surveillance of the coast was tremendously effective. Like Van Tromp, the vessels and gangs engaged in it rode the seas with a broom at their masthead, sweeping into the service, not every man, it is true, but enormous numbers of them. As for their quality, “One man out of a merchant ship is better than three the lieutenants get in town.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2379–Capt. Roberts, 27 June 1732.] This was the general opinion early in the century; but as the century wore on the quality of the man pressed in town steadily deteriorated, till at length the sailor taken fresh from the sea was reckoned to be worth six of him.
CHAPTER VI.
EVADING THE GANG.
As we have just seen, it was when returning from overseas that the British sailor ran the gravest risk of summary conversion into Falstaff’s famous commodity, “food for powder.”
Outward bound, the ship’s protection–that “sweet little cherub” which, contrary to all Dibdinic precedent, lay down below–had spread its kindly aegis over him, and, generally speaking, saved him harmless from the warrant and the hanger. But now the run for which he has signed on is almost finished, and as the Channel opens before him the magic Admiralty paper ceases to be of “force” for his protection. No sooner, therefore, does he make his land-fall off the fair green hills or shimmering cliffs than his troubles begin. He is now within the outer zone of danger, and all about him hover those dreaded sharks of the Narrow Seas, the rapacious press-smacks, seeking whom they may devour. Conning the compass-card of his chances as they bear down upon him and send their shot whizzing across his bows, the sailor, in his fixed resolve to evade the gang at any cost, resorted first of all to the most simple and sailorly expedient imaginable. He “let go all” and made a run for it. That way lay the line of least resistance, and, with luck on his side, of surest escape.
Three modes of flight were his to choose between–three modes involving as many nice distinctions, plus a possible difference with the master. He could run away in his ship, run away with her, or as a last resort he could sacrifice his slops, his bedding, his pet monkey and the gaudy parrot that was just beginning to swear, and run from her. Which should it be? It was all a toss-up. The chance of the moment, instantly detected and as instantly acted upon, determined his choice.
The sailor’s flight in his ship depended mainly upon her sailing qualities and the master’s willingness to risk being dismasted or hulled by the pursuer’s shot. Granted a capful of wind on his beam, a fleet keel under foot, and a complacent skipper aft, the flight direct was perhaps the means of escape the sailor loved above all others. The spice of danger it involved, the dash and frolic of the chase, the joy of seeing his leaping “barky” draw slowly away from her pursuer in the contest of speed, and of watching the stretch of water lying between him and capture surely widen out, were sensations dear to his heart.
Running away _with_ his ship was a more serious business, since the adoption of such a course meant depriving the master of his command, and this again meant mutiny. Happily, masters took a lenient view of mutinies begotten of such conditions. Not infrequently, indeed, they were consenting parties, winking at what they could not prevent, and assuming the command again when the safety of ship and crew was assured by successful flight, with never a hint of the irons, indictment or death decreed by law as the mutineer’s portion.
These modes of flight did not in every instance follow the hard-and-fast lines here laid down. Under stress of circumstance each was liable to become merged in the other; or both, perhaps, had to be abandoned in favour of fresh tactics rendered necessary by the accident or the exigency of the moment. The _Triton_ and _Norfolk_ Indiamen, after successfully running the gauntlet of the Channel tenders, in the Downs fell in with the _Falmouth_ man-o’-war. The meeting was entirely accidental. Both merchantmen were congratulating themselves on having negotiated the Channel without the loss of a man. The _Triton_ had all furled except her fore and mizen topsails, preparatory to coming to an anchor; but as the wind was strong southerly, with a lee tide running, the _Falmouth’s_ boats could not forge ahead to board her before the set of the tide carried her astern of the warship’s guns, whereupon her crew mutinied, threw shot into the man-o’-war’s boats, which had by this time drawn alongside, and so, making sail with all possible speed, got clear away. Meantime a shot had brought the _Norfolk_ to on the _Falmouth’s_ starboard bow, where she was immediately boarded. On her decks an ominous state of things prevailed. Her crew would not assist to clew up the sails, the anchor had been seized to the chain-plates and could not be let go, and when the gang from the _Falmouth_ attempted to cut the buoy ropes with which it was secured, the “crew attacked them with hatchets and treenails, made sail and obliged them to quit the ship.” Being by that, time astern of the _Falmouth’s_ guns, they too made their escape. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1485–Capt. Brett, 25 June 1755.]
Never, perhaps, did the sailor adopt the expedient of running away, ship and all, with so malicious a goodwill or so bright a prospect of success, as when sailing under convoy. In those days he seldom ventured to “risk the run,” even to Dutch ports and back, without the protection of one or more ships of war, and in this precaution there was danger as well as safety; for although the king’s ships safeguarded him against the enemy if hostilities were in progress, as well as against the “little rogues” of privateers infesting the coasts and the adjacent seas, no sooner did the voyage near its end than the captains of the convoying ships took out of him, by force if necessary, as many men as they happened to require. This was a _quid pro quo_ of which the sailor could see neither the force nor the fairness, and he therefore let slip no opportunity of evading it.
“Their Lordships,” writes a commander who had been thus cheated, “need not be surprised that I pressed so few men out of so large a Convoy, for the Wind taking me Short before I got the length of Leostaff (Lowestoft), the Pilot would not take Charge of the Shipp to turn her out over the Stamford in the Night, which Oblig’d me to come to an Anchor in Corton Road. This I did by Signal, but the Convoy took no Notice of it, and all of them Run away and Left me, my Bottom being like a Rock for Roughness, so that I could not Follow them.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732–Letters of Capt. Young, 1742.]
Supposing, however, that all these manoeuvres failed him and the gang after a hot chase appeared in force on deck, the game was not yet up so far as the sailor was concerned. A ship, it is true, had neither the length of the Great North Road nor yet the depth of the Forest of Dean, but all the same there was within the narrow compass of her timbers many a lurking place wherein the artful sailor, by a judicious exercise of forethought and tools, might contrive to lie undetected until the gang had gone over the side.
About five o’clock in the afternoon of the 25th of June 1756, Capt. William Boys, from the quarter-deck of his ship the _Royal Sovereign_, then riding at anchor at the Nore, observed a snow on fire in the five-fathom channel, a little below the Spoil Buoy. He immediately sent his cutter to her assistance, but in spite of all efforts to save her she ran aground and burnt to the water’s edge. Her cargo consisted of wine, and the loss of the vessel was occasioned by one of her crew, who was fearful of being pressed, hiding himself in the hold with a lighted candle. He was burnt with the ship. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1487–Capt. Boys, 26 June 1756. Oddly enough, a somewhat similar accident was indirectly the cause of Capt. Boys’ entering the Navy. In 1727, whilst the merchantman of which he was then mate was on the voyage home from Jamaica, two mischievous imps of black boys, inquisitive to know whether some liquor spilt on deck was rum or water, applied a lighted candle to it. It proved to be rum, and when the officers and crew, who were obliged to take to the boats in consequence, were eventually picked up by a Newfoundland fishing vessel, unspeakable sufferings had reduced their number from twenty-three to seven, and these had only survived by feeding on the bodies of their dead shipmates. In memory of that harrowing time Boys adopted as his seal the device of a burning ship and the motto: “From Fire, Water and Famine by Providence Preserved.”]
Barring the lighted candle and the lamentable accident which followed its use, the means of evading the gang resorted to in this instance was of a piece with many adopted by the sailor. He contrived cunning hiding-places in the cargo, where the gangsmen systematically “pricked” for him with their cutlasses when the nature of the vessel’s lading admitted of it, or he stowed himself away in seachests, lockers and empty “harness” casks with an ingenuity and thoroughness that often baffled the astutest gangsman and the most protracted search. The spare sails forward, the readily accessible hiding-hole of the green-hand, afforded less secure concealment. Pierre Flountinherre, routed out of hiding there, endeavoured to save his face by declaring that he had “left France on purpose to get on board an English man-of-war.” Frenchman though he was, the gang obliged him. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1510–Capt. Baskerville, 5 Aug. 1795.]
In his endeavours to best the impress officers and gangsmen the sailor found a willing backer in his skipper, who systematically falsified the ship’s articles by writing “run,” “drowned,” “discharged” or “dead” against the names of such men as he particularly desired to save harmless from the press. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1525–Capt. Berry, 31 March 1801.] This done, the men were industriously coached in the various parts they were to play at the critical moment. In the skipper’s stead, supposing him to be for some reason unfit for naval service, some specially valuable hand was dubbed master. Failing this substitution, which was of course intended to save the man and not the skipper, the ablest seaman in the ship figured as mate, whilst others became putative boatswain or carpenter and apprentices–privileged persons whom no gang could lawfully take, but who, to render their position doubly secure, were furnished with spurious papers, of which every provident skipper kept a supply at hand for use in emergencies. When all hands were finally mustered to quarters, so to speak, there remained on deck only a “master” who could not navigate the ship, a “mate” unable to figure out the day’s run, a “carpenter” who did not know how to handle an adze, and some make-believe apprentices “bound” only to outwit the gang. And if in spite of all these precautions an able seaman were pressed, the real master immediately came forward and swore he was the mate.
Such thoroughly organised preparedness as this, however, was the exception rather than the rule, for though often attempted, it rarely reached perfection or stood the actual test. The sailor was too childlike by nature to play the fraud successfully, and as for the impress officer and the gangsman, neither was easily gulled. Supposing the sailor, then, to have nothing to hope for from deception or concealment, and supposing, too, that it was he who had the rough bottom beneath him and the fleet keel in pursuit, how was he to outwit the gang and evade the pinch? Nothing remained for him but to heave duty by the board and abandon his ship to the doubtful mercies of wind and wave. He accordingly went over the side with all the haste he could, appropriating the boats in defiance of authority, and leaving only the master and his mate, the protected carpenter and the apprentices to work the ship. Many a trader from overseas, summarily abandoned in this way, crawled into some outlying port, far from her destination, in quest–since a rigorous press often left no others available–of “old men and boys to carry her up.” There is even on record the case of a ship that passed the Nore “without a man belonging to her but the master, the passengers helping him to sail her.” Her people had “all got ashore by Harwich.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1473–Capt. Bouler, 18 Feb. 1725-6.]
Few shipowners were so foolhardy as to incur the risk of being thus hit in the pocket by the sailor’s well-known predilection for French leave when in danger of the press. Nor were the masters, for they, even when not part owners, had still an appreciable stake in the safety of the ships they sailed. As between masters, owners and men there consequently sprang up a sort of triangular sympathy, having for its base a common dread of the gangs, and for its apex their circumvention. This apex necessarily touched the coast at a point contiguous to the ocean tracks of the respective trades in which the ships sailed; and here, in some spot far removed from the regular haunts of the gangsman, an emergency crew was mustered by those indefatigable purveyors, the crimps, and held in readiness against the expected arrival.
Composed of seafaring men too old, too feeble, or too diseased to excite the cupidity of the most zealous lieutenant who eked out his pay on impress perquisites; of lads but recently embarked on the adventurous voyage of their teens; of pilots willing, for a consideration, to forego the pleasure of running ships aground; of fishermen who evaded His Majesty’s press under colour of Sea-Fencible, Militia, or Admiralty protections; and of unpressable foreigners whose wives bewailed them more or less beyond the seas, this scratch crew–the Preventive Men of the merchant service–here awaited the preconcerted signal which should apprise them that their employer’s ship was ready for a change of hands.
For safety’s sake the transfer was generally effected by night, when that course was possible; but the untimely appearance of a press-smack on the scene not infrequently necessitated the shifting of the crews in the broad light of day and the hottest of haste. On shore all had been in readiness perhaps for days. At the signal off dashed the deeply laden boats to the frantic ship, the scratch crew scrambled aboard, and the regular hands, thus released from duty, tumbled pell-mell into the empty boats and pulled for shore with a will mightily heartened by a running fire of round-shot from the smack and of musketry from her cutter, already out to intercept the fugitives. Then it was:–
“Cheerily, lads, cheerily! there’s a ganger hard to wind’ard; Cheerily, lads, cheerily! there’s a ganger hard a-lee; Cheerily, lads, cheerily! else ’tis farewell home and kindred, And the bosun’s mate a-raisin’ hell in the King’s Navee. Cheerily, lads, cheerily ho! the warrant’s out, the hanger’s drawn! Cheerily, lads, so cheerily! we’ll leave ’em an _R_ in pawn!”
