EVADING THE GANG.
As we have just seen, it was when returning from overseas that
the British sailor ran the gravest risk of summary conversion into
Falstaff's famous commodity, "food for powder."
Outward bound, the ship's protection--that "sweet little cherub" which,
contrary to all Dibdinic precedent, lay down below--had spread its
kindly aegis over him, and, generally speaking, saved him harmless from
the warrant and the hanger. But now the run for which he has signed
on is almost finished, and as the Channel opens before him the magic
Admiralty paper ceases to be of "force" for his protection. No sooner,
therefore, does he make his land-fall off the fair green hills or
shimmering cliffs than his troubles begin. He is now within the outer
zone of danger, and all about him hover those dreaded sharks of the
Narrow Seas, the rapacious press-smacks, seeking whom they may devour.
Conning the compass-card of his chances as they bear down upon him
and send their shot whizzing across his bows, the sailor, in his fixed
resolve to evade the gang at any cost, resorted first of all to the most
simple and sailorly expedient imaginable. He "let go all" and made a run
for it. That way lay the line of least resistance, and, with luck on his
side, of surest escape.
Three modes of flight were his to choose between--three modes involving
as many nice distinctions, plus a possible difference with the master.
He could run away in his ship, run away with her, or as a last resort
he could sacrifice his slops, his bedding, his pet monkey and the gaudy
parrot that was just beginning to swear, and run from her. Which
should it be? It was all a toss-up. The chance of the moment, instantly
detected and as instantly acted upon, determined his choice.
The sailor's flight in his ship depended mainly upon her sailing
qualities and the master's willingness to risk being dismasted or hulled
by the pursuer's shot. Granted a capful of wind on his beam, a fleet
keel under foot, and a complacent skipper aft, the flight direct was
perhaps the means of escape the sailor loved above all others. The spice
of danger it involved, the dash and frolic of the chase, the joy of
seeing his leaping "barky" draw slowly away from her pursuer in the
contest of speed, and of watching the stretch of water lying between him
and capture surely widen out, were sensations dear to his heart.
Running away _with_ his ship was a more serious business, since the
adoption of such a course meant depriving the master of his command,
and this again meant mutiny. Happily, masters took a lenient view of
mutinies begotten of such conditions. Not infrequently, indeed, they
were consenting parties, winking at what they could not prevent, and
assuming the command again when the safety of ship and crew was assured
by successful flight, with never a hint of the irons, indictment or
death decreed by law as the mutineer's portion.
These modes of flight did not in every instance follow the hard-and-fast
lines here laid down. Under stress of circumstance each was liable to
become merged in the other; or both, perhaps, had to be abandoned
in favour of fresh tactics rendered necessary by the accident or the
exigency of the moment. The _Triton_ and _Norfolk_ Indiamen, after
successfully running the gauntlet of the Channel tenders, in the
Downs fell in with the _Falmouth_ man-o'-war. The meeting was entirely
accidental. Both merchantmen were congratulating themselves on having
negotiated the Channel without the loss of a man. The _Triton_ had all
furled except her fore and mizen topsails, preparatory to coming to an
anchor; but as the wind was strong southerly, with a lee tide running,
the _Falmouth's_ boats could not forge ahead to board her before the set
of the tide carried her astern of the warship's guns, whereupon her crew
mutinied, threw shot into the man-o'-war's boats, which had by this time
drawn alongside, and so, making sail with all possible speed, got clear
away. Meantime a shot had brought the _Norfolk_ to on the _Falmouth's_
starboard bow, where she was immediately boarded. On her decks an
ominous state of things prevailed. Her crew would not assist to clew up
the sails, the anchor had been seized to the chain-plates and could not
be let go, and when the gang from the _Falmouth_ attempted to cut the
buoy ropes with which it was secured, the "crew attacked them with
hatchets and treenails, made sail and obliged them to quit the ship."
Being by that, time astern of the _Falmouth's_ guns, they too made their
escape. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1485--Capt. Brett, 25 June
1755.]
Never, perhaps, did the sailor adopt the expedient of running away,
ship and all, with so malicious a goodwill or so bright a prospect of
success, as when sailing under convoy. In those days he seldom ventured
to "risk the run," even to Dutch ports and back, without the protection
of one or more ships of war, and in this precaution there was danger as
well as safety; for although the king's ships safeguarded him against
the enemy if hostilities were in progress, as well as against the
"little rogues" of privateers infesting the coasts and the adjacent
seas, no sooner did the voyage near its end than the captains of the
convoying ships took out of him, by force if necessary, as many men as
they happened to require. This was a _quid pro quo_ of which the sailor
could see neither the force nor the fairness, and he therefore let slip
no opportunity of evading it.
"Their Lordships," writes a commander who had been thus cheated, "need
not be surprised that I pressed so few men out of so large a Convoy,
for the Wind taking me Short before I got the length of Leostaff
(Lowestoft), the Pilot would not take Charge of the Shipp to turn her
out over the Stamford in the Night, which Oblig'd me to come to an
Anchor in Corton Road. This I did by Signal, but the Convoy took no
Notice of it, and all of them Run away and Left me, my Bottom being
like a Rock for Roughness, so that I could not Follow them." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732--Letters of Capt. Young, 1742.]
