of circumstance there happened to be in the
English language a word--"pressed"--which tallied almost exactly in
pronunciation with the old French word _prest_, so long employed, as we
have seen, to differentiate from his fellows the man who, by the devious
means we have here described, was made "ready" for the sea service.
"Press" means to constrain, to urge with force--definitions precisely
connoting the development and manner of violent enlistment. Hence, as
the change from covert to overt violence grew in strength, "pressing,"
in the mouths of the people at large, came to be synonymous with that
most obnoxious, oppressive and fear-inspiring system of recruiting
which, in the course of time, took the place of its milder and more
humane antecedent, "presting." The "prest" man disappeared, [Footnote:
The Law Officers of the Crown retained him, on paper, until the close
of the eighteenth century--an example in which they were followed by
the Admiralty. To admit his disappearance would have been to knock the
bottom out of their case.] and in his stead there came upon the
scene his later substitute the "pressed" man, "forced," as Pepys so
graphically describes his condition, "against all law to be gone."
An odder coincidence than this gradual substitution of "pressed" for
_prest,_ or one more grimly appropriate in its application, it would
surely be impossible to discover in the whose history of nomenclature.

With the growth of the power and violence of the impress there was
gradually inaugurated another change, which perhaps played a larger part
than any other feature of the system in making it finally obnoxious to
the nation at large--finally, because, as we shall see, the nation
long endured its exactions with pathetic submission and lamentable
indifference. The incidence of pressing was no longer confined, as in
its earlier stages, to the overflow of the populace upon the country's
rivers, and bays, and seas. Gradually, as naval needs grew in volume and
urgency, the press net was cast wider and wider, until at length, during
the great century of struggle, when the system was almost constantly
working at its highest pressure and greatest efficiency, practically
every class of the population of these islands was subjected to its
merciless inroads, if not decimated by its indiscriminate exactions.

On the very threshold of the century we stumble upon an episode
curiously indicative of the set of the tide. Czar Peter of Russia had
been recently in England, acquiring a knowledge of English customs
which, on his return home, he immediately began to put in practice. His
navy, such as it was, was wretchedly manned. [Footnote: The navy got
together by Czar Peter had all but disappeared by the time Catherine II.
came to the throne. "Ichabod" was written over the doors of the
Russian Admiralty. Their ships of war were few in number, unseaworthy,
ill-found, ill-manned. Two thousand able-bodied seamen could with
difficulty be got together in an emergency. The nominal fighting
strength of the fleet stood high, but that strength in reality consisted
of men "one half of whom had never sailed out of the Gulf of Finland,
whilst the other half had never sailed anywhere at all." When the fleet
was ordered to sea, the Admiralty "put soldiers on board, and by calling
them sailors persuaded themselves that they really were so."--_State
Papers, Russia,_ vol. lxxvii.--Macartney, Nov. 16-27, 1766.] Russian
serfs made bad sailors and worse seamen. In the English ships thronging
the quays at Archangel there was, however, plenty of good stuff-men who
could use the sea without being sick, men capable of carrying a ship to
her destination without piling her up on the rocks or seeking nightly
shelter under the land. He accordingly pressed every ninth man out of
those ships.

When news of this high-handed proceeding reached England, it roused the
Queen and her advisers to indignation. Winter though it was, they lost
no time in dispatching Charles Whitworth, a rising diplomat of the
suavest type, as "Envoy Extraordinary to our Good (but naughty) Brother
the Czar of Muscovy," with instructions to demand the release, immediate
and unconditional, of the pressed men. Whitworth found the Czar at
Moscow. The Autocrat of All the Russias listened affably enough to what
he had to say, but refused his demand in terms that left scant room
for doubt as to his sincerity of purpose, and none for protracted
"conversations." "Every Prince," he declared for sole answer, "can take
what he likes out of his own havens." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1436--Capt. J. Anderson's letters and enclosures; _State Papers,
Russia_, vol. iv.--Whitworth to Secretary Harley.] The position thus
taken up was unassailable. Centuries of usage hedged the prerogative in,
and Queen Anne herself, in the few years she had been on the throne, had
not only exercised it with a free hand, but had laid that hand without
scruple upon many a foreign seaman.

The lengths to which the system had gone by the end of the third quarter
of the century is thrown into vivid relief by two incidents, one of
which occurred in 1726, the other fifty years later.

In the former year one William Kingston, pressed in the Downs--a man
who hailed from Lyme Regis and habitually "used the sea"--was,
notwithstanding that fact, discharged by express Admiralty order
because he was a "substantial man and had a landed estate." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1473--Capt Charles Browne, 25 March 1726, and
endorsement.]

The incident of 1776, known as the Duncan case, occurred, or rather
began, at North Shields. Lieutenant Oaks, captain of the press-gang in
that town, one day met in the streets a man who, unfortunately for his
future, "had the appearance of a seaman." He accordingly pressed him;
whereupon the man, whose name was Duncan, produced the title-deeds
of certain house property in London, down Wapping way, worth some six
pounds per annum, and claimed his discharge on the ground that as a
freeholder and a voter he was immune from the press. The lieutenant
laughed the suggestion to scorn, and Duncan was shipped south to the
fleet.

The matter did not end there. Duncan's friends espoused his cause and
took energetic steps for his release. Threatened with an action at law,
and averse from incurring either unnecessary risks or opprobrium where
pressed men were concerned, the Admiralty referred the case to Mr.
Attorney-General (afterwards Lord) Thurlow for his opinion.

The point of law Thurlow was called upon to resolve was, "Whether being
a freeholder is an exception from being pressed;" and as Duncan was
represented in counsel's instructions--on what ground, other than his
"appearance," is not clear--to be a man Who habitually used the sea, it
is hardly matter for surprise that the great jurist's opinion, biassed
as it obviously was by that alleged fact, should have been altogether
inimical to the pressed man and favourable to the Admiralty.

"I see no reason," he writes, in his crabbed hand and nervous diction,
"why men using the sea, and being otherwise fit objects to be impressed
into His Majesty's service, should be exempted only because they
are Freeholders. Nor did I ever read or hear of such an exemption.
Therefore, unless some use or practice, which I am ignorant of, gives
occasion to this doubt, I see no reason for a Mariner being discharged,
seriously, because he is a Freeholder. It's a qualification easily
attained: a single house at Wapping would ship a first-rate man-of-war.
If a Freeholder is exempt, _eo nomine_, it will be impossible to go
on with the pressing service. [Footnote: It would have been equally
impossible to go on with the naval service had the fleet contained many
freeholders like John Barnes. Granted leave of absence from his ship,
the _Neptune,_ early in May, "in order to give his vote in the city,"
he "return'd not till the 8th of August."--_Admiralty Records_ 1.
2653--Capt. Whorwood, 23 Aug. 1741.] There is no knowing a Freeholder
by sight: and if claiming that character, or even showing deeds is
sufficient, few Sailors will be without it." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 7. 299--Law Officers' Opinions, 1756-77, No. 64.]

Backed by this opinion, so nicely in keeping with its own inclinations,
the Admiralty kept the man. Its views, like its practice, had undergone
an antipodal change since the Kingston incident of fifty years before.
And possession, commonly reputed to be nine points of the law, more
than made up for the lack of that element in Mr. Attorney-General's
sophistical reasoning.

In this respect Thurlow was in good company, for although Coke, who
lived before violent pressing became the rule, had given it as his
opinion that the king could not lawfully press men to serve him in his
wars, the legal luminaries who came after him, and more particularly
those of the eighteenth century, differed from him almost to a man.
Blackstone, whilst admitting that no statute expressly legalised
pressing, reminded the nation--with a leer, we might almost say--that
many statutes strongly implied, and hence--so he put it--amply justified
it. In thus begging the question he had in mind the so-called Statutes
of Exemption which, in protecting from impressment certain persons or
classes of persons, proceeded on the assumption, so dear to the Sea
Lords, that the Crown possessed the right to press all. This also
was the view taken by Yorke, Solicitor-General in 1757. "I take the
prerogative," he declares, "to be most clearly legal." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 7. 298--Law Officers' Opinions, 1733-56, No. 102.]

Another group of lawyers took similar, though less exalted ground. Of
these the most eminent was that "great oracle of law," Lord Mansfield.
"The power of pressing," he contends, "is founded upon immemorial usage
allowed for ages. If not, it can have no ground to stand upon. The
practice is deduced from that trite maxim of the Constitutional Law
of England, that private mischief had better be submitted to than that
public detriment should ensue."

The sea-lawyer had yet to be heard. With him "private mischief" counted
for much, the usage of past ages for very little. He lived and suffered
in the present. Of common law he knew nothing, but he possessed a fine
appreciation of common justice, and this forced from him an indictment
of the system that held him in thrall as scathing in its truth, its
simplicity and its logic as it is spontaneous and untutored in its
diction.

"You confidently tell us," said he, dipping his pen in the gall of
bitterness, "that our King is a father to us and our officers friends.
They are so, we must confess, in some respects, for Indeed they use us
like Children in Whiping us into Obedience. As for English Tars to
be the Legitimate Sons of Liberty, it is an Old Cry which we have
Experienced and Knows it to be False. God knows, the Constitution is
admirable well Callculated for the Safety and Happiness of His Majesty's
Subjects who live by Employments on Shore; but alass, we are not
Considered as Subjects of the same Sovereign, unless it be to Drag us by
Force from our Families to Fight the Battles of a Country which Refuses
us Protection." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--Petitions of the
Seamen of the Fleet, 1797.]

Such, in rough outline, was the Impress System of the eighteenth
century. In its inception, its development, and more especially in its
extraordinary culmination, it perhaps constitutes the greatest anomaly,
as it undoubtedly constitutes the grossest imposition, any free
people ever submitted to. Although unlawful in the sense of having no
foundation in law, and oppressive and unjust in that it yearly enslaved,
under the most noxious conditions, thousands against their will, it was
nevertheless for more than a hundred years tolerated and fostered as the
readiest, speediest and most effective means humanly devisable for the
manning of a fleet whose toll upon a free people, in the same period
of time, swelled to more than thrice its original bulk. Standing as a
bulwark against aggression and conquest, it ground under its heel the
very people it protected, and made them slaves in order to keep them
free. Masquerading as a protector, it dragged the wage-earner from
his home and cast his starving family upon the doubtful mercies of the
parish. And as if this were not enough, whilst justifying its existence
on the score of public benefit it played havoc with the fisheries,
clipped the wings of the merchant service, and sucked the life-blood out
of trade.

It was on the rising tide of such egregious contradictions as these that
the press-gang came in; for the press-gang was at once the embodiment
and the active exponent of all that was anomalous or bad in the Impress
System.




CHAPTER II.

WHY THE GANG WAS NECESSARY.



The root of the necessity that seized the British sailor and made of him
what he in time became, the most abject creature and the most efficient
fighting unit the world has ever produced, lay in the fact that he was
island-born.

In that island a great and vigorous people had sprung into being--a
people great in their ambitions, commerce and dominion; vigorous in
holding what they had won against the assaults, meditated or actual, of
those who envied their greatness and coveted their possessions. Of this
island people, as of their world-wide interests, the "chiefest defence"
was a "good fleet at sea." [Footnote: This famous phrase is used,
perhaps for the first time, by Josiah Burchett, sometime Secretary to
the Admiralty, in his _Observations on the Navy_, 1700.]

The Peace of Utrecht, marking though it did the close of the protracted
war of the Spanish Succession, brought to the Island Kingdom not peace,
but a sword; for although its Navy was now as unrivalled as its commerce
and empire, the supreme struggle for existence, under the guise of the
mastery of the sea, was only just begun. Decade after decade, as that
struggle waxed and waned but went remorselessly on, the Navy grew in
ships, the ships in tonnage and weight of metal, and with their growth
the demand for men, imperative as the very existence of the nation,
mounted ever higher and higher. In 1756 fifty thousand sufficed for the
nation's needs. By 1780 the number had reached ninety-two thousand; and
with 1802 it touched high-water mark in the unprecedented total of
one hundred and twenty-nine thousand men in actual sea pay. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 7. 567-Navy Progress, 1756-1805. These figures are
below rather than above the mark, since the official returns on which
they are based are admittedly deficient.]

Beset by this enormous and steadily growing demand, the Admiralty, the
defensive proxy of the nation, had perforce to face the question as to
where and how the men were to be obtained.

The source of supply was never at any time in doubt. Here, ready to
hand, were some hundreds of thousands of persons using the sea, or
following vocations merging into the sea in the capacity of colliers,
bargemen, boatmen, longshoremen, fishermen and deep-sea sailors or
merchantmen, who constituted the natural Naval Reserve of an Island
Kingdom--a reserve ample, if judiciously drawn upon, to meet, and more
than meet, the Navy's every need.

The question of means was one more complicated, more delicate, and hence
incomparably more difficult of solution. To draw largely upon these
seafaring classes, numerous and fit though they were, meant detriment
to trade, and if the Navy was the fist, trade was the backbone of the
nation. The sufferings of trade, moreover, reacted unpleasantly upon
those in power at Whitehall. Methods of procuration must therefore be
devised of a nature such as to insure that neither trade nor Admiralty
should suffer--that they should, in fact, enjoy what the unfortunate
sailor never knew, some reasonable measure of ease.

In its efforts to extricate itself and trade from the complex
difficulties of the situation, Admiralty had at its back what an
eighteenth century Beresford would doubtless have regarded as the finest
talent of the service. Neither the unemployed admiral nor the half-pay
captain had at that time, in his enforced retirement at Bath or
Cheltenham, taken seriously to parliamenteering, company promoting,
or the concocting of pedigrees as a substitute for walking the
quarter-deck. His occupation was indeed gone, but in its stead there
had come to him what he had rarely enjoyed whilst on the active service
list--opportunity. Carried away by the stimulus of so unprecedented
a situation as that afforded by the chance to make himself heard,
he rushed into print with projects and suggestions which would have
revolutionised the naval policy and defence of the country at a stroke
had they been carried into effect. Or he devoted his leisure to the
invention of signal codes, semaphore systems, embryo torpedoes, gun
carriages, and--what is more to our point--methods ostensibly calculated
to man the fleet in the easiest, least oppressive and most expeditious
manner possible for a free people. Armed with these schemes, he
bombarded the Admiralty with all the pertinacity he had shown in his
quarter-deck days in applying for leave or seeking promotion. Many,
perhaps most, of the inventions which it was thus sought to father upon
the Sea Lords, were happily never more heard of; but here and there one,
commending itself by its seeming practicability, was selected for trial
and duly put to the test.

Fair to look upon while still in the air, these fruits of leisured
superannuation proved deceptively unsound when plucked by the hand of
experiment. Registration, first adopted in 1696, held out undeniable
advantages to the seaman. Under its provisions he drew a yearly
allowance when not required at sea, and extra prize-money when on
active service. Yet the bait did not tempt him, and the system was
soon discarded as useless and inoperative. Bounty, defined by some
sentimentalist as a "bribe to Neptune," for a while made a stronger
appeal; but, ranging as it did from five to almost any number of pounds
under one hundred per head, it proved a bribe indeed, and by putting an
irresistible premium on desertion threatened to decimate the very ships
it was intended to man. In 1795 what was commonly known as the Quota
Scheme superseded it. This was a plan of Pitt's devising, under which
each county contributed to the fleet according to its population, the
quota varying from one thousand and eighty-one men for Yorkshire to
twenty-three for Rutland, whilst a minor Act levied special toll on
seaports, London leading the way with five thousand seven hundred and
four men. Like its predecessor Bounty, however, this mode of recruiting
drained the Navy in order to feed it. Both systems, moreover, possessed
another and more serious defect. When their initial enthusiasm had
cooled, the counties, perhaps from force of habit as component parts of
a country whose backbone was trade, bought in the cheapest market. Hence
the Quota Man, consisting as he generally did of the offscourings of the
merchant service, was seldom or never worth the money paid for him. An
old man-o'-war's-man, picking up a miserable specimen of this class of
recruit by the slack of his ragged breeches, remarked to his grinning
messmates as he dangled the disreputable object before their eyes:
"'Ere's a lubber as cost a guinea a pound!" He was not far out in his
estimate.

As in the case of the good old method of recruiting by beat of drum and
the lure of the king's shilling, system after system thus failed to draw
into its net, however speciously that net was spread, either the class
or the number of men whose services it was desired to requisition. And
whilst these futilities were working out their own condemnation the
stormcloud of necessity grew bigger and bigger on the national horizon.
Let trade suffer as it might, there was nothing for it but to discard
all new-fangled notions and to revert to the system which the usage
of ages had sanctioned. The return was imperative. Failing what Junius
stigmatised as the "spur of the Press," the right men in the right
numbers were not to be procured. The wisdom of the nation was at fault.
It could find no other way.

There were, moreover, other reasons why the press-gang was to the Navy
an indispensable appendage--reasons perhaps of little moment singly,
but of tremendous weight in the scale of naval necessity when lumped
together and taken in the aggregate.

Of these the most prominent was that fatal flaw in naval administration
which Nelson was in the habit of anathematising as the "Infernal
System." Due partly to lack of foresight and false economy at Whitehall,
partly to the character of the sailor himself, it resolved itself into
this, that whenever a ship was paid off and put out of commission, all
on board of her, excepting only her captain and her lieutenants, ceased
to be officially connected with the Navy. Now, as ships were for various
reasons constantly going out of commission, and as the paying off of a
first-second-or third-rate automatically discharged from their country's
employ a body of men many hundreds in number, the "lowering" effects of
such a system, working year in, year out, upon a fleet always in chronic
difficulties for men, may be more readily imagined than described.

To a certain limited extent the loss to the service was minimised by
a process called "turning over"; that is to say, the company of a
ship paying off was turned over bodily, or as nearly intact as it was
possible to preserve it, to another ship which at the moment chanced to
be ready, or making ready, for sea. Or it might be that the commander of
a ship paying off, transferred to another ship fitting out, carried the
best men of his late command, commonly known as "old standers," along
with him.