[Footnote: When Jack deserted his ship under other conditions than those here described, an _R_ was written against his name to denote that he had “run.” So, when he shirked an obligation, monetary or moral, by running away from it, he was said to “leave an _R_ in pawn.”]
The place of muster of the emergency men thus became in turn the landing-place of the fugitive crew. Its whereabouts depended as a matter of course upon the trade in which the ship sailed. The spot chosen for the relief of the Holland, Baltic and Greenland traders of the East Coast was generally some wild, inaccessible part abutting directly on the German Ocean or the North Sea. London skippers in those trades favoured the neighbourhood of Great Yarmouth, where the maze of inland waterways constituting the Broads enabled the shifty sailor to lead the gangs a merry game at hide and seek. King’s Lynners affected Skegness and the Norfolk lip of the Wash. Of the men who sailed out of Hull not one in ten could be picked up, on their return, by the gangs haunting the Humber. They went ashore at Dimlington on the coast of Holderness, or at the Spurn. The homing sailors of Leith, as of the ports on the upper reaches of the Firth of Forth, enjoyed an immunity from the press scarcely less absolute than that of the Orkney Islanders, who for upwards of forty years contributed not a single man to the Navy. Having on either hand an easily accessible coast, inhabited by a people upon whose hospitality the gangs were chary of intruding, and abounding in lurking-places as secure as they were snug, the Mother Firth held on to her sailor sons with a pertinacity and success that excited the envy of the merchant seaman at large and drove impress officers to despair. The towns and villages to the north of the Firth were “full of men.” On no part of the north coast, indeed, from St. Abb’s Head clear round to Annan Water, was it an easy matter to circumvent the canny Scot who went a-sailoring. He had a trick of stopping short of his destination, when homeward bound, that proved as baffling to the gangs as it was in seeming contradiction to all the traditions of a race who pride themselves on “getting there.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral Pringle, Report on Rendezvous, 2 April 1795, and Captains’ Letters, _passim_.]
In the case of outward-bound ships, the disposition of the two crews was of course reversed. The scratch crew carried the ship down to the stipulated point of exchange, where they vacated her in favour of the actual crew, who had been secretly conveyed to that point by land. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Admiral Lord Nelson, Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Whichever way the trick was worked, it proved highly effective, for, except from the sea, no gang durst venture near such points of debarkation and departure without strong military support.
There still remained the emergency crew itself. The most decrepit, crippled or youthful were of course out of the question. But the foreigner and our shifty friend the man in lieu were fair game. Entering largely as they did into the make-up of almost every scratch crew, they were pressed without compunction whenever and wherever caught abusing their privileges by playing the emergency man. To keep such persons always and in all circumstances was a point of honour with the Navy Board. It had no other means of squaring accounts with the scratch crew.
The emergency man who plied “on his own” was more difficult to deal with. Keepers of the Eddystone made a “great deal of money” by putting inward-bound ships’ crews ashore; but when one of their number, Matthew Dolon by name, was pressed as a punishment for that offence, the Admiralty, having the fear of outraged Trade before its eyes, ordered his immediate discharge. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732–Capt. Yeo, 25 July 1727.]
The pilot, the fisherman and the longshoreman were notorious offenders in this respect. Whenever they saw a vessel bound in, they were in the habit of putting off to her and of first inciting the crew to escape and then hiring themselves at exorbitant rates to work the vessel into port. On such mischievous interlopers the gangsman had no mercy. He took them whenever he could, confident that when their respective cases were stated to the Board, that body would “tumble” to the occasion.
Any attempt at estimating the number of seafaring men who evaded the gangs and the call of the State by means of the devices and subterfuges here roughly sketched into the broad canvas of our picture would prove a task as profitless as it is impossible of accomplishment. One thing only is certain. The number fluctuated greatly from time to time with the activity or inactivity of the gangs. When the press was lax, there arose no question as there existed no need of escape; when it was hot, it was evaded systematically and with a degree of success extremely gratifying to the sailor. Taking the sea-borne coal trade of the port of London alone, it is estimated that in the single month of September 1770, at a time when an exceptionally severe press from protections was in full swing, not less than three thousand collier seamen got ashore between Yarmouth Roads and Foulness Point. As the coal trade was only one of many, and as the stretch of coast concerned comprised but a few miles out of hundreds equally well if not better adapted to the sailor’s furtive habits, the total of escapes must have been little short of enormous. It could not have been otherwise. In this grand battue of the sea it was clearly impossible to round-up and capture every skittish son of Neptune.
On shore, as at sea, the sailor’s course, when the gang was on his track, followed the lines of least resistance, only here he became a skulk as well as a fugitive. It was not that he was a less stout-hearted fellow than when at sea. He was merely the victim of a type of land neurosis. Drink and his recent escape from the gang got on his nerves and rendered him singularly liable to panic. The faintest hint of a press was enough to make his hair rise. At the first alarm he scuttled into hiding in the towns, or broke cover like a frightened hare.
The great press of 1755 affords many instances of such panic flights. Abounding in “lurking holes” where a man might lie perdue in comparative safety, King’s Lynn nevertheless emptied itself of seamen in a few hours’ time, and when the gang hurried to Wells by water, intending to intercept the fugitives there, the “idle fishermen on shore” sounded a fresh alarm and again they stampeded, going off to the eastward in great numbers and burying themselves in the thickly wooded dells and hills of that bit of Devon in Norfolk which lies between Clay-next-the-Sea and Sheringham. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486–Capt. Baird, 29 March and 21 April 1755.]
A similar exodus occurred at Ipswich. The day the warrants came down, as for many days previous, the ancient borough was full of seamen; but no sooner did it become known that the press was out than they vanished like the dew of the morning. For weeks the face of but one sailor was seen in the town, and he was only ferreted out, with the assistance of a dozen constables, after prolonged and none too legal search. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486–Capt. Brand, 26 Feb. 1755.]
How effectually the sailor could hide when dread of the press had him in its grip is strikingly illustrated by the hot London press of 1740. On that occasion the docks, the riverside slums and dens, the river itself both above and below bridge, were scoured by gangs who left no stratagem untried for unearthing and taking the hidden sailor. When the rigour of the press was past not a seaman, it is said, was to be found at large in London; yet within four-and-twenty hours sixteen thousand emerged from their retreats. [Footnote: Griffiths, _Impressment Fully Considered_.]
The secret of such effectual concealment lay in the fact that the nature of his hiding-place mattered little to the sailor so long as it was secure. Accustomed to quarters of the most cramped description on shipboard, he required little room for his stowing. The roughest bed, the worst ventilated hole, the most insanitary surroundings and conditions were all one to him. He could thus hide himself away in places and receptacles from which the average landsman would have turned in fear or disgust. In quarry, clay-pit, cellar or well; in holt, hill or cave; in chimney, hayloft or secret cell behind some old-time oven; in shady alehouse or malodorous slum where a man’s life was worth nothing unless he had the smell of tar upon him, and not much then; on isolated farmsteads and eyots, or in towns too remote or too hostile for the gangsman to penetrate–somewhere, somehow and of some sort the sailor found his lurking-place, and in it, by good providence, lay safe and snug throughout the hottest press.
Many of the seamen employed in the Newfoundland trade of Poole, gaining the shore at Chapman’s Pool or Lulworth, whiled away their stolen leisure either in the clay-pits of the Isle of Purbeck, where they defied intrusion by posting armed sentries at every point of access to their stronghold, or–their favourite haunt–on Portland Island, which the number and ill-repute of the labourers employed in its stone quarries rendered well-nigh impregnable. To search for, let alone to take the seamen frequenting that natural fortress–who of course “squared” the hard-bitten quarrymen–was more than any gang durst undertake unless, as was seldom the case, it consisted of some “very superior force.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581 –Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 5 Aug. 1805.]
With the solitary exception of Falmouth town, the Cornish coast was merely another Portland Neck enormously extended. From Rame Head to the Lizard and Land’s End, and in a minor sense from Land’s End away to Bude Haven in the far nor’-east, the entire littoral of this remote part of the kingdom was forbidden ground whereon no gangsman’s life was worth a moment’s purchase. The two hundred seins and twice two hundred drift-boats belonging to that coast employed at least six thousand fishermen, and of these the greater part, as soon as the fishing season was at an end, either turned “tinners” and went into the mines, where they were unassailable,
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 28 Sept. 1805.] or betook themselves to their strongholds at Newquay, St. Ives, Newland, Mousehole, Coversack, Polpero, Cawsand and other places where, in common with smugglers, deserters from the king’s ships at Hamoaze, and an endless succession of fugitive merchant seamen, they were as safe from intrusion or capture as they would have been on the coast of Labrador. It was impossible either to hunt them down or to take them on a coast so “completely perforated.” A thousand “stout, able young fellows” could have been drawn from this source without being missed; but the gangs fought shy of the task, and only when they carried vessels in distress into Falmouth were the redoubtable sons of the coves ever molested. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral M’Bride, 9 March 1795. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 578–Petition of the Inhabitants of the Village of Coversack, 31 Jan. 1778.]
On the Bristol Channel side Lundy Island offered unrivalled facilities for evasion, and many were the crews marooned there by far-sighted skippers who calculated on thus securing them against their return from Bristol, outward bound. The gangs as a rule gave this little Heligoland a wide berth, and when carried thither against their will they had a disconcerting habit of running away with the press-boat, and of thus marooning their commanding officer, that contributed not a little to the immunity the island enjoyed. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–Capt. Aylmer, 22 Dec. 1743.]
The sailor’s objection to Lundy was as strong as the gangsman’s. From his point of view it was no ideal place to hide in, and the effect upon him of enforced sojourn there was to make him sulky and mutinous. Rather the shore with all its dangers than an island that produced neither tobacco, rum, nor women! He therefore preferred sticking to his ship, even though he thereby ran the risk of impressment, until she arrived the length of the Holmes.
These islands are two in number, Steep Holme and Flat Holme, and so closely can vessels approach the latter, given favourable weather conditions, that a stone may be cast on shore from the deck. The business of landing and embarking was consequently easy, and though the islands themselves were as barren as Lundy of the three commodities the sailor loved, he was nevertheless content to terminate his voyage there for the following reasons. Under the lee of one or other of the islands there was generally to be found a boat-load of men who were willing, for a suitable return in coin of the realm, to work the ship into King Road, the anchorage of the port of Bristol. The sailor was thus left free to gain the shore in the neighbourhood of Uphill, Weston, or Clevedon Bay, whence it was an easy tramp, not to Bristol, of which he steered clear because of its gangs, but to Bath, or, did he prefer a place nearer at hand, to the little town of Pill, near Avon-mouth.
A favourite haunt of seafaring men, fishermen, pilots and pilots’ assistants, with a liberal sprinkling of that class of female known in sailor lingo as “brutes,” this lively little town was a place after Jack’s own heart. The gangsmen gave it a wide berth. It offered an abundance of material for him to work upon, but that material was a trifle too rough even for his infastidious taste. The majority of the permanent indwellers of Pill, as well as the casual ones, not only protected themselves from the press, when such a course was necessary, by a ready use of the fist and the club, but, when this means of exemption failed them, pleaded the special nature of their calling with great plausibility and success. They were “pilots’ assistants,” and as such they enjoyed for many years the unqualified indulgence of the naval authorities. The appellation they bore was nevertheless purely euphemistic. As a matter of fact they were sailors’ assistants who, under cover of an ostensible vocation, made it their real business, at the instigation and expense of Bristol shipowners, to save crews harmless from the gangs by boarding ships at the Holmes and working them from thence into the roadstead or to the quays. They are said to have been “very fine young men,” and many a longing look did the impress officers at Bristol cast their way whilst struggling to swell their monthly returns. So essentially necessary to the trade of the place were they considered to be, however, that they were allowed to checkmate the gangs, practically without molestation or hindrance, till about the beginning of the last century, when the Admiralty, suddenly awaking to the unpatriotic nature of a practice that so effectually deprived the Navy of its due, caused them to be served with a notice to the effect that “for the future all who navigated ships from the Holmes should be pressed as belonging to those ships.” At this threat the Pill men jeered. Relying on the length of pilotage water between King Road and Bristol, they took a leaf from the sailor’s log and ran before the press-boats could reach the ships in which they were temporarily employed. For four years this state of things continued. Then there was struck at the practice a blow which not even the Admiralty had foreseen. Tow-paths were constructed along the river-bank, and the pilots’ assistants, ousted by horses, fell an easy prey to the gangs. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 14 April 1805.]