Supposing, however, that all these manoeuvres failed him and the gang
after a hot chase appeared in force on deck, the game was not yet up
so far as the sailor was concerned. A ship, it is true, had neither the
length of the Great North Road nor yet the depth of the Forest of Dean,
but all the same there was within the narrow compass of her timbers many
a lurking place wherein the artful sailor, by a judicious exercise of
forethought and tools, might contrive to lie undetected until the gang
had gone over the side.
About five o'clock in the afternoon of the 25th of June 1756, Capt.
William Boys, from the quarter-deck of his ship the _Royal Sovereign_,
then riding at anchor at the Nore, observed a snow on fire in the
five-fathom channel, a little below the Spoil Buoy. He immediately sent
his cutter to her assistance, but in spite of all efforts to save her
she ran aground and burnt to the water's edge. Her cargo consisted of
wine, and the loss of the vessel was occasioned by one of her crew, who
was fearful of being pressed, hiding himself in the hold with a lighted
candle. He was burnt with the ship. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1487--Capt. Boys, 26 June 1756. Oddly enough, a somewhat similar
accident was indirectly the cause of Capt. Boys' entering the Navy. In
1727, whilst the merchantman of which he was then mate was on the voyage
home from Jamaica, two mischievous imps of black boys, inquisitive
to know whether some liquor spilt on deck was rum or water, applied a
lighted candle to it. It proved to be rum, and when the officers
and crew, who were obliged to take to the boats in consequence, were
eventually picked up by a Newfoundland fishing vessel, unspeakable
sufferings had reduced their number from twenty-three to seven,
and these had only survived by feeding on the bodies of their dead
shipmates. In memory of that harrowing time Boys adopted as his seal the
device of a burning ship and the motto: "From Fire, Water and Famine by
Providence Preserved."]
Barring the lighted candle and the lamentable accident which followed
its use, the means of evading the gang resorted to in this instance
was of a piece with many adopted by the sailor. He contrived cunning
hiding-places in the cargo, where the gangsmen systematically "pricked"
for him with their cutlasses when the nature of the vessel's lading
admitted of it, or he stowed himself away in seachests, lockers and
empty "harness" casks with an ingenuity and thoroughness that often
baffled the astutest gangsman and the most protracted search. The spare
sails forward, the readily accessible hiding-hole of the green-hand,
afforded less secure concealment. Pierre Flountinherre, routed out of
hiding there, endeavoured to save his face by declaring that he
had "left France on purpose to get on board an English man-of-war."
Frenchman though he was, the gang obliged him. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1510--Capt. Baskerville, 5 Aug. 1795.]
In his endeavours to best the impress officers and gangsmen the sailor
found a willing backer in his skipper, who systematically falsified
the ship's articles by writing "run," "drowned," "discharged" or
"dead" against the names of such men as he particularly desired to save
harmless from the press. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1525--Capt.
Berry, 31 March 1801.] This done, the men were industriously coached
in the various parts they were to play at the critical moment. In the
skipper's stead, supposing him to be for some reason unfit for naval
service, some specially valuable hand was dubbed master. Failing this
substitution, which was of course intended to save the man and not the
skipper, the ablest seaman in the ship figured as mate, whilst others
became putative boatswain or carpenter and apprentices--privileged
persons whom no gang could lawfully take, but who, to render their
position doubly secure, were furnished with spurious papers, of which
every provident skipper kept a supply at hand for use in emergencies.
When all hands were finally mustered to quarters, so to speak, there
remained on deck only a "master" who could not navigate the ship, a
"mate" unable to figure out the day's run, a "carpenter" who did not
know how to handle an adze, and some make-believe apprentices "bound"
only to outwit the gang. And if in spite of all these precautions an
able seaman were pressed, the real master immediately came forward and
swore he was the mate.
Such thoroughly organised preparedness as this, however, was the
exception rather than the rule, for though often attempted, it rarely
reached perfection or stood the actual test. The sailor was too
childlike by nature to play the fraud successfully, and as for the
impress officer and the gangsman, neither was easily gulled. Supposing
the sailor, then, to have nothing to hope for from deception or
concealment, and supposing, too, that it was he who had the rough bottom
beneath him and the fleet keel in pursuit, how was he to outwit the gang
and evade the pinch? Nothing remained for him but to heave duty by the
board and abandon his ship to the doubtful mercies of wind and wave.
He accordingly went over the side with all the haste he could,
appropriating the boats in defiance of authority, and leaving only the
master and his mate, the protected carpenter and the apprentices to work
the ship. Many a trader from overseas, summarily abandoned in this
way, crawled into some outlying port, far from her destination, in
quest--since a rigorous press often left no others available--of "old
men and boys to carry her up." There is even on record the case of
a ship that passed the Nore "without a man belonging to her but the
master, the passengers helping him to sail her." Her people had "all
got ashore by Harwich." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1473--Capt.
Bouler, 18 Feb. 1725-6.]