Unfortunately, the occasion of fitting out did not always coincide with
the occasion of paying off; and although turnovers were frequently made
by Admiralty order, there were serious obstacles in the way of their
becoming general. Once the men were paid off, the Admiralty had no
further hold upon them. By a stretch of authority they might, it is
true, be confined to quarters or on board a guardship; but if in these
circumstances they rose in a body and got ashore, they could neither
be retaken nor punished as deserters, but--to use the good old service
term--had to be "rose" again by means of the press-gang. Turnovers,
accordingly, depended mainly upon two closely related circumstances: the
goodwill of the men, and the popularity of commanders. A captain who
was notorious for his use of the lash or the irons, or who was reputed
unlucky, rarely if ever got a turnover except by the adoption of the
most stringent measures. One who, on the other hand, treated his men
with common humanity, who bested the enemy in fair fight and sent rich
prizes into port, never wanted for "followers," and rarely, if ever,
had recourse to the gang. [Footnote: In his Autobiography Lord Dundonald
asserts that he was only once obliged to resort to pressing--a statement
so remarkable, considering the times he lived in, as to call for
explanation. The occasion was when, returning from a year's "exile in a
tub," a converted collier that "sailed like a hay-stack," he fitted out
the _Pallas_ at Portsmouth and could obtain no volunteers. Setting
his gangs to work, he got together a scratch crew of the wretchedest
description; yet so marvellous were the personality and disciplinary
ability of the man, that with only this unpromising material ready
to his hand he intercepted the Spanish trade off Cape Finisterre and
captured four successive prizes of very great value. The _Pallas_
returned to Portsmouth with "three large golden candlesticks, each about
five feet high, placed upon the mast-heads," and from that time onward
Dundonald's reputation as a "lucky" commander was made. He never again
had occasion to invoke the aid of the gang.] Under such men the seaman
would gladly serve "even in a dung barge." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 2733--Capt. Young, 28 Sept. 1776.] Unhappily for the
service, such commanders were comparatively few, and in their absence
the Infernal System drained the Navy of its best blood and accentuated a
hundred-fold the already overwhelming need for the impress.

The old-time sailor, [Footnote: The use of the word "sailor" was
long regarded with disfavour by the Navy Board, who saw in it only a
colourless substitute for the good old terms "seaman" and "mariner."
Capt. Bertie, of the _Ruby_ gunship, once reported the pressing of a
"sailor," Thomas Letting by name, out of a collier in Yarmouth Roads,
and was called upon by My Lords to define the new-fangled term. This
he did with admirable circumlocution. "As for explaining the word
'sailor,'" said he, "I can doe it no otherwise than (by) letting of
you know that Thomas Letting is a Sailor."--_Admiralty Records_ 1.
1468--Capt. Bertie, 6 May 1706.] again, was essentially a creature of
contradictions. Notorious for a "swearing rogue," who punctuated his
strange sea-lingo with horrid oaths and appalling blasphemies, he
made the responses required by the services of his Church with all the
superstitious awe and tender piety of a child. Inconspicuous for his
thrift or "forehandedness," it was nevertheless a common circumstance
with him to have hundreds of pounds, in pay and prize-money, to his
credit at his bankers, the Navy Pay-Office; and though during a voyage
he earned his money as hardly as a horse, and was as poor as a church
mouse, yet the moment he stepped ashore he made it fly by the handful
and squandered it, as the saying went, like an ass. When he was sober,
which was seldom enough provided he could obtain drink, he possessed
scarcely a rag to his back; but when he was drunk he was himself
the first to acknowledge that he had "too many cloths in the wind."
According to his own showing, his wishes in life were limited to three:
"An island of tobacco, a river of rum, and--more rum;" but according
to those who knew him better than he knew himself, he would at any time
sacrifice all three, together with everything else he possessed, for the
gratification of a fourth and unconfessed desire, the dearest wish of
his life, woman. Ward's description of him, slightly paraphrased, fits
him to a hair: "A salt-water vagabond, who is never at home but when
he is at sea, and never contented but when he is ashore; never at ease
until he has drawn his pay, and never satisfied until he has spent
it; and when his pocket is empty he is just as much respected as a
father-in-law is when he has beggared himself to give a good portion
with his daughter." [Footnote: Ward, _Wooden World Dissected_, 1744.]
With all this he was brave beyond belief on the deck of a ship, timid to
the point of cowardice on the back of a horse; and although he fought to
a victorious finish many of his country's most desperate fights, and
did more than any other man of his time to make her the great nation
she became, yet his roving life robbed him of his patriotism and made it
necessary to wring from him by violent means the allegiance he shirked.
It was at this point that he came in contact with what he hated most in
life, yet dearly loved to dodge--the press-gang.

That such a creature of contradictions should be averse from serving the
country he loved is perhaps the most consistent trait in his
character; for here at least the sailor had substantial grounds for his
inconsistency.

For one thing, his aversion to naval service was as old as the Navy
itself, having grown with its growth. We have seen in what manner King
John was obliged to admonish the sailor in order to induce him to take
his prest-money; and Edward III., referring to his attitude in the
fourteenth century, is said to have summed up the situation in the
pregnant words: "There is navy enough in England, were there only
the will." Raleigh, recalling with bitterness of soul those glorious
Elizabethan days when no adventurer ever dreamt of pressing, scoffed
at the seamen of King James's time as degenerates who went on board a
man-of-war "with as great a grudging as if it were to be slaves in the
galleys." A hundred years did not improve matters. The sailors of Queen
Anne entered her ships like men "dragged to execution." [Footnote:
Justice, _Dominion and Laws of the Sea_, 1705, Appendix on Pressing.]

In the merchant service, where the sailor received his initiation into
the art and mystery of the sea, life during the period under review, and
indeed for long after, was hard enough in all conscience. Systematic
and unspeakably inhuman brutality made the merchant seaman's lot a daily
inferno. Traders sailing out of Liverpool, Bristol and a score of other
British ports depended almost entirely for their crews upon drugged rum,
so evil was their reputation in this respect amongst seafaring men. In
the East India Company's ships, even, the conditions were little short
of unendurable. Men had rather be hanged than sail to the Indies in
them. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1463, 1472--Letters of Captains
Bouler and Billingsley, and numerous instances.]

Of all these bitternesses the sailor tasted freely. Cosmopolite that
he was, he wandered far a-sea and incurred the blows and curses of many
masters, happy if, amid his manifold tribulations, he could still call
his soul his own. Just here, indeed, was where the shoe of naval service
pinched him most sorely; for though upon the whole life on board a
man-of-war was not many shades worse than life aboard a trader, it yet
introduced into his already sadly circumscribed vista of happiness the
additional element of absolute loss of free-will, and the additional
dangers of being shot as an enemy or hanged as a deserter. These
additional things, the littles that yet meant so much, bred in him a
hatred of the service so implacable that nothing less drastic than the
warrant and the hanger could cope with or subdue it. Eradicated it never
was.

The keynote to the sailor's treatment in the Navy may be said to have
been profane abuse. Officers of all ranks kept the Recording Angel
fearfully busy. With scarcely an exception they were men of blunt speech
and rough tongue who never hesitated to call a spade a spade, and the
ordinary seaman something many degrees worse. These were technicalities
of the service which had neither use nor meaning elsewhere. But to the
navigation of the ship, to daily routine and the maintenance of that
exact discipline on which the Navy prided itself, they were as essential
as is milk to the making of cheese. Nothing could be done without them.
Decent language was thrown away upon a set of fellows who had been bred
in that very shambles of language, the merchant marine. To them "'twas
just all the same as High Dutch." They neither understood it nor
appreciated its force. But a volley of thumping oaths, bellowed at them
from the brazen throat of a speaking-trumpet, and freely interlarded
with adjectives expressive of the foulness of their persons, and the
ultimate state and destination of their eyes and limbs, saved the
situation and sometimes the ship. Officers addicted to this necessary
flow of language were sensible of only one restraint. Visiting parties
caused them embarrassment, and when this was the case they fell back
upon the tactics of the commander who, unable to express himself with
his usual fluency because of the presence of ladies on the quarter-deck,
hailed the foreyard-arm in some such terms as these: "Foreyard-arm
there! God bless you! God bless you! God bless you! _You know what I
mean!_"

Hard words break no bones, and to quarter-deck language, as such, the
sailor entertained no rooted objection. What he did object to, and
object to with all the dogged insistence of his nature, was the fact
that this habitual flow of profane scurrility was only the prelude to
what, with grim pleasantry, he was accustomed to describe as "serving
out slops." Anything intended to cover his back was "slops" to the
sailor, and the punishments meted out to him covered him like a garment.

The old code of naval laws, the _Monumenta Juridica_ or _Black Book_ of
the Admiralty, contained many curious disciplinary methods, not a few
of which too long survived the age they originated in. If, for instance,
one sailor robbed another and was found guilty of the crime, boiling
pitch was poured over his head and he was powdered with feathers "to
mark him," after which he was marooned on the first island the ship fell
in with. Seamen guilty of undressing themselves while at sea were ducked
three times from the yard-arm--a more humane use of that spar than
converting it into a gallows. On this code were based Admiral the
Earl of Lindsay's "Instructions" of 1695. These included ducking,
keel-hauling, fasting, flogging, weighting until the "heart or back be
ready to break," and "gogging" or scraping the tongue with hoop-iron
for obscene or profane swearing; for although the "gentlemen of the
quarter-deck" might swear to their heart's content, that form of
recreation was strictly taboo in other parts of the ship. Here we have
the origin of the brutal discipline of the next century, summed up in
the Consolidation Act of George II. [Footnote: 22 George II. c. 33.]--an
Act wherein ten out of thirty-six articles awarded capital punishment
without option, and twelve death or minor penalties.

Of the latter, the one most commonly in use was flogging at the gangway
or jears. This duty fell to the lot of the boatswain's mate. [Footnote:
"As it is the Custom of the Army to punish with the Drums, so it is
the known Practice of the Navy to punish with the Boatswain's
Mate."--_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1482--Capt. (afterwards Admiral)
Boscawen, 25 Feb. 1746-7.] The instrument employed was the
cat-o'-nine-tails, the regulation dose twelve lashes; but since the
actual number was left to the captain's discretion or malice, as the
case might be, it not infrequently ran into three figures. Thus John
Watts, able seaman on board H.M.S. _Harwich,_ Capt. Andrew Douglas
commander, in 1704 received one hundred and seventy lashes for striking
a shipmate in self-defence, his captain meanwhile standing by and
exhorting the boatswain's mate to "Swinge the Dog, for hee has a Tough
Hide"--and that, too, with a cat waxed to make it bite the harder.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5265--Courts-Martial, 1704-5.]

It was just this unearned increment of blows--this dash of bitter added
to the regulation cup--that made Jack's gorge rise. He was not the sort
of chap, it must be confessed, to be ruled with a feather. "An impudent
rascal" at the best of times, he often "deserved a great deal and had
but little." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1472--Capt. Balchen, 26
Jan. 1716-7.] But unmerited punishment, too often devilishly devised,
maliciously inflicted and inhumanly carried out, broke the back of his
sense of justice, already sadly overstrained, and inspired him with a
mortal hatred of all things naval.

For the slightest offence he was "drubbed at the gears"; for serious
offences, from ship to ship. If, when reefing topsails on a dark night
or in the teeth of a sudden squall, he did not handle the canvas with
all the celerity desired by the officer of the watch, he and his fellow
yardsmen were flogged _en bloc_. He was made to run the gauntlet, often
with the blood gushing from nose and ears as the result of a previous
dose of the cat, until he fell to the deck comatose and at the point of
death. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1466--Complaint of ye Abuse of
a Sayler in the _Litchfield_, 1704. In this case the man actually died.]
Logs of wood were bound to his legs as shackles, and whatever the nature
of his offence, he invariably began his expiation of it, the preliminary
canter, so to speak, in irons. If he had a lame leg or a bad foot, he
was "started" with a rope's-end as a "slacker." If he happened to be
the last to tumble up when his watch was called, the rattan [Footnote:
Carried at one time by both commissioned and warrant officers.] raised
weals on his back or drew blood from his head; and, as if to add insult
to injury, for any of these, and a hundred and one other offences, he
was liable to be black-listed and to lose his allowance of grog.

Some things, too, were reckoned sins aboard ship which, unhappily for
the sailor, could not well be avoided. Laughing, or even permitting the
features to relax in a smile in the official presence, was such a sin.
"He beats us for laughing," declare the company of the _Solebay_, in
a complaint against their commander, "more like Doggs than Men."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1435--Capt. Aldred, 29 Feb. 1703-4.]
One of the _Nymph's_ company, in or about the year 1797, received three
dozen for what was officially termed "Silent Contempt"--"which was
nothing more than this, that when flogged by the boatswain's mate the
man smiled." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--Petitions, 1793-7.]
This was the "Unpardonable Crime" of the service.

Contrariwise, a man was beaten if he sulked. And as a rule the sailor
was sulky enough. Works of supererogation, such as polishing everything
polishable--the shot for the guns, in extreme cases, not even
excepted--until it shone like the tropical sun at noonday, left him
little leisure or inclination for mirth. "Very pretty to look at,"
said Wellington, when confronted with these glaring evidences of
hyper-discipline, "but there is one thing wanting. I have not seen a
bright face in the ship."

A painful tale of discipline run mad, or nearly so, is unfolded by that
fascinating series of sailor-records, the Admiralty Petitions. Many of
them, it must in justice be owned, bear unqualified testimony to the
kindness and humanity of officers; but in the great majority of cases
the evidence they adduce is overwhelmingly to the contrary. And if their
language is sometimes bombastic, if their style is almost uniformly
illiterate, if they are the productions of a band of mutinous dogs
standing out for rights which they never possessed and deserving of a
halter rather than a hearing, these are circumstances that do not in
the least detract from the veracity of the allegations they advance. The
sailor appealed to his king, or to the Admiralty, "the same as a child
to its father"; and no one who peruses the story of his wrongs, as set
forth in these documents, can doubt for a moment that he speaks the
truth with all a child's simplicity.

The seamen of the _Reunion_ open the tale of oppression and ill-usage.
"Our Captain oblidges us to Wash our Linnen twice a week in Salt Water
and to put 2 Shirts on every Week, and if they do not look as Clean as
if they were washed in Fresh Water, he stops the person's Grog which has
the misfortune to displease him; and if our Hair is not Tyd to please
him, he orders it to be Cutt Off." On the _Amphitrite_ "flogging is
their portion." The men of the _Winchelsea_ "wold sooner be Shot at like
a Targaite than to Remain." The treatment systematically meted out
to the _Shannon's_ crew is more than the heart "can Cleaverly
Bear"--enough, in short, to make them "rise and Steer the Ship into an
Enemies Port." The seamen of the _Glory_ are made wretched by "beating,
blacking, tarring, putting our heads in Bags," and by being forced to
"drink half a Gallon of Salt Water" for the most trivial breaches of
discipline or decorum. On the _Blanch,_ if they get wet and hang or
spread their clothes to dry, the captain "thros them overboard." The
_Nassau's_ company find it impossible to put the abuse they receive on
paper. It is "above Humanity." Though put on board to fight for king and
country, they are used worse than dogs. They have no encouragement to
"face the Enemy with a chearful Heart." Besides being kept "more
like Convicts than free-born Britons," the _Nymph's_ company have an
unspeakable grievance. "When Engaged with the Enemy off Brest, March
the 9th, 1797, they even Beat us at our Quarters, though on the Verge of
Eternity." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5l25--Petitions, 1793-7.]

On the principle advanced by Rochefoucault, that there is something
not displeasing to us in the misfortunes of our friends, the sailor
doubtless derived a sort of negative satisfaction from the fact that he
was not the only one on shipboard liable to the pains and penalties of
irascibility, brutality and excessive disciplinary zeal. Particularly
was this true of his special friend the "sky-pilot" or chaplain, that
super-person who perhaps most often fell a victim to quarter-deck
ebullitions. Notably there is on record the case of one John
Cruickshank, chaplain of H.M.S. _Assurance,_ who was clapped in irons,
court-martialled and dismissed the service merely because he happened
to take--what no sailor could ever condemn him for-a drop too much, and
whilst in that condition insisted on preaching to the ship's company
when they were on the very point of going into action. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 5265--Courts-Martial, 1704-5. His zeal was
unusual. Most naval chaplains thought "of nothing more than making His
Majesty's ships sinecures"] There is also that other case of the "saucy
Surgeon of the _Seahorse_" who incurred his captain's dire displeasure
all on account of candles, of which necessary articles he, having his
wife on board, thought himself entitled to a more liberal share than
was consistent with strict naval economy; and who was, moreover, so
"troblesome about his Provisions, that if he did not always Chuse out
of ye best in ye whole Ship," he straightway got his back up and
"threatened to Murder the Steward." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1470--Capt. Blowers, 3 Jan. 1710-11.] Such interludes as these would
assuredly have proved highly diverting to the foremast-man had it not
been for the cat and that savage litter of minor punishments awaiting
the man who smiled.

In the matter of provisions, there can be little doubt that the sailor
shared to the full the desire evinced by the surgeon of the _Seahorse_
to take blood-vengeance upon someone on account of them. His
"belly-timber," as old Misson so aptly if indelicately describes it, was
mostly worm-eaten or rotten, his drink indescribably nasty.

Charles II. is said to have made his breakfast off ship's diet the
morning he left the _Naseby,_ and to have pronounced it good; and Nelson
in 1803 declared it "could not possibly be improved upon." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 580-Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.]
Such, however, was not the opinion of the chaplain of the _Dartmouth,_
for after dining with his captain on an occasion which deserves to
become historic, he swore that "although he liked that Sort of Living
very well, as for the King's Allowance there was but a Sheat of
Browne Paper between it and Hell." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1464--Misdemenors Comited by Mr Edward Lewis, Chapling on Board H. M.
Shipp Dartmouth, 1 Oct. 1702.] Which of these opinions came nearest to
the truth, the sequel will serve to show.

On the face of it the sailor's dietary was not so bad. A ship's stores,
in 1719, included ostensibly such items as bread, wine, beef, pork,
peas, oatmeal, butter, cheese, water and beer, and if Jack had but had
his fair share of these commodities, and had it in decent condition,
he would have had little reason to grumble about the king's allowance.
Unhappily for him, the humanities of diet were little studied by the
Victualling Board.

Taking the beef, the staple article of consumption on shipboard, cooking
caused it to shrink as much as 45 per cent., thus reducing the sailor's
allowance by nearly one-half. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1495--Capt. Barrington, 23 Dec. 1770.] The residuum was often "mere
carrion," totally unfit for human consumption. "Junk," the sailor
contemptuously called it, likening it, in point of texture,
digestibility and nutritive properties, to the product of picked oakum,
which it in many respects strongly resembled. The pork, though it lost
less in the cooking, was rancid, putrid stuff, repellent in odour and
colour-particulars in which it found close competitors in the butter and
cheese, which had often to be thrown overboard because they "stunk
the ship." [Footnote: To disinfect a ship after she had been fouled by
putrid rations or disease, burning sulphur and vinegar were commonly
employed. Their use was preferable to the means adopted by the carpenter
of the _Feversham_, who in order to "sweeten ship" once "turn'd on
the cock in the hould" and through forgetfulness "left it running for
eighteen howers," thereby not only endangering the vessel's safety,
but incidentally spoiling twenty-one barrels of powder in the
magazine.--_Admiralty Records_ 1. 2653--Capt. Watson, 18 April 1741.]
The peas "would not break." Boiled for eight hours on end, they came
through the ordeal "almost as hard as shott." Only the biscuit, apart
from the butter and cheese, possessed the quality of softness. Damp,
sea-water, mildew and weevil converted "hard" into "soft tack" and added
another horror to the sailor's mess. The water he washed these varied
abominations down with was frequently "stuff that beasts would cough
at." His beer was no better. It would not keep, and was in consequence
both "stinking and sour." [Footnote: According to Raleigh, old oil
and fish casks were used for the storing of ship's beer in Elizabeth's
reign.] Although the contractor was obliged to make oath that he had
used both malt and hops in the brewing, it often consisted of nothing
more stimulating than "water coloured and bittered," and sometimes the
"stingy dog of a brewer" even went so far as to omit the "wormwood."