Bath had no gang, and was in consequence much frequented by sailors of the better class. In 1803–taking that as a normal year–the number within its limits was estimated at three hundred–enough to man a ship-of-the-line. The fact being duly reported to the Admiralty, a lieutenant and gang were ordered over from Bristol to do some pressing. The civic authorities–mayor, magistrates, constables and watchmen–fired with sudden zeal for the service, all came forward “in the most handsome manner” with offers of countenance and support. In the purlieus of the town, however, the advent of the gang created panic. The seamen went into prompt hiding, the mob turned out in force, angry and threatening, resolved that no gang should violate the sanctuary of a cathedral city. Seeing how the wind set, the mayor and magistrates, having begun by backing the warrant, continued backing until they backed out of the affair altogether. The zealous watchmen could not be found, the eager constables ran away. Dismayed by these untimely defections, the lieutenant hurriedly resolved “to drop the business.” So the gang marched back to Bristol empty-handed, followed by the hearty execrations of the rabble and the heartier good wishes of the mayor, who assured them that as soon as he should be able to clap the skulking seamen in jail “on suspicion of various misdemeanours,” he would send for them again. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1528–Capt. Barker, 3 and 11 July 1803.] We do not learn that he ever did.
To Bristol no unprotected sailor ever repaired of his own free will, for early in the century of pressing the chickens of the most notorious kidnapping city in England began to come home to roost. The mantle of the Bristol mayor whom Jeffreys tried for a “kidnapping knave” fell upon a succession of regulating captains whose doings put their civic prototype to open shame, and more petitions and protests against the lawlessness of the gangs emanated from Bristol than from any other city in the kingdom.
The trowmen who navigated the Severn and the Wye, belonging as they did mainly to extra-parochial spots in the Forest of Dean, were exempt from the Militia ballot and the Army of Reserve. On the ground that they came under the protection of inland navigation, they likewise considered themselves exempt from the sea service, but this contention the Court of Exchequer in 1798 completely overset by deciding that the “passage of the River Severn between Gloucester and Bristol is open sea.” A press-gang was immediately let loose upon the numerous tribe frequenting it, whereupon the whole body of newly created sailors deserted their trows and fled to the Forest, where they remained in hiding till the disappointed gang sought other and more fruitful fields. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 14 April 1805.]
Within Chester gates the sailor for many years slept as securely as upon the high seas. No householder would admit the gangsmen beneath his roof; and when at length they succeeded in gaining a foothold within the city, all who were liable to the press immediately deserted it–“as they do every town where there is a gang”–and went “to reside at Parkgate.” Parkgate in this way became a resort of sea-faring men without parallel in the kingdom–a “nest” whose hornet bands were long, and with good reason, notorious for their ferocity and aggressiveness. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1446–Capt. Ayscough, 17 Nov. 1780.] An attempt to establish a rendezvous here in 1804 proved a failure. The seamen fled, no “business” could be done, and officer and gang were soon withdrawn.
In comparison with the seething Deeside hamlet, Liverpool was tameness itself. Now and then, as in 1745, the sailor element rose in arms, demanding who was master; but as a rule it suffered the gang, if not gladly, at least with exemplary patience. Homing seamen who desired to evade the press in that city–and they were many–fled ashore from their ships at Highlake, a spot so well adapted to their purpose that it required “strict care to catch them.” From Highlake they made their way to Parkgate, swelling still further the sailor population of that far-famed nest of skulkers.
Cork was a minor Parkgate. A graphic account of the conditions obtaining in that city has been left to us by Capt. Bennett, of H.M.S. _Lennox_, who did port duty there from May 1779 till March 1783. “Many hundreds of the best Seamen in this Province,” he tells us, “resort in Bodys in Country Villages round about here, where they are maintained by the Crimps, who dispose of them to Bristol, Liverpool and other Privateers, who appoint what part of the Coast to take them on Board. They go in Bodys, even in the Town of Cork, and bid defiance to the Press-gangs, and resort in houses armed, and laugh at both civil and military Power. This they did at Kinsale, where they threatened to pull the Jail down in a garrison’d Town.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1502–Capt. Bennett, 12 and 26 April 1782.] These tactics rendered the costly press-gangs all but useless. A hot press at Cork, in 1796, yielded only sixteen men fit for the service.
Space fails us to tell of how, owing to a three days’ delay in the London post that brought the warrants to Newhaven in the spring of ’78, the “alarm of soon pressing” spread like wildfire along that coast and drove every vessel to sea; of how “three or four hundred young fellows” belonging to Great Yarmouth and Gorleston, who had no families and could well have been spared without hindrance to the seafaring business of those towns, thought otherwise and took a little trip of “thirty or forty miles in the country to hide from the service”; or of how Capt. Routh, of the rendezvous at Leeds, happened upon a great concourse of skulkers at Castleford, whither they had been drawn by reasons of safety and the alleged fact that
“Castleford woman must needs be fair, Because they wash both in Calder and Aire,”
and after two unsuccessful attempts at surprise, at length took them with the aid of the military. These were everyday incidents which were accepted as matters of course and surprised nobody. Nevertheless the vagaries of the wayward children of the State, who chose to run away and hide instead of remaining to play the game, cost the naval authorities many an anxious moment. _They_ had to face both evasion and invasion, and the prevalence of the one did not help to repel the other.
His country’s fear of invasion by the French afforded the seafaring man the chance of the century. Pitt’s Quota Bill put good money in his pocket at the expense of his liberty, but in Admiral Sir Home Popham’s great scheme for the defence of the coasts against Boney and his flat-bottomed boats he scented something far more to his advantage and taste.
From the day in 1796 when Capt. Moriarty, press-gang-officer at Cork, reported the arrival of the long-expected Brest fleet off the Irish coast, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1621–Capt. Crosby, 30 Dec. 1796.] the question how best to defend from sudden attack so enormously extended and highly vulnerable a seaboard as that of the United Kingdom, became one of feverish moment. At least a hundred different projects for compassing that desirable end at one time or another claimed the attention of the Navy Board. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Knowles, 25 Jan. 1805.] One of these was decidedly ingenious. It aimed at destroying the French flotilla by means of logs of wood bored hollow and charged with gunpowder and ball. These were to be launched against the invaders somewhat after the manner of the modern torpedo, of which they were, in fact, the primitive type and original. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Rear-Admiral Young, 14 Aug. 1803, and secret enclosure, as in the Appendix. The Admiral’s “machine,” as he termed it, though embodying the true torpedo idea of an explosive device to be propelled against an enemy’s ship, was not designed to be so propelled on its own buoyancy, but by means of a fishing-boat, in which it lay concealed. Had his inventive genius taken a bolder flight and given us a more finished product in place of this crudity, the Whitehead torpedo would have been anticipated, in something more than mere principle, by upwards of half a century.]
Meantime, however, the Admiralty had adopted another plan–Admiral Popham, already famous for his improved code of signals, its originator. On paper it possessed the merits of all Haldanic substitutes for the real thing. It was patriotic, cheap, simple as kissing your hand. All you had to do was to take the fisherman, the longshoreman and other stalwarts who lived “one foot in sea and one on shore,” enroll them in corps under the command (as distinguished from the control) of naval officers, and practise them (on Sundays, since it was a work of strict necessity) in the use of the pike and the cannon, and, hey presto! the country was as safe from invasion as if the meddlesome French had never been. The expense would be trivial. Granting that the French did not take alarm and incontinently drop their hostile designs upon the tight little island, there would be a small outlay for pay, a trifle of a shilling a day on exercise days, but nothing more–except for martello towers. The boats it was proposed to enroll and arm would cost nothing. Their patriotic owners were to provide them free of charge.
Such was the Popham scheme on paper. On a working basis it proved quite another thing. The pikes provided were old ship-pikes, rotten and worthless. The only occasion on which they appear to have served any good purpose was when, at Gerrans and St. Mawes, the Fencibles joined the mob and terrified the farmers, who were ignorant of the actual condition of the pikes, into selling their corn at something less than famine prices. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Capt. Spry, 14 April 1801.] Guns hoary with age, requisitioned from country churchyards and village greens where they had rusted, some of them, ever since the days of Drake and Raleigh, were dragged forth and proudly grouped as “parks of artillery.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1513–Capt. Bradley, 21 Aug. 1796.] Signal stations could not be seen one from the other, or, if visible, perpetrated signals no one could read. The armed smacks were equally unreliable. In Ireland they could not be “trusted out of sight with a gun.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1529–Capt. Bowen, 12 Oct. 1803.] In England they left the guns behind them. The weight, the patriotic owners discovered, seriously hampered the carrying capacity and seaworthiness of their boats; so to abate the nuisance they hove the guns overboard on to the beach, where they were speedily buried in sand or shingle, while the appliances were carried off by those who had other uses for them than their country’s defence. The vessels thus armed, moreover, were always at sea, the men never at home. When it was desired to practise them in the raising of the sluice-gates which, in the event of invasion, were to convert Romney Marsh into an inland sea, no efforts availed to get together sufficient men for the purpose. Immune from the press by reason of their newly created status of Sea-Fencibles, they were all elsewhere, following their time-honoured vocations of fishing and smuggling with industry and gladness of heart. As a means of repelling invasion the Popham scheme was farcical and worthless; as a means of evading the press it was the finest thing ever invented. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Berkeley, Reports on Sea-Fencibles, 1805; Admiral Lord Keith, Sentiments upon the Sea-Fencible System, 7 Jan. 1805.] The only benefits the country ever drew from it, apart from this, were two. It provided the Admiralty with an incomparable register of seafaring men, and some modern artists with secluded summer retreats.
It goes without saying that a document of such vital consequence to the seafaring man as an Admiralty protection did not escape the attention of those who, from various motives, sought to aid and abet the sailor in his evasion of the press. Protections were freely lent and exchanged, bought and sold, “coaxed,” concocted and stolen. Skilful predecessors of Jim the Penman imitated to the life the signatures of Pembroke and Sandwich, Lord High Admirals, and of the lesser fry who put the official hand to those magic papers. “Great abuses” were “committed that way.” Bogus protections could be obtained at Sunderland for 8s. 6d., Stephenson and Collins, the disreputable schoolmasters who made a business of faking them, coining money by the “infamous practice.” In London “one Broucher, living in St. Michael’s Lane,” supplied them to all comers at 3 Pounds apiece. Even the Navy Office was not above suspicion in this respect, for in ’98 a clerk there, whose name does not transpire, was accused of adding to his income by the sale of bogus protections at a guinea a head. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2740–Lieut. Abbs, 5 Oct. 1798.]
