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THE PRESS-GANG AFLOAT AND ASHORE
By J. R. Hutchinson
CONTENTS
I. HOW THE PRESS-GANG CAME IN.
II. WHY THE GANG WAS NECESSARY.
III. WHAT THE PRESS-GANG WAS.
IV. WHOM THE GANG MIGHT TAKE.
V. WHAT THE GANG DID AFLOAT.
VI. EVADING THE GANG.
VII. WHAT THE GANG DID ASHORE.
VIII. AT GRIPS WITH THE GANG.
IX. THE GANG AT PLAY.
X. WOMEN AND THE PRESS-GANG.
XI. IN THE CLUTCH OF THE GANG.
XII. HOW THE GANG WENT OUT.
APPENDIX: ADMIRAL YOUNG'S TORPEDO.
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:
AN UNWELCOME VISIT FROM THE PRESS GANG.
MANNING THE NAVY. Reproduced by kind permission from a rare print in the
collection of Mr. A. M. BROADLEY.
THE PRESS-GANG SEIZING A VICTIM.
SEIZING A WATERMAN ON TOWER HILL ON THE MORNING OF HIS WEDDING DAY.
JACK IN THE BILBOES. From the Painting by MORLAND.
ONE OF THE RAREST OF PRESS-GANG RECORDS. A play-bill announcing the
suspension of the Gang's operations on "Play Nights," in the collection
of Mr. A. M. BROADLEY, by whose kind permission it is reproduced.
SAILORS CAROUSING. From the Mezzotint after J. IBBETSON.
ANNE MILLS WHO SERVED ON BOARD THE _MAIDSTONE_ IN 1740.
MARY ANNE TALBOT.
MARY ANNE TALBOT DRESSED AS A SAILOR.
THE PRESS GANG, OR ENGLISH LIBERTY DISPLAYED.
ADMIRAL YOUNG'S TORPEDO. Reproduced from the Original Drawing at the
Public Record Office.
THE PRESS-GANG.
CHAPTER I.
HOW THE PRESS-GANG CAME IN.
The practice of pressing men--that is to say, of taking by intimidation
or force those who will not volunteer--would seem to have been
world-wide in its adoption.
Wherever man desired to have a thing done, and was powerful enough
to insure the doing of it, there he attained his end by the simple
expedient of compelling others to do for him what he, unaided, could not
do for himself.
The individual, provided he did not conspire in sufficient numbers to
impede or defeat the end in view, counted only as a food-consuming atom
in the human mass which was set to work out the purpose of the master
mind and hand. His face value in the problem was that of a living wage.
If he sought to enhance his value by opposing the master hand, the
master hand seized him and wrung his withers.
So long as the compelling power confined the doing of the things it
desired done to works of construction, it met with little opposition
in its designs, experienced little difficulty in coercing the labour
necessary for piling its walls, excavating its tanks, raising its
pyramids and castles, or for levelling its roads and building its ships
and cities. These were the commonplace achievements of peace, at
which even the coerced might toil unafraid; for apart from the normal
incidence of death, such works entailed little danger to the lives
of the multitudes who wrought upon them. Men could in consequence be
procured for them by the exercise of the minimum of coercion--by, that
is to say, the mere threat of it.
When peace went to the wall and the pressed man was called upon to go to
battle, the case assumed another aspect, an acuter phase. Given a state
of war, the danger to life and limb, the incidence of death, at once
jumped enormously, and in proportion as these disquieting factors in the
pressed man's lot mounted up, just in that proportion did his opposition
to the power that sought to take him become the more determined,
strenuous, and undisguised.
Particularly was this true of warlike operations upon the sea, for to
the extraordinary and terrible risks of war were here added the ordinary
but ever-present dangers of wind and wave and storm, sufficient in
themselves to appal the unaccustomed and to antagonise the unwilling.
In face of these superlative risks the difficulty of procuring men was
accentuated a thousand-fold, and with it both the nature and the degree
of the coercive force necessary to be exercised for their procuration.
In these circumstances the Ruling Power had no option but to resort
to more exigent means of attaining its end. In times of peace, working
through myriad hands, it had constructed a thousand monuments of
ornamental or utilitarian industry. These, with the commonweal they
represented, were now threatened and must be protected at all costs.
