The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore by John R. Hutchinson (page 5)

It did not always do, however, to presume upon the loss of a forefinger, particularly if it were missing from the left hand. Capt. Barker, while he was regulating the press at Bristol, once had occasion to send into Ilchester for a couple of brace of convicts who had received the royal pardon on condition of their serving at sea. Near Shepton Mallet, on the return tramp, his gangsmen fell in with a party armed with sticks and knives, who “beat and cut them in a very cruel manner.” They succeeded, however, in taking the ringleader, one Charles Biggen, and brought him in; but when Barker would have discharged the fellow because his left forefinger was wanting, the Admiralty brushed the customary rule aside and ordered him to be kept. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1528–Capt. Barker, 28 July 1803, and endorsement.]

The main considerations entering into the dispatch of pressed men to the fleet, when at length their period of detention at headquarters came to an end, were economy, speed and safety. Transport was necessarily either by land or water, and in the case of seaport, river or canal towns, both modes were of course available. Gangs operating at a distance from the sea, or remote from a navigable river or canal, were from their very situation obliged to send their catch to market either wholly by land, or by land and water successively. Land transport, though always healthier, and in many instances speedier and cheaper than transport by water, was nevertheless much more risky. Pressed men therefore preferred it. The risks–rescue and desertion–were all in their favour. Hence, when they “offered chearfully to walk up,” or down, as the case might be, the seeming magnanimity of the offer was never permitted to blind those in charge of them to the need for a strong attendant guard. [Footnote: In the spring of 1795 a body of Quota Men, some 130 strong, voluntarily marched from Liverpool to London, a distance of 182 miles, instead of travelling by coach as at first proposed. Though all had received the bounty and squandered it in debauchery, not a man deserted; and in their case the danger of rescue was of course absent. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1511–Capt. Bowen, 21 April 1795.] The men would have had to walk in any case, for transport by coach, though occasionally sanctioned, was an event of rare occurrence. A number procured in Berkshire were in 1756 forwarded to London “by the Reading machines,” but this was an exceptional indulgence due to the state of their feet, which were already “blistered with travelling.”

Even with the precaution of a strong guard, there were parts of the country through which it was highly imprudent, if not altogether impracticable, to venture a party on foot. Of these the thirty-mile stretch of road between Kilkenny and Waterford, the nearest seaport, perhaps enjoyed the most unenviable reputation. No gang durst traverse it; and no body of pressed men, and more particularly of pressed Catholics, could ever have been conveyed even for so short a distance through a country inhabited by a fanatical and strongly disaffected people without courting certain bloodshed. The naval authorities in consequence left Kilkenny severely alone. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1529–Capt. Bowen, 12 Oct. 1803.]

The sending of men overland from Appledore to Plymouth, a course frequently adopted to avoid the circuitous sea-route, was attended with similar risks. The hardy miners and quarrymen of the intervening moorlands loved nothing so much as knocking the gangsman on the head. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 22 Sept. 1805.]

The attenuated neck of land between the Mersey and the Dee had an evil reputation for affairs of this description. Men pressed at Chester, and sent across the neck to the tenders or ships of war in the Mersey, seldom reached their destination unless attended by an exceptionally strong escort. The reason is briefly but graphically set forth by Capt. Ayscough, who dispatched three such men from Chester, under convoy of his entire gang, in 1780. “On the road thither,” says he, “about seven miles from hence, at a village called Sutton, they were met by upwards of one Hundred Arm’d Seamen from Parkgate, belonging to different privateers at Liverpool. An Affray ensued, and the three Impress’d men were rescued by the Mobb, who Shot one of my Gang through the Body and wounded two others.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1446–Capt. Ayscough, 17 Nov. 1780.] Parkgate, it will be recalled, was a notorious “nest of seamen.” The alternative route to Liverpool, by passage-boat down the Dee, was both safer and cheaper. To send a pressed man that way, accompanied by two of the gang, cost only twelve-and-six. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Admiral Phillip, 14 Sept. 1804.]

Mr. Midshipman Goodave and party, convoying pressed men from Lymington to Southampton, once met with an adventure in traversing the New Forest which, notwithstanding its tragic sequel, is not without its humorous side. They had left the little fishing village of Lepe some miles behind, and were just getting well into the Forest, when a cavalcade of mounted men, some thirty strong, all muffled in greatgoats and armed to the teeth, unexpectedly emerged from the wood and opened fire upon them. Believing it to be an attempt at rescue, the gang closed in about their prisoners, but when one of these was the first to fall, his arm shattered and an ear shot off, the gangsmen, perceiving their mistake, broke and fled in all directions. Not far, however. The smugglers, for such they were, quickly rounded them up and proceeded, not to shoot them, as the would-be fugitives anticipated, but to administer to them the “smugglers’ oath.” This they did by forcing them on their knees and compelling them, at the point of the pistol and with horrible execrations, to “wish their eyes might drop out if they told their officers which way they, the smugglers, were gone.” Having extorted this unique pledge of secrecy as to their movements, they rode away into the Forest, unaware that Mr. Midshipman Goodave, snugly ensconced in the neighbouring ditch, had seen and heard all that passed–a piece of discretion on his part that later on brought at least one of the smugglers into distressing contact with the law. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 300–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1778-83, No. 18: Informations of Shepherd Goodave, 1 Oct. 1779.]

Just as the dangers of the sea sometimes rendered it safer to dispatch pressed men from seaport towns by land–as at Exmouth, where the entrance to the port was in certain weathers so hazardous as to bottle all shipping up, or shut it out, for days together–so the dangers peculiar to the land rendered it as often expedient to dispatch them from inland towns by water. This was the case at Stourbridge. Handed over to contractors responsible for their safe-keeping, the numerous seamen taken by the gangs in that town and vicinity were delivered on board the tenders in King Road, below Bristol–conveyed thither by water, at a cost of half a guinea per head. This sum included subsistence, which would appear to have been mainly by water also. To Liverpool, the alternative port of delivery, carriage could only be had by land, and the risks of land transit in that direction were so great as to be considered insuperable, to say nothing of the cost. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1500–Letters of Capt. Beecher, 1780.]

At ports such as Liverpool, Dublin and Hull, where His Majesty’s ships made frequent calls, the readiest means of disposing of pressed men was of course to put them immediately on ship-board; but when no ship was thus available, or when, though available, she was bound foreign or on other prohibitive service, there was nothing for it, in the case of rendezvous lying so far afield as to render land transport impracticable, but to forward the harvest of the gangs by water. In this way there grew up a system of sea transport that centred from many distant and widely separated points of the kingdom upon those great entrepôts for pressed men, the Hamoaze, Spithead and the Nore.

Now and then, for reasons of economy or expediency, men were shipped to these destinations as “passengers” on colliers and merchant vessels, their escort consisting of a petty officer and one or more gangsmen, according to the number to be safeguarded. Occasionally they had no escort at all, the masters being simply bound over to make good all losses arising from any cause save death, capture by an enemy’s ship or the act of God. From King’s Lynn to the Nore the rate per head, by this means of transport, was 2 Pounds, 15s., including victualling; from Hull, 2 Pounds 12s. 6d.; from Newcastle, 10s. 6d. The lower rates for the longer runs are explained by the fact that, shipping facilities being so much more numerous on the Humber and the Tyne, competition reduced the cost of carriage in proportion to its activity. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral Phillip, 3 and 11 Aug. 1801; Admiral Pringle, 2 April 1795.]

In spite of every precaution, such serious loss attended the shipping of men in this manner as to force the Admiralty back upon its own resources. Recourse was accordingly had, in the great majority of cases, to that handy auxiliary of the fleet, the hired tender. Tenders fell into two categories–cruising tenders, employed exclusively, or almost exclusively, in pressing afloat after the manner described in an earlier chapter, and tenders used for the double purpose of “keeping” men pressed on land and of conveying them to the fleet when their numbers grew to such proportions as to make a full and consequently dangerous ship. In theory, “any old unmasted hulk, unfit to send to sea, would answer to keep pressed men in.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral Pringle, 2 April 1795.] In practice, the contrary was the case. Fitness for sea, combined with readiness to slip at short notice, was more essential than mere cubic capacity, since transhipment was thus avoided and the pressed man deprived of another chance of taking French leave.

One all-important consideration, in the case of tenders employed for the storing and detention of pressed men prior to their dispatch to the fleet, was that the vessel should be able to lie afloat at low water; for if the fall of the tide left her high and dry, the risk of desertion, as well as of attack from the shore, was enormously increased. Whitehaven could make no use of man-storing tenders for this reason; and at the important centre of King’s Lynn, which was really a receiving station for three counties, it was found “requisite to have always a vessel below the Deeps to keep pressed men aboard,” since their escape or rescue by way of the flats was in any anchorage nearer the town a foregone conclusion. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486–Capt. Baird, 27 Feb. 1755.]