American protections were the Admiralty’s pet bugbear. For many years after the successful issue of the War of Independence a bitter animosity characterised the attitude of the British naval officer towards the American sailor. Whenever he could be laid hold of he was pressed, and no matter what documents he produced in evidence of his American birth and citizenship, those documents were almost invariably pronounced false and fraudulent. There were weighty reasons, however, for refusing to accept the claim of the alleged American sailor at its face value. No class of protection was so generally forged, so extensively bought and sold, as the American. Practically every British seaman who made the run to an American port took the precaution, during his sojourn in that land of liberty, to provide himself with spurious papers against his return to England, where he hoped, by means of them, to checkmate the gang. The process of obtaining such papers was simplicity itself. All the sailor had to do, at, say, New York, was to apply himself to one Riley, whose other name was Paddy. The sum of three dollars having changed hands, Riley and his client betook themselves to the retreat of some shady Notary Public, where the Irishman made ready oath that the British seaman was as much American born as himself. The business was now as good as done, for on the strength of this lying affidavit any Collector of Customs on the Atlantic coast would for a trifling fee grant the sailor a certificate of citizenship. Riley created American citizens in this way at the rate, it is said, of a dozen a day, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1523-Deposition of Zacharias Pasco, 20 Jan. 1800.] and as he was only one of many plying the same lucrative trade, the effect of such wholesale creations upon the impress service in England, had they been allowed to pass unchallenged, may be readily conceived.
The fraud, worse luck for the service, was by no means confined to America. Almost every home seaport had its recognised perveyor of “false American passes.” At Liverpool a former clerk to the Collector of Customs for Pembroke, Pilsbury by name, grew rich on them, whilst at Greenock, Shields and other north-country shipping centres they were for many years readily procurable of one Walter Gilly and his confederates, whose transactions in this kind of paper drove the Navy Board to desperation. They accordingly instructed Capt. Brown, gang-officer at Greenock, to take Gilly at all hazards, but the fabricator of passes fled the town ere the gang could be put on his track. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1549–Capt. Brown, 22 Aug. 1809.]
Considering that every naval officer, from the Lord High Admiral downwards, had these facts and circumstances at his fingers’ end, it is hardly suprising that protections having, or purporting to have, an American origin, should have been viewed with profound distrust –distrust too often justified, and more than justified, by the very nature of the documents themselves. Thus a gentleman of colour, Cato Martin by name, when taken out of the _Dolly_ West-Indiaman at Bristol, had the assurance to produce a white man’s pass certifying his eyes, which were undeniably yellow, to be a soft sky-blue, and his hair, which was hopelessly black and woolly, to be of that well-known hue most commonly associated with hair grown north of the Tweed. It was reserved, however, for an able seaman bearing the distinguished name of Oliver Cromwell to break all known records in this respect. When pressed, he unblushingly produced a pass dated in America the 29th of May and viséd by the American Consul in London on the 6th of June immediately following, thus conferring on its bearer the unique distinction of having crossed the Atlantic in eight days at a time when the voyage occupied honester men nearly as many weeks. To press such frauds was a public benefit. On the other hand, one confesses to a certain sympathy with the American sailor who was pressed because he “spoke English very well.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2734–Capt. Yorke, 8 March 1798.]
Believing in the simplicity of his heart that others were as gullible as himself, the fugitive sailor sought habitually to hide his identity beneath some temporary disguise of greater or less transparency. That of farm labourer was perhaps his favourite choice. The number of seamen so disguised, and employed on farms within ten miles of the coast between Hull and Whitby prior to the sailing of the Greenland and Baltic ships in 1803, was estimated at more than a thousand able-bodied men. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Admiral Phillip, Report on Rendezvous, 25 April 1804.] Seamen using the Newfoundland trade of Dartmouth were “half-farmer, half-sailor.” When the call of the sea no longer lured them, they returned to the land in an agricultural sense, resorting in hundreds to the farmsteads in the Southams, where they were far out of reach of the gangs. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral M’Bride, Report on Rendezvous, 28 Feb. 1795]
CHAPTER VII.
WHAT THE GANG DID ASHORE.
In his endeavours to escape the gang the sailor resembled nothing so much as that hopelessly impotent fugitive the flying-fish. For both the sea swarmed with enemies bent on catching them. Both sought to evade those enemies by flight, and both, their ineffectual flight ended, returned to the sea again whether they would or not. It was their fate, a deep-sea kismet as unavoidable as death.
The ultimate destination of the sailor who by strategy or accident succeeded in eluding the triple line of sea-gangs so placed as to head him off from the coast, was thus never in doubt. His longest flights were those he made on land, for here the broad horizon that stood the gangs in such good stead at sea was measurably narrower, while hiding-places abounded and were never far to seek. All the same, in spite of these adventitious aids to self-effacement, the predestined end of the seafaring man sooner or later overtook him. The gang met him at the turning of the ways and wiped him off the face of the land. In the expressive words of a naval officer who knew the conditions thoroughly well, the sailor’s chances of obtaining a good run for his money “were not worth a chaw of tobacco.”
For this inevitable finish to all the sailor’s attempts at flight on shore there existed in the main two reasons. The first of these lay in the sailor himself, making of him an unconscious aider and abettor in his own capture. Just as love and a cough cannot be hid, so there was no disguising the fact that the sailor was a sailor. He was marked by characteristics that infallibly betrayed him. His bandy legs and rolling gait suggested irresistibly the way of a ship at sea, and no “soaking” in alehouse or tavern could eliminate the salt from the peculiar oaths that were as natural to him as the breath of life. Assume what disguise he would, he fell under suspicion at sight, and he had only to open his mouth to turn that suspicion into certainty. It needed no Sherlock Holmes of a gangsman to divine what he was or whence he came.
The second reason why the sailor could never long escape the gangs was because the gangs were numerically too many for him. It was no question of a chance gang here and there. The country swarmed with them.
Take the coast. Here every seaport of any pretensions in the way of trade, together with every spot between such ports known to be favoured or habitually used by the homing sailor as a landing-place, with certain exceptions already noted, either had its own particular gang or was closely watched by some gang stationed within easy access of the spot. In this way the whole island was ringed in by gangs on shore, just as it was similarly ringed in by other gangs afloat.
“If their Lordships would give me authority to press here,” says Lieut. Oakley, writing to the Sea Lords from Deal in 1743, “I could frequently pick up good seamen ashoar. I mean seamen _who by some means escape being prest by the men of war and tenders_.”
In this modest request the lieutenant states the whole case for the land-gang, at once demonstrating its utility and defining its functions. Unconsciously he does more. He echoes a cry that incessantly assailed the ears of Admiralty: “The sailor has escaped! Send us warrants and give us gangs, and we will catch him yet.”
It was this call, the call of the fleet, that dominated the situation and forced order out of chaos. The men must be “rose,” and only method could do it. The demand was a heavy one to make upon the most unsystematic system ever known, yet it survived the ordeal. The coast was mapped out, warrants were dispatched to this point and that, rendezvous were opened, gangs formed. No effort or outlay was spared to take the sailor the moment he got ashore, or very soon after.
In this systematic setting of land-traps that vast head-centre of the nation’s overseas trade, the metropolis, naturally had first place. The streets, and especially the waterside streets, were infested with gangs. At times it was unsafe for any able-bodied man to venture abroad unless he had on him an undeniable protection or wore a dress that unmistakeably proclaimed the gentleman. The general rendezvous was on Tower Hill; but as ships completing their complement nearly always sent a gang or two to London, minor rendezvous abounded. St. Katherine’s by the Tower was specially favoured by them. The “Rotterdam Arms” and the “Two Dutch Skippers,” well-known taverns within that precinct, were seldom without the bit of bunting that proclaimed the headquarters of the gang. At Westminster the “White Swan” in King’s Street usually bore a similar decoration, as did also the “Ship” in Holborn.
A characteristic case of pressing by a gang using the last-named house occurred in 1706. Ransacking the town in quest of pressable subjects of Her Majesty, they came one day to the “Cock and Rummer” in Bow Street, where a big dinner was in progress. Here nothing would suit their tooth but mine host’s apprentice, and as ill-luck would have it the apprentice was cook to the establishment and responsible for the dinner. Him they nevertheless seized and would have hurried away in spite of his master’s supplications, protests and offers of free drinks, had it not been for the fact that a mob collected and forcibly prevented them. Other gangs hurrying to the assistance of their hard-pressed comrades–to the number, it is said, of sixty men–a free fight ensued, in the course of which a burly constable, armed with a formidable longstaff, was singled out by the original gang, doubtless on account of the prominent part he took in the fray, as a fitting substitute for the apprentice. By dint of beating the poor fellow till he was past resistance they at length got him to the “Ship,” where they were in the very act of bundling him into a coach, with the intention of carrying him to the waterside below bridge, and of their putting him on board the press-smack, when in the general confusion he somehow effected his escape. [Footnote: “A Horrible Relation,” _Review_, 17 March 1705-6.] Such incidents were common enough not only at that time but long after.
At Gravesend sailors came ashore in such numbers from East India and other ships as to keep a brace of gangs busy. Another found enough to do at Broadstairs, whence a large number of vessels sailed in the Iceland cod fishery and similar industries. Faversham was a port and had its gang, and from Margate right away to Portsmouth, and from Portsmouth to Plymouth, nearly every town of any size that offered ready hiding to the fugitive sailor from the Channel was similarly favoured. Brighton formed a notable exception, and this circumstance gave rise to an episode about which we shall have more to say presently.
To record in these pages the local of all the gangs that were stationed in this manner upon the seaboard of the kingdom would be as undesirable as it is foreign to the scope of this chapter. Enough to repeat that the land, always the sailor’s objective in eluding the triple cordon of sea-borne gangs, was ringed in and surrounded by a circle of land-gangs in every respect identical with that described as hedging the southern coast, and in its continuity almost as unbroken as the shore itself. Both sea-gangs and coast-gangs were amphibious, using either land or sea at pleasure.
Inland the conditions were the same, yet materially different. What was on the coast an encircling line assumed here the form of a vast net, to which the principal towns, the great cross-roads and the arterial bridges of the country stood in the relation of reticular knots, while the constant “ranging” of the gangs, now in this direction, now in that, supplied the connecting filaments or threads. The gangs composing this great inland net were not amphibious. Their most desperate aquatic ventures were confined to rivers and canals. Ability to do their twenty miles a day on foot counted for more with them than a knowledge of how to handle an oar or distinguish the “cheeks” of a gaff from its “jaw.”
Just as the sea-gangs in their raids upon the land were the Danes and “creekmen” of their time, so the land-gangsman was the true highwayman of the century that begot him. He kept every strategic point of every main thoroughfare, held all the bridges, watched all the ferries, haunted all the fairs. No place where likely men were to be found escaped his calculating eye.
He was an inveterate early riser, and sailors sauntering to the fair for want of better employment ran grave risks. In this way a large number were taken on the road to Croydon fair one morning in September 1743. For actual pressing the fair itself was unsafe because of the great concourse of people; but it formed one of the best possible hunting-grounds and was kept under close observation for that reason. Here the gangsman marked his victim, whose steps he dogged into the country when his business was done or his pleasure ended, never for a moment losing sight of him until he walked into the trap all ready set in some wayside spinny or beneath some sheltering bridge.
Bridges were the inland gangsman’s favourite haunt. They not only afforded ready concealment, they had to be crossed. Thus Lodden Bridge, near Reading, accounted one of the “likeliest places in the country for straggling seamen,” was seldom without its gang. Nor was the great bridge at Gloucester, since, as the first bridge over the Severn, it drew to itself all the highroads and their users from Wales and the north. To sailors making for the south coast from those parts it was a point of approach as dangerous as it was unavoidable. Great numbers were taken here in consequence. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 58l–Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 14 April 1805.]
So of ferries. The passage boats at Queensferry on the Firth of Forth, watched by gangs from Inverkeithing, yielded almost as many men in the course of a year as the costly rendezvous at Leith. Greenock ferries proved scarcely less productive. But there was here an exception. The ferry between Glenfinart and Greenock plied only twice a week, and as both occasions coincided with market-days the boat was invariably crowded with women. Only once did it yield a man. Peter Weir, the hand in charge, one day overset the boat, drowning every soul on board except himself. Thereupon the gang pressed him, arguing that one who used the sea so effectively could not fail to make a valuable addition to the fleet.
Inland towns traversed by the great highroads leading from north to south, or from east to west, were much frequented by the gangs. Amongst these Stourbridge perhaps ranked first. Situated midway between the great ports of Liverpool and Bristol, it easily and effectually commanded Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Kidderminster and other populous towns, while it was too small to afford secure hiding within itself. The gangs operating from Stourbridge brought in an endless procession of ragged and travel-stained seamen. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1500 –Letters of Capt. Beecher, 1780.]