What more reasonable than to demand of those who had built, or of
their successors in the perpetual inheritance of toil, that they should
protect what they had reared. Hitherto, in most cases, the men required
to meet the national need had submitted at a threat. They had to live,
and coercive toil meant at least a living wage. Now, made rebellious by
a fearful looking forward to the risks they were called upon to incur,
they had to be met by more effective measures. Faced by this emergency,
Power did not mince matters. It laid violent hands upon the unwilling
subject and forced him, _nolens volens_, to sail its ships, to man its
guns, and to fight its battles by sea as he already, under less overt
compulsion, did its bidding by land.
It is with this phase of pressing--pressing open, violent and
unashamed--that we purpose here to deal, and more particularly with
pressing as it applies to the sea and sailors, to the Navy and the
defence of an Island Kingdom.
At what time the pressing of men for the sea service of the Crown was
first resorted to in these islands it is impossible to determine. There
is evidence, however, that the practice was not only in vogue, but
firmly established as an adjunct of power, as early as the days of the
Saxon kings. It was, in fact, coeval with feudalism, of which it may be
described as a side-issue incidental to a maritime situation; for though
it is impossible to point to any species of fee, as understood of the
tenure of land, under which the holder was liable to render service at
sea, yet it must not be forgotten that the great ports of the kingdom,
and more especially the Cinque Ports, were from time immemorial bound
to find ships for national purposes, whenever called upon to do so, in
return for the peculiar rights and privileges conferred upon them by
the Crown. The supply of ships necessarily involved the supply of men
to sail and fight them, and in this supply, or, rather, in the mode
of obtaining it, we have undoubtedly the origin of the later impress
system.
With the reign of John the practice springs into sudden prominence.
The incessant activities of that uneasy king led to almost incessant
pressing, and at certain crises in his reign commission after commission
is directed, in feverish succession, to the sheriffs of counties and the
bailiffs of seaports throughout the kingdom, straitly enjoining them
to arrest and stay all ships within their respective jurisdictions, and
with the ships the mariners who sail them. [Footnote: By a plausible
euphemism they were said to be "hired." As a matter of fact, both
ships and men were retained during the royal pleasure at rates fixed by
custom.] No exception was taken to these edicts. Long usage rendered the
royal lien indefeasible. [Footnote: In more modern times the pressing
of ships, though still put forward as a prerogative of the Crown, was
confined in the main to unforeseen exigencies of transport. On the fall
of Louisburg in 1760, vessels were pressed at that port in order to
carry the prisoners of war to France (_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1491--Capt.
Byron, 17 June 1760); and in 1764, again, we find Capt. Brereton, of the
_Falmouth_, forcibly impressing the East India ship _Revenge_ for
the purpose of transporting to Fort St. George, in British India,
the company, numbering some four hundred and twenty-one souls, of the
_Siam_, then recently condemned at Manilla as unseaworthy.--_Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1498--Letters of Capt. Brereton, 1764.]
In the carrying out of the royal commands there was consequently, at
this stage in the development of pressing, little if any resort to
direct coercion. From the very nature of the case the principle of
coercion was there, but it was there only in the bud. The king's right
to hale whom he would into his service being practically undisputed, a
threat of reprisals in the event of disobedience answered all purposes,
and even this threat was as yet more often implied than openly
expressed. King John was perhaps the first to clothe it in words.
Requisitioning the services of the mariners of Wales, a notoriously
disloyal body, he gave the warrant, issued in 1208, a severely minatory
turn. "Know ye for certain," it ran, "that if ye act contrary to this,
we will cause you and the masters of your vessels to be hanged, and all
your goods to be seized for our use."
At this point in the gradual subjection of the seaman to the needs of
the nation, defensive or the contrary, we are confronted by an event
as remarkable in its nature as it is epoch-making in its consequences.
Magna Charta was sealed on the 13th of June 1215, and within a year of
that date, on, namely, the 14th of April then next ensuing, King John
issued his commission to the barons of twenty-two seaports, requiring
them, in terms admitting of neither misconstruction nor compromise,
to arrest all ships, and to assemble those ships, together with their
companies, in the River of Thames before a certain day. [Footnote:
Hardy, _Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum_, 1833.] This wholesale embargo upon
the shipping and seamen of the nation, imposed as it was immediately
after the ensealing of Magna Charta, raises a question of great
constitutional interest. In what sense, and to what extent, was the
Charter of English Liberties intended to apply to the seafaring man?