Such a dietary as this made a meal only an unavoidable part of the day's
punishment and inspired the sailor with profound loathing. "Good
Eating is an infallible Antidote against murmuring, as many a Big-Belly
Place-Man can instance," he says in one of his petitions. Poor fellow!
his opportunities of putting it to the test were few enough. On Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays, the so-called Banyan days of the service, when
his hateful ration of meat was withheld and in its stead he regaled
himself on plum-duff--the "plums," according to an old regulation, "not
worse than Malaga"--he had a taste of it. Hence the banyan day, though
in reality a fast-day, became indelibly associated in his simple mind
and vocabulary with occasions of feasting and plenty, and so remains to
this day.

If the sailor's only delicacy was duff, his only comforts were rum and
tobacco, and to explore some unknown island, and discover therein a
goodly river of the famous Jamaica spirit, flowing deep and fragrant
between towering mountains of "pig tail," is commonly reputed to have
been the cherished wish of his heart. With tobacco the Navy Board did
not provide him, nor afford dishonest pursers opportunity to "make dead
men chew," [Footnote: Said of pursers who manipulated the Muster Books,
which it was part of their duty to keep, in such a way as to make it
appear that men "discharged dead" had drawn a larger quantity of tobacco
than was actually the case, the difference in value of course going
into their own pockets.] until 1798; but rum they allowed him at a
comparatively early date. When sickness prevailed on board, when beer
ran short or had to be turned over the side to preserve a sweet ship,
rum or wine was issued, and although the Admiralty at first looked
askance at the innovation, and at times left commanders of ships to foot
the bill for spirits thus served out, the practice made gradual headway,
until at length it ousted beer altogether and received the stamp of
official approval. Half a pint, dealt out each morning and evening in
equal portions, was the regular allowance--a quantity often doubled were
the weather unusually severe or the men engaged in the arduous duty
of watering ship. At first the ration of rum was served neat and
appreciated accordingly; but about 1740 the practice of adding water was
introduced. This was Admiral Vernon's doing. Vernon was best known to
his men as "Old Grog," a nickname originating in a famous grogram coat
he affected in dirty weather; and as the rum and water now served out
to them was little to their liking, they marked their disapproval of the
mixture, as well as of the man who invented it, by dubbing it "grog."
The sailor was not without his sense of humour.

The worst feature of rum, from the sailor's point of view, worse by far
than dilution, was the fact that it could be so easily stopped. Here his
partiality for the spirit told heavily against him. His grog was stopped
because he liked it, rather than because he deserved to lose it. The
malice of the thing did not make for a contented ship.

The life of the man-o'-war's-man, according to Lord Nelson, was on an
average "finished at forty-five years." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 580--Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Bad food and
strenuous labour under exceptionally trying conditions sapped his
vitals, made him prematurely old, and exposed him to a host of ills
peculiar to his vocation. He "fell down daily," to employ the old
formula, in spotted or putrid fevers. He was racked by agues, distorted
by rheumatic pains, ruptured or double-ruptured by the strain of
pulling, hauling and lifting heavy weights. He ate no meal without
incurring the pangs of acute indigestion, to which he was fearfully
subject. He was liable to a "prodigious inflammation of the head, nose
and eyes," occasioned by exposure. Scurvy, his most inveterate and
merciless enemy, "beat up" for him on every voyage and dragged his
brine-sodden body down to a lingering death. Or, did he escape these
dangers and a watery grave, protracted disease sooner or later rendered
him helpless, or a brush with the enemy disabled him for ever from
earning his bread.

His surgeons were, as a rule, a sorry lot. Not only were they deficient
in numbers, they commonly lacked both professional training and skill.
Their methods were consequently of the crudest description, and long
continued so. The approved treatment for rupture, to which the sailor
was painfully liable, was to hang the patient up by the heels until the
prolapsus was reduced. Pepys relates how he met a seaman returning from
fighting the Dutch with his eye-socket "stopped with oakum," and as late
at least as the Battle of Trafalgar it was customary, in amputations,
to treat the bleeding stump with boiling pitch as a cauterant. In his
general attitude towards the sick and wounded the old-time naval surgeon
was not unlike Garth, Queen Anne's famous physician. At the Kit Cat Club
he one day sat so long over his wine that Steele ventured to remind
him of his patients. "No matter," said Garth. "Nine have such bad
constitutions that no physician can save them, and the other six such
good ones that all the physicans in the world could not kill them."

Many were the devices resorted to in order to keep the man-o'-war's-man
healthy and fit. As early as 1602 a magic electuary, invented by one
"Doctor Cogbourne, famous for fluxes," was by direction of the Navy
Commissioners supplied for his use in the West Indies. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1464--Capt. Barker, 14 Oct. 1702.] By Admiral
Vernon and his commanders he was dosed freely with "Elixir of Vitriol,"
which they not only "reckoned the best general medicine next to
rhubarb," but pinned their faith to as a sovereign specific for scurvy
and fevers. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 161--Admiral Vernon, 31
Oct. 1741.] Lime-juice, known as a valuable anti-scorbutic as early as
the days of Drake and Raleigh, was not added to his rations till 1795.
He did not find it very palatable. The secret of fortifying it was
unknown, and oil had to be floated on its surface to make it keep.
Sour-crout was much more to his taste as a preventive of scurvy, and
in 1777, at the request of Admiral Montagu, then Governor and
Commander-in-Chief over the Island of Newfoundland, the Admiralty caused
to be sent out, for the use of the squadron on that station, where
vegetables were unprocurable, a sufficient quantity of that succulent
preparation to supply twelve hundred men for a period of two months.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 471--Admiral Montagu, 28 Feb. 1777,
and endorsement.]

Rice the sailor detested. Of all species of "soft tack" it was least to
his liking. He nicknamed it "strike-me-blind," being firmly convinced
that its continued use would rob him of his eyesight. Tea was not added
to his dietary till 1824, but as early as 1795 he could regale himself
on cocoa. For the rest, sugar, essence of malt, essence of spruce,
mustard, cloves, opium and "Jesuits'" or Peruvian bark were considered
essential to his well-being on shipboard. He was further allowed a
barber-one to every hundred men-without whose attentions it was found
impossible to keep him "clean and healthy."

With books he was for many years "very scantily supplied." It was not
till 1812, indeed, that the Admiralty, shocked by the discovery that he
had practically nothing to elevate his mind but daily association with
the quarter-deck, began to pour into the fleet copious supplies of
literature for his use. Thereafter the sailor could beguile his leisure
with such books as the _Old Chaplains Farewell Letter_, Wilson's
_Maxims, The Whole Duty of Man_, Seeker's _Duties of the Sick_, and,
lest returning health should dissipate the piety begotten of his
ailments, Gibson's _Advice after Sickness_. Thousands of pounds were
spent upon this improving literature, which was distributed to the fleet
in strict accordance with the amount of storage room available at the
various dockyards. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ Accountant-General,
Misc. (Various), No. l06--Accounts of the Rev. Archdeacon Owen,
Chaplain-General to the Fleet, 1812-7.]

A fundamental principle of man-o'-war routine was that the sailor formed
no part of it for hospital purposes. Hence sickness was not encouraged.
If the sailor-patient did not recover within a reasonable time, he was
"put on shore sick," sometimes to the great terror of the populace, who,
were he supposed to be afflicted with an infectious disease, fled
from him "as if he had the plague." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
2732--Capt. Young, 24 June 1740.] On shore he was treated for thirty
days at his country's charges. If incurable, or permanently disabled, he
was then turned adrift and left to shift for himself. A clean record
and a sufficiently serious wound entitled him to a small pension or
admission to Greenwich Hospital, an institution which had religiously
docked his small pay of sixpence a month throughout his entire service.
Failing these, there remained for him only the streets and the beggar's
rôle.

His pay was far from princely. From 3d. a day in the reign of King John
it rose by grudging increments to 20s. a month in 1626, and 24s. in
1797. Years sometimes elapsed before he touched a penny of his earnings,
except in the form of "slop" clothing and tobacco. Amongst the instances
of deferred wages in which the Admiralty records abound, there may be
cited the case of the _Dreadnought_, whose men in 1711 had four years'
pay due; and of the _Dunkirk_, to whose company, in the year following,
six and a half years' was owing. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1470--Capt. Bennett, 8 March 1710-11. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1471--Capt.
Butler, 19 March, 1711-12,] And at the time of the Nore Mutiny it was
authoritatively stated that there were ships then in the fleet which
had not been paid off for eight, ten, twelve and in one instance even
fifteen years. "Keep the pay, keep the man," was the policy of the
century--a sadly mistaken policy, as we shall presently see.

In another important article of contentment the sailor was hardly better
off. The system of deferred pay amounted practically to a stoppage of
all leave for the period, however protracted, during which the pay was
withheld. Thus the _Monmouth's_ men had in 1706 been in the ship "almost
six years, and had never had the opportunity of seeing their families
but once." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1468-Capt. Baker, 3 Nov.
1706.] In Boscawen's ship, the _Dreadnought_, there were in 1744 two
hundred and fifty men who "had not set foot on shore near two year."
Admiral Penrose once paid off in a seventy-four at Plymouth, many
of whose crew had "never set foot on land for six or seven years";
[Footnote: Penrose (Sir V. C., Vice-Admiral of the Blue), _Observations
on Corporeal Punishment, Impressment, etc.,_ 1824.] and Brenton, in
his _Naval History_, instances the case of a ship whose company, after
having been eleven years in the East Indies, on returning to England
were drafted straightway into another ship and sent back to that quarter
of the globe without so much as an hour's leave ashore.

What was true of pay and leave was also true of prize-money. The
sailor was systematically kept out of it, and hence out of the means of
enjoyment and carousal it afforded him, for inconscionable periods. From
a moral point of view the check was hardly to his detriment. But
the Navy was not a school of morals, and withholding the sailor's
hard-earned prize-money over an indefinite term of years neither made
for a contented heart nor enhanced his love for a service that first
absorbed him against his will, and then, having got him in its clutches,
imposed upon and bested him at every turn.

Although the prime object in withholding his pay was to prevent his
running from his ship, so far from compassing that desirable end it had
exactly the contrary effect. Both the preventive and the disease were of
long standing. With De Ruyter in the Thames in 1667, menacing London
and the kingdom, the seamen of the fleet flocked to town in hundreds,
clamouring for their wages, whilst their wives besieged the Navy Office
in Seething Lane, shrieking: "This is what comes of not paying our
husbands!"

Essentially a creature of contradictions, the sailor rarely, if he could
avoid it, steered the course laid down for him, and in nothing perhaps
was this idiosyncrasy so glaringly apparent as in his behaviour as his
country's creditor. He "would get to London if he could." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732--Capt. Young, 12 Dec. 1742.] "An
unaccountable humour" impelled him "to quit His Majesty's service
without leave." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 480--Shirley, Governor
of Massachusetts, 12 Sept. 1746.] Once the whim seized him, no ties of
deferred pay or prize-money had power to hold him back. The one he could
obtain on conditions; the other he could dispose of at a discount which,
though ruinously heavy, still left him enough to frolic on.

The weapon of deferred pay was thus a two-edged one. If it hurt the
sailor, it also cut the fingers of those who employed it against him. So
exigent were the needs of the service, he could "run" with impunity.
For if he ran whilst his pay was in arrears, he did so with the full
knowledge that, barring untimely recapture by the press-gang, he would
receive a free pardon, together with payment of all dues, on the sole
condition, which he never kept if he could help it, of returning to his
ship when his money was gone. He therefore deserted for two reasons:
First, to obtain his pay; second, to spend it.

The penalty for desertion, under a well-known statute of George I.,
[Footnote: 13 George I., art. 7.] was death by hanging. As time went on,
however, discipline in this respect suffered a grave relapse, and fear
of the halter no longer served to check the continual exodus from the
fleet. If the runaway sailor were taken, "it would only be a whipping
bout." So he openly boasted. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1479--Capt. Boscawen, 26 April 1743.] The "bout," it is true, at times
ran to six, or even seven hundred lashes--the latter being the heaviest
dose of the cat ever administered in the British navy; [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 482--Admiral Lord Colvill, 12 Nov. 1765.] but
even this terrible ordeal had no power to hold the sailor to his duty,
and although Admiral Lord St. Vincent, better known in his day as
"hanging Jervis," did his utmost to revive the ancient custom of
stretching the sailor's neck, the trend of the times was against him,
and within twenty-five years of the reaffirming of the penalty, in the
22nd year of George II., hanging for desertion had become practically
obsolete.

In the declining days of the practice a grim game at life and death was
played upon the deck of a king's ship lying in the River St. Lawrence.
The year was 1760. Quebec had only recently fallen before the British
onslaught. A few days before that event, at a juncture when every man in
the squadron was counted upon to play his part in the coming struggle,
and to play it well, three seamen, James Mike, Thomas Wilkinson and
William M'Millard by name, deserted from the _Vanguard_. Retaken some
months later, they were brought to trial; but as men were not easy to
replace in that latitude, the court, whilst sentencing all three to
suffer the extreme penalty of the law, added to their verdict a rider
to the effect that it would be good policy to spare two of them. Admiral
Lord Colvill, then Commander-in-Chief, issued his orders accordingly,
and at eleven o'clock on the morning of the 12th of July the condemned
men, preceded to the scaffold by two chaplains, were led to the
_Vanguard's_ forecastle, where they drew lots to determine which of them
should die. The fatal lot fell to James Mike, who, in presence of the
assembled boats of the squadron, was immediately "turned off" at the
foreyard-arm. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 482--Admiral Lord
Colvill, 10 July 1760; Captains' Logs, 1026--Log of H.M.S. _Vanguard_.]

Encouraged in this grim fashion, desertion assumed alarming proportions.
Nelson estimated that whenever a large convoy of merchant ships
assembled at Portsmouth, at least a thousand men deserted from the
fleet. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580--Memorandum on the State
of the Fleet, 1803.] This was a "liberty they would take," do what you
could to prevent it.

Of those who thus deserted fully one-third, according to the same high
authority, never saw the fleet again. "From loss of clothes, drinking
and other debaucheries" they were "lost by death to the country." Some
few of the remainder, after drinking His Majesty's health in a final
bowl, voluntarily returned on board and "prayed for a fair wind"; but
the majority held aloof, taking their chances and their pleasures in
sailorly fashion until, their last stiver gone, they fell an easy prey
to the press-gang or the crimp.

While the crimp was to the merchant service what the press-gang was
to the Navy, a kind of universal provider, there was in his method of
preying upon the sailor a radical difference. Like his French compeer,
the recruiting sergeant of the Pont Neuf in the days of Louis the
Well-Beloved, wherever sailors congregated the crimp might be heard
rattling his money-bags and crying: "Who wants any? Who wants any?"
Where the press-gang used the hanger or the cudgel, the crimp employed
dollars. The circumstance gave him a decided "pull" in the contest for
men, for the dollars he offered, whether in the way of pay or bounty,
were invariably fortified with rum. The two formed a contraption no
sailor could resist. "Money and liquor held out to a seaman," said
Nelson, "are too much for him."

In law the offence of enticing seamen to desert His Majesty's service,
like desertion itself, was punishable with death; [Footnote: 22
George n. cap. 33.] but in fact the penalty was either commuted to
imprisonment, or the offender was dealt with summarily, without invoking
the law. Crimps who were caught red-handed had short shrift. Two of the
fraternity, named respectively Henry Nathan and Sampson Samuel, were
once taken in the Downs. "Send Nathan and Samuel," ran the Admiralty
order in their case, "to Plymouth by the first conveyance. Admiral Young
is to order them on board a ship going on foreign service as soon as
possible." Another time an officer, boarding a boat filled with men as
it was making for an Indiaman at Gravesend, found in her six crimps,
all of whom suffered the same fate. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1542--Capt. Bazeley, 7 Feb. 1808. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1513--Capt.
Bowater, 12 June 1796.]

Men seduced by means of crimpage bounty were said to be "silver cooped,"
and the art of silver cooping was not only practised at home, it was
world-wide. In whatever waters a British man-o'-war cast anchor, there
the crimp appeared, plying his crafty trade. His assiduity paid a high
compliment to the sterling qualities of the British seaman, but for the
Navy it spelt wholesale depletion.

In home ports he was everywhere in evidence. No ship of war could lie in
Leith Roads but she lost a good part of her crew through his seductions.
"M'Kirdy & M'Lean, petty-fogging writers," were the chief crimps at
Greenock. Sheerness crimps gave "great advance money." Liverpool was
infested with them, all the leading merchant shippers at Bristol,
London and other great ports having "agents" there, who offered the
man-o'-war's-man tempting bounties and substantial wages to induce him
to desert his ship. A specially active agent of Bristol shipowners was
one Vernon Ley, who plied his trade chiefly at Exeter and Plymouth,
whence he was known to send to Bristol, in the space of six months, as
many as seventy or eighty men, whom he provided with postchaises for the
journey and 8 Pounds per man as bounty. James White, a publican who kept
the "Pail of Barm" at Bedminster, made a close second in his activity
and success. Spithead had its regular contingent of crimps, and many an
East India ship sailing from that famous anchorage was "entirely manned"
by their efforts, of course at the expense of the ships of war lying
there. At Chatham, crimpage bounty varied from fifteen to twenty
guineas per head; and at Cork, a favourite recruiting ground for both
merchantmen and privateers, the same sum could be had any day, with high
wages to boot.

In the Crown Colonies a similar state of things prevailed. Queen's ships
visiting Jamaica in or about the year 1716 lost so heavily they scarce
dared venture the return voyage to England, their men having "gone
a-wrecking" in the Gulf of Florida, where one armed sloop was reputed
to have recovered Spanish treasure to the value of a hundred thousand
dollars. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1471--Capt. Balchen, 13 May
1716.] Time did not lessen desertion in the island, though it wrought a
change in the cause. When Admiral Vernon was Commander-in-Chief there
in the forties, he lost five hundred men within a comparatively short
time--"seduced out," to use his own words, "through the temptations of
high wages and thirty gallons of rum, and conveyed drunk on board from
the punch-houses where they are seduced." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 233--Admiral Vernon, 5 Sept. 1742. A rare recruiting sheet of 1780,
which has for its headpiece a volunteer shouting: "Rum for nothing!"
describes Jamaica as "that delightful Island, abounding in Rum, Sugar
and Spanish Dollars, where there is delicious living and plenty of GROGG
and PUNCH."]