On board the tenders the comfort and health of the pressed man were no more studied than in the strong-rooms and prisons ashore. A part of the hold was required to be roughly but substantially partitioned off for his security, and on rare occasions this space was fitted with bunks; but as the men usually arrived “all very bare of necessaries”–except when pressed afloat, a case we are not now considering–any provision for the slinging of hammocks, or the spreading of bedding they did not possess, came to be looked upon as a superfluous and uncalled-for proceeding. Even the press-room was a rarity, save in tenders that had been long in the service. Down in the hold of the vessel, whither the men were turned like so many sheep as soon as they arrived on board, they perhaps found a rough platform of deal planks provided for them to lie on, and from this they were at liberty to extract such sorry comfort as they could during the weary days and nights of their incarceration. Other conveniences they had none. When this too was absent, as not infrequently happened, they were reduced to the necessity of “laying about on the Cables and Cask,” suffering in consequence “more than can well be expressed.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–Capt. A’Court, 22 April 1741; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1497–Capt. Bover, 11 Feb. 1777, and Captains’ Letters, _passim_.] It is not too much to say that transported convicts had better treatment.

Cooped up for weeks at a stretch in a space invariably crowded to excess, deprived almost entirely of light, exercise and fresh air, and poisoned with bad water and what Roderick Random so truthfully called the “noisome stench of the place,” it is hardly surprising that on protracted voyages from such distant ports as Limerick or Leith the men should have “fallen sick very fast.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1444–Capt. Allen, 4 March 1771, and Captains’ Letters, _passim_.] Officers were, indeed, charged “to be very careful of the healths of the seamen” entrusted to their keeping; yet in spite of this most salutary regulation, so hopelessly bad were the conditions under which the men were habitually carried, and so slight was the effort made to ameliorate them, that few tenders reached their destination without a more or less serious outbreak of fever, small-pox or some other equally malignant distemper. Upon the fleet the effect was appalling. Sickly tenders could not but make sickly ships.

If the material atmosphere of the tender’s hold was bad, its moral atmosphere was unquestionably worse. Dark deeds were done here at times, and no man “peached” upon his fellows. Out of this deplorable state of things a remarkable legal proceeding once grew. Murder having been committed in the night, and none coming forward to implicate the offender, the coroner’s jury, instead of returning their verdict against some person or persons unknown, found the entire occupants of the tender’s hold, seventy-two in number, guilty of that crime. A warrant was actually issued for their apprehension, though never executed. To put the men on their trial was a useless step, since, in the circumstances, they would have been most assuredly acquitted. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 300–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1778-83, No. 20.] Just as assuredly any informer in their midst would have been murdered.

The scale of victualling on board the tenders was supposed to be the same as on shore. “Full allowance daily” was the rule; and if the copper proved too small to serve all at one boiling, there were to be as many boilings as should be required to go round. Unhappily for the pressed man, there was a weevil in his daily bread. While it was the bounden duty of the master of the vessel to feed him properly, and of the officers to see that he was properly fed, “officers and masters generally understood each other too well in the pursery line.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral M’Bride, 19 March 1795.] Rations were consequently short, boilings deficient, and though the cabin went well content, the hold was the scene of bitter grumblings.

Nor were these the only disabilities the pressed man laboured under. His officers proved a sore trial to him. The Earl of Pembroke, Lord High Admiral, foreseeing that this would be the case, directed that he should be “used with all possible tenderness and humanity.” The order was little regarded. The callosity of Smollett’s midshipman, who spat in the pressed man’s face when he dared to complain of his sufferings, and roughly bade him die for aught he cared, was characteristic of the service. Hence a later regulation, with grim irony, gave directions for his burial. He was to be put out of the way, as soon as might be after the fatal conditions prevailing on board His Majesty’s tenders had done their work, with as great a show of decency as could be extracted from the sum of ten shillings.

Strictly speaking, it was not in the power of the tender’s officers to mitigate the hardships of the pressed man’s lot to any appreciable extent, let them be as humane as they might. For this the pressed man himself was largely to blame. An ungrateful rogue, his hide was as impervious to kindness as a duck’s back to water. Supply him with slops [Footnote: The regulations stipulated that slops should be served out to all who needed them; but as their acceptance was held to set up a contract between the recipient and the Crown, the pressed man was not unnaturally averse from drawing upon such a source of supply as long as any chance of escape remained to him.] wherewith to cover his nakedness or shield him from the cold, and before the Sunday muster came round the garments had vanished–not into thin air, indeed, but in tobacco and rum, for which forbidden luxuries he invariably bartered them with the bumboat women who had the run of the vessel while she remained in harbour. Or allow him on deck to take the air and such exercise as could be got there, and the moment your back was turned he was away _sans congé_. Few of these runaways were as considerate as that Scotch humorist, William Ramsay, who was pressed at Leith for beating an informer and there put on board the tender. Seizing the first opportunity of absconding, “Sir,” he wrote to the lieutenant in command, “I am so much attached to you for the good usage I have received at your hands, that I cannot think of venturing on board your ship again in the present state of affairs. I therefore leave this letter at my father’s to inform you that I intend to slip out of the way.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1524.–Capt. Brenton, 20 Oct. 1800.]

When that clever adventuress, Moll Flanders, found herself booked for transportation beyond the seas, her one desire, it will be recalled, was “to come back before she went.” So it was with the pressed man. The idea of escape obsessed him–escape before he should be rated on shipboard and sent away to heaven only knew what remote quarter of the globe. It was for this reason that irons were so frequently added to his comforts. “Safe bind, safe find” was the golden rule on board His Majesty’s tenders.

How difficult it was for him to carry his cherished design into execution, and yet how easy, is brought home to us with surprising force by the catastrophe that befell the _Tasker_ tender. On the 23rd of May 1755 the _Tasker_ sailed out of the Mersey with a full cargo of pressed men designed for Spithead. She possessed no press-room, and as the men for that reason had the run of the hold, all hatches were securely battened down with the exception of the maindeck scuttle, an opening so small as to admit of the passage of but one man at a time. Her crew numbered thirty-eight, and elaborate precautions were taken for the safe-keeping of her restless human freight. So much is evident from the disposition of her guard, which was as follows:–

_(a)_ At the open scuttle two sentries, armed with pistol and cutlass. Orders, not to let too many men up at once.

_(b)_ On the forecastle two sentries, armed with musket and bayonet. Orders, to fire on any pressed man who should attempt to swim away.

_(c)_ On the poop one sentry, similarly armed, and having similar orders.

_(d)_ On the quarter-deck, at the entrance to the great cabin, where the remaining arms were kept, one sentry, armed with cutlass and pistol. Orders, to let no pressed man come upon the quarter-deck.

There were thus six armed sentinels stationed about the ship–ample to have nipped in the bud any attempt to seize the vessel, but for two serious errors of judgment on the part of the officer responsible for their disposition. These were, first, the discretionary power vested in the sentries at the scuttle; and, second, the inadequate guard, a solitary man, set for the defence of the great cabin and the arms it contained. Now let us see how these errors of judgment affected the situation.

Either through stupidity, bribery or because they were rapidly making an offing, the sentries at the scuttle, as the day wore on, admitted a larger number of pressed men to the comparative freedom of the deck than was consistent with prudence. The number eventually swelled to fourteen–sturdy, determined fellows, the pick of the hold. One of them, having a fiddle, struck up a merry tune, the rest fell to dancing, the tender’s crew who were off duty caught the infection and joined in, while the officers stood looking on, tolerantly amused and wholly unsuspicious of danger. Suddenly, just when the fun was at its height, a splash was heard, a cry of “Man overboard!” ran from lip to lip, and officers and crew rushed to the vessel’s side. They were there, gazing into the sea, for only a minute or two, but by the time they turned their faces inboard again the fourteen determined men were masters of the ship. In the brief disciplinary interval they had overpowered the guard and looted the cabin of its store of arms. That night they carried the tender into Redwharf Bay and there bade her adieu. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 920–Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, 3 June 1755, and enclosures.] To pursue them in so mountainous a country would have been useless; to punish them, even had they been retaken, impossible. As unrated men they were neither mutineers nor deserters, [Footnote: By 4 & 5 Anne, cap. 6, pressed men could be apprehended and tried for desertion by virtue of the Queen’s shilling having been forced upon them at the time they were pressed, but as the use of that coin fell into abeyance, so the Act in question became gradually a dead-letter. Hay, Murray, Lloyd, Pinfold and Jervis, Law Officers of the Crown, giving an opinion on this important point in 1756, held that “pressed men are not subject to the Articles (of War) until they are actually rated on board some of His Majesty’s ships.”–_Admiralty Records_ 7. 299–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1756-77, No. 3, Case 2.] and the seizure of the tender was at the worst a bloodless crime in which no one was hurt save an obdurate sentry, who was slashed over the head with a cutlass.