Essentially a tyrant and a ruthless promise-breaker, John's natural
cruelty would in itself sufficiently account for the dire penalties
threatened under the warrant of 1208; but neither his tyranny, his
faithlessness of character, nor his very human irritation at
the concessions wrung from him by his barons, can explain to our
satisfaction why, having granted a charter affirming and safeguarding
the liberties of, ostensibly, every class of his people, he should
immediately inflict upon one of those classes, and that, too, the one
least of all concerned in his historic dispute, the pains of a most
rigorous impressment. The only rational explanation of his conduct is,
that in thus acting he was contravening no convention, doing violence to
no covenant, but was, on the contrary, merely exercising, in accordance
with time-honoured usage, an already well-recognised, clearly denned and
firmly seated prerogative which the great charter he had so recently put
his hand to was in no sense intended to limit or annul.
This view of the case is confirmed by subsequent events. Press warrants,
identical in every respect save one with the historic warrant of 1216,
continued to emanate from the Crown long after King John had gone to his
account, and, what is more to the point, to emanate unchallenged. Stubbs
himself, our greatest constitutional authority, repeatedly admits as
much. Every crisis in the destinies of the Island Kingdom--and they were
many and frequent--produced its batch of these procuratory documents,
every batch its quota of pressed men. The inference is plain. The
mariner was the bondsman of the sea, and to him the _Nullus liber homo
capiatur_ clause of the Great Charter was never intended to apply. In
his case a dead-letter from the first, it so remained throughout the
entire chapter of his vicissitudes.
The chief point wherein the warrants of later times differed from those
of King John was this: As time went on the penalties they imposed on
those who resisted the press became less and less severe. The death
penalty fell into speedy disuse, if, indeed, it was ever inflicted at
all. Imprisonment for a term of from one to two years, with forfeiture
of goods, was held to meet all the exigencies of the case. Gradually
even this modified practice underwent amelioration, until at length
it dawned upon the official intelligence that a seaman who was free
to respond to the summons of the boatswain's whistle constituted an
infinitely more valuable physical asset than one who cursed his king and
his Maker in irons. All punishment of the condign order, for contempt
or resistance of the press, now went by the board, and in its stead the
seaman was merely admonished in paternal fashion, as in a Proclamation
of 1623, to take the king's shilling "dutifully and reverently" when it
was tendered to him.
In its apparent guilelessness the admonition was nevertheless woefully
deceptive. Like the subdued beat of drum by which, some five years
later, the seamen of London were lured to Tower Hill, there to be seized
and thrown bodily into the waiting fleet, it masked under its mild
exterior the old threat of coercion in a new form. The ancient pains and
penalties were indeed no more; but for the back of the sailor who was
so ill-advised as to defy the press there was another rod in pickle. He
could now be taken forcibly.
For side by side with the negative change involved in the abolition
of the old punishments, there had been in progress, throughout the
intervening centuries, a positive development of far worse omen for the
hapless sailor-man. The root-principle of direct coercion, necessarily
inherent in any system that seeks to foist an arbitrary and obnoxious
status upon any considerable body of men, was slowly but surely bursting
into bud. The years that had seen the unprested seaman freed from the
dread of the yardarm and the horrors of the forepeak, had bred a new
terror for him. Centuries of usage had strengthened the arm of that
hated personage the Press-Master, and the compulsion which had once
skulked under cover of a threat now threw off its disguise and stalked
the seafaring man for what it really was--Force, open and unashamed. The
_dernier ressort_ of former days was now the first resort. The seafaring
man who refused the king's service when "admonished" thereto had short
shrift. He was "first knocked down, and then bade to stand in the king's
name." Such, literally and without undue exaggeration, was the later
system which, reaching the climax of its insolent pretensions to
justifiable violence in the eighteenth century, for upwards of a hundred
years bestrode the neck of the unfortunate sailor like some monstrous
Old Man of the Sea.
Outbursts of violent pressing before the dawn of the eighteenth century,
though spasmodic and on the whole infrequent, were not entirely unknown.
Times of national stress were peculiarly productive of them. Thus when,
in 1545, there was reason to fear a French invasion, pressing of the
most violent and unprecedented character was openly resorted to in order
to man the fleet. The class who suffered most severely on that occasion
were the fisher folk of Devon, "the most part" of whom were "taken
as marryners to serve the king." [Footnote: _State Papers_, Henry
VIII.--Lord Russell to the Privy Council, 22 Aug. 1545. Bourne, who
cites the incident in his _Tudor Seamen_, misses the essential point
that the fishermen were forcibly pressed.]
