The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore Part 13

At Waterford Capt. Price went one better than this, for a man who was totally unfit for the service having one day shown him some trifling disrespect, the 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, "he has been eating the king's victuals ever since." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1501--Lieut. Collingwood, 18 March 1781.] Punishment enough, surely!

One night at Londonderry, as Lieut. Watson was making his way down to the quay for the purpose of boarding the _Hope_ tender, of which he was commander, he accidentally ran against a couple of strangers.

"Hallo! my lads," cried he, "who and what are you?"

"I am what I am," replied one of them, insolently.

The lieutenant, who had been dining, fired up at this and demanded to know if language such as that was proper to be addressed to a king's officer.

"As you please," said he of the insolent tongue. "If you like it better, I'll say I'm a piece of a man."

"So I see by your want of manners," retorted the lieutenant. "Come along with me, my brave piece! I know those who will make a whole man of you before they're done."

With that he seized the fellow, meaning to take him to his boat, which lay near by, but the pressed man, watching his chance, tripped him up and made off. Next day there was a sequel. The lieutenant "was taken possession of by the Civil Power" on a charge of a.s.sault. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1531--Lieut. Watson, 27 Oct. 1804.]

Another officer who met with base ingrat.i.tude from a pressed man whose manners he attempted to reform was Capt. Bethel of the _Phoenix_. At the Nore he was once grossly abused by the 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 discharged the man and paid his pa.s.sage south. He was immediately sued for false imprisonment and cast in heavy damages. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1493--Capt. Bethel, 29 Aug. 1762.]

Capt. Brereton, of the _Falmouth_, was "had" in similar fashion by the master of an East-Indiaman whom he pressed at Manilla because of his insolence, and who afterwards, by a successful suit at law, let him in for 400 Pounds damages and costs. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.

1494--Capt. Brereton, 18 Oct. 1765.]

This was turning the tables of etiquette on its professors with a vengeance.

Such costly lessons in the art of politeness, however, did not in the least abash the naval officer or deter him from the continued inculcation of manners. Young fellows idly roystering on the river could not be permitted to miscall with impunity the gorgeous admiral pa.s.sing 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 "pitiful"

thing and its officers as "little scandalous creatures," be allowed to go scot-free. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2379--Capt. Robinson, 21 Feb. 1725-6.] At whatever cost, the dignity of the service must be maintained.

Nowhere did the use of invective attain such extraordinary perfection as amongst those who plied their vocations on the country's busy waterways.

Here "sauce" was reduced to a science and vituperation to a fine art.

Thames watermen and Tyne keelmen in particular acquired an astounding proficiency in the choice and application of abusive epithets, but of the two the keelman carried off the palm. The wherryman, it is true, possessed a ripe vocabulary, but the fact 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 scope of abusive description. He became in consequence of these superior advantages so "insupportably impudent"

that the only known cure for his complaint was to follow the prescription of Capt. Atkins of the _Panther_, and "take him as fast as you could ketch him"; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1438--Capt.

Atkins, 23 Dec. 1720.] but even this drastic method of curbing his tongue was robbed of much of its efficacy by the jealous care with which he was "protected."

Failure to amain, that is, to douse your topsail or dip your colours when you meet with a ship of war--the marine equivalent for raising one's hat--const.i.tuted a gross contempt of the king's service. The custom was very ancient, King John having inst.i.tuted it in the second year of his reign. At that time, and indeed for 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 lieutenant, the L. Admirall or his lieutenant, to lose the ship and goods, & theire bodies to be imprisoned."_] but with the advent of the century of pressing another means of inspiring respect for the flag, now exacted as a courtesy rather than a right, came into vogue.

The offending vessel paid for its omission in men.

If you were anything but a king's ship, and flew a flag that only king's ships were ent.i.tled to fly, you were guilty, in the eyes of every right-seeing naval officer, of another piece of ill manners so gross as to be deserving of the severest punishment the press was capable of inflicting upon you. You might fly the "flag and Jack white, with a red cross (commonly called St. George's cross) pa.s.sing quite through 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 uppermost," or in any other manner deemed inconsistent with the dignity of the service which permitted you to fly them, laid you open to reprisals of the most summary nature. Before you realised the heinousness of your offence, a gang boarded you and your best man or men were gone beyond recall. The joy of waterside weddings--occasions prolific in the display of wrong colours--was often turned into sorrow in this way.

Inability to do the things you professed to do involved grave risk of making intimate acquaintance with the gang. If, for example, you were a skipper and navigated your vessel more like a 'prentice than 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 _Jane_, Stewart master, ran on board of us in a most lubberly manner--for which, as is customary on such occasions, I took four of his people." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1448--Capt. Archer, 17 May 1795.]

