Since the termination of the American war, there had been nothing to
call for any unusual energy in manning the navy; and the grants required
by Government for this purpose diminished with every year of peace.
In 1792 this grant touched its minimum for many years. In 1793 the
proceedings of the French had set Europe on fire, and the English were
raging with anti-Gallican excitement, fomented into action by every
expedient of the Crown and its Ministers. We had our ships; but where
were our men? The Admiralty had, however, a ready remedy at hand, with
ample precedent for its use, and with common (if not statute) law to
sanction its application. They issued “press warrants,” calling upon
the civil power throughout the country to support their officers in the
discharge of their duty. The sea-coast was divided into districts, under
the charge of a captain in the navy, who again delegated sub-districts to
lieutenants; and in this manner all homeward-bound vessels were watched
and waited for, all ports were under supervision; and in a day, if need
were, a large number of men could be added to the forces of his Majesty’s
navy. But if the Admiralty became urgent in their demands, they were
also willing to be unscrupulous. Landsmen, if able-bodied, might soon
be trained into good sailors; and once in the hold of the tender, which
always awaited the success of the operation of the press-gang, it was
difficult for such prisoners to bring evidence of the nature of their
former occupations, especially when none had leisure to listen to such
evidence, or were willing to believe it if they did listen, or would act
upon it for the release of the captive if they had by possibility both
listened and believed. Men were kidnapped, literally disappeared, and
nothing was ever heard of them again. The street of a busy town was not
safe from such press-gang captures, as Lord Thurlow could have told,
after a certain walk he took about this time on Tower Hill, when he, the
attorney-general of England, was impressed, when the Admiralty had its
own peculiar ways of getting rid of tiresome besiegers and petitioners.
Nor yet were lonely inland dwellers more secure; many a rustic went to a
statute fair or “mop,” and never came home to tell of his hiring; many a
stout young farmer vanished from his place by the hearth of his father,
and was no more heard of by mother or lover; so great was the press for
men to serve in the navy during the early years of the war with France,
and after every great naval victory of that war.
The servants of the Admiralty lay in wait for all merchant-men and
traders; there were many instances of vessels returning home after
long absence, and laden with rich cargo, being boarded within a day’s
distance of land, and so many men pressed and carried off, that the ship
with her cargo became unmanageable from the loss of her crew, drifted
out again into the wild wide ocean, and was sometimes found in the
helpless guidance of one or two infirm or ignorant sailors; sometimes
such vessels were never heard of more. The men thus pressed were taken
from the near grasp of parent or wives, and were often deprived of the
hard earnings of years, which remained in the hands of the masters of
the merchantman in which they had served, subject to all the chances of
honesty or dishonesty, life or death. Now all this tyranny (for I can use
no other word) is marvellous to us; we cannot imagine how it is that a
nation submitted to it for so long, even under any warlike enthusiasm,
any panic of invasion, any amount of loyal subservience to the governing
powers. When we read of the military being called in to assist the civil
power in backing up the press-gang, of parties of soldiers patrolling
the streets, and sentries with screwed bayonets placed at every door
while the press-gang entered and searched each hole and corner of the
dwelling; when we hear of churches being surrounded during divine service
by troops, while the press-gang stood ready at the door to seize men as
they came out from attending public worship, and take these instances as
merely types of what was constantly going on in different forms, we do
not wonder at Lord Mayors, and other civic authorities in large towns,
complaining that a stop was put to business by the danger which the
tradesmen and their servants incurred in leaving their houses and going
into the streets, infested by press-gangs.
Whether it was that living in closer neighbourhood to the metropolis—the
centre of politics and news—inspired the inhabitants of the southern
counties with a strong feeling of that kind of patriotism which
consists in hating all other nations; or whether it was that the
chances of capture were so much greater at all the southern ports
that the merchant sailors became inured to the danger; or whether it
was that serving in the navy, to those familiar with such towns as
Portsmouth and Plymouth, had an attraction to most men from the dash
and brilliancy of the adventurous employment—it is certain that the
southerners took the oppression of press-warrants more submissively
than the wild north-eastern people. For with them the chances of profit
beyond their wages in the whaling or Greenland trade extended to the
lowest description of sailor. He might rise by daring and saving to be a
ship-owner himself. Numbers around him had done so; and this very fact
made the distinction between class and class less apparent; and the
common ventures and dangers, the universal interest felt in one pursuit,
bound the inhabitants of that line of coast together with a strong tie,
the severance of which by any violent extraneous measure, gave rise to
passionate anger and thirst for vengeance. A Yorkshire man once said to
me, “My county folk are all alike. Their first thought is how to resist.
Why! I myself, if I hear a man say it is a fine day, catch myself trying
to find out that it is no such thing. It is so in thought; it is so in
word; it is so in deed.”
So you may imagine the press-gang had no easy time of it on the Yorkshire
coast. In other places they inspired fear, but here rage and hatred. The
Lord Mayor of York was warned on 20th January, 1777, by an anonymous
letter, that “if those men were not sent from the city on or before the
following Tuesday, his lordship’s own dwelling, and the Mansion-house
also, should be burned to the ground.”