During the Civil Wars of the next century both parties to the strife
issued press warrants which were enforced with the utmost rigour. The
Restoration saw a marked recrudescence of similar measures. How great
was the need of men at that time, and how exigent the means employed
to procure them, may be gathered from the fact, cited by Pepys, that in
1666 the fleet lay idle for a whole fortnight "without any demand for a
farthing worth of anything, but only to get men." The genial diarist
was deeply moved by the scenes of violence that followed. They were, he
roundly declares, "a shame to think of."
The origin of the term "pressing," with its cognates "to press" and
"pressed," is not less remarkable than the genesis of the violence it
so aptly describes. Originally the man who was required for the king's
service at sea, like his twin brother the soldier, was not "pressed"
in the sense in which we now use the term. He was merely subjected to a
process called "presting." To "prest" a man meant to enlist him by
means of what was technically known as "prest" money--"prest" being the
English equivalent of the obsolete French _prest_, now _prêt_, meaning
"ready." In the recruiter's vocabulary, therefore, "prest" money stood
for what is nowadays, in both services, commonly termed the "king's
shilling," and the man who, either voluntarily or under duress, accepted
or received that shilling at the recruiter's hands, was said to be
"prested" or "prest." In other words, having taken the king's ready
money, he was thenceforth, during the king's pleasure, "ready" for the
king's service.
By the transfer of the prest shilling from the hand of the recruiter to
the pouch of the seaman a subtle contract, as between the latter and
his sovereign, was supposed to be set up, than which no more solemn or
binding pact could exist save between a man and his Maker. One of the
parties to the contract was more often than not, it is true, a strongly
dissenting party; but although under the common law of the land this
circumstance would have rendered any similar contract null and void, in
this amazing transaction between the king and his "prest" subject it was
held to be of no vitiating force. From the moment the king's shilling,
by whatever means, found its way into the sailor's possession, from that
moment he was the king's man, bound in heavy penalties to toe the
line of duty, and, should circumstances demand it, to fight the king's
enemies to the death, be that fate either theirs or his.
By some strange irony of circumstance there happened to be in the
English language a word--"pressed"--which tallied almost exactly in
pronunciation with the old French word _prest_, so long employed, as we
have seen, to differentiate from his fellows the man who, by the devious
means we have here described, was made "ready" for the sea service.
"Press" means to constrain, to urge with force--definitions precisely
connoting the development and manner of violent enlistment. Hence, as
the change from covert to overt violence grew in strength, "pressing,"
in the mouths of the people at large, came to be synonymous with that
most obnoxious, oppressive and fear-inspiring system of recruiting
which, in the course of time, took the place of its milder and more
humane antecedent, "presting." The "prest" man disappeared, [Footnote:
The Law Officers of the Crown retained him, on paper, until the close
of the eighteenth century--an example in which they were followed by
the Admiralty. To admit his disappearance would have been to knock the
bottom out of their case.] and in his stead there came upon the
scene his later substitute the "pressed" man, "forced," as Pepys so
graphically describes his condition, "against all law to be gone."
An odder coincidence than this gradual substitution of "pressed" for
_prest,_ or one more grimly appropriate in its application, it would
surely be impossible to discover in the whose history of nomenclature.
With the growth of the power and violence of the impress there was
gradually inaugurated another change, which perhaps played a larger part
than any other feature of the system in making it finally obnoxious to
the nation at large--finally, because, as we shall see, the nation
long endured its exactions with pathetic submission and lamentable
indifference. The incidence of pressing was no longer confined, as in
its earlier stages, to the overflow of the populace upon the country's
rivers, and bays, and seas. Gradually, as naval needs grew in volume and
urgency, the press net was cast wider and wider, until at length, during
the great century of struggle, when the system was almost constantly
working at its highest pressure and greatest efficiency, practically
every class of the population of these islands was subjected to its
merciless inroads, if not decimated by its indiscriminate exactions.