Few shipowners were so foolhardy as to incur the risk of being thus hit
in the pocket by the sailor's well-known predilection for French leave
when in danger of the press. Nor were the masters, for they, even when
not part owners, had still an appreciable stake in the safety of the
ships they sailed. As between masters, owners and men there consequently
sprang up a sort of triangular sympathy, having for its base a common
dread of the gangs, and for its apex their circumvention. This apex
necessarily touched the coast at a point contiguous to the ocean tracks
of the respective trades in which the ships sailed; and here, in some
spot far removed from the regular haunts of the gangsman, an emergency
crew was mustered by those indefatigable purveyors, the crimps, and held
in readiness against the expected arrival.
Composed of seafaring men too old, too feeble, or too diseased to excite
the cupidity of the most zealous lieutenant who eked out his pay on
impress perquisites; of lads but recently embarked on the adventurous
voyage of their teens; of pilots willing, for a consideration, to forego
the pleasure of running ships aground; of fishermen who evaded His
Majesty's press under colour of Sea-Fencible, Militia, or Admiralty
protections; and of unpressable foreigners whose wives bewailed them
more or less beyond the seas, this scratch crew--the Preventive Men of
the merchant service--here awaited the preconcerted signal which should
apprise them that their employer's ship was ready for a change of hands.
For safety's sake the transfer was generally effected by night, when
that course was possible; but the untimely appearance of a press-smack
on the scene not infrequently necessitated the shifting of the crews in
the broad light of day and the hottest of haste. On shore all had been
in readiness perhaps for days. At the signal off dashed the deeply laden
boats to the frantic ship, the scratch crew scrambled aboard, and the
regular hands, thus released from duty, tumbled pell-mell into the empty
boats and pulled for shore with a will mightily heartened by a running
fire of round-shot from the smack and of musketry from her cutter,
already out to intercept the fugitives. Then it was:--
"Cheerily, lads, cheerily! there's a ganger hard to wind'ard;
Cheerily, lads, cheerily! there's a ganger hard a-lee;
Cheerily, lads, cheerily! else 'tis farewell home and kindred,
And the bosun's mate a-raisin' hell in the King's Navee.
Cheerily, lads, cheerily ho! the warrant's out, the hanger's drawn!
Cheerily, lads, so cheerily! we'll leave 'em an _R_ in pawn!"
[Footnote: When Jack deserted his ship under other conditions than those
here described, an _R_ was written against his name to denote that he
had "run." So, when he shirked an obligation, monetary or moral, by
running away from it, he was said to "leave an _R_ in pawn."]
The place of muster of the emergency men thus became in turn the
landing-place of the fugitive crew. Its whereabouts depended as a matter
of course upon the trade in which the ship sailed. The spot chosen for
the relief of the Holland, Baltic and Greenland traders of the East
Coast was generally some wild, inaccessible part abutting directly
on the German Ocean or the North Sea. London skippers in those trades
favoured the neighbourhood of Great Yarmouth, where the maze of inland
waterways constituting the Broads enabled the shifty sailor to lead the
gangs a merry game at hide and seek. King's Lynners affected Skegness
and the Norfolk lip of the Wash. Of the men who sailed out of Hull not
one in ten could be picked up, on their return, by the gangs haunting
the Humber. They went ashore at Dimlington on the coast of Holderness,
or at the Spurn. The homing sailors of Leith, as of the ports on the
upper reaches of the Firth of Forth, enjoyed an immunity from the
press scarcely less absolute than that of the Orkney Islanders, who for
upwards of forty years contributed not a single man to the Navy. Having
on either hand an easily accessible coast, inhabited by a people upon
whose hospitality the gangs were chary of intruding, and abounding in
lurking-places as secure as they were snug, the Mother Firth held on to
her sailor sons with a pertinacity and success that excited the envy of
the merchant seaman at large and drove impress officers to despair. The
towns and villages to the north of the Firth were "full of men." On
no part of the north coast, indeed, from St. Abb's Head clear round to
Annan Water, was it an easy matter to circumvent the canny Scot who went
a-sailoring. He had a trick of stopping short of his destination,
when homeward bound, that proved as baffling to the gangs as it was
in seeming contradiction to all the traditions of a race who pride
themselves on "getting there." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
579--Admiral Pringle, Report on Rendezvous, 2 April 1795, and Captains'
Letters, _passim_.]
In the case of outward-bound ships, the disposition of the two crews
was of course reversed. The scratch crew carried the ship down to the
stipulated point of exchange, where they vacated her in favour of the
actual crew, who had been secretly conveyed to that point by land.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580--Admiral Lord Nelson, Memorandum
on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Whichever way the trick was worked, it
proved highly effective, for, except from the sea, no gang durst venture
near such points of debarkation and departure without strong military
support.
There still remained the emergency crew itself. The most decrepit,
crippled or youthful were of course out of the question. But the
foreigner and our shifty friend the man in lieu were fair game. Entering
largely as they did into the make-up of almost every scratch crew, they
were pressed without compunction whenever and wherever caught abusing
their privileges by playing the emergency man. To keep such persons
always and in all circumstances was a point of honour with the Navy
Board. It had no other means of squaring accounts with the scratch crew.