At Louisberg, in the Island of Cape Breton, the North American Squadron
in 1746 lost so many men through the seductions practised by New England
skippers frequenting that port, that Townsend, the admiral in command,
indited a strongly worded protest to Shirley, then Governor of
Massachusetts; but the latter, though deploring the "vile behaviour"
of the skippers in question, could do nothing to put a stop to it.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 480--Townsend, 17 Aug.; Shirley, 12
Sept. 1746.] As a matter of fact he did not try.

On the coast of Carolina many of the English merchantmen in 1743 paid
from seventeen to twenty guineas for the run home, and in addition "as
many pounds of Sugar, Gallons of Rum and pounds of Tobacco as pounds
in Money." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1 1479-Capt. Bladwell, 1 July
1743.]

The lust for privateering had much to answer for in this respect. So
possessed were the Virginians by the desire to get rich at the expense
of their enemies that they quite "forgot their allegiance to the King."
By the offer of inordinately high wages and rich prizes they did their
utmost to seduce carpenters, gunners, sailmakers and able seamen from
His Majesty's ships. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1480--Capt.
Lord Alexander Banff, 21 Oct. 1744.] Any ship forced to winter at Rhode
Island, again, always counted upon losing enough men to "disable her
from putting to sea" when the spring came. Here, too, the privateering
spirit was to blame, Rhode Island being notorious for its enterprise in
that form of piracy. Another impenitent sinner in her inroads upon the
companies of king's ships was Boston, where "a sett of people made it
their Business" to entice them away. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1440--Capt. Askew, 27 Aug. 1748.] No ship could clean, refit, victual
or winter there without "the loss of all her men." Capt. Young, of
the _Jason_, was in 1753 left there with never a soul on board except
"officers and servants, widows' men, the quarter-deck gentlemen and
those called idlers." The rest had been seduced at 30 Pounds per head.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732--Capt. Young, 6 Oct. 1753. The
"widows' men" here humorously alluded to would not add much to the
effectiveness of the depleted company. They were imaginary sailors,
borne on the ship's books for pay and prize-money which went to
Greenwich Hospital.]

So it went on. Day in, day out, at home and abroad, this ceaseless drain
of men, linking hands in the decimation of the fleet with those able
adjutants Disease and Death, accentuated progressively and enormously
the naval needs of the country. For the apprehension and return of
deserters from ships in home ports a drag-net system of rewards and
conduct-money sprang into being; but this the sailor to some extent
contrived to elude. He "stuck a cockade in his hat" and made shift to
pass for a soldier on leave; or he laid furtive hands on a horse and
set up for an equestrian traveller. In the neighbourhood of all great
seaport towns, as on all main roads leading to that paradise and
ultimate goal of the deserter, the metropolis, horse-stealing by sailors
"on the run" prevailed to an alarming extent; and although there was
a time when the law strung him up for the crime of borrowing horses to
help him on his way, as it had once hanged him for deserting, the naval
needs of the country eventually changed all that and brought him a
permanent reprieve. Thenceforth, instead of sending the happy-go-lucky,
devil-may-care felon to the gallows, they turned him over to the
press-gang and so re-consigned him, penniless and protesting, to the
duty he detested.




CHAPTER III.

WHAT THE PRESS-GANG WAS.



From the standpoint of a systematic supply of men to the fleet, the
press-gang was a legitimate means to an imperative end. This was the
official view. In how different a light the people came to regard the
petty man-trap of power, we shall presently see.

Designed as it was for the taking up of able-bodied adults, the main
idea in the formation of the gang was strength and efficiency. It was
accordingly composed of the stoutest men procurable, dare-devil fellows
capable of giving a good account of themselves in fight, or of carrying
off their unwilling prey against long odds. Brute strength combined
with animal courage being thus the first requisite of the ganger, it
followed--not perhaps as a matter of course so much as a matter of
fact--that his other qualities were seldom such as to endear him to the
people. Wilkes denounced him for a "lawless ruffian," and one of the
newspapers of his time describes him, with commendable candour and
undeniable truth, as a "profligate and abandoned wretch, perpetually
lounging about the streets and incessantly vomiting out oaths and horrid
curses." [Footnote: _London Chronicle,_ 16 March 1762.]

The getting of a gang together presented little difficulty. The first
business of the officer charged with its formation was to find suitable
quarters, rent not to exceed twenty shillings a week, inclusive of fire
and candle. Here he hung out a flag as the sign of authority and a bait
for volunteers. As a rule, they were easily procurable. All the roughs
of the town were at his disposal, and when these did not yield material
enough recourse was had to beat of drum, that instrument, together with
the man who thumped it, being either hired at half-a-crown a day or
"loaned" from the nearest barracks. Selected members of the crowd thus
assembled were then plied with drink "to invite them to enter"--an
invitation they seldom refused.

It goes without saying that gangs raised in this manner were of an
exceedingly mixed character. On the principle of setting a thief
to catch a thief, seafaring men of course had first preference, but
landsmen were by no means excluded. The gang operating at Godalming in
1782 may be cited as typical of the average inland gang. It consisted of
three farmers, one weaver, one bricklayer, one labourer, and two others
whose regular occupations are not divulged. They were probably sailors.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1502--Capt. Boston, Report on
Rendezvous, 1782.]

Landsmen entered on the express understanding that they should not
be pressed when the gang broke up. Sailor gangsmen, on the contrary,
enjoyed no such immunity. The most they could hope for, when their
arduous duties came to an end, was permission to "choose their ship."
The concession was no mean one. By choosing his ship discreetly the
gangsman avoided encounters with men he had pressed, thus preserving his
head unbroken and his skin intact.

Ship-gangs, unlike those operating on land, were composed entirely of
seamen. For dash, courage and efficiency, they had no equal and few
rivals.

Apart from the officers commanding it, the number of men that went to
the making of a gang varied from two to twenty or more according to the
urgency of the occasion that called it into being and the importance or
ill-repute of the centre selected as the scene of its operations.
For Edinburgh and Leith twenty-one men, directed by a captain, two
lieutenants and four midshipmen, were considered none too many. Greenock
kept the same number of officers and twenty men fully employed, for
here there was much visiting of ships on the water, a fast cutter being
retained for that purpose. The Liverpool gang numbered eighteen men,
directed by seven officers and backed by a flotilla of three tenders,
each under the command of a special lieutenant. Towns such as
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Great Yarmouth, Cowes and Haverfordwest also had
gangs of at least twenty men each, with boats as required; and Deal,
Dover and Folkstone five gangs between them, totalling fifty men and
fifteen officers, and employing as many boats as gangs for pressing in
the Downs.

In the case of ship-gangs, operating directly from a ship of war in
harbour or at sea, the officers in charge were as a matter of course
selected from the available ward or gun-room contingent. Few, if any, of
the naval men whose names at one time or another spring into prominence
during the century, escaped this unpleasant but necessary duty in their
younger days. But on shore an altogether different order of things
prevailed.

 [Illustration: MANNING THE NAVY. Reproduced by kind permission from a
rare print in the collection of Mr. A. M. Broadley.]

The impress service ashore was essentially the grave of promotion.
Whether through age, fault, misfortune or lack of influence in high
places, the officers who directed it were generally disappointed men,
service derelicts whose chances of ever sporting a second "swab," or
of again commanding a ship, had practically vanished. Naval men afloat
spoke of them with good-natured contempt as "Yellow Admirals," the
fictitious rank denoting a kind of service quarantine that knew no
pratique.

Like the salt junk of the foremast--man, the Yellow Admiral got
fearfully "out of character" through over-keeping. With the service he
lost all touch save in one degrading particular. His pay was better
than his reputation, but his position was isolated, his duties and his
actions subject to little official supervision. With opportunity came
peculiar temptations to bribery and peculation, and to these he often
succumbed. The absence of congenial society frequently weighed heavy
upon him and drove him to immoderate drinking. Had he lived a generation
or so later the average impress officer ashore could have echoed with
perfect truth, and almost nightly iteration, the crapulous sentiment
in which Byron is said to have toasted his hosts when dining on board
H.M.S. _Hector_ at Malta:--

   "Glorious Hector, son of Priam,
    Was ever mortal drunk as I am!"

[Footnote: The authenticity of the anecdote, notwithstanding the fact
that it was long current in naval circles, is more than doubtful. When
Bryon visited Malta in 1808 the _Hector_ was doing duty at Plymouth as a
prison-ship, and naval records disclose no other ship of that name till
1864.]

A lieutenant attached to the gang at Chester is responsible for a piece
of descriptive writing, of a biographical nature, which perhaps depicts
the impress officer of the century at his worst. Addressing a brother
lieutenant at Waterford, to which station his superior was on the point
of being transferred, "I think but right," says he, "to give you a
character of Capt. P., who is to be your Regulating Captain. I have been
with him six months here, and if it had not been that he is leaving
the place, I should have wrote to the Board of Admiralty to have been
removed from under his command. At first you'll think him a Fine old
Fellow, but if it's possible he will make you Quarrel with all your
Acquaintance. Be very Careful not to Introduce him to any Family that
you have a regard for, for although he is near Seventy Years of Age, he
is the greatest Debauchee you ever met with--a Man of No Religion, a
Man who is Capable of any Meanness, Arbitrary and Tyrannicall in his
Disposition. This City has been several times just on the point of
writing against him to the Board of Admiralty. He has a wife, and
Children grown up to Man's Estate. The Woman he brings over with him
is Bird the Builder's Daughter. To Conclude, there is not a House in
Chester that he can go into but his own and the Rendezvous, after having
been Six Months in one of the agreeablest Cities in England." [Footnote:
_Ad,_ 1. 1500--Lieut. Shuckford, 7 March 1780.]

Ignorant of the fact that his reputation had thus preceded him, Capt. P.
found himself assailed, on his arrival at Waterford, by a "most Infamous
Epitaph," emanating none knew whence, nor cared. This circumstance,
accentuated by certain indiscretions of which the hectoring old officer
was guilty shortly after his arrival, aroused strong hostility against
him. A mob of fishwives, attacking his house at Passage, smashed the
windows and were with difficulty restrained from levelling the place
with the ground. His junior officers conspired against him. Piqued by
the loss of certain perquisites which the newcomer remorselessly swept
away, they denounced him to the Admiralty, who ordered an inquiry into
his conduct. After a hearing of ten days it went heavily against him,
practically every charge being proved. He was immediately superseded and
never again employed--a sad ending to a career of forty years under such
men as Anson, Boscawen, Hawke and Vernon. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1500--Capt. Bennett, 13 Nov. 1780, and enclosures constituting the
inquiry.] Yet such was the ultimate fate of many an impress officer.
A stronger light focussed him ashore, and habits, proclivities and
weaknesses that escaped censure at sea, were here projected odiously
upon the sensitive retina of public opinion.

Of the younger men who drifted into the shore service there were some,
it need scarcely be said, who for obvious reasons escaped, or, rather,
did not succumb to the common odium. A notable example of this type
of officer was Capt. Jahleel Brenton, who for some years commanded the
gangs at Leith and Greenock. Though a man of blunt sensibilities and
speech, he possessed qualities which carried him out of the stagnant
back-water of pressing into the swim of service afloat, where he
eventually secured a baronetcy and the rank of Vice-Admiral. Singularly
enough, he was American-born.

The senior officer in charge of a gang, commonly known as the Regulating
Captain, might in rank be either captain or lieutenant. It was his duty
to hire, but not to "keep" the official headquarters of the gang, to
organise that body, to direct its operations, to account for all moneys
expended and men pressed, and to "regulate" or inspect the latter and
certify them fit for service or otherwise. In this last-named duty a
surgeon often assisted him, usually a local practitioner, who received a
shilling a head for his pains. One or more lieutenants, each of whom had
one or more midshipmen at his beck and call, served under the Regulating
Captain. They "kept" the headquarters and led the gang, or contingents
of the gang, on pressing forays, thus coming in for much of the hard
work, and many of the harder knocks, that unpopular body was liable to.
Sometimes, as in the case of Dover, Deal and Folkestone, several gangs
were grouped under a single regulating officer.

The pay of the Regulating Captain was 1 Pound a day, with an additional
5s. subsistence money. Lieutenants received their usual service pay, and
for subsistence 3s. 6d. In special cases grants were made for coach-hire
[Footnote: Capt. William Bennett's bill for the double journey between
Waterford and Cork, on the occasion of the inquiry into the conduct
of the Regulating Officer at the former place, over which he presided,
amounted to forty-three guineas--a sum he considered "as moderate as
any gentleman's could have been, laying aside the wearing of my uniform
every day." Half the amount went in chaise and horse hire, "there
being," we are told, "no chaises upon the road as in England," and
"only one to be had at Cork, all the rest being gone to Dublin with
the Lawyers and the Players, the Sessions being just ended and the Play
House broke up" (_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1503--Capt. Bennett, 24 March
1782). Nelson's bill for posting from Burnham, Norfolk, to London
and back, 260 miles, in the year 1789, amounted to 19 Pounds, 55. 2d.
(_Admiralty Records_ Victualling Dept, Miscellanea, No. 26).] and
such purposes as "entertainments to the Mayor and Corporation, the
Magistrates and the Officers of the Regulars and the Militia, by way of
return for their civilities and for their assistance in carrying on the
impress." The grant to the Newcastle officers, under this head, in 1763
amounted to upwards of 93 Pounds. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1493--Capt. Bover, 6 March 1763, and endorsement.]

"Road-money" was generally allowed at the rate of 3d. a mile for
officers and 1d. a mile for gangers when on the press; but as a matter
of fact these modest figures were often largely exceeded--to the no
small emolument of the regulating officer. Lieut. Gaydon, commanding at
Ilfracombe, in 1795 debited the Navy Board with a sum of 148 Pounds for
1776 miles of travel; Capt. Gibbs, of Swansea, with 190 Pounds for 1561
miles; and Capt. Longcroft, of Haverfordwest, with 524 Pounds for 8388
miles--a charge characterised by Admiral M'Bride, who that year reported
upon the working of the impress, as "immense." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 579--Admiral M'Bride, 19 March 1795.] He might well have
used a stronger term.

An item which it was at one time permissible to charge, possesses a
special interest. This was a bonus of 1s. a head on all men pressed--a
bonus that was in reality nothing more than the historic prest shilling
of other days, now no longer paid to pressed men, diverted into the
pockets of those who did the pressing. The practice, however, was
short-lived. Tending as it did to fill the ships with unserviceable men,
it was speedily discontinued and the historic shilling made over to the
certifying surgeon.

The shore midshipman could boast but little affinity with his namesake
of the quarter-deck. John Richards, midshipman of the Godalming gang,
had never in his life set foot on board a man-of-war or been to sea. His
age was forty. The case of James Good, of Hull, is even more remarkable.
He had served as "Midshipman of the Impress" for thirty years out of
sixty-three. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1455--Capt. Acklom,
6 Oct. 1814. _Admiralty Records_ 1.1502--Capt. Boston, Report on
Rendezvous, 1782.] The pay of these elderly youths at no time exceeded a
guinea a week.

The gangsman was more variously, if not more generously remunerated. At
Deal, in 1743, he had 1s. per day for his boat, and "found himself," or,
in the alternative, "ten shillings for every good seaman procured, in
full for his trouble and the hire of the boat." At Dover, in 1776, he
received 2s. 6d. a day; at Godalming, six years later, 10s. 6d. a week;
and at Exeter, during the American War of Independence, when the demand
for seamen was phenomenal, 14s. a week, 5s. for every man pressed, and
clothing and shoes "when he deserved it." Pay and allowances were thus
far from uniform. Both depended largely upon the scarcity or abundance
of suitable gangsmen, the demand for seamen, and the astuteness of the
officer organising the gang. Some gangs not on regular wages received as
much as "twenty shillings for each man impressed, and six-pence a mile
for as many miles as they could make it appear each man had travelled,
not exceeding twenty, besides (a noteworthy addition) the twelve-pence
press-money "; but if a man pressed under these conditions were found
to be unserviceable after his appearance on shipboard, all money
considerations for his capture were either withheld or recalled. On the
whole, considering the arduous and disagreeable nature of the gangsman's
calling, the Navy Board cannot be accused of dealing any too generously
by him.

"If ever you intend to man the fleet without being cheated by the
captains and pursers," Charles II. is credited with having once said
to his council, "you may go to bed." What in this sense was true of the
service afloat was certainly not less true of that loosely organised and
laxly supervised naval department, the impress ashore. Considering the
repute of the officers engaged in it, and the opportunities they enjoyed
for peculation and the taking of bribes--considering, above all, the
extreme difficulty of keeping a watchful eye upon officers scattered
throughout the length and breadth of the land, the wonder is, not that
irregularities crept in, but that they should have been, upon the whole,
so few and so venial.

To allow the gangsmen to go fishing for sea-fish or dredging for
oysters, as was commonly done when there was little prospect of a catch
on land, was no more heinous than the custom prevailing--to everybody's
knowledge--at King's Lynn in Norfolk, where the gang had no need to
go a-fishing because, regularly as the cobbles came in, the midshipman
attached to the gang appeared on the quay and had the "insolence to
demand Three of the Best Fysh for the Regulating Captain, the Lieutenant
and himself." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1546--Petition of the
Owners of the Fishing Cobbles of Lynn, 3 March 1809.] And if, again,
rating a gangsman in choicest quarterdeck language were no serious
offence, why should not the Regulating Captain rate his son as
midshipman, even though "not proper to be employed as such." And
similarly, granting it to be right to earn half a sovereign by pressing
a man contrary to law, where was the wrong in "clearing him of the
impress" for the same amount, as was commonly done by the middies at
Sunderland and Shields. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1557--Capt.
Bell, 27 June 1806, enclosure.] These were works of supererogation
rather than sins against the service, and little official notice was
taken of them unless, as in the case of Liverpool, they were carried
to such lengths as to create a public scandal. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 579--Admiral Child, 30 Jan. 1800.]

There were, as a matter of course, some officers in the service who went
far beyond the limits of such venial irregularities and, like Falstaff,
"misused the king's press damnably." Though according to the terms
of their warrant they were "to take care not to demand or receive any
money, gratuity, reward, or any other consideration whatsoever for the
sparing, exchanging or discharging any person or persons impressed or to
be impressed," the taking of "gratifications" for these express purposes
prevailed to a notorious extent. The difficulty was to fasten the
offence upon the offenders. "Bailed men," as they were called, did not
"peach." Their immunity from the press was too dearly bought to admit of
their indulging personal animus against the officer who had taken their
money. It was only through some tangle of circumstance over which the
delinquent had no control that the truth leaked out. Such a case was
that of the officer in command of the _Mary_ tender at Sunderland, a
lieutenant of over thirty years' standing. Having pressed one Michael
Dryden, a master's mate whom he ought never to have pressed at all, he
so far "forgot" himself as to accept a bribe of 15 Pounds for the man's
release, and then, "having that day been dining with a party of military
officers," forgot to release the man. The double lapse of memory
proved his ruin. Representations were made to the Admiralty, and the
unfortunately constituted lieutenant was "broke" and black-listed.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2740--Lieut. Atkinson, 24 June 1798,
and endorsement.]