From ports on the Bristol Channel to ports on the English Channel, and the reverse, many seamen crossed the country by stage-coach or wagon, and to intercept them gangs were stationed at Okehampton, Liskeard and Exeter. Taunton and Salisbury also, as “great thoroughfares to and from the west,” had each its gang, and a sufficient number of sailors escaped the press at the latter place to justify the presence of another at Romsey. Andover had a gang as early as 1756, on the recommendation of no less a man than Rodney.
Shore gangs were of necessity ambulatory. To sit down before the rendezvous pipe in hand, and expect the evasive sailor to come of his own accord and beg the favour of being pressed, would have been a futile waste of time and tobacco. The very essence of the gangman’s duty lay in the leg-work he did. To that end he ate the king’s victuals and wore the king’s shoe-leather. Consequently he was early afoot and late to bed. Ten miles out and ten home made up his daily constitutional, and if he saw fit to exceed that distance he did not incur his captain’s displeasure. The gang at Reading, a strategic point of great importance on the Bath and Bristol road, traversed all the country round about within a radius of twenty miles–double the regulation distance. That at King’s Lynn, another centre of unmeasured possibilities, trudged as far afield as Boston, Ely, Peterborough and Wells-on-Sea. And the Isle of Wight gang, stationed at Cowes or Ryde, now and then co-operated with a gang from Portsmouth or Gosport and ranged the whole length and breadth of the island, which was a noted nest of deserters and skulkers. “Range,” by the way, was a word much favoured by the officers who led such expeditions. Its use is happy. It suggests the object well in view, the nicely calculated distance, the steady aim that seldom missed its mark. The gang that “ranged” rarely returned empty-handed.
On these excursions the favourite resting-place was some secluded nook overlooking the point of crossing of two or more highroads; the favourite place of refreshment, some busy wayside alehouse. Both were good to rest or refresh in, for at both the chances of effecting a capture were far more numerous than on the open road.
The object of the gang in taking the road was not, however, so much what could be picked up by chance in the course of a day’s march, as the execution of some preconcerted design upon a particular person or place. This brings us to the methods of pressing commonly adopted, which may be roughly summarised under the three heads of surprise, violence and the hunt. Frequently all three were combined; but as in the case of gangs operating on the waters of rivers or harbours, the essential element in all pre-arranged raids, attacks and predatory expeditions was the first-named element, surprise. In this respect the gangsmen were genuine “Peep-o’-Day Boys.” The siege of Brighton is a notable case in point.
The inhabitants of Brighton, better known in the days of the press-gang as Brighthelmstone, consisted largely of fisher-folk in respect to whom the Admiralty had been guilty of one of its rare oversights. For generations no call was made upon them to serve the king at sea. This accidental immunity in course of time came to be regarded by the Brighton fisherman as his birthright, and the misconception bred consequences. For one thing, it made him intolerably saucy. He boasted that no impress officer had power to take him, and he backed up the boast by openly insulting, and on more than one occasion violently assaulting the king’s uniform. With all this he was a hardy, long-lived, lusty fellow, and as his numbers were never thinned by that active corrector of an excessive birth-rate, the press-gang, he speedily overstocked the town. An energetic worker while his two great harvests of herring and mackerel held out, he was at other times indolent, lazy and careless of the fact that his numerous progeny burdened the rates. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 31 Dec. 1804.] These unpleasing circumstances having been duly reported to the Admiralty, their Lordships decided that what the Brighton fisherman required to correct his lax principles and stiffen his backbone was a good hot press. They accordingly issued orders for an early raid to be made upon that promising nursery of man-o’-war’s-men.
The orders, which were of course secret, bore date the 3rd of July 1779, and were directed to Capt. Alms, who, as regulating officer at Shoreham, was likewise in charge of the gang at Newhaven under Lieut. Bradley, and of the gang at Littlehampton under Lieut. Breedon. At Shoreham there was also a tender, manned by an able crew. With these three gangs and the tender’s crew at his back, Alms determined to lay siege to Brighton and teach the fishermen there a lesson they should not soon forget. But first, in order to render the success of the project doubly sure, he enlisted the aid of Major-General Sloper, Commandant at Lewes, who readily consented to lend a company of soldiers to assist in the execution of the design.
These preparations were some little time in the making, and it was not until the Thursday immediately preceding the 24th of July that all was in readiness. On the night of that day, by preconcerted arrangement, the allied forces took the road–for the Littlehampton gang, a matter of some twenty miles–and at the first flush of dawn united on the outskirts of the sleeping town, where the soldiers were without loss of time so disposed as to cut off every avenue of escape. This done, the gangs split up and by devious ways, but with all expedition, concentrated their strength upon the quay, expecting to find there a large number of men making ready for the day’s fishing. To their intense chagrin the quay was deserted. The night had been a tempestuous one, with heavy rain, and though the unfortunate gangsmen were soaked to the skin, the fishermen all lay dry in bed. Hearing the wind and rain, not a man turned out.
By this time the few people who were abroad on necessary occasions had raised the alarm, and on every hand were heard loud cries of “Press-gang!” and the hurried barricading of doors. For ten hours “every man kept himself locked up and bolted.” For ten hours Alms waited in vain upon the local Justice of the Peace for power to break and enter the fishermen’s cottages. His repeated requests being refused, he was at length “under the necessity of quitting the town with only one man.” So ended the siege of Brighton; but Bradley, on his way back to Newhaven, fell in with a gang of smugglers, of whom he pressed five. Brighton did not soon forget the terrors of that rain-swept morning. For many a long day her people were “very shy, and cautious of appearing in public.” The salutary effects of the raid, however, did not extend to the fishermen it was intended to benefit. They became more insolent than ever, and a few years later marked their resentment of the attempt to press them by administering a sound thrashing to Mr. Midshipman Sealy, of the Shoreham rendezvous, whom they one day caught unawares. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1445-46–Letters of Capt. Alms.]
The surprise tactics of the gang of course varied according to circumstances, and the form they took was sometimes highly ingenious. A not uncommon stratagem was the impersonation of a recruiting party beating up for volunteers. With cockades in their hats, drums rolling and fifes shrilling, the gangsmen, who of course had their arms concealed, marched ostentatiously through the high-street of some sizable country town and so into the market-place. Since nobody had anything to fear from a harmless recruiting party, people turned out in strength to see the sight and listen to the music. When they had in this way drawn as many as they could into the open, the gangsmen suddenly threw off their disguise and seized every pressable person they could lay hands on. Market-day was ill-adapted to these tactics. It brought too big a crowd together.
A similar ruse was once practised with great success upon the inhabitants of Portsmouth by Capt. Bowen of the _Dreadnought_, in connection with a general press which the Admiralty had secretly ordered to be made in and about that town. Dockyard towns were not as a rule considered good pressing-grounds because of the drain of men set up by the ships of war fitting out there; but Bowen had certainly no reason to subscribe to that opinion. Late on the night of the 8th of March 1803, he landed a company of marines at Gosport for the purpose, as it was given out, of suppressing a mutiny at Fort Monckton. The news spread rapidly, drawing crowds of people from their homes in anticipation of an exciting scrimmage. This gave Bowen the opportunity he counted upon. When the throngs had crossed Haslar Bridge he posted marines at the bridge-end, and as the disappointed people came pouring back the “jollies” pressed every man in the crowd. Five hundred are said to have been taken on this occasion, but as the nature of the service forbade discrimination at the moment of pressing, nearly one-half were next day discharged as unfit or exempt. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1057–Admiral Milbanke, 9 March 1803.]
Sometimes, though not often, it was the gang that was surprised. All hands would perhaps be snug in bed after a long and trying day, when suddenly a thunderous knocking at the rendezvous door, and stentorian cries of: “Turn out! turn out there!” coupled with epithets here unproducible, would bring every man of them into the street in the turn of a handspike, half-dressed but fully armed and awake to the fact that a party of belated seamen was coming down the road. The sailors were perhaps more road-weary than the gangsmen, and provided none of them succeeded in slipping away in the darkness, or made a successful resistance, in half-an-hour’s time or less the whole party would be safe under lock and key, cursing luck for a scurvy trickster in delivering them over to the gang.
The sailor’s well-known partiality for drink was constantly turned to account by the astute gangsman. If a sailor himself, he laid aside his hanger or cudgel and played the game of “What ho! shipmate” at the cost of a can or two of flip, gently guiding his boon companion to the rendezvous when he had got him sufficiently corned. Failing these tactics, he adopted others equally effective. At Liverpool, where the seafaring element was always a large one, it was a common practice for the gangs to lie low for a time, thus inducing the sailor to believe himself safe from molestation. He immediately indulged in a desperate drinking bout and so put himself entirely in their power. Whether rolling about the town “very much in liquor,” or “snugly moored in Sot’s Bay,” he was an easy victim.
Another ineradicable weakness that often landed the sailor in the press-room was his propensity to indulge in “swank.” Two jolly tars, who were fully protected and consequently believed themselves immune from the press, once bought a four-wheeled post-chaise and hired a painter in Long Acre to ornament it with anchors, masts, cannon and a variety of other objects emblematic of the sea. In this ornate vehicle they set out, behind six horses, with the intention of posting down to Alnwick, where their sweethearts lived. So impatient were they to get over the road that they could not be prevailed upon, at any of the numerous inns where they pulled up for refreshment, to stop long enough to have the wheels properly greased, crying out at the delay: “Avast there! she’s had tar enough,” and so on again. Just as they were making a triumphal entry into Newcastle-upon-Tyne the wheels took fire, and the chaise, saturated with the liquor they had spilt in the course of their mad drive, burst into flames fore and aft. The sailors bellowed lustily for help, whereupon the spectators ran to their assistance and by swamping the ship with buckets of water succeeded in putting out the fire. Now it happened that in the crowd drawn together by such an unusual occurrence there was an impress officer who was greatly shocked by the exhibition. He considered that the sailors had been guilty of unseemly behaviour, and on that ground had them pressed. Notwithstanding their protections they were kept.
In his efforts to swell the returns of pressed men the gangsman was supposed–we may even go so far as to say enjoined–to use no more violence than was absolutely necessary to attain his end. The question of force thus resolved itself into one of the degree of resistance he encountered. Needless to say, he did not always knock a man down before bidding him stand in the king’s name. Recourse to measures so extreme was not always necessary. Every sailor had not the pluck to fight, and even when he had both the pluck and the good-will, hard drinking, weary days of tramping, or long abstinence from food had perhaps sapped his strength, leaving him in no fit condition to hold his own in a scrap with the well-fed gangsman. The latter consequently had it pretty much his own way. A firm hand on the shoulder, or at the most a short, sharp tussle, and the man was his. But there were exceptions to this easy rule, as we shall see in our next chapter.
Hunting the sailor was largely a matter of information, and unfortunately for his chances of escape informers were seldom wanting. Everywhere it was a game at hide-and-seek. Constables had orders to report him. Chapmen, drovers and soldiers, persons who were much on the road, kept a bright lookout for him. The crimp, habitually given to underhand practices, turned informer when prices for seamen ruled low in the service he usually catered for. His mistress loved him as long as his money lasted; when he had no more to throw away upon her she perfidiously betrayed him. And for all this there was a reason as simple as casting up the number of shillings in the pound. No matter how penniless the sailor himself might be, he was always worth that sum at the rendezvous. Twenty shillings was the reward paid for information leading to his apprehension as a straggler or a skulker, and it was largely on the strength of such informations, and often under the personal guidance of such detestable informers, that the gang went a-hunting.
Apart from greed of gain, the motive most commonly underlying informations was either jealousy or spite. Women were the greatest sinners in the first respect. Let the sailorman concealed by a woman only so much as look with favour upon another, and his fate was sealed. She gave him away, or, what was more profitable, sold him without regret. There were as good fish in the sea as ever came out. Perhaps better.