The emergency man who plied "on his own" was more difficult to deal
with. Keepers of the Eddystone made a "great deal of money" by putting
inward-bound ships' crews ashore; but when one of their number, Matthew
Dolon by name, was pressed as a punishment for that offence, the
Admiralty, having the fear of outraged Trade before its eyes, ordered
his immediate discharge. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732--Capt.
Yeo, 25 July 1727.]
The pilot, the fisherman and the longshoreman were notorious offenders
in this respect. Whenever they saw a vessel bound in, they were in the
habit of putting off to her and of first inciting the crew to escape and
then hiring themselves at exorbitant rates to work the vessel into port.
On such mischievous interlopers the gangsman had no mercy. He took
them whenever he could, confident that when their respective cases were
stated to the Board, that body would "tumble" to the occasion.
Any attempt at estimating the number of seafaring men who evaded the
gangs and the call of the State by means of the devices and subterfuges
here roughly sketched into the broad canvas of our picture would prove a
task as profitless as it is impossible of accomplishment. One thing only
is certain. The number fluctuated greatly from time to time with the
activity or inactivity of the gangs. When the press was lax, there arose
no question as there existed no need of escape; when it was hot, it was
evaded systematically and with a degree of success extremely gratifying
to the sailor. Taking the sea-borne coal trade of the port of London
alone, it is estimated that in the single month of September 1770, at
a time when an exceptionally severe press from protections was in full
swing, not less than three thousand collier seamen got ashore between
Yarmouth Roads and Foulness Point. As the coal trade was only one of
many, and as the stretch of coast concerned comprised but a few miles
out of hundreds equally well if not better adapted to the sailor's
furtive habits, the total of escapes must have been little short of
enormous. It could not have been otherwise. In this grand battue of the
sea it was clearly impossible to round-up and capture every skittish son
of Neptune.
On shore, as at sea, the sailor's course, when the gang was on his
track, followed the lines of least resistance, only here he became a
skulk as well as a fugitive. It was not that he was a less stout-hearted
fellow than when at sea. He was merely the victim of a type of land
neurosis. Drink and his recent escape from the gang got on his nerves
and rendered him singularly liable to panic. The faintest hint of a
press was enough to make his hair rise. At the first alarm he scuttled
into hiding in the towns, or broke cover like a frightened hare.
The great press of 1755 affords many instances of such panic flights.
Abounding in "lurking holes" where a man might lie perdue in comparative
safety, King's Lynn nevertheless emptied itself of seamen in a few
hours' time, and when the gang hurried to Wells by water, intending to
intercept the fugitives there, the "idle fishermen on shore" sounded a
fresh alarm and again they stampeded, going off to the eastward in great
numbers and burying themselves in the thickly wooded dells and hills of
that bit of Devon in Norfolk which lies between Clay-next-the-Sea and
Sheringham. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486--Capt. Baird, 29
March and 21 April 1755.]
A similar exodus occurred at Ipswich. The day the warrants came down, as
for many days previous, the ancient borough was full of seamen; but no
sooner did it become known that the press was out than they vanished
like the dew of the morning. For weeks the face of but one sailor was
seen in the town, and he was only ferreted out, with the assistance of a
dozen constables, after prolonged and none too legal search. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486--Capt. Brand, 26 Feb. 1755.]
How effectually the sailor could hide when dread of the press had him in
its grip is strikingly illustrated by the hot London press of 1740. On
that occasion the docks, the riverside slums and dens, the river itself
both above and below bridge, were scoured by gangs who left no stratagem
untried for unearthing and taking the hidden sailor. When the rigour of
the press was past not a seaman, it is said, was to be found at large in
London; yet within four-and-twenty hours sixteen thousand emerged from
their retreats. [Footnote: Griffiths, _Impressment Fully Considered_.]
The secret of such effectual concealment lay in the fact that the nature
of his hiding-place mattered little to the sailor so long as it was
secure. Accustomed to quarters of the most cramped description on
shipboard, he required little room for his stowing. The roughest
bed, the worst ventilated hole, the most insanitary surroundings and
conditions were all one to him. He could thus hide himself away in
places and receptacles from which the average landsman would have turned
in fear or disgust. In quarry, clay-pit, cellar or well; in holt, hill
or cave; in chimney, hayloft or secret cell behind some old-time oven;
in shady alehouse or malodorous slum where a man's life was worth
nothing unless he had the smell of tar upon him, and not much then; on
isolated farmsteads and eyots, or in towns too remote or too hostile
for the gangsman to penetrate--somewhere, somehow and of some sort the
sailor found his lurking-place, and in it, by good providence, lay safe
and snug throughout the hottest press.
Many of the seamen employed in the Newfoundland trade of Poole, gaining
the shore at Chapman's Pool or Lulworth, whiled away their stolen
leisure either in the clay-pits of the Isle of Purbeck, where they
defied intrusion by posting armed sentries at every point of access to
their stronghold, or--their favourite haunt--on Portland Island,
which the number and ill-repute of the labourers employed in its stone
quarries rendered well-nigh impregnable. To search for, let alone
to take the seamen frequenting that natural fortress--who of course
"squared" the hard-bitten quarrymen--was more than any gang durst
undertake unless, as was seldom the case, it consisted of some "very
superior force." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral
Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 5 Aug. 1805.]