Another species of fraud upon which the Admiralty was equally severe,
was that long practised with impunity by a certain regulating officer at
Poole. Not only did he habitually put back the dates on which men were
pressed, thus "bearing" them for subsistence money they never received,
he made it a further practice to enter on his books the names of
fictitious pressed men who opportunely "escaped" after adding their
quota to his dishonest perquisites. So general was misappropriation of
funds by means of this ingenious fraud that detection was deservedly
visited with instant dismissal. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1526--Capt. Boyle, 2 Oct. 1801, and endorsement.]

Though to the gangsman all things were reputedly lawful, some things
were by no means expedient. He could with impunity deprive almost any
ablebodied adult of his freedom, and he could sometimes, with equal
impunity, add to his scanty earnings by restoring that freedom for a
consideration in coin of the realm; but when, like Josh Cooper, sometime
gangsman at Hull, he extended his prerogative to the occupants of
hen-roosts, he was apt to find himself at cross-purposes with the law as
interpreted by the sitting magistrates.

Amongst less questionable perquisites accruing to the gangsman two only
need be mentioned here. One was the "straggling-money" paid to him
for the apprehension of deserters--20s. for every deserter taken, with
"conduct" money to boot; the other, the anker of brandy designedly
thrown overboard by smugglers when chased by a gang engaged in pressing
afloat. Occasionally the brandy checked the pursuit; but more often
it gave an added zest to the chase and so hastened the capture of the
fugitive donors.

To the unscrupulous outsider the opportunities for illicit gain afforded
by the service made an irresistible appeal. Sham gangs and make-believe
press-masters abounded, thriving exceedingly upon the fears and
credulity of the people until capture put a term to their activities
and sent them to the pillory, the prison or the fleet they pretended to
cater for.

Their mode of operation seldom varied. They pressed a man, and then took
money for "discharging" him; or they threatened to press and were bought
off. One Philpot was in 1709 fined ten nobles and sentenced to the
pillory for this fraud. He had many imitators, amongst them John Love,
who posed as a midshipman, and William Moore, his gangsman, both of
whom were eventually brought to justice and turned over to His Majesty's
ships.

The rôle adopted by these last-named pretenders was a favourite one with
men engaged in crimping for the merchant service. Shrewsbury in 1780
received a visit from one of these individuals--"a Person named Hopkins,
who appeared in a Lieutenant's Uniform and committed many fraudulant
Actions and Scandalous Abuses in raising Men," as he said, "for the
Navy." Two months later another impostor of the same type appeared at
Birmingham, where he scattered broadcast a leaflet, headed with the
royal arms and couched in the following seductive terms: "Eleven Pounds
for every Able Seaman, Five Pounds for every ordinary Seaman, and Three
Pounds for every Able-bodied Landsman, exclusive of a compleat set of
Sea Clothing, given by the Marine Society. All Good Seamen, and other
hearty young Fellows of Spirit, that are willing to serve on board any
of His Majesty's Vessels or Ships of War, Let them with Chearfulness
repair to the Sailors' Head Rendezvous in this Town, where a proper
Officer attends, who will give them every encouragement they can desire.
Now my Jolly Lads is the time to fill your Pockets with Dollars, Double
Doubloon's & Luidores. Conduct Money allowed, Chest and Bedding sent
Carriage Free." Soon after, the two united forces at Coventry, whither
Capt. Beecher desired to "send a party to take them," but to this
request the Admiralty turned a deaf ear. In their opinion the game was
not worth the candle. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1500--Letters of
Capt. Beecher, 1780]

Ex-midshipman Rookhad, who when dismissed the service took to boarding
vessels in the Thames and extorting money and liquor from the masters as
a consideration for not pressing their men, did not escape so lightly.
Him the Admiralty prosecuted. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 298--Law
Officers' Opinions, 1733-56, No. 12. Process was by information in the
Court of King's Bench, for a misdemeanour.]

It was in companies, however, that the sham ganger most frequently took
the road, for numbers not only enhanced his chances of obtaining money,
they materially diminished the risk of capture. One such gang was
composed of "eighteen desperate villians," who were nevertheless taken.
Another, a "parcel of fellows armed with cutlasses like a pressgang,"
appeared at Dublin in 1743, where they boldly entered public-houses on
pretence of looking for sailors, and there extorted money and drink.
What became of them we are not told; but in the case of the pretended
gang whose victim, after handing over two guineas as the price of his
release, was pressed by a regularly constituted gang, we learn the
gratifying sequel. The real gang gave chase to the sham gang and pressed
every man of them.

According to the "Humble Petition of Grace Blackmore of Stratford le
Bow, widow," on Friday the 29th of May, in an unknown year of Queen
Anne's reign, "there came to Bow ffaire severall pretended pressmasters,
endeavouring to impress." A tumult ensued. Murder was freely "cryed
out," apparently with good reason, for in the mêlée petitioner's
husband, then constable of Bow, was "wounded soe that he shortly after
dyed." [Footnote: _State Papers Domestic,_ Anne, xxxvi. No. 17.]

There were occasions when the sham gang operated under cover of a real
press-warrant, and for this the Admiralty was directly to blame. It had
become customary at the Navy Office to send out warrants, whether to
commanders of ships or to Regulating Captains, in blank, the person
to whom the warrant was directed filling in the name for himself. Such
warrants were frequently stolen and put to irregular uses, and of this a
remarkable instance occurred in 1755.

In that year one Nicholas Cooke, having by some means obtained
possession of such a warrant, "filled up the blank thereof by directing
it to himself, by the name and description of Lieutenant Nicholas Cooke,
tho' in truth not a Lieutenant nor an Officer in His Majesty's Navy,"
hired a vessel--the _Providence_ snow of Dublin--and in her cruised the
coasts of Ireland, pressing men. After thus raising as many as he could
carry, he shaped his course for Liverpool, no doubt intending, on his
arrival at that port, to sell his unsuspecting victims to the merchant
ships in the Mersey at so much a head. Through bad seamanship, however,
the vessel was run aground at Seacombe, opposite to Liverpool, and Capt.
Darby, of H.M.S. _Seahorse_, perceiving her plight, and thinking to
render assistance in return for perhaps a man or two, took boat and
rowed across to her. To his astonishment he found her full of Irishmen
to the number of seventy-three, whom he immediately pressed and removed
to his own ship. The circumstance of the false warrant now came to
light, and with it another, of worse omen for the mock lieutenant. In
the hold a quantity of undeclared spirits was discovered, and this fact
afforded the Admiralty a handle they were not slow to avail themselves
of. They put the Excise Officers on the scent, and Cooke was prosecuted
for smuggling. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 298--Law Officers'
Opinions, 1733-56, No. 101.]

The most successful sham gang ever organised was perhaps that said to
have been got together by a trio of mischievous Somerset girls. The
scene of the exploit was the Denny-Bowl quarry, near Taunton. The
quarrymen there were a hard-bitten set and great braggarts, openly
boasting that no gang dare attack them, and threatening, in the event
of so unlikely a contingency, to knock the gangsmen on the head and bury
them in the rubbish of the pit. There happened to be in the neighbouring
town "three merry maids," who heard of this tall talk and secretly
determined to put the vaunted courage of the quarrymen to the test.
They accordingly dressed themselves in men's clothing, stuck cockades in
their hats, and with hangers under their arms stealthily approached the
pit. Sixty men were at work there; but no sooner did they catch sight of
the supposed gang than they one and all threw down their tools and ran
for their lives.

Officially known as the Rendezvous, a French term long associated with
English recruiting, the headquarters of the gang were more familiarly,
and for brevity's sake, called the "rondy." Publicans were partial to
having the rondy on their premises because of the trade it brought
them. Hence it was usually an alehouse, frequently one of the shadiest
description, situated in the lowest slum of the town; but on occasions,
as when the gang was of uncommon strength and the number of pressed
men dealt with proportionately large, a private house or other suitable
building was taken for the exclusive use of the service. It was
distinguished by a flag--a Jack--displayed upon a pole. The cost of the
two was 27s., and in theory they were supposed to last a year; but in
towns where the populace evinced their love for the press by hewing
down the pole and tearing the flag in ribbons, these emblems of national
liberty had frequently to be renewed. At King's Lynn as much as 13
Pounds was spent upon them in four years--an outlay regarded by the
Navy Board with absolute dismay. It would have been not less dismayed,
perhaps, could it have seen the bunting displayed by rendezvous whose
surroundings were friendly. There the same old Jack did duty year after
year until, grimy and bedraggled, it more resembled the black flag than
anything else that flew, wanting only the skull and cross-bones to make
it a fitting emblem of authorised piracy.

The rondy was hardly a spot to which one would have resorted for a
rest-cure. When not engaged in pressing, the gangsmen were a roistering,
drinking crew, under lax control and never averse from a row, either
amongst themselves or with outsiders. Sometimes the commanding officer
made the place his residence, and when this was the case some sort of
order prevailed. The floors were regularly swept, the beds made, the
frowsy "general" gratified by a weekly "tip" on pay-day. But when, on
the other hand, the gangsmen who did not "find themselves" occupied
the rondy to the exclusion of the officer, eating and sleeping there,
tramping in and out at all hours of the day and night, dragging pressed
men in to be "regulated" and locked up, and diverting such infrequent
intervals of leisure as they enjoyed by pastimes in which fear of the
"gent overhead" played no part--when this was the case the rondy became
a veritable bear-garden, a place of unspeakable confusion wherein papers
and pistols, boots and blankets, cutlasses, hats, beer-pots and staves
cumbered the floors, the lockers and the beds with a medley of articles
torn, rusty, mud-stained, dirt-begrimed and unkept.

Amongst accessories essential to the efficient activity of gangs
stationed at coast or river towns the boat had first place. Sometimes
both sail and row-boats were employed. Luggers of the old type, fast
boats carrying a great press of sail, served best for overhauling ships;
but on inland waterways, such as the Thames, the Humber or the Tyne, a
"sort of wherry, constructed for rowing fast," was the favourite vehicle
of pursuit. The rate of hire varied from 1s. a day to two or more
guineas a week, according to the size and class of boat. At Cork it was
"five shillings Irish" per day.

Accessories of a less indispensable nature, occasionally allowed, were,
at Dartmouth and a few other places, cockades for the gangsmen's hats,
supplied at a cost of 1s. each; at Tower Hill a messenger, pay 20s. a
week; and at Appledore an umbrella for use in rainy weather, price 12s.
6d.

The arms of the gang comprised, first, a press-warrant, and, second,
such weapons as were necessary to enforce it.

In the literature of the eighteenth century the warrant is inseparably
associated with the short, incurvated service sword commonly known as
the cutlass or hanger; but in the press-gang prints of the period the
gangsmen are generally armed with stout clubs answering to Smollett's
"good oak plant." Apart from this artistic evidence, however, there is
no valid reason for believing that the bludgeon ever came into general
use as the ganger's weapon. As early as the reign of Anne he went armed
with the "Queen's broad cutlash," and for most gangs, certainly for all
called upon to operate in rough neighbourhoods, the hanger remained the
stock weapon throughout the century. In expeditions involving special
risk or danger, the musket and the pistol supplemented what must have
been in itself no mean weapon.

As we have already seen, the earliest recorded press-warrants emanated
from the king in person, whilst later ones were issued by the king in
council and endorsed by the naval authorities. As the need of men became
more and more imperative, however, this mode of issue was found to be
too cumbersome and inexpeditious. Hence, by the time the eighteenth
century came in, with its tremendously enhanced demands on behalf of the
Navy, the royal prerogative in respect to warrants had been virtually
delegated to the Admiralty, who issued them on their own initiative,
though ostensibly in pursuance of His Majesty's Orders in Council.

An Admiralty warrant empowered the person to whom it was directed to
"impress" as many "seamen" as possibly he could procure, giving to each
man so impressed 1s. "for prest money." He was to impress none but such
as "were strong bodies and capable to serve the king"; and, having
so impressed such persons, he was to deliver them up to the officer
regulating the nearest rendezvous. All civil authorities were to be
"aiding and assisting" to him in the discharge of this duty.

Now this document, the stereotyped press-warrant of the century, here
concisely summarised in its own phraseology, was not at all what it
purported to be. It was in fact a warrant out of time, an official
anachronism, a red-tape survival of that bygone period when pressing
still meant "presting" and force went no further than a threat. For men
were now no longer "prested." They were pressed, and that, too, in the
most drastic sense of the term. The king's shilling no longer changed
hands. Even in Pepys' time men were pressed "without money," and in
none of the accounts of expenses incurred in pressing during the century
which followed, excepting only a very few of the earlier ones, can
any such item as the king's shilling or prest-money be discovered.
Its abolition was a logical sequence of the change from presting to
pressing.

The seaman, moreover, so far from being the sole quarry of the
warrant-holder, now sought concealment amongst a people almost without
exception equally liable with himself to the capture he endeavoured to
elude. Retained merely as a matter of form, and totally out of keeping
with altered conditions, the warrant was in effect obsolete save as an
instrument authorising one man to deprive another of his liberty in
the king's name. Even the standard of "able bodies and capable" had
deteriorated to such an extent that the officers of the fleet were kept
nearly as busy weeding out and rejecting men as were the officers of the
impress in taking them.

Still, the warrant served. Stripped of its obsolete injunctions, it
read: "Go ye out into the highways and hedges, and water-ways, and
compel them to come in"--enough, surely, for any officer imbued with
zeal for His Majesty's service.

Though according to the strict letter of the law as defined by various
decisions of the courts a press-warrant was legally executable only by
the officer to whom it was addressed, in practice the limitation was
very widely departed from, if not altogether ignored; for just as a
constable or sheriff may call upon bystanders to assist him in the
execution of his office, so the holder of a press-warrant, though
legally unable to delegate his authority by other means, could call upon
others to aid him in the execution of his duty. Naturally, the gangsmen
being at hand, and being at hand for that very purpose, he gave them
first preference. Hence, the gangsman pressed on the strength of a
warrant which in reality gave him no power to press.

While the law relating to the intensive force of warrants was thus
deliberately set at naught, an extraordinary punctiliousness for legal
formality was displayed in another direction. According to tradition and
custom no warrant was valid until it had received the sanction of the
civil power. Solicitor-General Yorke could find no statutory authority
for such procedure. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 298--Law Officers'
Opinions, 1733-56, No. 102.] He accordingly pronounced it to be
non-essential to the validity of warrants. Nevertheless, save in cases
where the civil power refused its endorsement, it was universally
adhered to. What was bad law was notoriously good policy, for a
disaffected mayor, or an unfriendly Justice of the Peace, had it in his
power to make the path of the impress officer a thorny one indeed. "Make
unto yourselves friends," was therefore one of the first injunctions
laid upon officers whose duties unavoidably made them many enemies.




CHAPTER IV.

WHOM THE GANG MIGHT TAKE.



In theory an authority for the taking of seafaring men only, the
press-warrant was in practice invested with all the force of a Writ
of Quo Warranto requiring every able-bodied male adult to show by what
right he remained at large. The difference between the theory and the
practice of pressing was consequently as wide as the poles.

While the primary and ostensible objective of the impress remained
always what it had been from the outset, the seaman who had few if any
land-ties except those of blood or sex, from this root principle
there sprang up a very Upas tree of pretension, whose noxious branches
overspread practically every section of the community. Hence the
press-gang, the embodiment of this pretension, eventually threw aside
ostence and took its pick of all who came its way, let their occupation
or position be what it might. It was no duty of the gangsman to employ
his hanger in splitting hairs. "First catch your man," was for him the
greatest of all the commandments. Discrimination was for his masters.
The weeding out could be done when the pressing was over.

The classes hardest hit by this lamentable want of discrimination were
the classes engaged in trade. "Mr. Coventry," wrote Pepys some four
years after the Restoration, "showed how the medium of the men the King
hath one year with another employed in his navy since his coming, hath
not been above 3000 men, or at most 4000; and now having occasion for
30,000, the remaining 26,000 _must be found out of the Trade of the
Nation_." Naturally. Where a nation of shopkeepers was concerned it
could hardly have been otherwise. They who go down to the sea in ships
and do business in great waters, returning laden with the spoils of the
commercial world, have perforce to render tribute unto Caesar; but Mr.
Commissioner Coventry little guessed, when he enunciated his corollary
with such nice precision, to what it was destined to lead in the next
hundred years or so.

Under the merciless exactions of the press-gang Trade did not, however,
prove the submissive thing that was wont to stand at its doors and cry:
"Will you buy? will you buy?" or to bow prospective customers into its
rich emporiums with unctuous rubbing of hands and sauve words.
Trade knew its power and determined to use it. "Look you! my Lords
Commissioners," cried Trade, truculently cocking its hat in the face of
Admiralty, "I have had enough. You have taken my butcher, my baker, my
candlestick-maker, nor have you spared that worthy youth, the 'prentice
who was to have wed my daughter. My coachman, the driver of my gilded
chariot, goes in fear of you, and as for my sedan-chair man, he is no
more found. My colliers, draymen, watermen, the carpenters who build my
ships and the mariners who sail them, the ablest of these my necessary
helpers sling their hammocks in your fleet. You have crippled the
printing of my Bible and the brewing of my Beer, and I can bear no more.
Protect me from my arch-enemy the foreigner if you must and will, but
not, my Lords Commissioners, by such monstrous personal methods as
these." "Your servant!" said Admiralty, obsequious before the only power
it feared--"your servant to command!" and straightway set about finding
a remedy for the evils Trade complained of.

Now, to attain this end, so desirable if Trade were to be placated, it
was necessary to define with precision either whom the gang might take,
or whom it might not take; and here Admiralty, though notoriously a body
without a brain, achieved a stroke of genius, for it brought down both
birds with a single stone. Postulating first of all the old _lex sine
lege_ fiction that every native-born Briton and every British male
subject born abroad was legally pressable, it laid it down as a logical
sequence that no man, whatever his vocation or station in life,
was lawfully exempt; that exemption was in consequence an official
indulgence and not a right; and that apart from such indulgence every
man, unless idiotic, blind, lame, maimed or otherwise physically unfit,
was not only liable to be pressed, but could be legally pressed for
the king's service at sea. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 300--Law
Officers' Opinions, 1778-83, No. 26; and _Admiralty Records_ 1.
581--Admiral Berkeley, 14 Feb. 1805, well express the official view.]
Having thus cleared the ground root and branch, Admiralty magnanimously
proceeded to frame a category of persons whom, as an act of grace and a
concession to Trade, it was willing to protect from assault and capture
by its emissary the press-gang.