On the wings of spite and malice the escapades of youth often came home to roost after many years. Men who had run away to sea as lads, but had afterwards married and settled down, were informed on by evil-disposed persons who bore them some grudge, and torn from their families as having used the sea. Stephen Kemp, of Warbelton in Sussex, one of the many who suffered this fate, had indeed used the sea, but only for a single night on board a fishing-boat. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1445–Capt. Alms, 9 June 1777.]
In face of these infamies it is good to read of how they dealt with informers at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There the role was one fraught with peculiar danger. Rewards were paid by the Collector of Customs, and when a Newcastle man went to the Customs-House to claim the price of some sailor’s betrayal, the people set upon him and incontinently broke his head. One notorious receiver of such rewards was “nearly murther’d.” Thereafter informers had to be paid in private places for fear of the mob, and so many persons fell under suspicion of playing the dastardly game that the regulating captain was besieged by applicants for “certificates of innocency.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1497–Letters of Capt. Bover, 1777.]
[Illustration: 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.]
Informations not infrequently took the form of anonymous communications addressed by the same hand to two different gangs at one and the same time, and when this was the case, and both gangs sallied forth in quest of the skulker, a collision was pretty sure to follow. Sometimes the encounter resolved itself into a running fight, in the course of which the poor sailor, who formed the bone of contention, was pressed and re-pressed several times over between his hiding-place and one or other of the rendezvous.
Rivalry between gangs engaged in ordinary pressing led to many a stirring encounter and bloody fracas. A gang sent out by H.M.S. _Thetis_ was once attacked, while prowling about the waterside slums of Deptford, by “three or four different gangs, to the number of thirty men.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1502–Capt. Butcher, 29 Oct. 1782.] There was a greater demand for bandages than for sailors in Deptford during the rest of the night.
The most extraordinary affair of this description to be met with in the annals of pressing is perhaps one that occurred early in the reign of Queen Anne. Amongst the men-of-war then lying at Spithead were the _Dorsetshire_, Capt. Butler commander, and the _Medway_. Hearing that some sailors were in hiding at a place a little distance beyond Gosport, Capt. Butler dispatched his 1st and 2nd lieutenants, in charge of thirty of his best men, with instructions to take them and bring them on board. It so happened that a strong gang was at the same time on shore from the _Medway_, presumably on the same errand, and this party the Dorsetshires, returning to their ship with the seamen they had taken, found posted in the Gosport road for the avowed purpose of re-pressing the pressed men. By a timely detour, however, they reached the waterside “without any mischief done.”
Meanwhile, a rumour had somehow reached the ears of Capt. Butler to the effect that a fight was in progress and his 1st lieutenant killed. He immediately took boat and hurried over to Gosport, where, to his relief, he found his people all safe in their boats, but on the Point, to use his own graphic words, “severall hundred People, some with drawn Swords, some with Spitts, others with Clubbs, Staves & Stretchers. Some cry’d ‘One & All!’ others cry’d ‘Medways!’ and some again swearing, cursing & banning that they would knock my People’s Brains out. Off I went with my Barge to the Longboat,” continues the gallant captain, “commanding them to weigh their grappling & goe with me aboard. In the meantime off came about twelve Boats full with the _Medway’s_ men to lay my Longboat aboard, who surrounded us with Swords, Clubbs, Staves & divers Instruments, & nothing would do but all our Brains must be Knock’t out. Finding how I defended the Longboat, they then undertook to attack myselfe and people, One of their Boats came upon the stern and made severall Blows at my Coxwain, and if it had not been for the Resolution I had taken to endure all these Abuses, I had Kill’d all those men with my own Hand; but this Boat in particular stuck close to me with only six men, and I kept a very good Eye upon her. All this time we were rowing out of the Harbour with these Boats about us as far as Portsmouth Point, my Coxwain wounded, myselfe and People dangerously assaulted with Stones which they brought from the Beech & threw at us, and as their Boats drop’d off I took my opportunity & seized ye Boat with the Six Men that had so attack’d me, and have secured them in Irons.” With this the incident practically ended; for although the Medways retaliated by seizing and carrying off the _Dorsetshire’s_ coxwain and a crew who ventured ashore next day with letters, the latter were speedily released; but for a week Capt. Butler–fiery old Trojan! who could have slain a whole boat’s-crew with his own hand–remained a close prisoner on board his ship. “Should I but put my foot ashoar,” we hear him growl, “I am murther’d that minute.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1467–Capt. Butler, 1 June 1705.]
With certain exceptions presently to be noted, every man’s hand was against the fugitive sailor, and this being so it followed as a matter of course that in his inveterate pursuit of him the gangsman found more honourable allies than that nefarious person, the man-selling informer. The class whom the sailor himself, in his contempt of the good feeding he never shared, nicknamed “big-bellied placemen”–the pompous mayors, the portly aldermen and the county magistrate who knew a good horse or hound but precious little law, were almost to a man the gangsman’s coadjutors. Lavishly wined and dined at Admiralty expense, they urbanely “backed” the regulating captain’s warrants, consistently winked at his glaring infractions of law and order, and with the most commendable loyalty imaginable did all in their power to forward His Majesty’s service. Even the military, if rightly approached on their pinnacle of lofty superiority, now and then condescended to lend the gangsman a hand. Did not Sloper, Major-General and Commandant at Lewes, throw a whole company into the siege of Brighton?
These post-prandial concessions on the part of bigwigs desirous of currying favour in high places on the whole told heavily against the sorely harassed object of the gangsman’s quest, rendering it, amongst other things, extremely unsafe for him to indulge in those unconventional outbursts which, under happier conditions, so uniformly marked his jovial moods. At the playhouse, for example, he could not heave empty bottles or similar tokens of appreciation upon the stage without grave risk of incurring the fate that overtook Steven David, Samuel Jenkins and Thomas Williams, three sailors of Falmouth town who, merely because they adopted so unusual a mode of applauding a favourite, were by magisterial order handed over to Lieut. Box of H.M.S. _Blonde_, with a peremptory request that they should be transferred forthwith to that floating stage where the only recognised “turns” were those of the cat and the capstan. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1537–Capt. Ballard, 13 Dec. 1806.]
Luckily for the sailor and those of other callings who shared his liability to the press, the civil authorities did not range themselves on the gangsman’s side with complete unanimity. Local considerations of trade, coupled with some faint conception of the hideous injustice the seafaring classes groaned under, and groaned in vain, here and there outweighed patriotism and dinners. Little by little a cantankerous spirit of opposition got abroad, and every now and then, at this point or at that, some mayor or alderman, obsessed by this spirit beyond his fellows and his time, seized such opportunities as office threw in his way to mark his disapproval of the wrongs the sailor suffered. Had this attitude been more general, or more consistent in itself, the press-gang would not have endured for a day.
The role of Richard Yea and Nay was, however, the favourite one with urban authorities. Towns at first not “inclinable to allow a pressing,” afterwards relented and took the gang to their bosom, or entertained it gladly for a time, only to cast it out with contumely. A lieutenant who was sent to Newcastle to press in 1702 found “no manner of encouragement there”; yet seventy-five years later the Tyneside city, thanks to the loyal co-operation of a long succession of mayors, and of such men as George Stephenson, sometime Deputy-Master of the Trinity House, had become one of the riskiest in the kingdom for the seafaring man who was a stranger within her gates. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1498–Capt. Bover, 11 Aug. 1778.]
The attitude of Poole differed in some respects from that of other towns. Her mayors and magistrates, while they did not actually oppose the pressing of seamen within the borough, would neither back the warrants nor lend the gangs their countenance. The reason advanced for this disloyal attitude was of the absurdest nature. Poole held that in order to press twenty men you were not at liberty to kill the twenty-first. That, in fact, was what had happened on board the _Maria_ brig as she came into port there, deeply laden with fish from the Banks, and the corporation very foolishly never forgot the trivial incident.
It did not, of course, follow that the Poole sailor enjoyed freedom from the press. Far from it. What he did enjoy was a reputation that, if not all his own, was yet sufficiently so to be shared by few. Bred in that roughest of all schools, the Newfoundland cod fishery, he was an exceptionally tough nut to crack.
“If Poole were a fish pool
And the men of Poole fish,
There’d be a pool for the devil
And fish for his dish,”
was how the old jibe ran, and in this estimate of the Poole man’s character the gangs fully concurred. They knew him well and liked him little, so when bent on pressing him they adopted no squeamish measures, but very wisely “trusted to the strength of their right arms for it.” Some of their attempts to take him make strange reading.
About eight o’clock on a certain winter’s evening, Regulating Captain Walbeoff, accompanied by Lieut. Osmer, a midshipman and eight gangsmen, broke into the house of William Trim, a seafaring native of the place whom they knew to be at home and had resolved to press. Alarmed by the forcing of the door, and only too well aware of what it portended, Trim made for the stairs, where, turning upon his pursuers, he struck repeatedly and savagely at the midshipman, who headed them, with a red-hot poker which he had snatched out of the fire at the moment of his flight. He was, however, quickly overpowered, disarmed and dragged back into the lower room, where his captors threw him violently to the floor and with their hangers took effective measures to prevent his escape or further opposition. His sister happened to be in the house, and whilst this was going on the lieutenant brutally assaulted her, presumably because she wished to go to her brother’s assistance. Meanwhile Trim’s father, a man near seventy years of age, who lived only a stone’s-throw away, hearing the uproar, and being told the gang had come for his son, ran to the house with the intention, as he afterwards declared, of persuading him to go quietly. Seeing him stretched upon the floor, he stooped to lift him to his feet, when one of the gang attacked him and stabbed him in the back. He fell bleeding beside the younger man, and was there beaten by a number of the gangsmen whilst the remainder dragged his son off to the press-room, whence he was in due course dispatched to the fleet at Spithead. The date of this brutal episode is 1804; the manner of it, “nothing more than what usually happened on such occasions” in the town of Poole. [Footnote _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Admiral Phillip, Inquiry into the Conduct of the Impress Officers at Poole, 13 Aug. 1804.]
For this deplorable state of things Poole had none but herself to thank. Had she, instead of merely refusing to back the warrants, taken effective measures to rid herself of the gang, that mischievous body would have soon left her in peace. Rochester wore the jewel of consistency in this respect. When Lieut. Brenton pressed a youth there who “appeared to be a seafaring man,” but turned out to be an exempt city apprentice, he was promptly arrested and deprived of his sword, the mayor making no bones of telling him that his warrant was “useless in Rochester.” With this broad hint he was discharged; but the people proved less lenient than the mayor, for they set about him and beat him unmercifully. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 301–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1784-92, No. 42: Deposition of Lieut. Brenton.]
Save on a single occasion, already incidentally referred to, civic Liverpool treated the gang with uniform kindness. In 1745, at a time when the rebels were reported to be within only four miles of the city, the mayor refused to back warrants for the pressing of sailors to protect the shipping in the river. His reason was a cogent one. The captains of the _Southsea Castle_, the _Mercury_ and the _Loo_, three ships of war then in the Mersey, had just recently “manned their boats with marines and impressed from the shore near fifty men,” and the seafaring element of the town, always a formidable one, was up in arms because of it. This so intimidated the mayor that he dared not sanction further raids “for fear of being murder’d.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1440–Letters of Capt. Amherst, Dec. 1745.] His dread of the armed sailor was not shared by Henry Alcock, sometime mayor of Waterford. That gentleman “often headed the press-gangs” in person. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1500–Capt. Bennett, 13 Nov. 1780.]
Deal objected to the press for reasons extending back to the reign of King John. As a member of the Cinque Ports that town had constantly supplied the kings and queens of the realm, from the time of Magna Charta downwards, with great numbers of able and sufficient seamen who, according to the ancient custom of the Five Ports, had been impressed and raised by the mayor and magistrates of the town, acting under orders from the Lord Warden, and not by irresponsible gangs from without. It was to these, and not to the press as such, that Deal objected. The introduction of gangs in her opinion bred disorder. Great disturbances, breaches of the peace, riots, tumults and even bloodshed attended their steps and made their presence in any peaceably disposed community highly undesirable. Within the memory of living man even, Deal had obliged no less than four hundred seamen to go on board the ships of the fleet, and she desired no more of those strangers who recently, incited by Admiral the Marquis of Carmarthen, had gone a-pressing in her streets and grievously wounded divers persons. [Footnote: _State Papers Domestic_, Anne, xxxvi: No. 24: Petition of the Mayor, Jurats and Commonalty of the Free Town and Borough of Deal.]