The boldness of its inception and the anticlimaxical nature of its finish invest another exploit of this description with an interest all its own. This was the cutting out of the _Union_ tender from the river Tyne on the 12th April 1777. The commander, Lieut. Colville, having that day gone on shore for the “benefit of the air,” and young Barker, the midshipman who was left in charge in his absence, having surreptitiously followed suit, the pressed men and volunteers, to the number of about forty, taking advantage of the opportunity thus presented, rose and seized the vessel, loaded the great guns, and by dint of threatening to sink any boat that should attempt to board them kept all comers, including the commander himself, at bay till nine o’clock in the evening. By that time night had fallen, so, with the wind blowing strong off-shore and an ebb-tide running, they cut the cables and stood out to sea. For three days nothing was heard of them, and North Shields, the scene of the exploit and the home of most of the runaways, was just on the point of giving the vessel up for lost when news came that she was safe. Influenced by one Benjamin Lamb, a pressed man of more than ordinary character, the rest had relinquished their original purpose of either crossing over to Holland or running the vessel ashore on some unfrequented part of the coast, and had instead carried her into Scarborough Bay, doubtless hoping to land there without interference and so make their way to Whitby or Hull. In this design, however, they were partly frustrated, for, a force having been hastily organised for their apprehension, they were waylaid as they came ashore and retaken to the number of twenty-two, the rest escaping. Lamb, discharged for his good offices in saving the tender, was offered a boatswain’s place if he would re-enter; but for poor Colville the affair proved disastrous. Becoming demented, he attempted to shoot himself and had to be superseded. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1497–Capt. Bover, 13 April 1777, and enclosures.]

All down through the century similar incidents, crowding thick and fast one upon another, relieved the humdrum routine of the pressed man’s passage to the fleet, and either made his miserable life in a measure worth living or brought it to a summary conclusion. Of minor incidents, all tending to the same happy or unhappy end, there was no lack. Now he sweltered beneath a sun so hot as to cause the pitch to boil in the seams of the deck above his head; again, as when the _Boneta_ sloop, conveying pressed men from Liverpool to the Hamoaze in 1740, encountered “Bedds of two or three Acres bigg of Ice & of five or Six foot thicknesse, which struck her with such force ’twas enough to drive her bows well out,” he “almost perished” from cold. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732–Capt. Young, 8 Feb. 1739-40.] To-day it was broad farce. He held his sides with laughter to see the lieutenant of the tender he was in, mad with rage and drink, chase the steward round and round the mainmast with a loaded pistol, whilst the terrified hands, fearing for their lives, fled for refuge to the coalhole, the roundtops and the shore. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1498–Complaint of the Master and Company of H. M. Hired Tender _Speedwell_, 21 Dec. 1778.] To-morrow it was tragedy. Some “little dirty privateer” swooped down upon him, as in the case of the _Admiral Spry_ tender from Waterford to Plymouth, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1500–Dickson, Surveyor of Customs at the Cove of Cork, April 1780.] and consigned him to what he dreaded infinitely more than any man-o’-war–a French prison; or contrary winds, swelling into a sudden gale, drove him a helpless wreck on to some treacherous coast, as they drove the _Rich Charlotte_ upon the Formby Sands in 1745, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1440–Capt. Amherst, 4 Oct. 1745.] and there remorselessly drowned him.

Provided he escaped such untoward accidents as death or capture by the enemy, sooner or later the pressed man arrived at the receiving station. Here another ordeal awaited him, and here also he made his last bid for freedom.

Taking the form of a final survey or regulating, the ordeal the pressed man had now to face was no less thoroughgoing than its precursor at the rendezvous had in all probability been superficial and ineffective. Eyes saw deeper here, wits were sharper, and in this lay at once the pressed man’s bane and salvation. For if genuinely unfit, the fact was speedily demonstrated; whereas if merely shamming, discovery overtook him with a certainty that wrote “finis” to his last hope. Nevertheless, for this ordeal, as for his earlier regulating at the rendezvous, the sailor who knew his book prepared himself with exacting care during the tedium of his voyage.

No sooner was he mustered for survey, then, than the most extraordinary, impudent and in many instances transparent impostures were sprung upon his examiners. Deafness prevailed to an alarming extent, dumbness was by no means unknown. Men who fought desperately when the gang took them, or who played cards with great assiduity in the tender’s hold, developed sudden paralysis of the arms. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1464–Capt. Bloyes, Jan. 1702-3; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1470–Capt. Bennett, 26 Sept. 1711. An extraordinary instance of this form of malingering is cited in the “Naval Sketch-Book,” 1826.] Legs which had been soundness itself at the rendezvous were now a putrefying mass of sores. The itch broke out again, virulent and from all accounts incurable. Fits returned with redoubled frequency and violence, the sane became demented or idiotic, and the most obviously British, losing the use of their mother tongue, swore with many gesticulatory _sacrés_ that they had no English, as indeed they had none for naval purposes. Looking at the miserable, disease-ridden crew, the uninitiated spectator was moved to tears of pity. Not so the naval officer. In France, when a prisoner of war, learning French there without a master, he had heard a saying that he now recalled to some purpose: _Vin de grain est plus doux que n’est pas vin de presse_–“Willing duties are sweeter than those that are extorted.” The punning allusion to the press had tickled his fancy and fixed the significant truism in his memory. From it he now took his cue and proceeded to man his ship.

So at length the pressed man, in spite of all his ruses and protestations, was rated and absorbed into that vast agglomeration of men and ships known as the fleet. Here he underwent a speedy metamorphosis. It was not that he lost his individuality and became a mere unit amongst thousands. Quite the contrary. Friends, creditors or next-of-kin, concocting petitions on his behalf, set forth in heart-rending terms the many disabilities he suffered from, together with many he did not, and prayed, with a fervour often reaching no deeper than their pockets, that he might be restored without delay to his bereaved and destitute family. Across the bottom right-hand corner of these petitions, conveniently upturned for that purpose, the Admiralty scrawled its initial order: “Let his case be stated.” The immediate effect of this expenditure of Admiralty ink was magical. It promoted the subject of the petition from the ranks, so to speak, and raised him to the dignity of a “State the Case Man.”

He now became a person of consequence. The kindliest inquiries were made after his health. The state of his eyes, the state of his limbs, the state of his digestion were all stated with the utmost minuteness and prolixity. Reams of gilt-edged paper were squandered upon him; and by the time his case had been duly stated, restated, considered, reconsidered and finally decided, the poor fellow had perhaps voyaged round the world or by some mischance gone to the next.

In the matter of exacting their pound of flesh the Lords Commissioners were veritable Shylocks. Neither supplications nor tears had power to move them, and though they sometimes relented, it was invariably for reasons of policy and in the best interests of the service. Men clearly shown to be protected they released. They could not go back upon their word unless some lucky quibble rendered it possible to traverse the obligation with honour. Unprotected subjects who were clearly unfit to eat the king’s victuals they discharged–for substitutes.

[Illustration: The Press Gang, or English Liberty Displayed.]

The principle underlying their Lordships’ gracious acceptance of substitutes for pressed men was beautifully simple. If as a pressed man you were fit to serve, but unwilling, you were worth at least two able-bodied men; if you were unfit, and hence unable to serve, you were worth at least one. This simple rule proved a source of great encouragement to the gangs, for however bad a man might be he was always worth a better.

The extortions to which the Lords Commissioners lent themselves in this connection–three, and, as in the case of Joseph Sanders of Bristol, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1534–Capt. Barker, 4 Jan. 1805, and endorsement.] even four able-bodied men being exacted as substitutes–could only be termed iniquitous did we not know the duplicity, roguery and deep cunning with which they had to cope. Upon the poor, indeed, the practice entailed great hardship, particularly when the home had to be sacrificed in order to obtain the discharge of the bread-winner who had been instrumental in getting it together; but to the unscrupulous crimp and the shady attorney the sailor’s misfortune brought only gain. Buying up “raw boys,” or Irishmen who “came over for reasons they did not wish known”–rascally persons who could be had for a song–they substituted these for seasoned men who had been pressed, and immediately, having got the latter in their power, turned them over to merchant ships at a handsome profit. At Hull, on the other hand, substitutes were sought in open market. The bell-man there cried a reward for men to go in that capacity. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–George Crowle, Esq., M.P. for Hull, 28 Dec. 1739.]

Even when the pressed man had procured his substitutes and obtained his coveted discharge, his liberty was far from assured. In theory exempt from the press for a period of at least twelve months, he was in reality not only liable to be re-pressed at any moment, but to be subjected to that process as often as he chose to free himself and the gang to take him. A Liverpool youth named William Crick a lad with expectations to the amount of “near 4000 Pounds,” was in this way pressed and discharged by substitute three times in quick succession. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Rear-Admiral Child, 8 Aug. 1799.] Intending substitutes themselves not infrequently suffered the same fate ere they could carry out their intention. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–Lieut. Leaver, 5 Jan. 1739-40, and numerous instances.]