With the solitary exception of Falmouth town, the Cornish coast was
merely another Portland Neck enormously extended. From Rame Head to the
Lizard and Land's End, and in a minor sense from Land's End away to Bude
Haven in the far nor'-east, the entire littoral of this remote part of
the kingdom was forbidden ground whereon no gangsman's life was worth
a moment's purchase. The two hundred seins and twice two hundred
drift-boats belonging to that coast employed at least six thousand
fishermen, and of these the greater part, as soon as the fishing season
was at an end, either turned "tinners" and went into the mines, where
they were unassailable,
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley, Report
on Rendezvous, 28 Sept. 1805.] or betook themselves to their strongholds
at Newquay, St. Ives, Newland, Mousehole, Coversack, Polpero, Cawsand
and other places where, in common with smugglers, deserters from the
king's ships at Hamoaze, and an endless succession of fugitive merchant
seamen, they were as safe from intrusion or capture as they would have
been on the coast of Labrador. It was impossible either to hunt them
down or to take them on a coast so "completely perforated." A thousand
"stout, able young fellows" could have been drawn from this source
without being missed; but the gangs fought shy of the task, and only
when they carried vessels in distress into Falmouth were the redoubtable
sons of the coves ever molested. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
579--Admiral M'Bride, 9 March 1795. _Admiralty Records_ 1. 578--Petition
of the Inhabitants of the Village of Coversack, 31 Jan. 1778.]
On the Bristol Channel side Lundy Island offered unrivalled facilities
for evasion, and many were the crews marooned there by far-sighted
skippers who calculated on thus securing them against their return from
Bristol, outward bound. The gangs as a rule gave this little Heligoland
a wide berth, and when carried thither against their will they had a
disconcerting habit of running away with the press-boat, and of thus
marooning their commanding officer, that contributed not a little to
the immunity the island enjoyed. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1439--Capt. Aylmer, 22 Dec. 1743.]
The sailor's objection to Lundy was as strong as the gangsman's. From
his point of view it was no ideal place to hide in, and the effect upon
him of enforced sojourn there was to make him sulky and mutinous. Rather
the shore with all its dangers than an island that produced neither
tobacco, rum, nor women! He therefore preferred sticking to his ship,
even though he thereby ran the risk of impressment, until she arrived
the length of the Holmes.
These islands are two in number, Steep Holme and Flat Holme, and so
closely can vessels approach the latter, given favourable weather
conditions, that a stone may be cast on shore from the deck. The
business of landing and embarking was consequently easy, and though the
islands themselves were as barren as Lundy of the three commodities the
sailor loved, he was nevertheless content to terminate his voyage there
for the following reasons. Under the lee of one or other of the islands
there was generally to be found a boat-load of men who were willing, for
a suitable return in coin of the realm, to work the ship into King Road,
the anchorage of the port of Bristol. The sailor was thus left free to
gain the shore in the neighbourhood of Uphill, Weston, or Clevedon Bay,
whence it was an easy tramp, not to Bristol, of which he steered clear
because of its gangs, but to Bath, or, did he prefer a place nearer at
hand, to the little town of Pill, near Avon-mouth.
A favourite haunt of seafaring men, fishermen, pilots and pilots'
assistants, with a liberal sprinkling of that class of female known
in sailor lingo as "brutes," this lively little town was a place after
Jack's own heart. The gangsmen gave it a wide berth. It offered an
abundance of material for him to work upon, but that material was a
trifle too rough even for his infastidious taste. The majority of the
permanent indwellers of Pill, as well as the casual ones, not only
protected themselves from the press, when such a course was necessary,
by a ready use of the fist and the club, but, when this means of
exemption failed them, pleaded the special nature of their calling with
great plausibility and success. They were "pilots' assistants," and as
such they enjoyed for many years the unqualified indulgence of the
naval authorities. The appellation they bore was nevertheless purely
euphemistic. As a matter of fact they were sailors' assistants who,
under cover of an ostensible vocation, made it their real business,
at the instigation and expense of Bristol shipowners, to save crews
harmless from the gangs by boarding ships at the Holmes and working them
from thence into the roadstead or to the quays. They are said to have
been "very fine young men," and many a longing look did the impress
officers at Bristol cast their way whilst struggling to swell their
monthly returns. So essentially necessary to the trade of the place were
they considered to be, however, that they were allowed to checkmate
the gangs, practically without molestation or hindrance, till about the
beginning of the last century, when the Admiralty, suddenly awaking to
the unpatriotic nature of a practice that so effectually deprived the
Navy of its due, caused them to be served with a notice to the effect
that "for the future all who navigated ships from the Holmes should
be pressed as belonging to those ships." At this threat the Pill men
jeered. Relying on the length of pilotage water between King Road and
Bristol, they took a leaf from the sailor's log and ran before the
press-boats could reach the ships in which they were temporarily
employed. For four years this state of things continued. Then there was
struck at the practice a blow which not even the Admiralty had foreseen.
Tow-paths were constructed along the river-bank, and the pilots'
assistants, ousted by horses, fell an easy prey to the gangs. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 14
April 1805.]