Ability to handle a musical instrument sometimes proved as fatal to one's liberty as inability to handle a ship. Queen Anne was directly responsible for this. Almost immediately after her accession she signed a warrant authorising the pressing of "drummers, fife and haut boys for sea and land." [Footnote: _Home Office Military Entry Books_, clxviii, f. 406.] Though the authorisation was only temporary, the practice thus set up continued long after its origin had been relegated to the sc.r.a.p-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 ill.u.s.trated as early as 1705, when Lieut. Thomson, belonging to the _Lickfield_, chancing to meet one Richard Bullard, fiddler, "persuaded him to go as far as Woolwich with him, to play a tune or two to him and some friends who had a mind to dance, saying he would pay him for it"--which he did, when tired of dancing, by handing him over to the press-gang. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1467--Capt. Byron, 13 July 1705.]

In 1781, again, a "stout lad of 17" was pressed at Waterford because, as a piper, he was considered likely to be "useful in amusing the new-raised men"; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1501--Lieut.

Collingwood, 18 March 1781.] 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 was discharged, and the amount of his pay and victualling was deducted from Sir Robert's wages as a caution to him to be more careful in future. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1544--Capt. Sir Robert Bromley, 1 Dec. 1808.]

Perhaps the oddest reasons ever adduced in justification of specific acts of pressing were those put forward in the cases of James Baily, a Gosport ferry-man who was pressed on account of his "great inactivity,"

and of John Conyear, exempt pa.s.senger 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 Conyear had not been on board, "another would, who might have been a proper person to serve His Majesty." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1451--Capt. Argles, 4 May 1807; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2485--Capt.

Scott, 13 March 1780.]

An ironical interest attaches to the pressing of John Hagin, a youth of nineteen who cherished an ambition to go a-whaling. Tramping the riverside at Hull one day in search of a ship, 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 berth. "Berth?" said the obliging officer. "Come this way;" and he conducted the unsuspecting youth to the rendezvous. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1455--Capt. Ackton, 23 March 1814.]

Before you took a voyage for the benefit of your health in those days it was always advisable to satisfy yourself as to the nature of the cargo the vessel carried or intended to carry, otherwise you were liable to be let in for a longer voyage than health demanded. Richard Gooding of Bawdsey, in the county of Suffolk, a twenty-one-year-old yeoman who knew nothing of the iniquities practised 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 contained. He demurred, alleging that it held nothing of interest to revenue men; but on their going below to see for themselves they discovered an appreciable quant.i.ty of gin. Thereupon the master wickedly declared Gooding to be the culprit, and he was pressed on suspicion of attempting to run a cargo of spirits. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.

1530--Capt. Broughton, 20 April 1803, and enclosure.]

Into the operations of the gang this element of suspicion entered very largely, especially in the pressing of supposed sailors. To carry about on your person any of the well-known marks of the seafaring man was to invite certain disaster. When pressed, like so many others, because he was "in appearance very much like 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 and the sea covered both arms from shoulder to wrist. "You and I will lovers die, eh?" said the officer, with a twinkle, as he spelt out one of the amatory inscriptions. "Just so, John! I'll see to that. Next man!"

[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1522--Description of a Person calling himself John Teede, 28 Dec. 1799.]

Bow-legged men ran the gravest of risks in this respect, and the goose of many a tailor was effectually cooked because of the d.a.m.ning fact, which no protestations of innocence of the sea could mitigate, that long confinement 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," as a convincing proof that he knew what was what, and was willing to provide it to the best of his ability, straightway sent out and pressed--a tailor! [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1436--Capt.

Allen, 26 March 1706.]

The itinerant Jewish peddler who hawked his wares about the country suffered grievously on this account. However indisputably Hebraic his name, 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 sailor, and the bandy appendages so characteristic of his race sooner or later brought the gang down upon him in full cry and landed him in the fleet.

In the year 1780 the fishing town of Cromer was thrown into a state of acute excitement by the behaviour of a casual stranger--a great, bearded man of foreign aspect who, taking a lodging in the place, resorted daily to the beach, where he walked the sands "at low water mark," now writing with great a.s.siduity in a book, again gesticulating 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 princ.i.p.al inhabitants of the place, alarmed by his vagaries, const.i.tuted themselves a committee of safety, and with the parson at their head went down to interview him; and when, in response to their none too polite inquiries, he flatly refused to give any account of himself, they by common consent voted him a spy and a public menace, telling each other that he was undoubtedly engaged in drawing plans of the coast in order to facilitate' the landing of some enemy; for did not the legend run:--

"He who would Old England win, Must at Weybourn Hope begin?"

and was not the "Hoop," as it was called locally, only a few miles to the northward? No time was to be lost. Post-haste they dispatched a messenger to Lieut. Brace at Yarmouth, begging him, if he would save his country from imminent danger, to lose not 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 convincing that functionary that he was nothing more dangerous than a stray agriculturist whom the Empress Catherine had sent over from Russia to study the English method of growing-turnips!

[Footnote: _State Papers_, Russia, cv.--Lieut. Brace, 18 Aug. 1780.]