On the very threshold of the century we stumble upon an episode
curiously indicative of the set of the tide. Czar Peter of Russia had
been recently in England, acquiring a knowledge of English customs
which, on his return home, he immediately began to put in practice. His
navy, such as it was, was wretchedly manned. [Footnote: The navy got
together by Czar Peter had all but disappeared by the time Catherine II.
came to the throne. "Ichabod" was written over the doors of the
Russian Admiralty. Their ships of war were few in number, unseaworthy,
ill-found, ill-manned. Two thousand able-bodied seamen could with
difficulty be got together in an emergency. The nominal fighting
strength of the fleet stood high, but that strength in reality consisted
of men "one half of whom had never sailed out of the Gulf of Finland,
whilst the other half had never sailed anywhere at all." When the fleet
was ordered to sea, the Admiralty "put soldiers on board, and by calling
them sailors persuaded themselves that they really were so."--_State
Papers, Russia,_ vol. lxxvii.--Macartney, Nov. 16-27, 1766.] Russian
serfs made bad sailors and worse seamen. In the English ships thronging
the quays at Archangel there was, however, plenty of good stuff-men who
could use the sea without being sick, men capable of carrying a ship to
her destination without piling her up on the rocks or seeking nightly
shelter under the land. He accordingly pressed every ninth man out of
those ships.
When news of this high-handed proceeding reached England, it roused the
Queen and her advisers to indignation. Winter though it was, they lost
no time in dispatching Charles Whitworth, a rising diplomat of the
suavest type, as "Envoy Extraordinary to our Good (but naughty) Brother
the Czar of Muscovy," with instructions to demand the release, immediate
and unconditional, of the pressed men. Whitworth found the Czar at
Moscow. The Autocrat of All the Russias listened affably enough to what
he had to say, but refused his demand in terms that left scant room
for doubt as to his sincerity of purpose, and none for protracted
"conversations." "Every Prince," he declared for sole answer, "can take
what he likes out of his own havens." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1436--Capt. J. Anderson's letters and enclosures; _State Papers,
Russia_, vol. iv.--Whitworth to Secretary Harley.] The position thus
taken up was unassailable. Centuries of usage hedged the prerogative in,
and Queen Anne herself, in the few years she had been on the throne, had
not only exercised it with a free hand, but had laid that hand without
scruple upon many a foreign seaman.
The lengths to which the system had gone by the end of the third quarter
of the century is thrown into vivid relief by two incidents, one of
which occurred in 1726, the other fifty years later.
In the former year one William Kingston, pressed in the Downs--a man
who hailed from Lyme Regis and habitually "used the sea"--was,
notwithstanding that fact, discharged by express Admiralty order
because he was a "substantial man and had a landed estate." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1473--Capt Charles Browne, 25 March 1726, and
endorsement.]
The incident of 1776, known as the Duncan case, occurred, or rather
began, at North Shields. Lieutenant Oaks, captain of the press-gang in
that town, one day met in the streets a man who, unfortunately for his
future, "had the appearance of a seaman." He accordingly pressed him;
whereupon the man, whose name was Duncan, produced the title-deeds
of certain house property in London, down Wapping way, worth some six
pounds per annum, and claimed his discharge on the ground that as a
freeholder and a voter he was immune from the press. The lieutenant
laughed the suggestion to scorn, and Duncan was shipped south to the
fleet.
The matter did not end there. Duncan's friends espoused his cause and
took energetic steps for his release. Threatened with an action at law,
and averse from incurring either unnecessary risks or opprobrium where
pressed men were concerned, the Admiralty referred the case to Mr.
Attorney-General (afterwards Lord) Thurlow for his opinion.
The point of law Thurlow was called upon to resolve was, "Whether being
a freeholder is an exception from being pressed;" and as Duncan was
represented in counsel's instructions--on what ground, other than his
"appearance," is not clear--to be a man Who habitually used the sea, it
is hardly matter for surprise that the great jurist's opinion, biassed
as it obviously was by that alleged fact, should have been altogether
inimical to the pressed man and favourable to the Admiralty.
"I see no reason," he writes, in his crabbed hand and nervous diction,
"why men using the sea, and being otherwise fit objects to be impressed
into His Majesty's service, should be exempted only because they
are Freeholders. Nor did I ever read or hear of such an exemption.
Therefore, unless some use or practice, which I am ignorant of, gives
occasion to this doubt, I see no reason for a Mariner being discharged,
seriously, because he is a Freeholder. It's a qualification easily
attained: a single house at Wapping would ship a first-rate man-of-war.