The discharging of a pressed man whose petition finally succeeded did not always prove to be the eminently simple matter it would seem. Time and tide waited for no man, least of all for the man who had the misfortune to be pressed, and in the interval between his appeal and the order for his release his ship, as already hinted, had perhaps put half the circumference of the globe between him and home; or when the crucial moment arrived, and he was summoned before his commander to learn the gratifying Admiralty decision, he made his salute in batches of two, three or even four men, each of whom protested vehemently that he was the original and only person to whom the order applied. An amusing attempt at “coming Cripplegate” in this manner occurred on board the _Lennox_ in 1711. A woman, who gave her name as Alice Williams, having petitioned for the release of her “brother,” one John Williams, a pressed man then on board that ship, succeeded in her petition, and orders were sent down to the commander, Capt. Bennett, to give the man his discharge. He proceeded to do so, but to his amazement discovered, first, that he had no less than four John Williamses on board, all pressed men; second, that while each of the four claimed to be the man in question, three of the number had no sister, while the fourth confessed to one whose name was not Alice but “Percilly”; and, after long and patient investigation, third, that one of them had a wife named Alice, who, he being a foreigner domiciled by marriage, had “tould him she would gett him cleare” should he chance to fall into the hands of the press-gang. In this she failed, for he was kept. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1470–Capt. Bennett, 2 Dec. 1711.]

Of the pressed man’s smiling arrest for debts which he did not owe, and of his jocular seizure by sheriffs armed with writs of Habeas Corpus, the annals of his incorporation in the fleet furnish many instances. Arrest for fictitious debt was specially common. In every seaport town attorneys were to be found who made it their regular practice. Particularly was this true of Bristol. Good seamen were rarely pressed there for whom writs were not immediately issued on the score of debts of which they had never heard. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Admiral Philip, 5 Dec. 1801.] To warrant such arrest the debt had to exceed twenty pounds, and service, when the pressed man was already on shipboard, was by the hands of the Water Bailiff.

The writ of Habeas Corpus was, in effect, the only legal check it was possible to oppose to the impudent pretensions and high-handed proceedings of the gang. While H.M.S. _Amaranth_ lay in dock in 1804 and her company were temporarily quartered on a hulk in Long Reach, two sheriff’s officers, accompanied by a man named Cumberland, a tailor of Deptford, boarded the latter and served a writ on a seaman for debt. The first lieutenant, who was in charge at the time, refused to let the man go, saying he would first send to his captain, then at the dock, for orders, which he accordingly did. The intruders thereupon went over the side, Cumberland “speaking very insultingly.” Just as the messenger returned with the captain’s answer, however, they again put in an appearance, and the lieutenant hailed them and bade them come aboard. Cumberland complied. “I have orders from my captain,” said the lieutenant, stepping up to him, “to press you.” He did so, and had it not been that a writ of Habeas Corpus was immediately sworn out, the Deptford tailor would most certainly have exchanged his needle for a marlinespike. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1532–Lieut. Collett, 13 Feb. 1804.]

Provocative as such redemptive measures were, and designedly so, they were as a rule allowed to pass unchallenged. The Lords Commissioners regretted the loss of the men, but thought “perhaps it would be as well to let them go.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 302–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1783-95, No. 24.] For this complacent attitude on the part of his captors the pressed man had reason to hold the Law Officers of the Crown in grateful remembrance. As early as 1755 they gave it as their opinion–too little heeded–that to bring any matter connected with pressing to judicial trial would be “very imprudent.” Later, with the lesson of twenty-two years’ hard pressing before their eyes, they went still further, for they then advised that a subject so contentious, not to say so ill-defined in law, should be kept, if not altogether, at least as much as possible out of court. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 7. 298–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1733-56, No. 99; _Admiralty Records_ 7. 299–Law Officers’ Opinions, 1756-77, No. 70.]

CHAPTER XII.

HOW THE GANG WENT OUT.

Not until the year 1833 did belated Nemesis overtake the press-gang. It died the unmourned victim of its own enormities, and the manner of its passing forms the by no means least interesting chapter in its extraordinary career.

Summarising the causes, direct and indirect, which led to the final scrapping of an engine that had been mainly instrumental in manning the fleet for a hundred years and more, and without which, whatever its imperfections, that fleet could in all human probability never have been manned at all, we find them to be substantially these:–

_(a)_ The demoralising effects of long-continued, violent and indiscriminate pressing upon the Fleet;

_(b)_ Its injurious and exasperating effects upon Trade;

_(c)_ Its antagonising effect upon the Nation; and

_(d)_ Its enormous cost as compared with recruiting by the good-will of the People.

Frederick the Great, it is related, being in one of his grim humours after the dearly bought victory of Czaslaw, invited the neighbouring peasantry to come and share the spoil of the carcases on the field of battle. They responded in great numbers; whereupon he, surrounding them, pressed three hundred of the most promising and “cloathed them immediately from the dead.” [Footnote: _State Papers Foreign, Germany,_ vol. cccxl.–Robinson to Hyndford, 31 May 1742.] In this way, Ezekiel-like, he retrieved his losses; but to the regiments so completed the addition of these resurrection recruits proved demoralising to a degree, notwithstanding the Draconic nature of the Prussian discipline. In like manner the discipline used in the British fleet, while not less drastic, failed conspicuously to counteract the dry-rot introduced and fostered by the press-gang. In its efforts to maintain the Navy, indeed, that agency came near to proving its ruin.

On the most lenient survey of the recruits it furnished, it cannot be denied that they were in the aggregate a desperately poor lot, unfitted both physically and morally for the tremendous task of protecting an island people from the attacks of powerful sea-going rivals. How bad they were, the epithets spontaneously applied to them by the outraged commanders upon whom they were foisted abundantly prove. Witness the following, taken at random from naval captains’ letters extending over a hundred years:–

“Blackguards.”

“Sorry poor creatures that don’t earn half the victuals they eat.”

“Sad, thievish creatures.”

“Not a rag left but what was of such a nature as had to be destroyed.”

“150 on board, the greatest part of them sorry fellows.”

“Poor ragged souls, and very small.”

“Miserable poor creatures, not a seaman amongst them, and the fleet in the same condition.”

“Unfit for service, and a nuisance to the ship.”

“Never so ill-manned a ship since I have been at sea. The worst set I ever saw.”

“Twenty-six poor souls, but three of them seamen. Ragged and half dead.”

“Landsmen, boys, incurables and cripples. Sad wretches great part of them are.”

“More fit for an hospital than the sea.”

“All the ragg-tagg that can be picked up.”

In this last phrase, “All the rag-tag that can be picked up,” we have the key to the situation; for though orders to press “no aged, diseased or infirm persons, nor boys,” were sufficiently explicit, yet in order to swell the returns, and to appease in some degree the fleet’s insatiable greed for men, the gangs raked in recruits with a lack of discrimination that for the better part of a century made that fleet the most gigantic collection of human freaks and derelicts under the sun.

Billingsley, commander of the _Ferme_, receiving seventy pressed men to complete his complement in 1708, discovers to his chagrin that thirteen are lame in the legs, five lame in the hands, and three almost blind. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1469–Capt. Billingsley, 5 May 1708.] Latham, commanding the _Bristol_, on the eve of sailing for the West Indies can muster only eighteen seamen amongst sixty-eight pressed men that day put on board of him. As for the rest, they are either sick, or too old or too young to be of service–“ragged wretches, bad of the itch, who have not the least pretensions to eat His Majesty’s bread.” Forty of the number had to be put ashore. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 161–Admiral Watson, 26 Feb. 1754.] Admiral Mostyn, boarding his flagship, the _Monarch_, “never in his life saw such a crew,” though the _Monarch_ had an already sufficiently evil reputation in that respect, insomuch that whenever a scarecrow man-o’-war’s man was seen ashore the derisive cry instantly went up: “There goes a _Monarch_!” So hopelessly bad was the company in this instance, it was found impossible to carry the ship to sea. “I don’t know where they come from,” observes the Admiral, hot with indignation, “but whoever was the officer who received them, he ought to be ashamed, for I never saw such except in the condemned hole at Newgate. I was three hours and a half mustering this scabby crew, and I should have imagined that the Scum of the Earth had been picked up for this ship.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 480–Admiral Mostyn, 1 and 6 April 1755.] The vigorous protest prepares us for what Capt. Baird found on board the _Duke_ a few years later. The pressed men there exhibited such qualifications for sea duty as “fractured thigh-bone, idiocy, strained back and sickly, a discharged soldier, gout and sixty years old, rupture, deaf and foolish, fits, lame, rheumatic and incontinence of urine.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1490–Capt. Baird, 22 May 1759.]

That most reprehensible practice, the pressing of cripples for naval purposes, would appear to have had its origin in the unauthorised extension of an order issued by the Lord High Admiral, in 1704, to the effect that in the appointment of cooks to the Navy the Board should give preference to persons so afflicted. For the pressing of boys there existed even less warrant. Yet the practice was common, so much so that when, during the great famine of 1800, large numbers of youths flocked into Poole in search of the bread they could not obtain in the country, the gangs waylaid them and reaped a rich harvest. Two hundred was the toll on this occasion. As all were in a “very starving, ragged, filthy condition,” the gangsmen stripped them, washed them thoroughly in the sea, clad them in second-hand clothing from the quay-side shops, and giving each one a knife, a spoon, a comb and a bit of soap, sent them on board the tenders contented and happy. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Capt. Boyle, 2 June 1801.] These lads were of course a cut above the “scum of the earth” so vigorously denounced by Admiral Mostyn. Beginning their career as powder-monkeys, a few years’ licking into shape transformed them, as a rule, into splendid fighting material.

