The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore

no right to press a person of my distinction!" warmly protested an individual of the superior type when pounced upon by the gang. "Lor love yer! that's the wery reason we're a-p

o without sin either of omission or commission, the idea was universal. Pride of service and pride of self entered into its composition in about equal proportions; hence the sailing-master who neglected to salute the flag, or who through ignorance, crass

hether pertaining to sea or land, the recognised corrective was His Majesty's press. A solitary exception is found in the case of Henry Crabb of Chatham, a boatman who rejoiced in incurable lameness; rejoiced because, although there were many cripples on board the Queen's ships in his day, his infirmity was such as to leave him at liberty to ply for hire "when other men durst not for feare of

gher, must infallibly have killed two or three. By all this behaviour I concluded she must be an English vessel taken by the Spaniards. However, when we came within a cable's length of him he brought to, so we run close under his stern in order to shoot a little berth to leeward of him, and at the same time bid them hoist their boats out. Our people, as is customary upon such occasions, were then all up upon the gunhill and in the shrouds, looking at him. Just as we came under his quarter he pointed a gun that was sticking out a little abaft his main-shrouds right at us, and put the match to it, but it happened very luckily that the gun blew. A fellow that was standing on the quarter-deck then took up a blunderbuss and presented it, which by its not going off must have missed fire. As it was almost impossible, they being stripp'd and bareheaded, besides having their faces besmeared with powder, for us to judge them by their looks, I concluded they must be a Parcell of Light-headed Frenchmen run mad, and thinking it by no means prudent to let them kill my men in such a ridiculous manner, I

AROUSING. From the mezzo

ell, a currier who accidentally jostled him whilst he was drinking in a Poole taproom. "No, nor you neither!" replied Hartnell. The retort cost him a most disagreeable experience. Dibell and his comrades collared

e choleric old martinet promptly set the gang upon him and had him conveyed on board the tender, "where," says Lieut. Collingwood, writing a month later,

to the quay for the purpose of boarding the Hope tender, of which h

cried he, "who a

" replied one of

this and demanded to know if language such as tha

solent tongue. "If you like it bet

nant. "Come along with me, my brave piece! I know those

ng his chance, tripped him up and made off. Next day there was a sequel. The lieutenant "was taken possession o

e crew of a Customs-House boat, and in retaliation took one of their number and carried him to sea. Peremptory orders reaching him at one of the Scottish ports, however, he discha

pressed at Manilla because of his insolence, and who afterwards, by a successful suit at law, let him

es of etiquette on its pr

ll with impunity the gorgeous admiral passing in his twelve-oared barge, [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 577-Admiral the Marquis of Carmarthen, 24 June 1710.] nor irate shipmasters who flouted the impress service of the Crown as a

t that it embraced only a single dialect seriously handicapped him in his race with the keelman, who had no less than three to draw upon, all equally prolific. Between "keelish," "coblish" and "sheelish," the respective dialects of the north-country keelman, pilot and tradesman, he had at his command a source of supply unrivalled in vituperative richness, abundance and variety. With these at his tongue's end none could touch, much less outdo him in power and sc

long after, the salute was obligatory, its omission entailing heavy penalties; [Footnote: A copy of the original proclamation may be seen in Lansdowne MSS., clxxi, f. 218, where it is also summarised in the following terms: "Anno 2 regni Johannis regis: Frends not amaining at the j sumons but resisting the King his l

h the same"; likewise the "ensign red, with the cross in a canton of white at the upper corner thereof, next to the staff"; but if you presumed to display His Majesty's Jack, commonly called the Union Jack, or any other of the various flags of command flown by ships of war or vessels employed in the naval service, swift retribution overtook you. Similarly, the inadvertent hoisting of your colours "wrong end upp

an a master hand, some one belonging to you was bound, in waters swarming with ships of war, to pay the piper sooner or later. "A few days ago," writes Capt. Archer of the Isis, "a ship called the Jan

uthorisation was only temporary, the practice thus set up continued long after its origin had been relegated to the scrap-heap of memory, and not only continued, but was interpreted in a sense much broader than its royal originator ever intended it should be. This tendency to take an ell in lieu of the stipulated inch was illustrated as early as 1705, when Lieut. Thoms

81.] and as late as 1807 a gang at Portsmouth, acting under orders from Capt. Sir Robert Bromley, took one Madden, a blind man, because of his "qualification of playing on the Irish bagpipes." His affliction saved him. He

of John Conyear, exempt passenger on the packet-boat plying between Dartmouth and Poole, subjected to the same process because, as the officer responsible ingenuously put it when called to book for the act, if Conyea

p, he accidentally met one of the lieutenants employed in the local impress service, and mistaking him for the master of a Greenland ship, stepped up to him and asked him for a bert

in ships, in an evil hour acted on the advice of his apothecary and ran across to Holland for the sake of his health, which the infirmities of youth appear to have undermined. All went well until, on the return trip, just before Bawdsey Ferry hove in sight, down swooped a revenue cutter's boat with an urgent request that the master should open up his hatches and disclose what his hold contai

ke a sailor," John Teede protested vehemently that he had never been to sea in his life, and that all who said he had were unmitigated liars. "Strip him," said the officer, who had a short way with such cases. In a twinkling Teede's shirt was over his head and the sailor stood revealed. Devices emblematic of love a