If a Freeholder is exempt, _eo nomine_, it will be impossible to go
on with the pressing service. [Footnote: It would have been equally
impossible to go on with the naval service had the fleet contained many
freeholders like John Barnes. Granted leave of absence from his ship,
the _Neptune,_ early in May, "in order to give his vote in the city,"
he "return'd not till the 8th of August."--_Admiralty Records_ 1.
2653--Capt. Whorwood, 23 Aug. 1741.] There is no knowing a Freeholder
by sight: and if claiming that character, or even showing deeds is
sufficient, few Sailors will be without it." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 7. 299--Law Officers' Opinions, 1756-77, No. 64.]
Backed by this opinion, so nicely in keeping with its own inclinations,
the Admiralty kept the man. Its views, like its practice, had undergone
an antipodal change since the Kingston incident of fifty years before.
And possession, commonly reputed to be nine points of the law, more
than made up for the lack of that element in Mr. Attorney-General's
sophistical reasoning.
In this respect Thurlow was in good company, for although Coke, who
lived before violent pressing became the rule, had given it as his
opinion that the king could not lawfully press men to serve him in his
wars, the legal luminaries who came after him, and more particularly
those of the eighteenth century, differed from him almost to a man.
Blackstone, whilst admitting that no statute expressly legalised
pressing, reminded the nation--with a leer, we might almost say--that
many statutes strongly implied, and hence--so he put it--amply justified
it. In thus begging the question he had in mind the so-called Statutes
of Exemption which, in protecting from impressment certain persons or
classes of persons, proceeded on the assumption, so dear to the Sea
Lords, that the Crown possessed the right to press all. This also
was the view taken by Yorke, Solicitor-General in 1757. "I take the
prerogative," he declares, "to be most clearly legal." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 7. 298--Law Officers' Opinions, 1733-56, No. 102.]
Another group of lawyers took similar, though less exalted ground. Of
these the most eminent was that "great oracle of law," Lord Mansfield.
"The power of pressing," he contends, "is founded upon immemorial usage
allowed for ages. If not, it can have no ground to stand upon. The
practice is deduced from that trite maxim of the Constitutional Law
of England, that private mischief had better be submitted to than that
public detriment should ensue."
The sea-lawyer had yet to be heard. With him "private mischief" counted
for much, the usage of past ages for very little. He lived and suffered
in the present. Of common law he knew nothing, but he possessed a fine
appreciation of common justice, and this forced from him an indictment
of the system that held him in thrall as scathing in its truth, its
simplicity and its logic as it is spontaneous and untutored in its
diction.
"You confidently tell us," said he, dipping his pen in the gall of
bitterness, "that our King is a father to us and our officers friends.
They are so, we must confess, in some respects, for Indeed they use us
like Children in Whiping us into Obedience. As for English Tars to
be the Legitimate Sons of Liberty, it is an Old Cry which we have
Experienced and Knows it to be False. God knows, the Constitution is
admirable well Callculated for the Safety and Happiness of His Majesty's
Subjects who live by Employments on Shore; but alass, we are not
Considered as Subjects of the same Sovereign, unless it be to Drag us by
Force from our Families to Fight the Battles of a Country which Refuses
us Protection." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--Petitions of the
Seamen of the Fleet, 1797.]
Such, in rough outline, was the Impress System of the eighteenth
century. In its inception, its development, and more especially in its
extraordinary culmination, it perhaps constitutes the greatest anomaly,
as it undoubtedly constitutes the grossest imposition, any free
people ever submitted to. Although unlawful in the sense of having no
foundation in law, and oppressive and unjust in that it yearly enslaved,
under the most noxious conditions, thousands against their will, it was
nevertheless for more than a hundred years tolerated and fostered as the
readiest, speediest and most effective means humanly devisable for the
manning of a fleet whose toll upon a free people, in the same period
of time, swelled to more than thrice its original bulk. Standing as a
bulwark against aggression and conquest, it ground under its heel the
very people it protected, and made them slaves in order to keep them
free. Masquerading as a protector, it dragged the wage-earner from
his home and cast his starving family upon the doubtful mercies of the
parish. And as if this were not enough, whilst justifying its existence
on the score of public benefit it played havoc with the fisheries,
clipped the wings of the merchant service, and sucked the life-blood out
of trade.
It was on the rising tide of such egregious contradictions as these that
the press-gang came in; for the press-gang was at once the embodiment
and the active exponent of all that was anomalous or bad in the Impress
System.