The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore Part 18

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 ash.o.r.e. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 161--Admiral Watson, 26 Feb. 1754.] Admiral Mostyn, boarding his flags.h.i.+p, 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 ash.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+p 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 Sc.u.m of the Earth had been picked up for this s.h.i.+p." [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 "sc.u.m 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.] Beth.e.l.l, of the _Phoenix_, had many who had "never seen a gun fired in their lives"; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1490--Capt. Beth.e.l.l, 21 Aug. 1759.]

and Adams, of the _Bird-in-hand_, learnt the fallacy of the a.s.sertion 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 s.h.i.+ps 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, _pa.s.sim_.] while Bennett, of the _Lennox_, when applied to by the masters of eight outward-bound East-India s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p; [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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 sh.o.r.e.

In addition to the sweepings of the roads and slums, there were in His Majesty's s.h.i.+ps 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 cla.s.s, was strongly accentuated by an advent.i.tious circ.u.mstance 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 hara.s.sed government, were as yet undreamt of. In these circ.u.mstances 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--Pet.i.tion 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 const.i.tution, was perhaps an even less desirable recruit than his cousin the emanc.i.p.ated convict. In his letters to the Navy Board, Capt. Aston, R.N., relates how, immediately after the pa.s.sing 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-s.h.i.+lling was paid. They were dear at the price. Bankrupt in pocket, stamina and health, they c.u.mbered the s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p, that was all.

Yet the odium of the thing was theirs. For not only did a.s.sociation with criminals lower the standard of pressing as the gangs practised it, it heightened the general disrepute in which they were held. For an inst.i.tution 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 s.h.i.+ps with a taint far more deadly than mere inept.i.tude. 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--Pet.i.tion of the Company of H.M.S. _Nymph_, 1797.] In no circ.u.mstances were they to be trusted.

Given the slightest opening, they "ran" like water from a sieve. To counteract these dangerous tendencies the Marines were inst.i.tuted.

Drafted into the s.h.i.+ps 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 circ.u.mstance, when the number of pressed men present in a s.h.i.+p 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, _pa.s.sim_.] What they antic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.sed 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 Lords.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 pet.i.tions 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 pet.i.tions were the recognised line for him to air them on. They were accordingly relegated to that limbo of distasteful and quickly forgotten things, their Lords.h.i.+ps' pigeon-holes.

Yet there was amongst these doc.u.ments at least one which should have given the Heads of the Navy pause for serious thought. It was the pet.i.tion of the seamen of H.M.S. _Shannon_, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--Pet.i.tion of the s.h.i.+p'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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps 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-cla.s.s 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 succ.u.mb in consequence.

Possessed of marvellous recuperative powers, she did not even languish to any perceptible degree. Nevertheless, the detriment was there, a steadily c.u.mulative 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-p.r.i.c.ks" 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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, G.o.d 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 partic.i.p.ated largely.

To the fleet it acted as a rude feeder; to the people as a ruder specialist. Wielding the cutla.s.s 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 supposit.i.tious 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 s.p.a.ce 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.] a.s.suming, 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 nutsh.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured to the country, with trade in a state of high prosperity, the s.h.i.+pping 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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.