These exemptions from the wholesale incidence of the impress were not
granted all at once. Embodied from time to time in Acts of Parliament
and so-called acts of official grace--slowly and painfully wrung from a
reluctant Admiralty by the persistent demands and ever-growing power of
Trade--they spread themselves over the entire century of struggle for
the mastery of the sea, from which they were a reaction, and, touching
the lives of the common people in a hundred and one intimate points and
interests, culminated at length in the abolition of that most odious
system of oppression from which they had sprung, and in a charter
of liberties before which the famous charter of King John sinks into
insignificance.

 [Illustration: THE PRESS-GANG SEIZING A VICTIM.]

As a matter of policy the foreigner had first place in the list of
exemptions. He could volunteer if he chose, [Footnote: Strenuous efforts
were made in 1709 to induce the "Poor Palatines"--seven thousand of them
encamped at Blackheath, and two thousand in Sir John Parson's brewhouse
at Camberwell--to enter for the navy. But the "thing was New to them to
go aboard a Man of Warr," so they declined the invitation, "having the
Notion of being sent to Carolina."--_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1437--Letters
of Capt. Aston.] but he must not be pressed. [Footnote: 13 George II.
cap. 17.] To deprive him of his right in this respect was to invite
unpleasant diplomatic complications, of which England had already
too many on her hands. Trade, too, looked upon the foreigner as her
perquisite, and Trade must be indulged. Moreover, he fostered mutiny in
the fleet, where he was prone to "fly in the face" of authority and to
refuse to work, much less fight, for an alien people. If, however, he
served on board British merchant ships for two years, or if he married
in England, he at once lost caste, since he then became a naturalised
British subject and was liable to have even his honeymoon curtailed by
a visit from the press-gang. Such, in fact, was the fate of one William
Castle of Bristol in 1806. Pressed there in that year on his return
from the West Indies, he was discharged as a person of alien birth; but
having immediately afterwards committed the indiscretion of taking a
Bristol woman to wife, he was again pressed, this time within three
weeks of his wedding-day, and kept by express order of Admiralty.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1537--Capt. Barker, 23 July 1806.]

For some years after the passing of the Act exempting the foreigner,
his rights appear to have been generally, though by no means universally
respected. "Discharge him if not married or settled in England," was the
usual order when he chanced to be taken by the gang. With the turn of
the century, however, a reaction set in. Pressed men claiming to be
of alien birth were thenceforth only liberated "if unfit for service."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2733--Capt. Young, 11 March 1756,
endorsement, and numerous instances.] For this untoward change the
foreigner could blame none but himself. When taxed with having an
English wife, he could seldom or never be induced to admit the soft
impeachment. Consequently, whenever he was taken by the gang he was
assumed, in the absence of proof to the contrary, to have committed
the fatal act of naturalisation. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
581--Admiral Phillip, 26 Feb. 1805.] Alien seamen in distress through
shipwreck or other accidental causes, formed a humane exception to this
unwritten law.

The negro was never reckoned an alien. Looked upon as a proprietary
subject of the Crown, and having no one in particular to speak up for
or defend him, he "shared the same fate as the free-born white man."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 482--Admiral Lord Colvill, 29 Oct.
1762.] Many blacks, picked up in the West Indies or on the American
coast "without hurting commerce," were to be found on board our ships
of war, where, when not incapacitated by climatic conditions, they
made active, alert seamen and "generally imagined themselves free."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 585--Admiral Donnelly, 22 Feb. 1815.]
Their point of view, poor fellows, was doubtless a strictly comparative
one.

Theoretically exempt by virtue of his calling, whatever that might be,
the landsman was in reality scarcely less marked down by the gang than
his unfortunate brother the seafaring man; for notwithstanding all its
professions to the contrary, Admiralty could not afford to ignore
the potentialities of the reserve the landsman represented. Hence no
occupation, no property qualification, could or did protect him. As
early as 1705 old Justice, in his treatise on sea law, deplores bitterly
the "barbarous custom of pressing promiscuously landsmen and seamen,"
and declares that the gang, in its purblind zeal, "hurried away
tradesmen from their houses, 'prentices and journeymen from their
masters' shops, and even housekeepers (householders) too." By 1744
the practice had become confirmed. In that year Capt. Innes, of His
Majesty's armed sloop the _Hind_, applied to the Lords Commissioners for
"Twenty Landsmen from Twenty to Twenty-five years of Age." The Admiralty
order, "Let the Regulating Captains send them as he desires," [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1983--Capt. Innes, 3 May 1744, and endorsement.]
leaves no room for doubt as to the class of men provided. They were
pressed men, not volunteers.

Nor is this a solitary instance of a practice that was rapidly growing
to large proportions. Many a landsman, in the years that followed,
shared the fate of the Irish "country farmer" who went into Waterford
to sell his corn, and was there pressed and sent on board the tender; of
James Whitefoot, the Bristol glover, "a timid, unformed young man, the
comfort and support of his parents," who, although he had "never seen
a ship in his life," was yet pressed whilst "passing to follow his
business," which knew him no more; and of Winstanley, the London
butcher, who served for upwards of sixteen years as a pressed man.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1501--Capt. Bligh, 16 May 1781.
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1531--Duchess of Gordon, 14 Feb. 1804. _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 584--Humble Petition of Betsey Winstanley, 2 Sept. 1814.]
Wilkes' historic barber would have entered upon the same enforced career
had not that astute Alderman discovered, to the astonishment of the
nation at large, that a warrant which authorised the pressing of seamen
did not necessarily authorise the pressing of a city tonsor.

Amongst landsmen the harvester, as a worker of vital utility to the
country, enjoyed a degree of exemption accorded to few. Impress officers
had particular instructions concerning him. They were to delete him from
the category of those who might be taken. Armed with a certificate from
the minister and churchwardens of his parish, this migratory farm-hand,
provided always he were not a sailor masquerading in that disguise,
could traverse the length and breadth of the land to all intents and
purposes a free man. To him, as well as to the grower of corn who
depended so largely upon his aid in getting his crop, the concession
proved an inestimable boon. There were violations of the harvester's
status, it is true; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--Memorial of
Sir William Oglander, Bart., July 1796.] but these were too infrequent
to affect seriously the industry he represented.

So far as the press was concerned, the harvester was better off than the
gentleman, for while the former could dress as he pleased, the latter
was often obliged to dress as he could, and in this lay an element of
danger. So long as his clothes were as good as the blood he boasted, and
he wore them with an aplomb suggestive of position and influence, the
gentleman was safe; but let his pretensions to gentility lie more in the
past than in the suit on his back, and woe betide him! In spite of his
protestations the gang took him, and he was lucky indeed if, like the
gentleman who narrates his experience in the _Review_ for the both of
February 1706, he was able to convince his captors that he was foreign
born by "talking Latin and Greek."

To the people at large, whether landsmen or seafarers, the Act exempting
from the press every male under eighteen and over fifty-five years of
age would have brought a sorely needed relief had not Admiralty been a
past-master in the subtle art of outwitting the law. In this instance
a simple regulation did the trick. Every man or boy who claimed the
benefit of the age-limit when pressed, was required to prove his claim
ere he could obtain his discharge. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7.
300--Law Officers' Opinions, 1778-83, No. 43: "It is incumbent on those
who claim to be exempted to prove the facts."] The impossibility of any
general compliance with such a demand on the part of persons often as
ignorant of birth certificates as they were of the sea, practically
wiped the exemption off the slate.

In the eyes of the Regulating Captain no man was older than he looked,
no lad as young as he avowed. Hence thousands of pressed men over
fifty-five, who did not look the age they could not prove, figured on
the books of the fleet with boys whose precocity of appearance gave
the lie to their assertions. George Stephens, son of a clerk in the
Transport Office, suffered impressment when barely thirteen; and the son
of a corporal in Lord Elkinton's regiment, one Alexander M'Donald,
was listed in the same manner while still "under the age of twelve."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 583--Vice-Admiral Hunter, 10 May
1813. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1503--Capt. Butchart, 22 Jan. 1782, and
enclosure.] The gang did not pause by the way to discuss such questions.

Apprentices fell into a double category--those bound to the sea, those
apprenticed on land. Nominally, the sea apprentice was protected from
the impress for a term of three years from the date of his indentures,
provided he had not used the sea before; [Footnote: 2 & 3 Anne, cap. 6,
re-affirmed 13 George II. cap. 17.] while the land apprentice enjoyed
immunity under the minimum age-limit of eighteen years. The proviso in
the first case, however, left open a loop-hole the impress officer was
never slow to take advantage of; and the minimum age-limit, as we have
just seen, had little if any existence in fact. Apprentices pressed
after the three years' exemption had expired were never given up, nor
could their masters successfully claim them in law. They dropped like
ripe fruit into the lap of Admiralty. On the other hand, apprentices
pressed within the three years' exemption period were generally
discharged, for if they were not, they could be freed by a writ of
Habeas Corpus, or else the masters could maintain an action for damages
against the Admiralty. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 300--Law
Officers' Opinions, 1778-83, No. 25.] 'Prentices who "eloped" or ran
away from their masters, and then entered voluntarily, could not be
reclaimed by any known process at law if they were over eighteen years
of age. On the whole, the position of the apprentice, whether by land or
sea, was highly anomalous and uncertain. Often taken by the gang in the
hurry of visiting a ship, or in the scurry of a hot press on shore, he
was in effect the shuttlecock of the service, to-day singing merrily
at his capstan or bench, to-morrow bewailing his hard fate on board a
man-o'-war.

When it came to the exemption of seamen, Admiralty found itself on the
horns of a dilemma. Both the Navy and the merchant service depended in a
very large degree upon the seaman who knew the ropes--who could take his
turn at the wheel, scud aloft without going through the lubber-hole, and
act promptly and sailorly in emergency. To take wholesale such men
as these, while it would enormously enhance the effectiveness of His
Majesty's ships of war, must inevitably cripple sea-borne trade. It was
therefore necessary, for the well-being of both services, to discover
the golden mean. According to statute law [Footnote: 13 George II. cap.
17.] every person using the sea, of what age soever he might be, was
exempt from the impress for two years from the time of his first making
the venture. The concession did not greatly improve the situation from
a trade point of view. It merely touched the fringe of the problem, and
Trade was insistent.

A further concession was accordingly made. All masters, mates,
boatswains and carpenters of vessels of fifty tons and upwards were
exempted from the impress on condition of their going before a Justice
of the Peace and making oath to their several qualifications. This
affidavit, coupled with a succinct description of the deponent,
constituted the holder's "protection" and shielded him, or was supposed
to shield him, from molestation by the gang. Masters and mates of
colliers, and of vessels laid up for the winter, came under this head;
but masters or mates of vessels detected in running dutiable goods, or
caught harbouring deserters from the fleet, could be summarily dealt
with notwithstanding their protections. The same fate befell the mate or
apprentice who was lent by one ship to another.

In addition to the executive of the vessel, as defined in the foregoing
paragraph, it was of course necessary to extend protection to as many
of her "hands", as were essential to her safe and efficient working. How
many were really required for this purpose was, however, a moot point on
which ship-masters and naval officers rarely saw eye to eye; and since
the arbiter in all such disputes was the "quarter-deck gentlemen," the
decision seldom if ever went in favour of the master.

The importance of the coal trade won for colliers an early concession,
which left no room for differences of opinion. Every vessel employed
in that trade was entitled to carry one exempt able-bodied man for each
hundred units of her registered tonnage, provided it did not exceed
three hundred. The penalty for pressing such men was 10 Pounds for each
man taken. [Footnote: 2 & 3 Anne, cap. 6.]

On the coasts of Scotland commanders of warships whose carpenters had
run or broken their leave, and who perhaps were left, like Capt. Gage of
the _Otter_ sloop, "without so much as a Gimblett on board," [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1829-Capt. Gage, 29 Sept. 1742.] might press
shipwrights from the yards on shore to fill the vacancy, and suffer no
untoward consequences; but south of the Tweed this mode of collecting
"chips" was viewed with disfavour. There, although ship-carpenters,
sailmakers and men employed in rope-walks were by a stretch of the
official imagination reckoned as persons using the sea, and although
they were generally acknowledged to be no less indispensable to the
complete economy of a ship than the able-bodied seaman, legal questions
of an extremely embarrassing nature nevertheless cropped up when the
scene of their activities underwent too sudden and violent a change.
The pressing of such artificers consequently met with little official
encouragement. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 300--Law Officers'
Opinions, 1778-83, No. 2.]

Where the Admiralty scored, in the matter of ship protections, and
scored heavily, was when the protected person went ashore. For when on
shore the protected master, mate, boatswain, carpenter, apprentice
or seaman no longer enjoyed protection unless he was there "on ship's
duty." The rule was most rigorously, not to say arbitrarily, enforced.
Thus at Plymouth, in the year 1746, a seaman who protested in broken
English that he had come ashore to "look after his master's _sheep_" was
pressed because the naval officer who met and questioned him "imagined
sheep to have no affinity with a ship!" [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 2381--Capt. John Roberts, 11 July 1746. Capt. Roberts was a very
downright individual, and years before the characteristic had got him
into hot water. The occasion was when, in 1712, an Admiralty letter,
addressed to him at Harwich and containing important instructions, by
some mischance went astray and Roberts accused the Clerk of the Check of
having appropriated it. The latter called him a liar, whereupon Roberts
"gave him a slap in the face and bid him learn more manners." For this
exhibition of temper he was superseded and kept on the half-pay list
for some six years. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1471--Capt. Brand, 8 March
1711-12. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2378, section 11, Admiralty note.]

Any mate who failed to register his name at the rendezvous, as soon as
his ship arrived in port, did so at his peril. Without that formality he
was "not entitled to liberty." So strict was the rule that when William
Tassell, mate of the _Elizabeth_ ketch, was caught drinking in a Lynn
alehouse one night at ten o'clock, after having obtained "leave to run
about the town" until eight only, he was immediately pressed and
kept, the Admiralty refusing to declare the act irregular. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1546--Capt. Bowyer, 25 July 1809, and enclosure.]

In many ports it was customary for sailors to sleep ashore while
their ships lay at the quay or at moorings. The proceeding was highly
dangerous. No sailor ever courted sleep in such circumstances, even
though armed with a "line from the master setting forth his business,"
without grave risk of waking to find himself in the bilboes. The Mayor
of Poole once refused to "back" press-warrants for local use unless
protected men belonging to trading vessels of the port were granted the
privilege of lodging ashore. "Certainly not!" retorted the Admiralty.
"We cannot grant Poole an indulgence _that other towns do not enjoy_."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2485--Capt. Scott, 4 Jan. 1780, and
endorsement.]

In spite of the risk involved, the sailor slept ashore and--if he
survived the night--tried to steal back to his ship in the grey of the
morning. Now and then, by a run of luck, he made his offing in safety;
but more frequently he met the fate of John White of Bristol, who was
taken by the gang when only "about ninety yards from his vessel."

The only exceptions to this stringent rule were certain classes of
men engaged in the Greenland and South Seas whale fisheries. Skilled
harpooners, linesmen and boat-steerers, on their return from a whaling
cruise, could obtain from any Collector of Customs, for sufficient bond
put in, a protection from the impress which no Admiralty regulation,
however sweeping, could invalidate or override. Safeguarded by this
document, they were at liberty to live and work ashore, or to sail in
the coal trade, until such time as they should be required to proceed
on another whaling voyage. If, however, they took service on board any
vessel other than a collier, they forfeited their protections and could
be "legally detained." [Footnote: 13 George II. cap. 28. _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 2732--Capt. Young, 14 March 1756. _Admiralty Records_ 7.
300--Law Officers' Opinions, 1778-83, No. 42.]

In one ironic respect the gang strongly resembled a boomerang. So
thoroughly and impartially did it do its work that it recoiled upon
those who used it. The evil was one of long standing. Pepys complained
of it bitterly in his day, asserting that owing to its prevalence
letters could neither be received nor sent, and that the departmental
machinery for victualling and arming the fleet was like to be undone.
With the growth of pressing the imposition was carried to absurd
lengths. The crews of the impress tenders, engaged in conveying pressed
men to the fleet, could not "proceed down" without falling victims to
the very service they were employed in. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1486--Capt. Baird, 27 Feb. 1755, and numerous instances.] To check
this egregious robbing of Peter to pay Paul, both the Navy Board and the
Government were obliged to "protect" their own sea-going hirelings, and
even then the protections were not always effective.

Between the extremes represented by the landsman who enjoyed nominal
exemption and the seaman who enjoyed none, there existed a middle or
amphibious class of persons who lived exclusively on neither land
nor water, but habitually used both in the pursuit of their various
callings. These were the wherry or watermen, the lightermen, bargemen,
keelmen, trowmen and canal-boat dwellers frequenting mainly the inland
waterways of the country.

In the reign of Richard II. the jurisdiction of Admirals was denned as
extending, in a certain particular, to the "main stream of great rivers
nigh the sea." [Footnote: 15 Richard II. cap. 2.] Had the same line of
demarcation been observed in the pressing of those whose occupations lay
upon rivers, there would have been little cause for outcry or complaint.
But the Admiralty, the successors of the ancient "Guardians of the Sea"
whose powers were so clearly limited by the Ricardian statute, gradually
extended the old-time jurisdiction until, for the purposes of the
impress, it included all waterways, whether "nigh the sea" or inland,
natural or artificial, whereon it was possible for craft to navigate.
All persons working upon or habitually using such waterways were
regarded as "using the sea," and later warrants expressly authorised the
gangs to take as many of them as they should be able, not excepting even
the ferryman. The extension was one of tremendous consequence, since
it swept into the Navy thousands of men who, like the Ely and Cambridge
bargemen, were "hardy, strong fellows, who never failed to make good
seamen." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486--Capt. Baird, 29 April
1755.]

Amongst these denizens of the country's waterways the position of the
Thames wherryman was peculiar in that from very early times he had been
exempt from the ordinary incidence of the press on condition of
his periodically supplying from his own numbers a certain quota of
able-bodied men for the use of the fleet. The rule applied to all
watermen using the river between Gravesend and Windsor, and members
of the fraternity who "withdrew and hid themselves" at the time of the
making of such levies, were liable to be imprisoned for two years and
"banished any more to row for a year and a day." [Footnote: 2 & 3 Philip
and Mary, cap. 16.] The exemption he otherwise enjoyed appears to have
conduced not a little to the waterman's proverbial joviality. As a
youth he spent his leisure in "dancing and carolling," thus earning the
familiar sobriquet of "the jolly young waterman." Even so, his tenure of
happiness was anything but secure. With the naval officer and the gang
he was no favourite, and few opportunities of dashing his happiness were
allowed to pass unimproved. In the person of John Golden, however,
they caught a Tartar. To the dismay of the Admiralty and the officer
responsible for pressing him, he proved to be one of my Lord Mayor's
bargemen. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2733-Capt. Young, 7 March
1756.]