Bath had no gang, and was in consequence much frequented by sailors
of the better class. In 1803--taking that as a normal year--the number
within its limits was estimated at three hundred--enough to man a
ship-of-the-line. The fact being duly reported to the Admiralty, a
lieutenant and gang were ordered over from Bristol to do some
pressing. The civic authorities--mayor, magistrates, constables and
watchmen--fired with sudden zeal for the service, all came forward "in
the most handsome manner" with offers of countenance and support. In the
purlieus of the town, however, the advent of the gang created panic. The
seamen went into prompt hiding, the mob turned out in force, angry and
threatening, resolved that no gang should violate the sanctuary of a
cathedral city. Seeing how the wind set, the mayor and magistrates,
having begun by backing the warrant, continued backing until they backed
out of the affair altogether. The zealous watchmen could not be found,
the eager constables ran away. Dismayed by these untimely defections,
the lieutenant hurriedly resolved "to drop the business." So the gang
marched back to Bristol empty-handed, followed by the hearty execrations
of the rabble and the heartier good wishes of the mayor, who assured
them that as soon as he should be able to clap the skulking seamen in
jail "on suspicion of various misdemeanours," he would send for them
again. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1528--Capt. Barker, 3 and 11
July 1803.] We do not learn that he ever did.
To Bristol no unprotected sailor ever repaired of his own free will,
for early in the century of pressing the chickens of the most notorious
kidnapping city in England began to come home to roost. The mantle of
the Bristol mayor whom Jeffreys tried for a "kidnapping knave" fell
upon a succession of regulating captains whose doings put their civic
prototype to open shame, and more petitions and protests against the
lawlessness of the gangs emanated from Bristol than from any other city
in the kingdom.
The trowmen who navigated the Severn and the Wye, belonging as they did
mainly to extra-parochial spots in the Forest of Dean, were exempt from
the Militia ballot and the Army of Reserve. On the ground that they
came under the protection of inland navigation, they likewise considered
themselves exempt from the sea service, but this contention the Court
of Exchequer in 1798 completely overset by deciding that the "passage
of the River Severn between Gloucester and Bristol is open sea." A
press-gang was immediately let loose upon the numerous tribe frequenting
it, whereupon the whole body of newly created sailors deserted their
trows and fled to the Forest, where they remained in hiding till the
disappointed gang sought other and more fruitful fields. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 14
April 1805.]
Within Chester gates the sailor for many years slept as securely as upon
the high seas. No householder would admit the gangsmen beneath his roof;
and when at length they succeeded in gaining a foothold within the city,
all who were liable to the press immediately deserted it--"as they do
every town where there is a gang"--and went "to reside at Parkgate."
Parkgate in this way became a resort of sea-faring men without parallel
in the kingdom--a "nest" whose hornet bands were long, and with good
reason, notorious for their ferocity and aggressiveness. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1446--Capt. Ayscough, 17 Nov. 1780.] An attempt
to establish a rendezvous here in 1804 proved a failure. The seamen
fled, no "business" could be done, and officer and gang were soon
withdrawn.
In comparison with the seething Deeside hamlet, Liverpool was tameness
itself. Now and then, as in 1745, the sailor element rose in arms,
demanding who was master; but as a rule it suffered the gang, if not
gladly, at least with exemplary patience. Homing seamen who desired to
evade the press in that city--and they were many--fled ashore from
their ships at Highlake, a spot so well adapted to their purpose that it
required "strict care to catch them." From Highlake they made their
way to Parkgate, swelling still further the sailor population of that
far-famed nest of skulkers.
Cork was a minor Parkgate. A graphic account of the conditions obtaining
in that city has been left to us by Capt. Bennett, of H.M.S. _Lennox_,
who did port duty there from May 1779 till March 1783. "Many hundreds
of the best Seamen in this Province," he tells us, "resort in Bodys
in Country Villages round about here, where they are maintained by the
Crimps, who dispose of them to Bristol, Liverpool and other Privateers,
who appoint what part of the Coast to take them on Board. They go in
Bodys, even in the Town of Cork, and bid defiance to the Press-gangs,
and resort in houses armed, and laugh at both civil and military Power.
This they did at Kinsale, where they threatened to pull the Jail down
in a garrison'd Town." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1502--Capt.
Bennett, 12 and 26 April 1782.] These tactics rendered the costly
press-gangs all but useless. A hot press at Cork, in 1796, yielded only
sixteen men fit for the service.
Space fails us to tell of how, owing to a three days' delay in the
London post that brought the warrants to Newhaven in the spring of '78,
the "alarm of soon pressing" spread like wildfire along that coast and
drove every vessel to sea; of how "three or four hundred young fellows"
belonging to Great Yarmouth and Gorleston, who had no families and could
well have been spared without hindrance to the seafaring business of
those towns, thought otherwise and took a little trip of "thirty or
forty miles in the country to hide from the service"; or of how Capt.