The utter incapacity of the human refuse dumped into the fleet is justly stigmatised by one indignant commander, himself a patient long-sufferer in that respect, as a “scandalous abuse of the service.” Six of these poor wretches had not the strength of one man. They could not be got upon deck in the night, or if by dint of the rope’s-end they were at length routed out of their hammocks, they immediately developed the worst symptoms of the “waister”–seasickness and fear of that which is high. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1471–Capt. Billop, 26 Oct. 1712.] Bruce, encountering dirty weather on the Irish coast, when in command of the _Hawke_, out of thirty-two pressed men “could not get above seven to go upon a yard to reef his courses,” but was obliged to order his warrant officers and master aloft on that duty. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1477–Capt. Bruce, 6 Oct. 1741.] Belitha, of the _Scipio_, had but one man aboard him, out of a crew of forty-one, who was competent to stand his trick at the wheel; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1482–Capt. Belitha, 15 July 1746.] Bethell, of the _Phoenix_, had many who had “never seen a gun fired in their lives”; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1490–Capt. Bethell, 21 Aug. 1759.] and Adams, of the _Bird-in-hand_, learnt the fallacy of the assertion that that _rara avis_ is worth two in the bush. Mustered for drill in small-arms, his men “knew no more how to handle them than a child.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1440–Capt. Adams, 7 Oct. 1744.] For all their knowledge of that useful exercise they might have been Sea-Fencibles.

Yet while ships were again and again prevented from putting to sea because, though their complements were numerically complete, they had only one or no seaman on board, and hence were unable to get their anchors or make sail; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1478 –Capt. Boys, 14 April 1742; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1512–Capt. Bayly, 21 July 1796, and Captains’ Letters, _passim_.] while Bennett, of the _Lennox_, when applied to by the masters of eight outward-bound East-India ships for the loan of two hundred and fifty men to enable them to engage the French privateers by whom they were held up in the river of Shannon, dared not lend a single hand lest the pressed men, who formed the greater part of his crew, should rise and run away with the ship; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1499–Capt. Bennett, 22 Sept. 1779.] Ambrose, of the _Rupert_, cruising off Cape Machichaco with a crew of “miserable poor wretches” whom he feared could be of “no manner of use or service” to him, after a short but sharp engagement of only an hour’s duration captured, with the loss of but a single man, the largest privateer sailing out of San Sebastian–the _Duke of Vandome_, of twenty-six carriage guns and two hundred and two men, of whom twenty-nine were killed; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–Capt. Ambrose, 7 July and 26 Sept. 1741.] and Capt. Amherst, encountering a heavy gale in Barnstable Pool, off Appledore, would have lost his ship, the low-waisted, over-masted _Mortar_ sloop, had it not been for the nine men he was so lucky as to impress shortly before the gale. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1440–Capt. Amherst, 12 Dec. 1744.] Anson regarded pressed men with suspicion. When he sailed on his famous voyage round the world his ships contained only sixty-seven; but with his complement of five hundred reduced by sickness to two hundred and one, he was glad to add forty of those undesirables to their number out of the India-men at Wampoo. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439–Capt. Anson, 18 Sept. 1740, and 7 Dec. 1742.] These, however, were seamen such as the gangs did not often pick up in England, where, as we have seen, the able seaman who was not fully protected avoided the press as he would a lee shore.

In addition to the sweepings of the roads and slums, there were in His Majesty’s ships many who trod the decks “wide betwixt the legs, as if they had the gyves on.” Peculiar to the seafaring man, the tailor and the huckstering Jew, the gait of these individuals, who belonged mostly to the sailor class, was strongly accentuated by an adventitious circumstance having no necessary connection with Israelitish descent, the sartorial board or the rolling deep. They were in fact convicts who had but recently shed their irons, and who walked wide from force of habit. Reasons of policy rather than of mercy explained their presence in the fleet. The prisons of the country, numerous and insanitary though they were, could neither hold them all nor kill them; America would have no more of them; and penal settlements, those later garden cities of a harassed government, were as yet undreamt of. In these circumstances reprieved and pardoned convicts were bestowed in about equal proportions, according to their calling and election, upon the army and the navy.

The practice was one of very respectable antiquity and antecedents. By a certain provision of the Feudal System a freeman who had committed a felony, or become hopelessly involved in debt, might purge himself of either by becoming a serf. So, at a later date, persons in the like predicament were permitted to exchange their fetters, whether of debt or iron, for the dear privilege of “spilling every drop of blood in their bodies” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125–Petition of the Convicts on board the _Stanislaus_ hulk, Woolwich, 18 May 1797.] on behalf of the sovereign whose clemency they enjoyed. Broken on the wheel of naval discipline, they “did very well in deep water.” Nearer land they were given, like the jailbirds they were, to “hopping the twig.” [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2733–Capt. Young, 21 March 1776.]

The insolvent debtor, who in the majority of cases had studied his pleasures more than his constitution, was perhaps an even less desirable recruit than his cousin the emancipated convict. In his letters to the Navy Board, Capt. Aston, R.N., relates how, immediately after the passing of the later Act [Footnote: 4 & 5 Anne, cap. 6.] for the freeing of such persons from their financial fetters, he “gave constant attendance for almost two years at the sittings of the Courts of Sessions in London and Surrey,” lying in wait there for such debtors as should choose the sea. From the Queen’s Bench Prison, the Clink, Marshalsea, Borough Compter, Poultry Compter, Wood Street Compter, Ludgate Prison and the Fleet, he obtained in that time a total of one hundred and thirty-two, to whom in every case the prest-shilling was paid. They were dear at the price. Bankrupt in pocket, stamina and health, they cumbered the ships to the despair of commanders and were never so welcome as when they ran away. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1436–Letters of Capt. Aston, 1704-5.]

The responsibility for jail-bird recruiting did not of course rest with the gangs. They saw the shady crew safe on board ship, that was all. Yet the odium of the thing was theirs. For not only did association with criminals lower the standard of pressing as the gangs practised it, it heightened the general disrepute in which they were held. For an institution whose hold upon the affections of the people was at the best positively negative, this was a serious matter. Every convict whom the gang safeguarded consequently drove another nail in the coffin preparing for it. The first and most lasting effect of the wholesale pumping of sewage into the fleet was to taint the ships with a taint far more deadly than mere ineptitude. A spirit of ominous restlessness prevailed. Slackness was everywhere observable, coupled with incipient insubordination which no discipline, however severe, could eradicate or correct. At critical moments the men could with difficulty be held to their duty. To hold them to quarters in ’97, when engaging the enemy off Brest, the rattan and the rope’s-end had to be unsparingly used. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125–Petition of the Company of H.M.S. _Nymph_, 1797.] In no circumstances were they to be trusted. Given the slightest opening, they “ran” like water from a sieve. To counteract these dangerous tendencies the Marines were instituted. Drafted into the ships in thousands, they checked in a measure the surface symptoms of disaffection, but left the disease itself untouched. The fact was generally recognised, and it was no uncommon circumstance, when the number of pressed men present in a ship was large in proportion to the unpressed element, for both officers and marines to walk the deck day and night armed, fearful lest worse things should come upon them. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1499–Capt. Bennett, 22 Sept. 1799, and Captains’ Letters, _passim_.] What they anticipated was the mutiny of individual crews. But a greater calamity than this was in store for them.

In the wholesale mutinies at Spithead and the Nore the blow fell with appalling suddenness, notwithstanding the fact that in one form or another it had been long foreseen. Fifty-five years had elapsed since Vernon, scenting danger from the existing mode of manning the fleet, had first sounded the alarm. He dreaded, he told the Lords Commissioners in so many words, the consequences that must sooner or later ensue from adherence to the press. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 578–Vice-Admiral Vernon, 27 Jan. 1742-3.] Though the utterance of one gifted with singularly clear prevision, the warning passed unheeded. Had it been made public, it would doubtless have met with the derision with which the voice of the national prophet is always hailed. Veiled as it was in service privacy, it moved their Lordships to neither comment nor action. Action, indeed, was out of the question. The Commissioners were helpless in the grip of a system from which, so far as human sagacity could then perceive, there was no way of escape. Let its issue be what it might, they could no more replace or reconstruct it than they could build ships of tinsel.

Other warnings were not wanting. For some years before the catastrophic happenings of ’97 there flowed in upon the Admiralty a thin but steady stream of petitions from the seamen of the fleet, each of them a rude echo of Vernon’s sapient warning. To these, coming as they did from an unconsidered source, little if any significance was attached. Beyond the most perfunctory inquiry, in no case to be made public, they received scant attention. The sailor, it was thought, must have his grievances if he would be happy; and petitions were the recognised line for him to air them on. They were accordingly relegated to that limbo of distasteful and quickly forgotten things, their Lordships’ pigeon-holes.

Yet there was amongst these documents at least one which should have given the Heads of the Navy pause for serious thought. It was the petition of the seamen of H.M.S. _Shannon_, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125–Petition of the Ship’s Company of the _Shannon_, 16 June 1796.] in which there was conveyed a threat that afterwards, when the mutiny at the Nore was at its height, under the leadership of a pressed man whose coadjutors were mainly pressed men, came within an ace of resolving itself in action. That threat concerned the desperate expedient of carrying the revolted ships into an enemy’s port, and of there delivering them up. Had this been done–and only the Providence that watches over the destinies of nations prevented it–the act would have brought England to her knees.