Apart from the watermen of the Thames, the purchase of immunity from the
press by periodic levies met with little favour, and though the levy was
in many cases reluctantly adopted, it was only because it entailed the
lesser of two evils. The basis of such levies varied from one man in ten
to one in five--a percentage which the Admiralty considered a "matter
of no distress"; and the penalty for refusing to entertain them was
wholesale pressing.

The Tyne keelmen, while ostensibly consenting to buy immunity on this
basis, seldom levied the quota upon themselves. By offering bounties
they drew the price of their freedom to work in the keels from outside
sources. Lord Thurlow confessed that he did not know what "working in
the keels" meant. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 299--Law Officers'
Opinions, 1752-77, No. 70.] There were' few in the fleet who could have
enlightened him of their own experience. The keelmen kept their ranks as
far as possible intact. In this they were materially aided by the Mayor
and Corporation of Newcastle, who held a "Grand Protection" of the
Admiralty, and in return for this exceptional mark of their Lordships'
favour did all they could to further the pressing of persons less
essential to the trade of the town and river than were their own
keelmen.

On the rivers Severn and Wye there was plying in 1806 a flotilla of
ninety-eight trows, ranging in capacity from sixty to one hundred and
thirty tons, and employing five hundred and eighty-eight men, of whom
practically all enjoyed exemption from the press. It being a time of
exceptional stress for men, the Admiralty considered this proportion
excessive, and Capt. Barker, at that time regulating the press at
Bristol, was ordered to negotiate terms. He proposed a contribution of
trowmen on the basis of one in every ten, coupling the suggestion with a
thinly veiled threat that if it were not complied with he would set
his gangs to work and take all he could get. The Association of Severn
Traders, finding themselves thus placed between the devil and the deep
sea, agreed to the proposal with a reluctance they in vain endeavoured
to hide under ardent protestations of loyalty. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1537--Capt. Barker, 24 April and 9 May 1806, and enclosure.]

In the three hundred "flats" engaged in carrying salt, coals and other
commodities between Nantwich and Liverpool there were employed, in
1795, some nine hundred men who had up to that time largely escaped
the attentions of the gang. In that year, however, an arrangement was
entered into, under duress of the usual threat, to the effect that they
should contribute one man in six, or at the least one man in nine,
in return for exemption to be granted to the remainder. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 578--Admiral Pringle, Report on Rendezvous, 2
April 1795.]

Turf-boats plying on the Blackwater and the Shannon seem to have enjoyed
no special concessions. The men working them were pressed when-ever they
could be laid hold of, and if they were not always kept, their discharge
was due to reasons of physical unfitness rather than to any acknowledged
right to labour unmolested. Ireland's contribution to the fleet, apart
from the notoriously disaffected, was of too much consequence to be
played with; for the Irishman was essentially a good-natured soul,
and when his native indolence and slowness of movement had been duly
corrected by a judicious use of the rattan and the rope's-end, his
services were highly esteemed in His Majesty's ships of war.

In the category of exemptions the fisheries occupied a place entirely
their own. They were carefully fostered, but indifferently protected.

Previous to the year 1729 the most important concession granted to those
engaged in the taking of fish was the establishing of two extra "Fishe
Dayes" in the week. The provision was embodied in a statute of 1563,
whereby the people were required, under a penalty of, 3 Pounds for each
omission, "or els three monethes close Imprisonment without Baile or
Maineprise," to eat fish, to the total exclusion of meat, on Fridays and
Saturdays, and to content themselves with "one dish of flesh to three
dishes of fish" on Wednesdays. [Footnote: 5 Elizabeth, cap. 5.] The
enactment had no religious significance whatever; but in order to avoid
any suspicion of Popish tendencies it was deemed advisable, by those
responsible for the measure, to saddle it with a rider to the effect
that all persons teaching, preaching or proclaiming the eating of fish,
as enjoined by the Act, to be of "necessitee for the saving of the soule
of man," should be punished as "spreaders of fause newes." The true
significance of the measure lay in this. The abolition of Romish
fast-days had resulted, since the Reformation, in an enormous falling
off in the consumption of fish, and this decrease had in turn played
havoc with the fisheries. Now the fisheries were in reality the national
incubator for seamen, and Cecil, Elizabeth's astute Secretary of
State, perceiving in their decadence a grave menace to the manning of
prospective fleets, determined, for that reason if for no other, to
reanimate the dying industry. The Act in question was the practical
outcome of his deliberations. [Footnote: _State Papers Domestic_,
Elizabeth, vol. xxvii. Nos. 71 and 72, comprising Cecil's original
memoranda.]

An enactment which combined so happily the interests of the fisher
classes with those of national defence could not but be productive
of far-reaching consequences. The fishing industry not only throve
exceedingly because of it, it in time became, as Cecil clearly foresaw
it would become, a nursery for seamen and a feeder of the fleet as
unrivalled for the excellence of its material as it was inexhaustible in
its resources. Its prosperity was in fact its curse. Few exemptions were
granted it. Adventurers after whale and cod had special concessions,
suited to the peculiar conditions of their calling; but with these
exceptions craft of every description employed in the taking or the
carrying of fish, for a very protracted period enjoyed only such
exemptions as were grudgingly extended to sea-going craft in general.
The source of supply represented by the leviathan industry was too
valuable to be lightly restricted.

On the other hand, it was too important to be lightly depleted.
Therefore under Cecil's Act establishing extra "Fishe Dayes," no
fisherman "using or haunting the sea" could be pressed off-hand to serve
in the Queen's Navy. The "taker," as the press-master was at that time
called, was obliged to carry his warrant to the Justices inhabiting
the place or places where it was proposed that the fishermen should be
pressed, and of these Justices any two were empowered to "choose
out such nomber of hable men" as the warrant specified. In this way
originated the "backing" or endorsing of warrants by the civil power. At
first obligatory only as regards the pressing of fishermen, it came to
be regarded in time as an essential preliminary to all pressing done on
land.

No further provision of a special nature would appear to have been made
for the protecting of fisher folk from the press until the year 1729,
when an exemption was granted which covered the master, one apprentice,
one seaman and one landsman for each vessel. [Footnote: 2 George n. cap.
15.] In 1801, however, a sweeping change was inaugurated. A statute
of that date provided that no person engaged in the taking, curing or
selling of fish should be impressed. [Footnote: 41 George in. cap. 21.]
The exemption came too late to prove substantially beneficial to an
industry which had suffered incalculable injury from the then recent
wars. The press-gang was already nearing its last days.

Prior to the Act of 1801 persons whose sole occupation was "to
pick oysters and mussels at low water" were accounted fishermen and
habitually pressed as "using the sea."

The position of the smaller fry of fishermen is thrown into vivid relief
by an official communique of 1709 as opposed to an incident of later
date. "These poor people," runs the note, which was addressed to a naval
commander who had pressed a fisherman out of a boat of less than three
tons, "have been always protected for the support of their indigent
families, and therefore they must not Be taken into the service
unless there is a pressing occasion, _and then they will be all forced
thereinto_." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.2377--Capt. Robinson, 4
Feb. 1708-9, and endorsement.] Captain Boscawen, writing from the Nore
in 1745, supplies the antithesis. He had been instructed to procure half
a dozen fishing smacks, each of not less than sixty tons burden, for
transport purposes. None were to be had. "The reason the fishermen give
for not employing vessels of that size," he states, in explanation of
the fact, "is that all the young men are pressed, and that the old men
and boys are not able to work them." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1481--Capt. Boscawen, 23 Dec. 1745.]

Conditions such as these in time taught the fisherman wisdom, and he
awoke to the fact that exemption for a consideration, as in the case of
workers on rivers and canals, was preferable to paying through the
nose. The Admiralty was never averse from driving a bargain of this
description. It saved much distress, much bad blood, much good money.
In this way Worthing fishermen bought exemption in 1780. The fishery of
that town was then in its infancy, the people engaged in it "very poor
and needy." They employed only sixteen boats. Yet they found it cheaper
to contribute five men to the Navy, at a cost of 40 Pounds in
bounties, than to entertain the gang. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1446--Capt. Alms, 2 Jan. 1780.]

The Orkney fisherman bought his freedom, both on his fishing-grounds and
when carrying his catch to market, on similar terms; but being a person
of frugal turn of mind, he gradually developed the habit of withholding
his stipulated quota. The unexpected arrival in his midst of an armed
smack, followed by a spell of vigorous pressing, taught him that to
be penny-wise is sometimes to be pound-foolish. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 2740--Lieut. Abbs, 11 May 1798, and Admiralty note.]

On the Scottish coasts fishermen and ferrymen--the latter a numerous
class on that deeply indented seaboard--offered up one man in every five
or six on the altar of protection. The sacrifice distressed them less
than indiscriminate pressing. A prosperous people, they chose out those
of their number who could best be spared, supporting the families thus
left destitute by common subscription. Buss fishermen, who followed
the migratory herring; from fishing-ground to fishing-ground, were
in another category. Their contribution, when on the Scottish coast,
figured out at a man per buss, but as they were for some inscrutable
reason called upon to pay similar tribute on other parts of the coast,
they cannot be said to have escaped any too lightly. Neither did the
four hundred fishing-boats composing the Isle of Man fleet. Their crews
were obliged to surrender one man in every seven. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 579--Admiral Pringle, Report on Rendezvous, 2 April 1795;
Admiral Philip, Report on Rendezvous, 1 Aug. 1801.]

Opinions as to the value of material drawn from these sources differed
widely. The buss fisherman was on all hands acknowledged to be a
seasoned sailor; but when it came to those employed in smaller craft, it
was held that heaving at the capstan for a matter of only six or seven
weeks in the year could never convert raw lads into useful seamen, even
though they continued that healthful form of exercise all their lives.
This was the view entertained by the masters of fishing-smacks smarting
from loss of "hands." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1497--Thomas
Hurry, master, 3 March 1777.]

Admiralty saw things in quite another light. "What you admit," said
their Lordships, expressing the counter-view, "it is our business to
prevent. We will therefore take these lads, who are admittedly of no
service to you save for hauling in your nets or getting your anchors,
and will make of them what you, on your own showing, can never
make--able seamen.": The argument, backed as it was by the strong arm of
the press-gang, was unanswerable.

The fact that the fisherman passed much of his time on shore did not
free him from the press any more than it freed the waterman, or the
worker in keel or trow. In his main vocation he "used the sea," and that
was enough. For the use of the sea was the rule and standard by which
every man's liability to the press was supposed to be measured and
determined.

Except in the case of masters, mates and apprentices to the sea, whose
affidavits or indentures constituted their respective safeguards against
the press, every person exempt from that infliction, whether by statute
law or Admiralty indulgence, was required to have in his possession an
official voucher setting forth the fact and ground of his exemption.
This document was ironically termed his "protection."

Admiralty protections were issued under the hand of the Lord High
Admiral; ordinary protections, by departments and persons who possessed
either delegated or vested powers of issue. Thus each Trinity House
protected its own pilots; the Customs protected whale fishermen and
apprentices to the sea; impress officers protected seamen temporarily
lent to ships in lieu of men taken out of them by the gangs. Some
protections were issued for a limited period and lapsed when that period
expired; others were of perpetual "force," unless invalidated by some
irregular acton the part of the holder. No protection was good unless
it bore a minute description of the person to whom it applied, and all
protections had to be carried on the person and produced upon demand.
Thomas Moverty was pressed out of a wherry in the Thames owing to his
having changed his clothes and left his protection at home; and
John Scott of Mistley, in Suffolk, was taken whilst working in his
shirtsleeves, though his protection lay in the pocket of his jacket,
only a few yards away. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1479--Capt.
Bridges, 11 August 1743. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1531--Capt. Ballard, 15
March 1804, and enclosure.]

The most trifling irregularity in the protection itself, or the
slightest discrepancy between the personal appearance of the bearer and
the written description of him, was enough to convert the protection
into so much waste paper and the bearer into a naval seaman.
North-country apprentices, whose indentures bore a 14s. stamp in
accordance with Scottish law, were pressed because that document did not
bear a 15s. stamp according to English law. A seaman was in one instance
described in his protection as "smooth-faced," that is, beardless. The
impress officer scrutinised him closely. "Aha!" said he, "you are not
smooth-faced. You are pockmarked"; and he pressed the poor fellow for
that reason.

To be over-protected was as bad as having no protection at all.
Thomas Letting, a collier's man, and John Anthony of the merchant ship
_Providence_, learnt this fact to their cost when they were taken out
of their respective ships for having each two protections. In short,
the slightest pretext served. If a protection had but a few more days to
run; if the name, date, place or other essential particular showed
signs of "coaxing," that is, of having been "on purpose rubbed out" or
altered; if a man's description did not figure in his protection, or
if it figured on the back instead of in the margin, or in the margin
instead of on the back; if his face wore a ruddy rather than a pale
look, if his hair were red when it ought to have been brown, if he
proved to be "tall and remarkable thin" when he should have been
middle-sized and thick-set--in any of these, as in a hundred and one
similar cases, the bearer of the protection paid the penalty for what
the impress officer regarded as a "hoodwinking attempt" to cheat the
King's service of an eligible man.

Notwithstanding the fact that the impress officer regarded every
pressable man as a person who made it his chief business in life
to defraud the Navy of his services on the "miserable plea of a
protection," it by no means followed that his zeal in pressing him
on that account had in every case the countenance or met with the
unqualified approval of the Admiralty. Thousands of men and boys taken
in this irresponsible fashion obtained their discharge, though with
more or less difficulty and delay, when the facts of the case were
laid before the naval authorities; and in general it may be said, that
although the Lords Commissioners were only too ready to wink at any
colourable excuse whereby another physical unit might be added to the
fleet, they nevertheless laid it down as a rule, inviolable at least
on paper, "never to press any man from protections," since it brought
"great trouble and clamour upon them." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
3. 50--Admiralty Minutes, 26 Feb. 1744-5.] To assert that the rule was
generally obeyed would be to turn the truth into a lie. On the contrary,
it was almost universally disregarded. Both officers and gangs traversed
it on every possible occasion, leaving the justice or injustice of the
act to the arbitrament of the higher tribunal. Zeal for the service was
no crime, and to release a man was always so much easier than to catch
him.

"Pressing from protections," as the phrase ran in the service, did
not therefore mean that the Admiralty over-rode its own protections
at pleasure. It merely signified that on occasion more than ordinarily
stringent measures were adopted for the holding-up and examining of
all protected persons, or of as many of them as could be got at by the
gangs, to the end that all false or fraudulent vouchers might be weeded
out and the dishonest bearers of them consigned to another place. And
yet there were times when "pressing from protections" had its plenary
significance too.

Lovers of prints who are familiar with Hogarth's "Stage Coach; or,
a Country Inn Yard," date 1747, will readily recall the two
"outsides"--the one a down-in-the-mouth soldier, the other a jolly
Jack-tar on whose bundle may be read the word "Centurion." Now the
_Centurion_ was Anson's flag-ship, and in this print Hogarth has
incidentally recorded the fact that her crew, on their return from that
famous voyage round the world, were awarded life-protections from the
press. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1440--Capt. Anson, 24 July
1744.]

The life-protection was an indulgence extended to few. Samuel Davidson
of Newcastle, sailor, aged fifty, who had "served for nine years during
the late wars," in 1777 made bold to plead that fact as a reason why he
should be freed from the attentions of the press-gang for the rest of
his life. But the Lords Commissioners refused to admit the plea "unless
he was in a position not inferior to that of chief mate." On the other
hand, Henry Love of Hastings, who had merely served in a single Dutch
expedition, but had the promise of Pitt and Dundas that both he and
those who volunteered with him should never be pressed, was immediately
discharged when that calamity befell him. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1449--Capt. Columbine, 21 July 1800.]

The granting of extraordinary protections was thus something entirely
erratic and not to be counted upon. Captain Balchen in 1708 had special
protections for ten of his ship's company whom he desired to bring to
London as witnesses in a suit then pending against him; but the building
of the three earlier Eddystone lighthouses was allowed to be seriously
impeded by the pressing of the unprotected workmen when on shore at
Plymouth, and the keepers of the first erection of that name were once
carried off bag and baggage by the gang.

Smeaton, who built the third Eddystone, protected his men by means of
silver badges, and his storeboat enjoyed similar immunity--presumably
with the consent of Admiralty--by reason of a picture of the lighthouse
painted on her sail. Other great constructors, as well as rich
mercantile firms, bought protection at a price. They supplied a
stipulated number of men for the fleet, and found the arrangement a
highly convenient one for ridding themselves of those who were useless
to them or had incurred their displeasure. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 583--Admiral Thornborough, 30 Nov. 1813.]

Private protections, of which great numbers saw the light, were in no
case worth the paper they were written on. Joseph Bettesworth of Ryde,
Isle of Wight, Attorney-at-Law and Lord of the Manor of Ashey and Ryde,
by virtue of an ancient privilege pertaining to that Manor and confirmed
by royal Letters Patent, in 1790 protected some twenty seafaring men to
work his "Antient Ferry or Passage for the Wafting of Passengers to and
from Ride, Portsmouth and Gosport, in a smack of about 14 tons, and a
wherry." The regulating captain at the last-named place asked what he
should do about it. "Press every man as soon as possible," replied their
Lordships. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1506--Capt. John Bligh,
June 1790, and enclosure.]




CHAPTER V.

WHAT THE GANG DID AFLOAT.



"A man we want, and a man we must have," was the naval cry of the
century. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1531--Deposition of John
Swinburn, 28 July 1804.]

Nowhere was the cry so loud or so insistent as on the sea, where every
ship of war added to its volume. In times of peace, when the demand
for men was gauged by those every-day factors, sickness, death and
desertion, it dwindled, if it did not altogether die away; but given
a war-cloud on the near horizon and the cry for men swelled, as
many-voiced as there were keels in the fleet, to a sudden clamour of
formidable proportions--a clamour that only the most strenuous and
unremitting exertions could in any measure appease.

Every navy is argus-eyed, and in crises such as these, when the
very existence of the nation was perhaps at stake, it was first and
principally towards the crews of the country's merchant ships that the
eyes of the Navy were directed; for, shipboard life and shipboard duty
being largely identical in both services, no elaborate training
was required to convert the merchant sailor into a first-rate
man-o'-war's-man. The ships of both services were sailing ships. Both,
as a rule, went armed. Hence, not only was the merchant sailor an able
seaman, he was also trained in the handling of great guns, and in the
use of the cutlass, the musket and the boarding-pike. In a word, he was
that most valuable of all assets to a people seeking to dominate the
sea--a man-o'-war's-man ready-made, needing only to be called in in
order to become immediately effective.

The problem was how to catch him--how to take him fresh and vigorous
from his deep-sea voyaging--how to enroll him in the King's Navy ere he
got ashore with a pocketful of money and relaxed his hardened muscles in
the uncontrolled debauchery he was so partial to after long abstention.