nement to the board had warped his legs into a fatal resemblance to those of a typical Jack-tar. Harwich once had a mayor who, after vowing that he would "never be guilty of saying there was no law for pressing sailors

his accent and his nose might be, those evidences of nationality were Anglicised, so to speak, by the fact that his legs were the legs of a sail

ing wildly to the sea and the cliffs, whence the suspicious townsfolk, then all unused to "visitors" and their eccentricities, watched his antics in wonder and consternation. The principal inhabitants of the place, alarmed by his vagaries, constituted themselves a committee of safety, and with the parson at their head went down to inte

uld Old En

eybourn H

t a moment in sending his gang to seize the suspect and nip his fell design in the bud. With this alarming request Brace promptly complied, and the stranger was dragged away to Yarmouth. Arraigned before the mayor, he with difficulty succeeded in conv

ing by instigation, of which it is at once a specimen and a phase. The incentive here was suspicion; but i

e consignee's agent, on the trow's arrival at Bristol, hinted at a more than alliterative connection between china and chests, which he was proceeding to search when Onions objected, very rightly urging that he had no warrant. "Is it a warrant you're wanting?" demanded the baffled agent. "Very well

ed him to enter the army, but his guardians, piqued by her insistence, "had him kidnapped on board the impress tender at Shiel

ll of Clerkenwell upon a similar career. His step-mother and uncle desired to retain possession of the money, of which they were trustees;

family because of his drunken habits, were two out of many shipped abroad by this cheap but effectual means, the instigator of the gang being in each case the lad's own father. [Footnote: Admir

rendezvous, instructing him "to take all opportunities of impressing seafaring men belonging to the Isle of Man," as a punishment for the "extreme ill-conduct of the people of that Island to His Majesty's Officers on the Impress Service." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 3. 148-Admiralty Minutes, 11 Oct. 1803.] The Admiralty method of paying out anyone against whom you cherished a grudge possessed advantages which strongly commended it to the splenetic and the vindictive. For suppose you lay in wait for your enemy and beat or otherwise maltreated him: the chances were

watch, flashed into malicious action with that hoped-for opportunity, the coming of the gang. John Gray, carpenter of a merchant ship, in a moment of anger threatened to cut the skipper down with an axe. This happened under a West-Indian sun. Months afterwards, as the ship swung lazily into Bri

brute, at this flew into a passion and sought to ingraft his ideas of seamanship upon the mate through the medium of a handspike, with which he caught him a savage blow "just above the eye, cutting him about three inches in length." It was in mid-ocean that this lesson in navigation was administered. By the time Scilly shoved its nose above the horizon the skipper's "down" on the mate had reached an acute stage. His resentment of the latter's being the better seaman had now deepened into hatred, a

uld to quell it. Angered by so gross an indignity, they supplied the gang with information that led to the pressing of some sixty persons concerned in the tumult, but as these consisted mainly of "vagrants, gipsies, parish charges, maimed,

o on strike unless the masters raised their wages. In this they were not entirely unanimous, however. One of their number stood out, refusing to join the combine; wh

r-Master, that exalted individual, who entertained for the girl social ambitions in which fishermen's shacks had no place, resented his advances as insufferable impertinence. A word to Lieut. Leary, his friend at the local rendezvous, did the rest. Taylor disappeared, and though he was

In this condition he was found late one night knocking in a very violent manner at the door of the "Pied Bull," and swearing that, while none should keep him out, any who refused to assist him in breaking in should be shot down forthwith. Burrows, the ex-beadle, happened to be passing at the moment. He seized the drunken cleric and with the assistance of James Howell, one of the city watchmen, forcibly removed him to the watch-house, whence

the narrative continues, "the coffin was observed to stir, on which he was taken up, and by giving him some nourishment he came to himself, and is likely to do well." Whether this sailor was ever pressed, either bef

of the night the lad awoke, and finding the room stuffy and day on the point of breaking, he rose and dressed, purposing to see the town in the cool of the morning. The catch of the door, however, refused to yield under his hand, and while he was endeavouring to undo it the noise he made awakened the boatswain, who told him that if he looked in his breeches pocket he would find a knife there with which he could lift the latch. Acting on this hint, the lad succeeded in opening the door, and thereupon went downstairs i

together with marks of blood-stained hands and feet, were further discovered on the floor and the door of the chamber, down the stairs, and along the passage leading to the street, whence they could be distinctly traced to the waterside, not so very far away. Imagination, working upon these ghastly survivals of the hours of

ence of his guilt. In his pocket they discovered the boatswain's knife, and both it and the lad's clothing were stained with blood. Asked whose blood it was, and how it came there, he made no answer. Asked was it the boatswain's knife, he answ

under you, leaving you dangling in mid-air like a kind of death-fruit nearly, but not quite, ready to fall. Much depended on the executioner, and that grim functionary was in this case a raw hand, unused to his work, who bungled the job. The knot was ill-adjusted, the rope too long, the convict tall and lank. This last circums

and was sent on board a man-o'-war. There, in course of time, he rose to be master's mate, and in that capacity, whilst on the West-India station, was transferred to another ship. On this ship he

ped and the wound reopened. Discovering his condition when awakened by the apprentice, he rose and left the house, intending to have the wound re-dressed by the barber-surgeon who had inflicted it, with more effect than discre