At a time like this, when England’s worst enemies were emphatically the press-gangs which manned her fleet with the riff-raff of the nation and thus made national disaster not only possible but hourly imminent, the “old stander” and the volunteer were to her Navy what salt is to the sea, its perpetual salvation. Such men inculcated an example, created an _esprit de corps_, that infected even the vagrant and the jail-bird, to say nothing of the better-class seaman, taken mainly by gangs operating on the water, who was often content, when brought into contact with loyal men, to settle down and do his best for king and country. Amongst the pressed men, again, desertion and death made for the survival of the fittest, and in this residuum there was not wanting a certain savour. Subdued and quickened by man-o’-war discipline, they developed a dogged resolution, a super-capacity not altogether incompatible with degeneracy; and to crown all, the men who officered the resolute if disreputable crew were men in whose blood the salt of centuries tingled, men unrivalled for sea-sagacity, initiative and pluck. If they could not uphold the honour of the flag with the pressed man’s unqualified aid, they did what was immeasurably greater. They upheld it in spite of him.

Upon the trade of the nation the injury inflicted by the press-gang is rightly summed up in littles. Every able seaman, every callow apprentice taken out of or forcibly detained from a merchant vessel was, _ipso facto,_ a minute yet irretrievably substantial loss to commerce of one kind or another. Trade, it is true, did not succumb in consequence. Possessed of marvellous recuperative powers, she did not even languish to any perceptible degree. Nevertheless, the detriment was there, a steadily cumulative factor, and at the end of any given period of pressing the commerce of the nation, emasculated by these continuous if infinitesimal abstractions from its vitality, was substantially less in bulk, substantially less in pounds sterling, than if it had been allowed to run its course unhindered.

British in name, but Teutonic in its resentments, trade came to regard these continual “pin-pricks” as an intolerable nuisance. It was not so much the loss that aroused her anger as the constant irritation she was subjected to. This she keenly resented, and the stream of her resentment, joining forces with its confluents the demoralisation of the Navy through pressing, the excessive cost of pressing and the antagonising effects of pressing upon the nation at large, contributed in no small degree to that final supersession of the press-gang which was in essence, if not in name, the beginning of Free Trade.

To the people the impress was as an axe laid at the root of the tree. There was here no question, as with trade, of the mere loss of hands who could be replaced. Attacking the family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs were the tentacles struck at the very foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief as poignant as death.

If the people were slow to anger under the infliction it was because, in the first place, the gang had its advocates who, though they could not extol its virtues, since it had none, were yet able, and that with no small measure of success, to demonstrate to a people as insular in their prejudices as in their habitat that, but for the invincible Navy which the gang maintained for their protection, the hereditary enemy, the detested French, would most surely come and compel them one and all to subsist upon a diet of frogs. What could be seriously urged against the gang in face of an argument such as that?

Patriotism, moreover, glowed with ardent flame. Fanned to twofold heat by natural hatred of the foreigner and his insolent challenge of insular superiority, it blinded the people to the truth that liberty of the subject is in reality nothing more than freedom from oppression. So, with the gang at their very doors, waiting to snatch away their husbands, their fathers and their sons, they carolled “Rule Britannia” and congratulated themselves on being a free people. The situation was unparalleled in its sardonic humour; and, as if this were not enough, the “Noodle of Newcastle,” perceiving vacuously that something was still wanting, supplied the bathetic touch by giving out that the king, God bless him! could never prevail upon himself to break through the sacred liberties of his people save on the most urgent occasions. [Footnote: _Newcastle Papers_–Newcastle to Yorke, 27 Feb. 1749-50.]

The process of correcting the defective vision of the nation was as gradual as the acquisition of the sea-power the nation had set as its goal, and as painful. In both processes the gang participated largely. To the fleet it acted as a rude feeder; to the people as a ruder specialist. Wielding the cutlass as its instrument, it slowly and painfully hewed away the scales from their eyes until it stood visualised for what it really was–the most atrocious agent of oppression the world has ever seen. For the operation the people should have been grateful. The nature of the thing they had cherished so blindly filled them with rage and incited them to violence.

Two events now occurred to seal the fate of the gang and render its final supersession a mere matter of time rather than of debate or uncertainty. The mutiny at the Nore brought the people face to face with the appalling risks attendant on wholesale pressing, while the war with America, incurred for the sole purpose of upholding the right to press, taught them the lengths to which their rulers were still prepared to go in order to enslave them. In the former case their sympathies, though with the mutineers, were frozen at the fountain-head by fear of invasion and that supposititious diet of frogs. In the latter, as in the ancient quarrel between Admiralty and Trade, they went out to the party who not only abstained from pressing but paid the higher wages.

While the average cost of ‘listing a man “volunteerly” rarely exceeded the modest sum of 30s., the expense entailed through recruiting him by means of the press-gang ranged from 3s. 9d. per head in 1570 [Footnote: _State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth_, vol. lxxiii. f. 38: Estimate of Charge for Pressing 400 Mariners, 1570.] to 114 Pounds in 1756. Between these extremes his cost fluctuated in the most extraordinary manner. At Weymouth, in 1762, it was at least 100 Pounds; at Deal, in 1805, 32 Pounds odd; at Poole, in the same year, 80 Pounds. [Footnote: _London Chronicle_, 16-18 March, 1762; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581–Admiral Berkeley, 14 Feb. and 5 Aug. 1805.] From 1756 the average steadily declined until in 1795 it touched its eighteenth century minimum of about 6 Pounds. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579–Average based on Admirals’ Reports on Rendezvous, 1791-5.] A sharp upward tendency then developed, and in the short space of eight years it soared again to 20 Pounds. It was at this figure that Nelson, perhaps the greatest naval authority of his time, put it in 1803. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580 –Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.]

Up to this point we have considered only the prime cost of the pressed man. A secondary factor must now be introduced, for when you had got your man at an initial cost of 20 Pounds–a cost in itself out of all proportion to his value–you could never be sure of keeping him. Nelson calculated that during the war immediately preceding 1803 forty-two thousand seamen deserted from the fleet. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580–Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Assuming, with him, that every man of this enormous total was either a pressed man or had been procured at the cost of a pressed man, the loss entailed upon the nation by their desertion represented an outlay of 840,000 Pounds for raising them in the first instance, and, in the second, a further outlay of 840,000 Pounds for replacing them.

In this estimate there is, however, a substantial error; for, approaching the question from another point of view, let us suppose, as we may safely do without overstraining the probabilities of the case, that out of every three men pressed at least one ran from his rating. Now the primary cost of pressing three men on the 20 Pound basis being 60 Pounds, it follows that in order to obtain their ultimate cost to the country we must add to that sum the outlay incurred in pressing another man in lieu of the one who ran. The total cost of the three men who ultimately remain to the fleet consequently works out at 80 Pounds; the cost of each at 26 Pounds, 13s. 4d. Hence Nelson’s forty-two thousand deserters entailed upon the nation an actual expenditure, not of 1,680,000 Pounds, but of nearly two and a quarter millions.

Another fact that emerges from a scrutiny of these remarkable figures is this. Whenever the number of volunteer additions to the fleet increased, the cost of pressing increased in like ratio; whenever the number of volunteers declined, the pressed man became proportionally cheaper. Periods in which the pressed man was scarce and dear thus synchronise with periods when the volunteer was plentiful; but scarcity of volunteers, reacting upon the gangs, and conducing to their greater activity, brought in pressed men in greater numbers in proportion to expenditure and so reduced the cost per head. In this logical though at first sight bewildering interrelation of the laws of supply and demand, we have in a nutshell the whole case for the cost of pressing as against the gang. Taking one year with another the century through, the impress service, on a moderate estimate, employed enough able-bodied men to man a first-rate ship of the line, and absorbed at least enough money to maintain her, while the average number of men raised, taking again one year with another, rarely if ever exceeded the number of men engaged in obtaining them. With tranquillity at length assured to the country, with trade in a state of high prosperity, the shipping tonnage of the nation rising by leaps and bounds and the fleet reduced to an inexigent peace footing, why incur the ruinous expense of pressing the seaman when, as was now the case, he could be had for the asking or the making?

For Peace brought in her train both change and opportunity. The frantic dumping of all sorts and conditions of men into the fleet ceased. Necessity no longer called for it. No enemy hovered in the offing, to be perpetually outmanoeuvred or instantly engaged. Until that enemy could renew its strength, or time should call another into being, the mastery of the seas, the dear prize of a hundred years of strenuous struggle, remained secure. Our ships, maintained nevertheless as efficient fighting-machines, became schools of leisure wherein–a thing impossible amid the perpetual storm and stress of war–the young blood of the nation could be more gradually inured to the sea and tuned to fighting-pitch. Science had not yet linked hands with warfare. Steam, steel, the ironclad, the super-Dreadnought and the devastating cordite gun were still in the womb of the future; but the keels of a newer fleet were nevertheless already on the slips, and with the old order the press-gang, now for ever obsolete, went the way of all things useless.