A device of the simplest yet of the most elaborate description met the
difficulty. It was based upon the fact that to take the sailor afloat
was a much easier piece of strategy than to ferret him out of his
hiding-places after he got ashore. The impress trap was therefore set in
such a way as to catch him before he reached the land.

With infinite ingenuity and foresight sea-gangs were picketed from
harbour to harbour, from headland to headland, until they formed an
almost unbroken chain around the coasts and guarded the sailor's every
point of accustomed approach from overseas: This was the outer cordon
of the system, the beginning of the gauntlet the returning sailor had to
run, and he was a smart seaman indeed who could successfully negotiate
the uncharted rocks and shoals with which the coast was everywhere
strewn in his despite.

The composition of this chain of sea-gangs was mixed to a degree, yet
singularly homogeneous.

First of all, on its extreme outer confines, perhaps as far down Channel
as the Scillies, or as far north as the thirteen-mile stretch of sea
running between the Mull of Kintyre and the Irish coast, where the trade
for Liverpool, Whitehaven, Dublin and the Clyde commonly came in, the
homing sailor would suddenly descry, bearing down upon him under press
of sail, the trim figure of one of His Majesty's frigates, or the clean,
swift lines of an armed sloop. The meeting was no chance one. Both
the frigate and the sloop were there by design, the former cruising
to complete her own complement, the latter to complete that of some
ship-of-the-line at Plymouth, Spithead or the Nore, to which she stood
in the relation of tender.

Tenders were vessels taken into the king's service "at the time of
Impressing Seamen." Hired at certain rates per month, they continued in
the service as long as they were required, often most unwillingly, and
were principally employed in obtaining men for the king's ships or in
matters relative thereto. In burden they varied from thirty or forty to
one hundred tons, [Footnote: This was the maximum tonnage for which the
Navy Board paid, but when trade was slack larger vessels could be had,
and were as a matter of fact frequently employed, at the nominal tonnage
rate.] the smaller craft hugging the coast and dropping in from port
to port, the larger cruising far beyond shore limits. For deep-sea or
trade-route cruising the smaller craft were of little use. No ship of
force would bring-to for them.

While press-warrants were supplied regularly to every warship, no matter
what her rating, the supply of tenders was less general and much more
erratic. It was only when occasion demanded it, and then only to ships
of the first, second and third rate, that tenders were assigned for the
purpose of bringing their crews up to full strength. The urgency of
the occasion, the men to be "rose," the diplomacy of the commander
determined the number. A tender to each ship was the rule, but however
parsimonious the Navy Board might be on such occasions, a carefully
worded appeal to its prejudices seldom failed to produce a second,
or even a third attendant vessel. Boscawen once had recourse to this
ingenious ruse in order to obtain tender number two. The Navy Board
detested straggling seamen, so he suggested that, with several tenders
lying idle in the Thames, his men might be far more profitably employed
than in straggling about town. "Most reprehensible practice!" assented
the Board, and placed a second vessel at his disposal without more ado.
Lieut. Upton was immediately put in charge of her and ordered seawards.
He returned within a week with twenty-seven men, pressed out of
merchantmen in Margate Roads. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1478--Letters of Capt. Boscawen, July and August 1743.]

The tender assigned to Boscawen on this occasion was the _Galloper_, an
American-built vessel, "rigged in the manner the West Indians do
their sloops." Her armament consisted of six 9-pounders and threescore
small-arms, but as a sea-boat she belied her name, for she was
hopelessly sluggish under sail, and the great depth of her waist, and
her consequent liability to ship seas in rough weather, rendered her
"very improper" for cruising in the Channel.

For her company she had a master, a mate and six hands supplied by the
owners, in addition to thirty-four seamen temporarily drafted into her
from Boscawen's ship, the _Dreadnought_. It was the duty of the former
to work the vessel, of the latter to do the pressing; but these
duties were largely interchangeable. All were under the command of the
lieutenant, who with forty-two men at his beck and call could organise,
on a pinch, five gangs of formidable strength and yet leave sufficient
hands, given fair weather, to mind the tender in their temporary
absence. Tender's men were generally the flower of a ship's company,
old hands of tried fidelity, equal to any emergency and reputedly proof
against bribery, rum and petticoats. Yet the temptation to give duty the
slip and enjoy the pleasures of town for a season sometimes proved too
strong, even for them, and we read of one boat's-crew of eight, who,
overcome in this way, were discovered after many days in a French
prison. Instead of going pressing in the Downs, they had gone to
Boulogne.

On the commanders of His Majesty's ships the onus of raising men fell
with intolerable insistence. Nelson's greatest pleasure in his promotion
to Admiral's rank is said to have been derived from the fact that with
it there came a blessed cessation to the scurvy business of pressing;
and there were in the service few captains, whether before or after
Nelson's day, who could not echo with hearty approval the sentiment of
Capt. Brett of the _Roebuck_, when he said: "I can solemnly declare
that the getting and taking care of my men has given me more trouble and
uneasiness than all the rest of my duty." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1478--Capt. Brett, 27 Oct. 1742.]

Commanders of smaller and less effective ships found themselves on the
horns of a cruel dilemma did they dare to ask for tenders. Beg and
pray as they would, these were rarely allowed them save as a special
indulgence or a crying necessity. To most applications from this source
the Admiralty opposed a front well calculated "to encourage the others."
"If he has not men enough to proceed on service," ran its dictum, "their
Lordships will lay up the ship." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1471--Capt. Boyle, 1 March 1715-6, endorsement, and numerous instances.]
Faced with the summary loss of his command, their Lordships' high
displeasure, and consequent inactivity and half-pay for an indefinite
period, the captain whose complement was short, and who could obtain
neither men nor tender from the constituted authority, had no option but
to put to sea with such hands as he already bore and there beat up for
others. This, with their Lordships' gracious permission, he accordingly
did, thus adding another unit to the fleet of armed vessels already
prowling the Narrow Seas on a similar errand. It can be readily imagined
that such commanders were not out for pleasure.

To the great and incessantly active flotilla got together in this way,
the regulating captains on shore contributed a further large contingent.
Every seaport of consequence had its rendezvous, every seaport
rendezvous its amphibious gang or gangs who ranged the adjacent coast
for many leagues in swift bottoms whose character and mission often
remained wholly unsuspected until some skilful manoeuvre laid them
aboard their intended victim and brought the gang swarming over her
decks, armed to the teeth and resolute to press her crew.

We have now three classes of vessels, of varying build, rig, tonnage and
armament, engaged in a common endeavour to intercept and take the homing
sailor. Let us next see how they were disposed upon the coast.

Tenders from Greenwich and Blackwall ransacked the Thames below bridge
as far as Blackstakes in the river Medway, the Nore and the Swin
channel. Tenders from Margate, Ramsgate, Deal and Dover watched the
lower Thames estuary, swept the Downs, and kept a sharp lookout along
the coasts of Kent and Sussex, of Essex and of Norfolk. To these tenders
from Lynn dipped their colours off Wells-on-Sea or Cromer, whence
they bore away for the mouth of Humber, where Hull tenders took up the
running till met by those belonging to Sunderland, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
and Shields, which in turn joined up the cordon with others hailing
from Leith and the Firth of Forth. Northward of the Forth, away to the
extreme Orkneys, and all down the west coast of Scotland through the two
Minches and amongst the Hebrides, specially armed sloops from Leith and
Greenock made periodic cruises. Greenock tenders, again, united with
tenders from Belfast and Whitehaven in a lurking watch for ships making
home ports by way of the North Channel; or circled the Isle of Man, ran
thence across to Morecambe Bay, and so down the Lancashire coast the
length of Formby Head, where the Mersey tenders, alert for the Jamaica
trade, relieved them of their vigil. Dublin tenders guarded St. George's
Channel, aided by others from Milford Haven and Haverfordwest. Bristol
tenders cruised the channel of that names keeping a sharp eye on Lundy
Island and the Holmes, where shipmasters were wont to play them tricks
if they were not watchful. Falmouth and Plymouth tenders guarded the
coast from Land's End to Portland Bill, Portsmouth tenders from Portland
Bill to Beachy Head, and Folkestone and Dover tenders from Beachy Head
to the North Foreland, thus completing the encircling chain. Nor was
Ireland forgotten in the general sea-rummage. As a converging point for
the great overseas trade-routes it was of prime importance, and tenders
hailing from Belfast, Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick, or making
those places their chief ports of call, exercised unceasing vigilance
over all the coast.

In this general scouring of the coastal waters of the kingdom certain
points were of necessity subjected to a much closer surveillance than
others. Particularly was this true of the sea routes followed by the
East and West India, and the Baltic, Virginia, Newfoundland, Dutch
and Greenland trades, where these converged upon such centres of
world-commerce as London, Poole, Bristol, Liverpool and the great
northern entrepôts on the Forth and Clyde, the Humber and the Tyne. A
tender stationed off Poole, when a Newfoundland fish-convoy was expected
in, never failed to reap a rich harvest. At Highlake, near the mouth
of the Mersey, many a fine haul was made from the sugar and rum-laden
Jamaica ships, the privateers and slavers from which Liverpool drew her
wealth. Early in the century sloops of war had orders "to cruise between
Beechy and the Downs to Impress men out of homeward-bound Merchant
Ships," and in 1755 Rodney's lieutenants found the Channel "full of
tenders." Except in times of profound peace--few and brief in the
century under review--it was rarely or never in any other state. An
ocean highway so congested with the winged vehicles of commerce could
not escape the constant vigilance of those whose business it was to
waylay the inward-bound sailor.

A favourite station in the Channel was "at ye west end of ye Isle of
Wight, near Hurst Castle," where the watchful tender, having under her
eye all ships coming from the westward, as well as all passing through
the Needles, could press at pleasure by the simple expedient of sending
gangs aboard of them. At certain times of the year such ports as
Grimsby, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Brixham came in for similar
attention. When the fleets were due back from the "Great Fishery" on the
Dogger Banks, tenders cruising off those ports netted more men than they
could find room for; and so heavy was the tribute paid in this way by
the fishermen of the last-named port in 1805, that "not a single man was
to be found in Brixham liable to the impress." Every unprotected man,
out of a total of ninety-six fishing-smacks then belonging to the place,
had been snapped up by the tenders and ships of war cruising off the bay
or further up-Channel. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral
Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 15 Sept.]

The double cordon composed of ships and tenders on the cruise by no
means exhausted the resources called into play for the intercepting of
the sailor afloat. Still nearer the land was a third or innermost line
composed of boat-gangs operating, like so many of the tenders, from
rendezvous on shore, or from ships of war lying in dock or riding
at anchor. Less continuous than the outer cordon, it was not less
effective, and many a sailor who by strategy or good luck had all but
won through, struck his flag to the gang when perhaps only the cast of a
line separated him from shore and liberty.

It was across the entrance to harbours and navigable estuaries that this
innermost line was most frequently and most successfully drawn. Pill,
the pilot station for the port of Bristol, threw out such a line to
the further bank of Avon and thereby caught many an able seaman who
had evaded the tenders below King Road. On Southampton Water it was
generally so impassable that few men who could in the slightest
degree be considered liable to the press escaped its toils. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 5
Aug. 1805.] Dublin Bay knew it well. A press "on float" there, carried
out silently and swiftly in the grey of a September morning, 1801,
whilst the mists still hung thick over the water, resulted in the
seizure of seventy-four seamen who had eluded the press-smacks cruising
without the bay; but of this number two proving to be protected
apprentices, the Lord Mayor sent the Water Bailiff of the city, "with a
detachment of the army," and took them by force out of the hands of the
gang. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1526--Capt. Brabazon, 16 Sept.
1801.] On the Thames, notwithstanding the ceaseless activity of the
outer cordons, the innermost line of capture yielded enormously. The
night of October the 28th, 1776, saw three hundred and ninety-nine men,
the greater part of them good seamen, pressed by the boats of a single
ship--the _Princess Augusta_, Captain Sir Richard Bickerton commander,
then fitting out at Woolwich. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1497--Capt. Bickerton, 29 Oct. 1776.] Such a raid was very properly
termed a "hot press."

The amazing feature of this exploit is, that it should have been
possible at all, in view of what was going on in the Thames estuary
below a line drawn across the river's mouth from Foulness to
Sheerness-reach. Seawards of this line lay the two most famous
anchorages in the world, where ships foregathered from every quarter
of the navigable globe. Than the Nore and the Downs no finer
recruiting-ground could anywhere be found, and here the shore-gangs
afloat, and the boat-gangs from ships of war, were for ever on the
alert. No ship, whether inward or outward bound, could pass the Nore
without being visited. Nothing went by unsearched. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 2733--Capt. Young, 7 March 1756.] The wonder is that any
unprotected sailor ever found his way to London.

Between the Nore and the North Foreland the conditions were equally
rigorous. Through all the channels leading to the sea, channels
affording anchorage to innumerable ships of every conceivable rig and
tonnage, the gangs roamed at will, exacting toll of everything that
carried canvas. Even the smaller craft left high and dry upon the
flats, or awaiting the tide in some sand-girt pool, did not escape their
hawk-like vigilance.

 [Illustration: SEIZING A WATERMAN ON TOWER HILL ON THE MORNING OF HIS
WEDDING DAY.]

In the Downs these conditions reached their climax, for thither, in
never-ending procession, came the larger ships which were so fruitful of
good hauls. With the wind at north, or between north and east, few ships
came in and little could be done. But when the wind veered and came
piping out of the west or sou'-west, in they came in such numbers that
the gangs, however numerous they might be, had all their work cut out
to board them. A special tender, swift and exceedingly well-found, was
accordingly stationed here, whose duty it was to be "very watchful that
no vessel passed without a visit from the impress boats." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 2733--Orders of Vice-Admiral Buckle to Capt.
Yates, 29 April 1778.] In such work as this man-o'-war boats were of
little use. Just as they could not negotiate Deal beach without danger
of being reduced to matchwood, so they could not live in the choppy sea
kicked up in the Downs by a westerly gale. Folkstone market boats and
Deal cutters had to be requisitioned for pressing in those waters. Their
seaworthiness and speed made the Downs the crux of inward-bound ships,
whose only means of escaping their attentions was to incur another
danger by "going back of the Goodwins."

The procedure of boat-gangs pressing in harbour or on rivers seldom
varied, unless it were by accident. As a rule, night was the time
selected, for to catch the sailor asleep conduced greatly to the success
and safety of the venture. The hour chosen was consequently either close
upon midnight, some little time after he had turned in, or in the early
morning before he turned out. The darker the night and the dirtier the
weather the better. Surprise, swiftly and silently carried out, was half
the battle.

A case in point is the attempt made by Lieut. Rudsdale, of H.M.S.
_Licorne_, "to impress all men (without exception) from the ships and
vessels lying at Cheek Point above Passage of Waterford," in the year
'79. Putting-off in the pinnace with a picked crew at eleven o'clock
on a dark and tempestuous October night, he had scarcely left the ship
astern ere he overtook a boatload of men, how many he could not well
discern in the darkness, pulling in the direction he himself was bound.
Fearful lest they should suspect the nature of his errand and alarm
the ships at Passage, he ran alongside of them and pressed the entire
number, sending the boat adrift. Putting back, he set his capture on
board the _Licorne_ and once more turned the nose of the pinnace towards
Passage. There, dropping noiselessly aboard the _Triton_ brig, he caught
the hands asleep, pressed as many of them as he had room for, and with
them returned to the ship. Meanwhile, the master of the _Triton_ armed
what hands he had left and met Rudsdale's second attempt to board
him with a formidable array of handspikes, hatchets and crowbars.
A fusillade of bottles and billets of wood further evinced his
determination to protect the brig against all comers, and lest there
should be any doubt on that point he swore roundly that he would be the
death of every man in the pinnace if they did not immediately sheer
off and leave him in peace. This the lieutenant wisely did. No further
surprises were possible that night, for by this time the alarm had
spread, the pinnace was half-full of missiles, and one of his men lay
in the bottom of her severely wounded. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
471--Deposition of Lieut. Rudsdale, 24 Oct. 1779.] As it was, he had a
very fair night's work to his credit. Between the occupants of the boat
and those of the brig he had obtained close upon a score of men.

The expedients resorted to by commanders of ships of war temporarily
in port and short of their tale of men are vividly depicted in a report
made to the Admiralty in 1711. "Three days ago, very privately,"
writes Capt. Billingsley, whose ship, the _Vanguard_, was then lying at
Blackstakes, "I Sent two fishing Smacks with a Lieutenant and some Men,
with orders to proceede along the Essex Coast, and downe as far as the
Wallet, to the Naze, with directions to take all the men out of Oyster
Vessels and others that were not Exempted. The project succeeded, and
they are return'd with fourteen men, all fit, and but one has ever been
in the Service. The coast was Alarm'd, and the country people came downe
and fir'd from the Shore upon the Smacks, and no doubt but they doe
still take 'em to be privateers." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1470--Capt. Billingsley, 5 May 1711.]

Pressing at sea differed materially in many of its aspects from pressing
on the more sheltered waters of rivers and harbours. Carried out as a
rule in the broad light of day, it was for that very reason accompanied
with a more open and determined display of force than those quieter
ventures which depended so largely for their success upon the element
of surprise. Situated as we are in these latter days, when anyone who
chooses may drive his craft from Land's End to John o' Groats without
hindrance, it is difficult to conceive that there was ever a time when
the whole extent of the coastal waters of the kingdom, as ranged by
the impress tender, was under rigorous martial law. Yet such was
unquestionably the case. Throughout the eighteenth century the flag was
everywhere in armed evidence in those waters, and no sailing master of
the time could make even so much as a day's run with any certainty that
the peremptory summons: "Bring to! I'm coming aboard of you," would not
be bawled at him from the mouth of a gun.

The retention of the command of a tender depended entirely upon her
success in procuring men. As a rule, she was out for no other purpose,
and this being so, it is not to be supposed that the officer in charge
of her would do otherwise than employ the means ordained for that end.
Accordingly, as soon as a sail was sighted by the tender's lookout man,
a gun was loaded, shotted with roundshot, and run out ready for the
moment when the vessel should come within range.

The first intimation the intended victim had of the fate in store for
her was the shriek of the roundshot athwart her bows. This was the
signal, universally known as such, for her to back her topsails and
await the coming of the gang, already tumbling in ordered haste into the
armed boat prepared for them under the tender's quarter. And yet it was
not always easy for the sprat to catch the whale. A variety of factors
entered into the problem and made for failure as often as for success.
Sometimes the tender's powder was bad--so bad that in spite of an extra
pound or so added to the charge, the shot could not be got to carry
as far as a common musket ball. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
2485--Capt. Shirley, 5 Nov. 1780, and numerous instances.] When this was
the case her commander suffered a double mortification. His shot,
the symbol of authority and coercion, took the water far short of its
destined goal, whilst the vessel it was intended to check and intimidate
surged by amid the derisive cat-calls and laughter of her crew.

Even with the powder beyond reproach, ships did not always obey the
summons, pere

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