Routh, of the rendezvous at Leeds, happened upon a great concourse of
skulkers at Castleford, whither they had been drawn by reasons of safety
and the alleged fact that
"Castleford woman must needs be fair,
Because they wash both in Calder and Aire,"
and after two unsuccessful attempts at surprise, at length took them
with the aid of the military. These were everyday incidents which were
accepted as matters of course and surprised nobody. Nevertheless the
vagaries of the wayward children of the State, who chose to run away and
hide instead of remaining to play the game, cost the naval authorities
many an anxious moment. _They_ had to face both evasion and invasion,
and the prevalence of the one did not help to repel the other.
His country's fear of invasion by the French afforded the seafaring
man the chance of the century. Pitt's Quota Bill put good money in his
pocket at the expense of his liberty, but in Admiral Sir Home Popham's
great scheme for the defence of the coasts against Boney and his
flat-bottomed boats he scented something far more to his advantage and
taste.
From the day in 1796 when Capt. Moriarty, press-gang-officer at Cork,
reported the arrival of the long-expected Brest fleet off the Irish
coast, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1621--Capt. Crosby, 30 Dec.
1796.] the question how best to defend from sudden attack so enormously
extended and highly vulnerable a seaboard as that of the United Kingdom,
became one of feverish moment. At least a hundred different projects
for compassing that desirable end at one time or another claimed
the attention of the Navy Board. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 581--Admiral Knowles, 25 Jan. 1805.] One of these was decidedly
ingenious. It aimed at destroying the French flotilla by means of logs
of wood bored hollow and charged with gunpowder and ball. These were to
be launched against the invaders somewhat after the manner of the modern
torpedo, of which they were, in fact, the primitive type and original.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580--Rear-Admiral Young, 14 Aug. 1803,
and secret enclosure, as in the Appendix. The Admiral's "machine," as he
termed it, though embodying the true torpedo idea of an explosive device
to be propelled against an enemy's ship, was not designed to be so
propelled on its own buoyancy, but by means of a fishing-boat, in which
it lay concealed. Had his inventive genius taken a bolder flight and
given us a more finished product in place of this crudity, the Whitehead
torpedo would have been anticipated, in something more than mere
principle, by upwards of half a century.]
Meantime, however, the Admiralty had adopted another plan--Admiral
Popham, already famous for his improved code of signals, its originator.
On paper it possessed the merits of all Haldanic substitutes for the
real thing. It was patriotic, cheap, simple as kissing your hand. All
you had to do was to take the fisherman, the longshoreman and other
stalwarts who lived "one foot in sea and one on shore," enroll them in
corps under the command (as distinguished from the control) of naval
officers, and practise them (on Sundays, since it was a work of strict
necessity) in the use of the pike and the cannon, and, hey presto! the
country was as safe from invasion as if the meddlesome French had never
been. The expense would be trivial. Granting that the French did not
take alarm and incontinently drop their hostile designs upon the tight
little island, there would be a small outlay for pay, a trifle of a
shilling a day on exercise days, but nothing more--except for martello
towers. The boats it was proposed to enroll and arm would cost nothing.
Their patriotic owners were to provide them free of charge.
Such was the Popham scheme on paper. On a working basis it proved
quite another thing. The pikes provided were old ship-pikes, rotten and
worthless. The only occasion on which they appear to have served any
good purpose was when, at Gerrans and St. Mawes, the Fencibles joined
the mob and terrified the farmers, who were ignorant of the actual
condition of the pikes, into selling their corn at something less than
famine prices. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 579--Capt. Spry, 14
April 1801.] Guns hoary with age, requisitioned from country churchyards
and village greens where they had rusted, some of them, ever since the
days of Drake and Raleigh, were dragged forth and proudly grouped as
"parks of artillery." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1513--Capt.
Bradley, 21 Aug. 1796.] Signal stations could not be seen one from the
other, or, if visible, perpetrated signals no one could read. The armed
smacks were equally unreliable. In Ireland they could not be "trusted
out of sight with a gun." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1529--Capt.
Bowen, 12 Oct. 1803.] In England they left the guns behind them. The
weight, the patriotic owners discovered, seriously hampered the carrying
capacity and seaworthiness of their boats; so to abate the nuisance they
hove the guns overboard on to the beach, where they were speedily buried
in sand or shingle, while the appliances were carried off by those who
had other uses for them than their country's defence. The vessels thus
armed, moreover, were always at sea, the men never at home. When it was
desired to practise them in the raising of the sluice-gates which, in
the event of invasion, were to convert Romney Marsh into an inland
sea, no efforts availed to get together sufficient men for the purpose.
Immune from the press by reason of their newly created status of
Sea-Fencibles, they were all elsewhere, following their time-honoured
vocations of fishing and smuggling with industry and gladness of heart.
As a means of repelling invasion the Popham scheme was farcical and
worthless; as a means of evading the press it was the finest thing
ever invented. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley,
Reports on Sea-Fencibles, 1805; Admiral Lord Keith, Sentiments upon the
Sea-Fencible System, 7 Jan. 1805.] The only benefits the country ever
drew from it, apart from this, were two. It provided the Admiralty with
an incomparable register of seafaring men, and some modern artists with
secluded summer retreats.