Its memory still survives. Those who despair of our military system, or of our lack of it, talk of conscription. They alone forget. A people who for a hundred years patiently endured conscription in its most cruel form will never again suffer it to be lightly inflicted upon them.

APPENDIX

ADMIRAL YOUNG’S TORPEDO

DEAR NEPEAN,–I enclose a little project for destroying the Enemy’s Flatboats if they venture over to our Coast, which you may shew, if you please, to your Sea Lords as coming from some anonymous correspondent. If they can improve upon it so as to make it useful, I shall be glad of it; and if they think it good for nothing, and throw it in the fire, there is no harm done. As the conveying an Army must require a very great number of Boats, which must be very near each other, if many such vessels as I propose should get among them, they must necessarily commit great havoc. I cannot ascertain whether the blocks or logs of wood would be strong enough to throw the shot without bursting, or whether they would not throw the shot though they should burst. I think they would not burst, and so do some Officers of Artillery here; but that might be ascertained by experiment at any time. This sort of Fire-vessel will have the advantage of costing very little; and of being of no service to the Enemy should it fall into their hands.

W. YOUNG. LEWES, 14 _Aug_. 1803.

[Illustration: Admiral Young’s Torpedo. From the Original Drawing at the Public Record Office.]

_Secret_

“The success of an attempt to land an Army on an Enemy’s Coast, whose Army is prepared to prevent it, will depend in a great degree on the regularity of the order in which the Boats, or Vessels, are arranged, that carry the Troops on Shore; everything therefore which contributes to the breaking of that order will so far contribute to render success more doubtful; especially if, in breaking the order, some of the Boats or Vessels are destroyed. For this purpose Fireships well managed will be found very useful; I should therefore think that, at all the King’s Ports, and at all places where the Enemy may be expected to attempt a landing with Ships of War or other large Vessels, considerable quantities of materials for fitting Fireships according to the latest method should be kept ready to be put on board any small Vessels on the Enemy’s approach; but, as such Vessels would have little or no effect on Gunboats or Flatboats, machines might be made for the purpose of destroying them, by shot, and by explosion. The Shot should be large, but as they will require to be thrown but a short distance, and will have only thin-sided Vessels to penetrate, Machines strong enough to resist the effort of the small quantity of Powder necessary to throw them may probably be made of wood; either by making several chambers in one thick Block, as No. 1, or one chamber at each end of a log as No. 2, which may be used either separately, or fastened together. The Vents should communicate with each other by means of quick Match, which should be very carefully covered to prevent its sustaining damage, or being moved by things carried about. Such Machines, properly loaded, may be kept in Fishing boats or other small vessels near the parts of the Coast where the Enemy may be expected to land; or in secure places, ready to be put on board when the Enemy are expected. The Chambers should be cut horizontally, and the Machine should be so placed in the Vessel as to have them about level with the surface of the water; under the Machine should be placed a considerable quantity of Gunpowder; and over it, large Stones, and bags of heavy shingle, and the whole may be covered with fishing nets, or any articles that may happen to be on board. Several fuses, or trains of Match, should communicate with the Machine, and with the powder under it, so managed as to ensure those which communicate with the Machine taking effect upon the others, that the shot may be thrown before the Vessel is blown up. The Match, or Fuses, should be carefully concealed to prevent their being seen if the Vessel should be boarded…. If these Vessels are placed in the front of the Enemy’s Line, and not near the extremities of it, it would be scarcely possible for them to avoid the effects of the explosion unless, from some of them exploding too soon, the whole armament should stop. Every Machine would probably sink the Boat on each side of it, and so do considerable damage to others with the shot; and would kill and wound many men by the explosion and the fall of the stones…. As the success of these Vessels will depend entirely upon their not being suspected by the Enemy, the utmost secrecy must be observed in preparing the Machines and sending them to the places where they are to be kept. A few confidential men only should be employed to make them, and they should be so covered as to prevent any suspicion of their use, or of what they contain.”

INDEX

Adams, Capt.,

_Admiral Spry_ tender,

_Adventure_, H.M.S.,

Ages below eighteen and over fifty-five exempt,

Alcock, Henry, Mayor of Waterford,

Alms, Capt.,

_Amaranth_, H.M.S.,

Ambrose, Capt.,

Amherst, Capt,

_Amphitrite_, H.M.S.,

Andover, the press-gang at,

_Anglesea_, H.M.S.,

Anne, Queen, impresses foreign seamen, arms of press-gang under,
drummers and fifers pressed for navy in her reign, sailors unwilling to serve,

Anson, Admiral Lord,

Anthony, John, pressed with two protections on him,

Appledore, press-gang at, 72,

Apprentices, exempt from impressment only in some circumstances, in North-country pressed because their indentures bore Scotch 14s. stamp instead of English 15s.,

Archer, Capt,

Arms of the press-gang,

_Assurance_, H.M.S.,

Aston, Capt,

Atkinson, Lieut.,

Ayscough, Capt.,

Baily, James, a ferryman, pressed for his inactivity,

Baird, Capt,

Balchen, Capt.,

Ball, Capt.,

Banyan days,

Bargemen impressed in thousands,

Barker, Capt., regulating officer at Bristol, midshipman.

Barking, the press-gang at,

Barnicle, William,

Barnsley, Lieut.,

Barrington, Capt.,

Bath, Bristol gang’s fruitless attempt at,

Bawdsey,

_Beaufort_, East Indiaman,

Beecher, Capt,

Bennett, Capt,

Bertie, Capt,

Bethell, Capt, paid damages for wrongfully impressing,

Bettesworth, John, claims privilege of granting private protections to Ryde and Portsmouth ferrymen,

Biggen, Charles,

Billingsley, Capt.,

Bingham, William,

Birchall, Lieut.,

_Bird-in-hand_, H.M.S.,

Birmingham, sham gangs at,

_Black Book_ of the Admiralty,

Blackstone, Sir W.,

Blackwater, men working turf boats on, not exempt,

_Blanche_, H.M.S.,

Blear-eyed Moll,

_Blonde_, H.M.S.,

Boats for the press-gang,

Boat steerers on whalers exempt from impressment,

Boatswains, conditions of exemption,

_Bonetta_ sloop,

Boscawen, Capt.,

Boston, Mass.,

Bounty system, the,

Bowen, Capt.,

Box, Lieut,

Boys, Capt.,

Brace, Lieut.,

Bradley, Lieut,

Brawn, Capt.,

Breedon, Lieut.,

Brenton, Capt. Jahleel, afterwards Vice-Admiral,

Brenton, E. P., _Naval History_,

Brenton, Lieut,

Brereton, Capt.,

Brett, Capt, 110,

Bridges a favourite haunt of the press-gang,

Brighton, the press-gang at,

Bristol, the press-gang at,

Bristol jail as press-room,

_Bristol_, H.M.S.,

_Britannia_ trading vessel, three of the crew shot in resisting the press-gang, the ship captured and taken to port, the affair not within the coroner’s purview, the bodies buried at sea, court-martial acquits officers,

Brixham, the press-gang at,

Broadfoot case, the,

Broadstairs fishermen,
the press-gang at,
Bromley, Capt. Sir Robert,

Bullard, Richard, a fiddler persuaded to go to Woolwich to play and for payment was handed to the gang,

_Bull-Dog_ sloop,

Burchett, Josiah, _Observations on the Navy_,

Burrows, Sam,

Butler, Capt.,

Byron, Lord,

Calahan, a gangsman, killed in attempting an arrest,

Cambridge bargemen, press-gang among,

Campbell, Admiral,

Cape Breton,

Caradine, Samuel,

Carey, Rev. Lucius,

Carmarthen, Admiral the Marquis of,

Carolina,

Carpenters, conditions of exemption,
on warships on coast of Scotland could be replaced by shipwrights pressed from the yards,

Carrying the ship up,

Cartel ships,

Castle, William, an alien, impressed on his honeymoon,

Castleford, the press-gang at,

Cawsand safe from the press-gang,

Cecil, William, Lord Burleigh,

_Centurion_, H.M.S., Anson’s flagship, whose crew on their return had life-protection from the press,

Chaplains,

Charles II.,

Chatham, crimpage at,

_Chatham_, H.M.S.,

Chester, the press-gang at

_Chevrette_ corvette,

Clapp, Midshipman,

Clark, George,

Clephen, James,

_Clincher_ gun-brig,

Cockburn, Bailie, of Leith,

Cogbourne’s electuary,

Coke, Sir E.,

Collingwood, Admiral Lord,
Lieut,

Colvill, Admiral Lord,

Colville, Lieut.,

Convoys,

Conyear, John,

Cooper, Josh,

Cork, crimpage at,
the press-gang at,

Comet bomb ship,

Cornwall, the press-gang in,

Coversack, safe from the press-gang,

Coventry, Mr. Commissioner,

Coventry, sham gangs at,

Cowes, press-gang at,

Crabb, Henry,

Crews depleted by the press-gang,

Crick, William,

Crimps,
as sham gangsmen,

Cromer, the suspicions of the inhabitants, bring the press-gang,
to take a noted Russian,

