The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore Part 9

a.s.sistants, with a liberal sprinkling of that cla.s.s 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' a.s.sistants," 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' a.s.sistants 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'

a.s.sistants, 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 cla.s.s. 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 a.s.sured 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 pet.i.tions 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 "pa.s.sage 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 ash.o.r.e 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.

s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.body. 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 compa.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 subst.i.tutes for the real thing. It was patriotic, cheap, simple as kissing your hand. All you had to do was to take the fisherman, the longsh.o.r.eman and other stalwarts who lived "one foot in sea and one on sh.o.r.e," 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 h.o.a.ry 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 doc.u.ment 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 att.i.tude of the British naval officer towards the American sailor. Whenever he could be laid hold of he was pressed, and no matter what doc.u.ments he produced in evidence of his American birth and citizenship, those doc.u.ments were almost invariably p.r.o.nounced false and fraudulent. There were weighty reasons, however, for refusing to accept the claim of the alleged American sailor at its face value. No cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses." 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 pa.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstances 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 doc.u.ments themselves. Thus a gentleman of colour, Cato Martin by name, when taken out of the _Dolly_ West-Indiaman at Bristol, had the a.s.surance to produce a white man's pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.s dated in America the 29th of May and vised 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 ident.i.ty 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]

CHAPTER VII.

WHAT THE GANG DID ASh.o.r.e.

In his endeavours to escape the gang the sailor resembled nothing so much as that hopelessly impotent fugitive the flying-fish. For both the sea swarmed with enemies bent on catching them. Both sought to evade those enemies by flight, and both, their ineffectual flight ended, returned to the sea again whether they would or not. It was their fate, a deep-sea kismet as unavoidable as death.

The ultimate destination of the sailor who by strategy or accident succeeded in eluding the triple line of sea-gangs so placed as to head him off from the coast, was thus never in doubt. His longest flights were those he made on land, for here the broad horizon that stood the gangs in such good stead at sea was measurably narrower, while hiding-places abounded and were never far to seek. All the same, in spite of these advent.i.tious aids to self-effacement, the predestined end of the seafaring man sooner or later overtook him. The gang met him at the turning of the ways and wiped him off the face of the land. In the expressive words of a naval officer who knew the conditions thoroughly well, the sailor's chances of obtaining a good run for his money "were not worth a chaw of tobacco."

For this inevitable finish to all the sailor's attempts at flight on sh.o.r.e there existed in the main two reasons. The first of these lay in the sailor himself, making of him an unconscious aider and abettor in his own capture. Just as love and a cough cannot be hid, so there was no disguising the fact that the sailor was a sailor. He was marked by characteristics that infallibly betrayed him. His bandy legs and rolling gait suggested irresistibly the way of a ship at sea, and no "soaking"

in alehouse or tavern could eliminate the salt from the peculiar oaths that were as natural to him as the breath of life. a.s.sume what disguise he would, he fell under suspicion at sight, and he had only to open his mouth to turn that suspicion into certainty. It needed no Sherlock Holmes of a gangsman to divine what he was or whence he came.

The second reason why the sailor could never long escape the gangs was because the gangs were numerically too many for him. It was no question of a chance gang here and there. The country swarmed with them.

Take the coast. Here every seaport of any pretensions in the way of trade, together with every spot between such ports known to be favoured or habitually used by the homing sailor as a landing-place, with certain exceptions already noted, either had its own particular gang or was closely watched by some gang stationed within easy access of the spot.

In this way the whole island was ringed in by gangs on sh.o.r.e, just as it was similarly ringed in by other gangs afloat.

"If their Lordships would give me authority to press here," says Lieut.

Oakley, writing to the Sea Lords from Deal in 1743, "I could frequently pick up good seamen ash.o.a.r. I mean seamen _who by some means escape being prest by the men of war and tenders_."

In this modest request the lieutenant states the whole case for the land-gang, at once demonstrating its utility and defining its functions.

Unconsciously he does more. He echoes a cry that incessantly a.s.sailed the ears of Admiralty: "The sailor has escaped! Send us warrants and give us gangs, and we will catch him yet."