In this commonsense view of the case Deal was ably supported by Dover, the premier Cinque Port. Dover, it is true, so far as we know never embodied her objections to the press in any humble petition to the Queen’s Majesty. She chose instead a directer method, for when the lieutenant of the _Devonshire_ impressed six men belonging to a brigantine from Carolina in her streets, and attempted to carry them beyond the limits of the borough, “many people of Dover, in company with the Mayor thereof, assembled themselves together and would not permit the lieutenant to bring them away.” The action angered the Lords Commissioners, who resolved to teach Dover a lesson. Orders were accordingly sent down to Capt. Dent, whose ship the _Shrewsbury_ man-o’-war was then in the Downs, directing him to send a gang ashore and press the first six good seamen they should meet with, taking care, however, since their Lordships did not wish to be too hard upon the town, that the men so pressed were bachelors and not householders. Lieut. O’Brien was entrusted with this delicate punitive mission. He returned on board after a campaign of only a few hours’ duration, triumphantly bearing with him the stipulated hostages for Dover’s future good behaviour–“six very good seamen, natives and inhabitants, and five of them bachelors.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1696–Capt. Dent, 24 Aug. 1743.] The sixth was of course a householder, a circumstance that made the town’s punishment all the severer.
Its effects were less salutary than the Admiralty had anticipated. True, both Dover and Deal thereafter withdrew their opposition to the press so far as to admit the gang within their borders; but they kept a watchful eye upon its doings, and every now and then the old spirit flamed out again at white heat, consuming the bonds of some poor devil who, like Alexander Hart, freeman of Dover, had been irregularly taken. On this occasion the mayor, backed by a posse of constables, himself broke open the press-room door. A similar incident, occurring a little later in the same year, so incensed Capt. Ball, who aptly enough was at the time in command of the _Nemesis_, that he roundly swore “to impress every seafaring man in Dover and make them repent of their impudence.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 301–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1784-92, No. 44; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1507–Capt. Ball, 15 April 1791.]
Where the magistrate had it most in his power to make or mar the fugitive sailor’s chances was in connection with the familiar fiction that the Englishman’s house is his castle. To hide a sailor was to steal the king’s chattel–penalty, 5 Pounds forfeited to the parish; and if you were guilty of such a theft, or were with good reason suspected of being guilty, you found yourself in much the same case as the ordinary thief or the receiver of stolen goods. A search warrant could be sworn out before a magistrate, and your house ransacked from cellar to garret. Without such warrant, however, it could not be lawfully entered. In the heat of pressing forcible entry was nevertheless not unusual, and many an impress officer found himself involved in actions for trespass or damages in consequence of his own indiscretion or the excessive zeal of his gang. The defence set up by Lieut. Doyle, of Dublin, that the “Panel of the Door was Broke by Accident,” would not go down in a court of law, however avidly it might be swallowed by the Board of Admiralty.
More than this. The magistrate was by law empowered to seize all straggling seamen and landsmen and hand them over to the gangs for consignment to the fleet. The vagabond, as the unfortunate tramp of those days was commonly called, had thus a bad time of it. For him all roads led to Spithead. The same was true of persons who made themselves a public nuisance in other ways. By express magisterial order many answering to that description followed Francis Juniper of Cuckfield, “a very drunken, troublesome fellow, without a coat to his back,” who was sent away lest he should become “chargeable to the parish.” The magistrate in this way conferred a double benefit upon his country. He defended it against itself whilst helping it to defend itself against the French. Still, the latter benefit was not always above suspicion. The “ignorant zeal of simple justices,” we are told, often impelled them to hand over to the gangs men whom “any old woman could see with half an eye to be properer objects of pity and charity than fit to serve His Majesty.”
“Send your myrmidons,” was a form of summons familiar to every gang officer. As its tone implies, its source was magisterial, and when the officer received it he hastened with his gang to the Petty Sessions, the Assizes or the prison, and there took over, as an unearned increment of His Majesty’s fleet, the person of some misdemeanant willing to exchange bridewell for the briny, or the manacled body of some convicted felon who preferred to swing in a hammock at sea rather than on the gallows ashore.
A strangely assorted crew it was, this overflow of the jails that clanked slowly seawards, marshalled by the gang. Reprieves and commutations, if by no means universal in a confirmed hanging age, were yet common enough to invest it with an appalling sameness that was nevertheless an appalling variety. Able seamen sentenced for horse-stealing or rioting, town dwellers raided out of night-houses, impostors who simulated fits or played the maimed soldier, fishermen in the illicit brandy and tobacco line, gentlemen of the road, makers of “flash” notes and false coin, stealers of sheep, assaulters of women, pickpockets and murderers in one unmitigated throng went the way of the fleet and there sank their vices, their roguery, their crimes and their identity in the number of a mess.
Boys were in that flock of jail-birds too–youths barely in their teens, guilty of such heinous offences as throwing stones at people who passed in boats upon the river, or of “playing during divine service on Sunday” and remaining impenitent and obdurate when confronted with all the “terrific apparatus of fetters, chains and dark cells” pertaining to a well-equipped city jail. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1534, 1545–Capt. Barker, 1 March 1805, 20 Aug. 1809, and numerous instances.] The turning over of such young reprobates to the gang was one of the pleasing duties of the magistrate.
CHAPTER VIII.
AT GRIPS WITH THE GANG.
When all avenues of escape were cut off and the sailor found himself face to face with the gang and imminent capture, he either surrendered his liberty at the word of command or staked it on the issue of a fight.
His choice of the latter alternative was the proverbial turning of the worm, but of a worm that was no mean adversary. Fear of the gang, supposing him to entertain any, was thrown to the winds. Fear of the consequences–the clink, or maybe the gallows for a last land-fall–which had restrained him in less critical moments when he had both room to run and opportunity, sat lightly on him now. In red realism there flashed through his brain the example of some doughty sailor, the hero of many an anchor-watch and forecastle yarn, who had fought the gang to its last man and yet come off victor. The swift vision fired his blood and nerved his arm, and under its obsession he stood up to his would-be captors with all the dogged pluck for which he was famous when facing the enemy at sea.
In contests of this description the weapon perhaps counted for as much as the man who wielded it, and as its nature depended largely upon circumstances and surroundings, the range of choice was generally wide enough to please the most elective taste. Pressing consequently introduced the gangsman to some strange weapons.
Trim, the Poole sailor whose capture is narrated in the foregoing chapter, defended himself with a red-hot poker. In what may be termed domestic as opposed to public pressing, the use of this homely utensil as an impromptu liberty-preserver was not at all uncommon. Hot or cold, it proved a formidable weapon in the hands of a determined man, more especially when, as was at that time very commonly the case, it belonged to the ponderous cobiron or knobbed variety.
Another weapon of recognised utility, particularly in the vicinity of docks, careening-stations and ship-yards, was the humble tar-mop. Consisting of a wooden handle some five or six feet in length, though of no great diameter, terminating in a ball of spun-yarn forming the actual mop, this implement, when new, was comparatively harmless. No serious blow could then be dealt with it; but once it had been used for “paying” a vessel’s bottom and sides it underwent a change that rendered it truly formidable. The ball of ravellings forming the mop became then thoroughly, charged with tar or pitch and dried in a rough mass scarcely less heavy than lead. In this condition it was capable of inflicting a terrible blow, and many were the tussels decided by it. A remarkable instance of its effective use occurred at Ipswich in 1703, when a gang from the _Solebay_, rowing up the Orwell from Harwich, attempted to press the men engaged in re-paying a collier. They were immediately “struck down with Pitch-Mopps, to the great Peril of their Lives.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1436 –Capt. Aldred, 6 Jan. 1702-3.]
The weapon to which the sailor was most partial, however, was the familiar capstan-bar. In it, as in its fellow the handspike, he found a whole armament. Its availability, whether on shipboard or at the waterside, its rough-and-ready nature, and above all its heft and general capacity for dealing a knock-down blow without inflicting necessarily fatal injuries, adapted it exactly to the sailor’s requirements, defensive or the reverse. It was with a capstan-bar that Paul Jones, when hard pressed by a gang on board his ship at Liverpool, was reputed to have stretched three of his assailants dead on deck. Every sailor had heard of that glorious achievement and applauded it, the killing perhaps grudgingly excepted.
So, too, did he applaud the hardihood of William Bingham, that far-famed north-country sailor who, adopting pistols as his weapon, negligently stuck a brace of them in his belt and walked the streets of Newcastle in open defiance of the gangs, none of which durst lay a hand on him till the unlucky day when, in a moment of criminal carelessness that could never be forgiven, he left his weapons at home and was haled to the press-room fighting, all too late, like a fiend incarnate.
Not to enlarge on the endless variety of chance weapons, there remained those good old-standers the musket, the cutlass and the knife, each of which, in the sailor’s grasp, played its part in the rough-and-tumble of pressing, and played it well. A case in point, familiar to every seaman, was the last fight put up by that famous Plymouth sailor, Emanuel Herbert, another fatalist who, like Bingham, believed in having two strings to his bow. He accordingly provided himself with both fuzee and hanger, and with these comforting bed-fellows retired to rest in an upper chamber of the public-house where he lodged, easy in the knowledge that whatever happened the door of his crib commanded the stairs. From this stronghold the gang invited him to come down. He returned the compliment by inviting them up, assuring them that he had a warm welcome in store for the first who should favour him with a visit. The ambiguity of the invitation appears to have been thrown away upon the gang, for “three of my people,” says the officer who led them, “rushed up, and the gun missing fire, he immediately run one of them through the body with the hanger”–a mode of welcoming his visitors which resulted in Herbert’s shifting his lodgings to Exeter jail, and in the wounded man’s speedy death. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1473–Capt. Brown, 4 July 1727.]
Here was a serious contingency indeed; but whatever deterrent effect the fatal issue of this affair, as of many similar ones, may have had upon the sailor’s use of lethal weapons when attacked by the gang, that effect was largely, if not altogether, neutralised by the upshot of the famous Broadfoot case, which, occurring some sixteen years later, gave the scales of justice a decided turn in the sailor’s favour and robbed the killing of a gangsman of its only terror, the shadow of the gallows. The incident in question opened in Bristol river, with the boarding of a merchant-man by a tender’s gang. As they came over the side Broadfoot met them, blunderbuss in hand. Being there to guard the ship, he bade them begone, and upon their disregarding the order, and closing in upon him with evident intent to take him, he clapped the blunderbuss, which was heavily charged with swanshot, to his shoulder and let fly into the midst of them. One of their number, Calahan by name, fell mortally wounded, and Broadfoot was in due course indicted for wilful murder. [Footnote: _Westminster Journal_, 30 April 1743.] How he was found not guilty on the ground that a warrant directed to the lieutenant gave the gang no power to take him, and that he was therefore justified in defending himself, was well known to every sailor in the kingdom. No jury thereafter ever found him guilty of a capital felony if by chance he killed a gangsman in self-defence. The worst he had to fear was a verdict of manslaughter–a circumstance that proved highly inspiriting to him in his frequent scraps with the gang.