Crown Colonies, desertions in,

Croydon, the press-gang around,

Cruickshank, John, chaplain,

Culverhouse, Capt.,

Customs, Board of,

Dansays, Capt.,

Danton, Midshipman,

Darby, Capt.,

Dartmouth, H.M.S.,

Dartmouth, press-gang at,

Davidson, Samuel, of Newcastle,
applies for life protection

“DD,” discharged dead, in muster books against names of persons deceased,

Deal, press-gang at,

cutters,

Death of sailor in resisting impress, “accidental”,

Debusk, John, shot by the press-gang, on the Britannia,

Dent, Capt.,

Deptford, the press-gang at,

Desertion from the Navy,

Devonshire, H.M.S.,

Dipping the flag,

Director, H.M.S.,

Discipline in the Navy,

Disinfecting a ship,

Dispatch sloop,

Dolan, Edward,

Dominion and Laws of the Sea.,
See Justice, A.,

Dorsetshire, H.M.S.,

Douglas, Capt. Andrew,

Dover, press-gang at,

Downs, crimpage in the,

press-gang in,

Doyle, Lieut,

Dreadnought, H.M.S.,

Drummers pressed for the Navy,

Dryden, Michael, illegally pressed,

Dryden’s sister,

Dublin, sham gangs at,
the press-gang at,

Duke, H.M.S.,

Duke of Vandome, H.M.S.,

Duncan case, the,

Dundas, Henry,

Dundonald, Lord, Autobiography,

Dunkirk, H.M.S.,

Eccentricity leads to impressment,

Eddystone lighthouse, building delayed through impressment of workmen, builders of the third, protected,
keepers at, put inward-bound,
ships’ crews ashore,

Edinburgh, press-gang at,

Edmund and Mary Collier,

Edward III. on the Navy,

Elizabeth, Queen,

Elizabeth ketch,

Ely bargemen, press-gang among,

Emergency crews of men unfit for pressing supplied to merchant-men by the crimps,

Emergency men working on their own account, places of muster for,

English Eclogues. See Southey, R.,

Evading the press-gang. See under Press-gang, How it was evaded.,

Evans, Richard, keeper of Gloucester Castle,

Exemption from impressment, not a right, of foreigners,
negroes not included,
of landsmen only theoretical,
property no qualification for exemption, of harvesters,
of gentlemen, judged by appearances, below 18 and over 55 years,
of apprentices dependent on circumstances, of merchant seamen dependent on circumstances, of masters, mates, boatswains, and carpenters dependent on circumstances,
of some of crew of whalers,
of Thames wherrymen by quota system, of Tyne keelman by the same,
of Severn and Wye trow-men by 10% levy, did not extend to turf boats on Shannon and Blackwater, special for four on each fishing vessel, and later for all engaged in taking, curing, and selling fish,
of Worthing fishermen for a levy,
of Scottish and Manx fishermen, on similar terms, worthless without a document of protection,

Exeter, the press-gang at,

_Falmouth_, H.M.S.,

Falmouth, press-gang at,

Faversham, the press-gang at,

_Ferme_, H.M.S.,

Ferries, a favourite haunt of the press-gang,

_Feversham_, H.M.S.,

Fifers pressed for the Navy,

Fire on ship board,

Fisheries, carefully fostered,
three fish days made compulsory,
became a great nursery for seamen, few exemptions granted, at first special concessions only to the whale and cod fisheries,
later only such number as the warrant specified might be taken, and these the Justices chose; in 1801 no person employed in taking, curing, or selling fish could be impressed, with their best men impressed, only small smacks could be worked, a quota system preferred by the fishermen of some ports, in Cornwall, the men turned tinners in the off-season,

Flags, flying without authority,
omission to dip,

Fleet, Liberty of,

Folkstone market-boats,

Folkstone, press-gang at,

Forcible entry by the press-gang illegal,

Foreigners impressed,
theoretically exempt,
married to English wives considered naturalised, in emergency crews,

Frederick the Great,

Freeholders at one time exempt from impressment,

_Fubbs_, H.M.S.,

Gage, Capt.,

_Galloper_, tender to the _Dreadnought_,

_Ganges_, H.M.S.,

Garth, Dr.,

Gaydon, Lieut.,

Gentlemen exempt from the impress, but judged by appearance and manner,

Gibbs, Capt.,

_Glory_, H.M.S.,

Gloucester, the press-gang at,

Gloucester Castle used as press-room, the keeper’s magic palm,

Godalming, the press-gang at,

Golden, John, Lord Mayor’s bargeman, wrongfully impressed,

Good, James, midshipman,

Goodave, Midshipman,

Gooding, Richard,

Gosport, the press-gang at,

Gravesend, the press-gang at,

Gray, John,

Great Yarmouth, press-gang at,

Greenock, crimpage at,
press-gang at,
Trades Guild,

Greenock ferries, the press-gang at,

Greenwich Hospital,

Grimsby, the press-gang at,

Habeas Corpus, writs of, as means of arresting, and so freeing, pressed men for debts not owing,

Half-pay officers, their projects and inventions,

Hamoaze, the, an entrepôt for pressed men,

Harpooners exempt from impressment,

Harrison, Lieut.,

Hart, Alexander,

_Harwich_, H.M.S.,

Haverfordwest, press-gang at,

Hawke, Admiral Sir Edward,

_Hawke_, H.M.S.,

Haygarth, Lieut.,

Health and illness,

_Hector_, H.M.S.,

Herbert, Emanuel,

_Hind_ armed sloop,

_Historical Relation of State Affairs_. See Lutterell, N.,

Hogarth’s “Stage Coach,”

Hook, Joseph,

_Hope_ tender,

Hotten, J. C., _List of Persons of Quality, etc., who went from England to the American Plantations_,

Hull, press-gang at,

Humber, the press-gang on,

Hurst Castle, the press-gang at,

Ilfracombe, the press-gang at,

Impressment. See Pressed labour.,

Informers,

Inland waterways and the gang
at one time without the jurisdiction of the admirals,

Innes, Capt,

Ipswich, the press-gang at,

_Isis_, H.M.S.,

Isle of Man fishermen,

Jackson, Daniel, pressed from the Chester Volunteers,

Jamaica,

_Jason_, H.M.S.,

Jervis, John, Earl of St. Vincent,

Jews, pressed on account of bandy legs,

_John and Elizabeth_ pink,

John, King, impressment under,

Johnson, Rebecca Anne,

Jones, Paul,

Justice, A., _Dominion and Laws of the Sea_,

Keith, A., parson of the Fleet,
_Observations on the Act for Preventing Clandestine Marriages_,

Kilkenny, the press-gang at,

King’s Lynn, press-gang at,

Kingston, William, case of,

_King William_, Indiaman,

_Lady Shore_, the,

Landsmen exempt only in theory,

Latham, Capt.,

Law officers’ opinions on pressing,

Leave, stoppage of,

Leeds, the press-gang at,

Leith, crimpage at,
press-gang at,

_Lennox_, H.M.S.,

Letting, John, pressed with two protections on him,

Lewis, Edward, chaplain,

Libraries, ships’,

_Lichfield_, H.M.S.,

Licorne, H.M.S.,

Limehouse Hole, the press-gang at,

Lindsay, Admiral the Earl of, _Instructions_,

Linesmen on whalers exempt from impressment,

Liskeard, the press-gang at,

_List of Persons of Quality, etc., who went from England to the American Plantations_. See Hotten, J. C.,

_Litchfield_, H.M.S.,

Littlehampton, the press-gang at,

Liverpool, crimpage at,
press-gang at,

Lodden Bridge, the press-gang at,

London, the press-gang in,

Londonderry, the press-gang at,

Longcroft, Capt,

_Loo_, H.M.S.,

Love, Henry, gets life protection as promised by Pitt and Dundas,

Lowestoft, the press-gang at,

Lulworth,

Lundy Island, safe from the press-gang, but not to the sailors’ liking,
crews marooned on,

Lutterell, N., _Historical Relation of State Affairs_, Capt. Hon. Jas.,

Lymington, the press-gang at,

M’Bride, Admiral,

M’Cleverty, Capt.,

M’Donald, Alexander, impressed under the age of twelve, Charles,

M’Gugan’s wife,

M’Kenzie, Lieut.,

M’Quarry, Lachlan,

Magna Carta, its provisions contrary to impressment,

Mansfield, Lord,

Margate, the press-gang at,

_Maria_ brig,

Marines,

Marooned crews on Lundy Island,

_Martin_ galley,

_Mary_ smuggler,

Masters, conditions of exemption,

Mastery of the sea, a necessity for England,

Mates, conditions of exemption,

Medway, press-gang on,

_Medway_, H.M.S.,

Men in lieu,

Merchant seamen, conditions of exemption, unprotected when sleeping ashore,
the most valuable asset to the Navy,

Merchant service, hard conditions of crews,

_Mercury_, H.M.S.,

Messenger, George,

Mike, James, hanged for desertion,

Moll Flanders,

_Monarch_, H.M.S.,

_Monmouth_, H.M.S.,