It goes without saying that a document of such vital consequence to the
seafaring man as an Admiralty protection did not escape the attention
of those who, from various motives, sought to aid and abet the sailor
in his evasion of the press. Protections were freely lent and exchanged,
bought and sold, "coaxed," concocted and stolen. Skilful predecessors
of Jim the Penman imitated to the life the signatures of Pembroke and
Sandwich, Lord High Admirals, and of the lesser fry who put the official
hand to those magic papers. "Great abuses" were "committed that
way." Bogus protections could be obtained at Sunderland for 8s. 6d.,
Stephenson and Collins, the disreputable schoolmasters who made a
business of faking them, coining money by the "infamous practice." In
London "one Broucher, living in St. Michael's Lane," supplied them
to all comers at 3 Pounds apiece. Even the Navy Office was not above
suspicion in this respect, for in '98 a clerk there, whose name does
not transpire, was accused of adding to his income by the sale of
bogus protections at a guinea a head. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
2740--Lieut. Abbs, 5 Oct. 1798.]
American protections were the Admiralty's pet bugbear. For many years
after the successful issue of the War of Independence a bitter animosity
characterised the attitude of the British naval officer towards the
American sailor. Whenever he could be laid hold of he was pressed, and
no matter what documents he produced in evidence of his American birth
and citizenship, those documents were almost invariably pronounced false
and fraudulent. There were weighty reasons, however, for refusing to
accept the claim of the alleged American sailor at its face value. No
class of protection was so generally forged, so extensively bought and
sold, as the American. Practically every British seaman who made the run
to an American port took the precaution, during his sojourn in that land
of liberty, to provide himself with spurious papers against his return
to England, where he hoped, by means of them, to checkmate the gang. The
process of obtaining such papers was simplicity itself. All the sailor
had to do, at, say, New York, was to apply himself to one Riley, whose
other name was Paddy. The sum of three dollars having changed hands,
Riley and his client betook themselves to the retreat of some shady
Notary Public, where the Irishman made ready oath that the British
seaman was as much American born as himself. The business was now as
good as done, for on the strength of this lying affidavit any Collector
of Customs on the Atlantic coast would for a trifling fee grant the
sailor a certificate of citizenship. Riley created American citizens
in this way at the rate, it is said, of a dozen a day, [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1523-Deposition of Zacharias Pasco, 20 Jan.
1800.] and as he was only one of many plying the same lucrative trade,
the effect of such wholesale creations upon the impress service in
England, had they been allowed to pass unchallenged, may be readily
conceived.
The fraud, worse luck for the service, was by no means confined to
America. Almost every home seaport had its recognised perveyor of
"false American passes." At Liverpool a former clerk to the Collector
of Customs for Pembroke, Pilsbury by name, grew rich on them, whilst at
Greenock, Shields and other north-country shipping centres they were for
many years readily procurable of one Walter Gilly and his confederates,
whose transactions in this kind of paper drove the Navy Board to
desperation. They accordingly instructed Capt. Brown, gang-officer at
Greenock, to take Gilly at all hazards, but the fabricator of passes
fled the town ere the gang could be put on his track. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1549--Capt. Brown, 22 Aug. 1809.]
Considering that every naval officer, from the Lord High Admiral
downwards, had these facts and circumstances at his fingers' end, it
is hardly suprising that protections having, or purporting to have,
an American origin, should have been viewed with profound
distrust--distrust too often justified, and more than justified, by the
very nature of the documents themselves. Thus a gentleman of colour,
Cato Martin by name, when taken out of the _Dolly_ West-Indiaman at
Bristol, had the assurance to produce a white man's pass certifying his
eyes, which were undeniably yellow, to be a soft sky-blue, and his hair,
which was hopelessly black and woolly, to be of that well-known hue most
commonly associated with hair grown north of the Tweed. It was reserved,
however, for an able seaman bearing the distinguished name of Oliver
Cromwell to break all known records in this respect. When pressed, he
unblushingly produced a pass dated in America the 29th of May and
viséd by the American Consul in London on the 6th of June immediately
following, thus conferring on its bearer the unique distinction of
having crossed the Atlantic in eight days at a time when the voyage
occupied honester men nearly as many weeks. To press such frauds was a
public benefit. On the other hand, one confesses to a certain sympathy
with the American sailor who was pressed because he "spoke English very
well." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2734--Capt. Yorke, 8 March
1798.]
Believing in the simplicity of his heart that others were as gullible
as himself, the fugitive sailor sought habitually to hide his identity
beneath some temporary disguise of greater or less transparency. That of
farm labourer was perhaps his favourite choice. The number of seamen so
disguised, and employed on farms within ten miles of the coast between
Hull and Whitby prior to the sailing of the Greenland and Baltic
ships in 1803, was estimated at more than a thousand able-bodied men.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 580--Admiral Phillip, Report on
Rendezvous, 25 April 1804.] Seamen using the Newfoundland trade of
Dartmouth were "half-farmer, half-sailor." When the call of the sea no
longer lured them, they returned to the land in an agricultural sense,
resorting in hundreds to the farmsteads in the Southams, where they
were far out of reach of the gangs. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
579--Admiral M'Bride, Report on Rendezvous, 28 Feb. 1795]