There was another aspect of the case, however, that came home to the sailor rather more intimately than the risk of being called upon to “do time” under conditions scarcely worse than those he habitually endured at sea. Suppose, instead of his killing the gangsman, the gangsman killed him? He recalled a case he had heard much palaver about. An able seaman, a perfect Tom Bowling of a fellow, brought to at an alehouse in the Borough–the old “Bull’s Head” it was–having a mind to lie snug for a while, ‘tween voyages. However, one day, being three sheets in the wind or thereabouts, he risked a run and was made a prize of, worse luck, by a press-gang that engaged him. Their boat lay at Battle Bridge in the Narrow Passage, and while they were bearing down upon her, with the sailor-chap in tow, what should Jack do but out with his knife and slip it into one of the gangers. ‘Twas nothing much, a waistcoat wound at most, but the ganger resented the liberty, and swearing that no man should tap his claret for nix, he ups with his cudgel and fetches Jack a clip beside the head that lost him the number of his mess, for soon after he was discharged dead along of having his head broke. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486–Lieut. Slyford, 24 Nov. 1755. “Discharged dead,” abbreviated to “DD,” the regulation entry in the muster books against the names of persons deceased.]
Risks of this sort raised grave issues for the sailor–issues to be well considered of in those serious moments that came to the most reckless on the wings of the wind or the lift of the waves at sea, what time drink and the gang were remote factors in the problem of life. But ashore! Ah! that was another matter. Life ashore was far too crowded, far too sweet for serious reflections. The absorbing business of pleasure left little room for thought, and the thoughts that came to the sailor later, when he had had his fling and was again afoot in search of a ship, decidedly favoured the killing of a gangsman, if need be, rather than the loss of his own life or of a berth. The prevalence of these sentiments rendered the taking of the sailor a dangerous business, particularly when he consorted in bands.
In that part of the west country traversed by the great roads from Bristol to Liverpool, and having Stourbridge as its approximate centre, ambulatory bands proved very formidable. The presence of the rendezvous at Stourbridge accounted for this. Seamen travelled in strength because they feared it. Two gangs were stationed there under Capt. Beecher, and news of the approach of a large party of seamen from the south having one day been brought in, he at once made preparations for intercepting them. Lieut. Barnsley and his gang marched direct to Hoobrook, a couple of miles south of Kidderminster, a point the seamen had perforce to pass. His instructions were to wait there, picking up in the meantime such of the sailor party as lagged behind from footsoreness or fatigue, till joined by Lieut. Birchall and the other gang, when the two were to unite forces and press the main body. Through unforeseen circumstances, however, the plan miscarried. Birchall, who had taken a circuitous route, arrived late, whilst the band of sailors arrived early. They numbered, moreover, forty-six as against eleven gangsmen and two officers. Four to one was a temptation the sailors could not resist. They attacked the gangs with such ferocity that out of the thirteen only one man returned to the rendezvous with a whole skin. Luckily, there were no casualties on this occasion; but a few days later, while two of Barnsley’s gangsmen were out on duty some little distance from the town, they were suddenly attacked by a couple of sailors, presumably members of the same band, who left one of them dead in the road. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1501–Capt. Beecher, 12 July and 4 Aug. 1781.]
Owing to its close proximity to the Thames, that remote suburb of eighteenth century London known as Stepney Fields was much frequented by armed bands of the above description, who successfully resisted all attempts to take them. The master-at-arms of the _Chatham_ man-o’-war, chancing once to pass that way, came in for exceedingly rough usage at their hands, and when next day a lieutenant from the same ship appeared upon the scene with a gang at his back and tried to press the ringleaders in that affair, they “swore by God he should not, and if he offered to lay hands on them, they would cut him down.” With this threat they drew their cutlasses, slashed savagely at the lieutenant, and “made off through the Mobb which had gathered round them.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2579–Capt. Townshend, 21 April 1743.]
A spot not many miles distant from Stepney Fields was the scene of a singular fray many years later. His Majesty’s ship _Squirrel_ happened at the time to be lying in Longreach, and her commander, Capt. Brawn, one day received intelligence that a number of sailors were to be met with in the town of Barking. He at once dispatched his 1st and 2nd lieutenants with a contingent of twenty-five men and several petty officers, to rout them out and take them. They reached Barking about nine o’clock in the evening, the month being July, and were not long in securing several of the skulkers, who with many of the male inhabitants of the place were at that hour congregated in public-houses, unsuspicious of danger. The sudden appearance in their midst of so large an armed force, however, coupled with the outcry and confusion inseparable from the pressing of a number of men, alarmed the townsfolk, who poured into the streets, rescued the pressed men, and would have inflicted summary punishment upon the intruders had not the senior officer, seeing his party hopelessly outnumbered, tactfully drawn off his force. This he did in good order and without serious hurt; but just as he and his men were congratulating themselves upon their escape, they were suddenly ambushed, at a point where their road ran between high banks, by a “large concourse of Irish haymakers, to the number of at least five hundred men, all armed with sabres [Footnote: So in the original, but “sabres” is perhaps an error for “scythes.”] and pitchforks,” who with wild cries and all the Irishman’s native love of a shindy fell upon the unfortunate gangsmen and gave them a “most severe beating.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1529–Capt. Brawn, 3 July 1803.]
Attacks on the gang, made with deliberate intent to rescue pressed men from its custody, were by no means confined to Barking. The informer throve in the land, but notwithstanding his hostile activity the sailor everywhere had friends who possessed at least one cardinal virtue. They seldom hung back when he was in danger, or hesitated to strike a blow in his defence.
There came into Limehouse Hole, on a certain day in the summer of 1709, a vessel called the _Martin_ galley. How many men were in her we do not learn; but whatever their number, there was amongst them one man who had either a special dread of the press or some more than usually urgent occasion for wishing to avoid it. Watching his opportunity, he slipped into one of the galley’s boats, sculled her rapidly to land, and there leapt out–just as a press-gang hove in sight ahead! It was a dramatic moment. The sailor, tacking at sight of the enemy, ran swiftly along the river-bank, but was almost immediately overtaken, knocked down, and thrown into the press-boat, which lay near by. “This gather’d a Mob,” says the narrator of the incident, “who Pelted the Boat and Gang by throwing Stones and Dirt from the Shoar, and being Pursued also by the Galley’s men, who brought Cutlasses in the Boat with them to rescue their Prest Man, the Gang was at last forc’d to betake themselves to a Corn-lighter, where they might stand upon their Defence. The Galley’s men could not get aboard, but lay with their Boat along the side of the Lighter, where they endeavouring to force in, and the Gang to keep them out, the Boat of a sudden oversett and some of the Men therein were Drown’d. Three of the Press-Gang were forc’d likewise into the Water, whereof ’tis said one is Drown’d and the other two in Irons in the New Prison. The remaining part of the Gang leapt into a Wherry, the Galley’s men pursuing them, but, not gaining upon them, they gave over the Pursuit.” The pressed man all this while was laughing in his sleeve. “He lay on the other side of the Lighter, in the Tender’s boat, whence he made his escape.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1437 –Capt. Aston, 10 Aug. 1709.]
In their efforts to restore the freedom of the pressed man, the sailor’s friends did not confine their attention exclusively to the gang. When they turned out in vindication of those rights which the sailor did not possess, they not infrequently found their diversion in wrecking the gang’s headquarters or in making a determined, though generally futile, onslaught upon the tender. Respectable people, who had no particular reason to favour the sailor’s cause, viewed these ebullitions of mingled rage and mischief with dismay, stigmatising those who so lightheartedly participated in them as the “lower classes” and the “mob.”
Few towns in the kingdom boasted–or reprobated, as the case might be–a more erratically festive mob than Leith. As far back as 1709 Bailie Cockburn had advised the inhabitants of that burgh to “oppose any impressor,” and seizing the occasion of the “Impressure of an Apprentice Boy,” had set them an example by arresting the pinnace of Her Majesty’s ship _Rye_, together with her whole crew, thirteen in number, and keeping them in close confinement till the lad was given up. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2448–Capt. Shale, 4 Jan. 1708-9.] The worthy Bailie was in due time gathered unto his fathers, and with the growth of the century gangs came and went in endless succession, but neither the precept nor the example was ever forgotten in Leith. Much pressing was done there, but it was done almost entirely upon the water. To transfer the scene of action to the strand meant certain tumult, for there the whim of the mob was law. Now it pulled the gang-officer’s house about his ears because he dared to press a shipwright; again, it stoned the gang viciously because they rescued some seamen from a wreck–and kept them. Between whiles it amused itself by cutting down the rendezvous flag-staff; and if nothing better offered, it split up into component parts, each of which became a greater terror than the whole. One night, when the watch had been set and all was quiet, a party of this description, only three in number, approached the rendezvous and respectfully requested leave to drink a last dram with some newly pressed men who were then in the cage, their quondam shipmates. Suspecting no ulterior design, the guard incautiously admitted them, whereupon they dashed a quantity of spirits on the fire, set the place in a blaze, and carried off the pressed men amid the hullabaloo that followed. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1516-9–Letters of Capt. Brenton, 1797-8; Lieut. Pierie, 2 Feb. 1798.]
If Leith did this sort of thing well, Greenock, her commercial rival on the Clyde, did it very much better; for where the Leith mob was but a sporadic thing, erupting from its slummy fastnesses only in response to rumour of chance amusement to be had or mischief to be done, Greenock held her mob always in hand, a perpetual menace to the gangsman did he dare to disregard the Clydeside ordinance in respect to pressing. That ordinance restricted pressing exclusively to the water; but it went further, for it laid it down as an inviolable rule that members of certain trades should not be pressed at all.
It was with the Trades that the ordinance originated. There was little or no Greenock apart from the Trades. The will of the Trades was supreme. The coopers, carpenters, riggers, caulkers and seamen of the town ruled the burgh. Assembled in public meeting, they resolved unanimously “to stand by and support each other” in the event of a press; and having come to this decision they indited a trite letter to the magistrates, intimating in unequivocal terms that “if they countenanced the press, they must abide by the consequences,” for once the Trades took the matter in hand “they could not say where they would stop.” With the worthy burgesses laying down the law in this fashion, it is little wonder that the gangs “seldom dared to press ashore,” or that they should have been able to take “only two coopers in ten months.”
For the Trades were as good as their word. The moment a case of prohibited pressing became known they took action. Alexander Weir, member of the Shipwrights’ Society, was taken whilst returning from his “lawful employ,” and immediately his mates, to the number of between three and four hundred, downed tools and marched to the rendezvous, where they peremptorily demanded his release. Have him they would, and if the gang-officer did not see fit to comply with their demand, not only should he never press another man in Greenock, but they would seize one of the armed vessels in the river, lay her alongside the tender, where Weir was confined, and take him out of her by force. Brenton was regulating captain there at the time, and to pacify the mob he promised to release the man–and broke his word. Thereupon the people “became very riotous and proceeded to burn everything that came in their way. About twelve o’clock they hauled one of the boats belonging to the rendezvous upon the Square and put her into the fire, but by the timely assistance of the officers and gangs, supported by the magistrates and a body of the Fencibles, the boat was recovered, though much damaged, and several of the ringleaders taken up and sent to prison.” The affair did not end without bloodshed. “Lieut. Harrison, in defending himself, was under the necessity of running one of the rioters through the ribs.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1508–Letters of Capt. Brenton, 1793.]
Though Bailie Cockburn once “arrested” the pinnace of a man-o’-war at Leith, the attempted burning of the Greenock press-boat is worthy of more than passing note as the only instance of that form of retaliation to be met with in the history of home pressing. In the American colonies, on the other hand, it was a common feature of demonstrations against the gang. Boston was specially notorious for that form of reprisal, and Governor Shirley, in one of his masterly dispatches, narrates at length, and with no little humour, how the mob on one occasion burnt with great éclat what they believed to be the press-boat, only to discover, when it was reduced to ashes, that it belonged to one of their own ringleaders. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 38l8–Shirley to the Admiralty, 1 Dec. 1747.]
The threat of the Greenock artificers to lay alongside the tender and take out their man by force of arms was one for which there existed abundant, if by no means encouraging precedent. Long before, as early, indeed, as 1742, the keelmen frequenting Sunderland had set them an example in that respect by endeavouring, some hundreds strong, to haul the tender ashore–an attempt coupled with threats so dire that the officer in command trembled in his shoes lest he and his men should all “be made sacrifices of.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–Capt. Allen, 13 March 1741-2.] Nothing so dreadful happened,