It was this call, the call of the fleet, that dominated the situation and forced order out of chaos. The men must be "rose," and only method could do it. The demand was a heavy one to make upon the most unsystematic system ever known, yet it survived the ordeal. The coast was mapped out, warrants were dispatched to this point and that, rendezvous were opened, gangs formed. No effort or outlay was spared to take the sailor the moment he got ash.o.r.e, or very soon after.

In this systematic setting of land-traps that vast head-centre of the nation's overseas trade, the metropolis, naturally had first place. The streets, and especially the waterside streets, were infested with gangs.

At times it was unsafe for any able-bodied man to venture abroad unless he had on him an undeniable protection or wore a dress that unmistakeably proclaimed the gentleman. The general rendezvous was on Tower Hill; but as ships completing their complement nearly always sent a gang or two to London, minor rendezvous abounded. St. Katherine's by the Tower was specially favoured by them. The "Rotterdam Arms" and the "Two Dutch Skippers," well-known taverns within that precinct, were seldom without the bit of bunting that proclaimed the headquarters of the gang. At Westminster the "White Swan" in King's Street usually bore a similar decoration, as did also the "Ship" in Holborn.

A characteristic case of pressing by a gang using the last-named house occurred in 1706. Ransacking the town in quest of pressable subjects of Her Majesty, they came one day to the "c.o.c.k and Rummer" in Bow Street, where a big dinner was in progress. Here nothing would suit their tooth but mine host's apprentice, and as ill-luck would have it the apprentice was cook to the establishment and responsible for the dinner. Him they nevertheless seized and would have hurried away in spite of his master's supplications, protests and offers of free drinks, had it not been for the fact that a mob collected and forcibly prevented them. Other gangs hurrying to the a.s.sistance of their hard-pressed comrades--to the number, it is said, of sixty men--a free fight ensued, in the course of which a burly constable, armed with a formidable longstaff, was singled out by the original gang, doubtless on account of the prominent part he took in the fray, as a fitting subst.i.tute for the apprentice. By dint of beating the poor fellow till he was past resistance they at length got him to the "Ship," where they were in the very act of bundling him into a coach, with the intention of carrying him to the waterside below bridge, and of their putting him on board the press-smack, when in the general confusion he somehow effected his escape. [Footnote: "A Horrible Relation," _Review_, 17 March 1705-6.] Such incidents were common enough not only at that time but long after.

At Gravesend sailors came ash.o.r.e in such numbers from East India and other ships as to keep a brace of gangs busy. Another found enough to do at Broadstairs, whence a large number of vessels sailed in the Iceland cod fishery and similar industries. Faversham was a port and had its gang, and from Margate right away to Portsmouth, and from Portsmouth to Plymouth, nearly every town of any size that offered ready hiding to the fugitive sailor from the Channel was similarly favoured. Brighton formed a notable exception, and this circ.u.mstance gave rise to an episode about which we shall have more to say presently.

To record in these pages the local of all the gangs that were stationed in this manner upon the seaboard of the kingdom would be as undesirable as it is foreign to the scope of this chapter. Enough to repeat that the land, always the sailor's objective in eluding the triple cordon of sea-borne gangs, was ringed in and surrounded by a circle of land-gangs in every respect identical with that described as hedging the southern coast, and in its continuity almost as unbroken as the sh.o.r.e itself.

Both sea-gangs and coast-gangs were amphibious, using either land or sea at pleasure.

Inland the conditions were the same, yet materially different. What was on the coast an encircling line a.s.sumed here the form of a vast net, to which the princ.i.p.al towns, the great cross-roads and the arterial bridges of the country stood in the relation of reticular knots, while the constant "ranging" of the gangs, now in this direction, now in that, supplied the connecting filaments or threads. The gangs composing this great inland net were not amphibious. Their most desperate aquatic ventures were confined to rivers and ca.n.a.ls. Ability to do their twenty miles a day on foot counted for more with them than a knowledge of how to handle an oar or distinguish the "cheeks" of a gaff from its "jaw."

Just as the sea-gangs in their raids upon the land were the Danes and "creekmen" of their time, so the land-gangsman was the true highwayman of the century that begot him. He kept every strategic point of every main thoroughfare, held all the bridges, watched all the ferries, haunted all the fairs. No place where likely men were to be found escaped his calculating eye.