The unhandsome treatment meted out to the inoffensive Russian is of a piece with the whole aspect of pressing by instigation, of which it is at once a specimen and a phase. The incentive here was suspicion; but in the fertile field of instigation motives flourished in forms as varied as the weaknesses of human nature.

Thomas Onions, respectable burgess of Bridgnorth, engaged in working a trow from that place to Bristol, fell under suspicion owing to the mysterious disappearance of a portion of the cargo, which consisted of china. The rest of the crew being metaphorically as well as literally in the same boat, the 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, we'll see if we cannot find one." With that he stepped ash.o.r.e and hurried to the rendezvous, where he knew the officers, and within the hour the gang added Onions to the impress stock-pot. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1542--Memorial of the Inhabitants and Burgesses of Bridgnorth, 12 March 1808.]

Much the same motive led to the pressing of Charles M'Donald, a north-country youth of education and property. His mother wished him to enter the army, but his guardians, piqued by her insistence, "had him kidnapped on board the impress tender at Shields, under pretence of sending him on a visit." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1537--Capt.

Bland, 29 Nov. 1806, and enclosure.]

An "independent fortune of fourteen hundred pounds," bequeathed to him by his "Aunt Elizabeth," was instrumental in launching John Stillwell of Clerkenwell upon a similar career. His step-mother and uncle desired to retain possession of the money, of which they were trustees; so they suborned the gang and the young man disappeared. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1539--Capt. Burton, 25 April 1806, and enclosure.]

A more legitimate pastime of the gang was the pressing of incorrigible sons. George Clark of Birmingham and William Barnicle of Margate, the one a notorious thief, the other the despair of his 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: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1537--Jeremiah Clark, 30 July 1806; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1547--Lieut. Dawe, 4 Sept.

1809.] The distracting problem, "What to do with our sons?" was in this way amazingly simplified.

In thus utilising the gang as a means of retaliating upon those who incurred their displeasure, both naval officers and private individuals, had they been arraigned for the offence, could have pleaded in justification of their conduct the example of no less exalted a body than the Admiralty itself. The case of the bachelor seamen of Dover, pressed because of an official animus against that town, was as notorious as their Lordships' futile attempt to teach the Brighton fishermen respect for their betters, or their later orders to Capt.

Culverhouse, of the Liverpool 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 that he would either punish you himself or invoke the law to do it for him; while if you removed him by means of the garrot, the knife or the poisoned gla.s.s, no matter how discreetly the deed was done the hangman was pretty sure to get you sooner or later. But the gang--it was as safe as an epidemic!

The fact was not lost upon the community. People in almost every station of life appreciated it at its true worth, and, encouraged by the example of the Admiralty, availed themselves of the gang as the handiest, speediest and safest of mediums for wiping out old scores.

On shipboard, where life was more cramped and men consequently came into sharper contact than on sh.o.r.e, resentments were struck from daily intercourse like sparks from steel. Like sparks some died, impotent to harm their object; but others, cherished in bitterness of spirit through many a lonely 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 Bristol river and the gang came aboard, the skipper found his opportunity. Beckoning to the impress officer, he pointed to John Gray and said: "Take that man!" [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1542--Capt. Barker, 22 June 1808, and enclosure.] Gray never again lifted an axe on board a merchant vessel.

Certain amenities which once pa.s.sed between the master and the mate of the _Lady Sh.o.r.e_ serve to throw an even broader light upon the origin of quarrels at sea and the methods of settling them then in vogue. The _Lady Sh.o.r.e_ was on the pa.s.sage home from Quebec when the master one day gave certain sailing directions which the mate, who was a sober, careful seaman, thought fit to disregard on the ground that the safety of the ship would be endangered if he followed them. The master, an irascible, drunken brute, at this flew into a pa.s.sion 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, and to this, as the voyage neared its end, was added growing fear of prosecution. At this juncture a man-o'-war hove in sight and signalled an inspection of hands. "Get your chest on deck, Mr.

Mate," cried the exultant skipper. "You are too much master here. It is time for us to part." Taken out of the ship as a pressed man, the mate was ultimately discharged by order of the Admiralty; but the skipper had his revenge. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 583--Matthew Gill to Admiral Moorsom, 15 Jan. 1813.]

A riot that occurred at King's Lynn in the year '55 affords a striking instance of the retaliatory use of the gang on sh.o.r.e. In the course of the disturbance mud and stones were thrown at the magistrates, who had come out to do what they could 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, halt and idiots," the magisterial resentment caused greater rejoicings at Lynn than it did at Spithead, where the sweepings of the borough were eventually deposited. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 920--Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, 8 June 1755.]

There is a decided smack of the modern about the use the gang was put to by the journeymen coopers of Bristol. Considering themselves underpaid, they threatened to go 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; whereupon the rest summoned the gang and had the "blackleg" pressed for his contumacy. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1542--Capt. Barker, 20 Aug. 1808, and enclosure.]