The Pressgang - long version

The Press Gangs

From Life in Nelson’s Navy by Dudley Pope

Receiving Ship.

In 1803 Robert Hay wrote:
"August 1803 the receiving ship at Portsmouth was the Resolue. She was a kind of examination ship appointed to receive and cleanse all the newly raised levies that arrived in this port. After being thoroughly washed in a number of cisterns which were fitted around the sides of this vessel, we were examined while in a state of nudity before a committee of surgeon’s.

Those who had any appearance of disease or uncleanness were kept on board for cure or purification. The rest were sent on board the Salvador Del Mundo, which at that time lay guard ship in the harbour."

Numbers in a Press Gang.

Small Towns had a Lieutenant in charge, but Lynn had a Captain as did the large towns and cities.

A captains pay was £1 a day
A Lieutenants pay was 5/- a day with 2/9 a day subsistence.

1799 there were 29 Captains and 60 Lieutenants in the impressment service.

Edinburgh, Cork, Bristol all had Captains.

London had two Captains and seven Lieutenants.

Yarmouth (Norfolk), Poole, Dover, Appledore (Devon) and Liverpool had a Captain and two Lieutenants.

Bristol, Falmouth, Lynn, Southampton and Swansea had a Captain and one Lieutenant.

Deal, Exmouth, Faversham, Gosport Harwich and Littlehampton had a Lieutenant.

An Officer could claim 3 pence a mile.
A member of the gang could claim 1 pence a mile travailing money.

Press Gangs were to be found in some 50 Ports around Britain. The base that they worked from was known as the Rendezvous. If a surgeon was called he would receive one shilling for every man that he inspected.

The press gangs were in theory, limited in the men they could seize. To begin with, the government claimed that any man ‘using the sea’ could be pressed, and various legal authorities over the years
backed this up. The claim that a freeholder should be exempt was dismissed by Lord Thurlow while Attorney-General: ‘I see no reason why men using the sea ... should be exempted only because they are, free holders.... It is a qualification easily attained.’ Sir William Black-stone said that pressing was based on the Crown’s right to press everyone, and he was followed by Charles Yorke, the Solicitor-General in 1757, and Lord Mansfield.

So the Admiralty, maintaining that every British subject was liable for service, gradually accepted certain exemptions. A foreigner was exempted - officially. He could volunteer to serve in the Royal Navy (and many did, for reasons given later) but by a law of 1740 could not be pressed. However, the Admiralty soon gnawed at the law and the foreigner paid a heavy price eventually if he had anything to do with the British - if he served in a British merchant ship for two years, he became liable for pressing.

Marriage could prove fatal, ending his freedom and possibly his life, because if he married a British woman he became a British subject by naturalisation, as far as the Admiralty was concerned, and the men interrupting his honeymoon were likely to be the press gang. A good example of the unexpected perils of matrimony was a seaman arriving in Bristol in 1806 in a ship from the West Indies. He was promptly pressed but, successfully claiming that he was a foreigner, he was discharged by the Navy. He celebrated his freedom by proposing to a Bristol girl and marrying her, and within three weeks of the wedding he was back in the Navy with ‘pressed against his name in the muster book, and this time the Admiralty refused his claim to be a foreigner.

A genuine foreigner who was pressed could always get his freedom, providing he could get his consul to apply for his release. Because a foreigner could rarely speak English and in any case was unlikely to be able to get on shore to see a consul usually he stayed in the Royal Navy. If he was fortunate enough to be released, he was given a certificate of discharge, signed by the captain of his ship, certifying that the man had been discharged from the ship ‘by order of the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, by reason of his being a subject of ; and by order of their Lordships had this certificate given him, to prevent his being impressed’. A note beneath the signature said:

‘On the back of this certificate must be put a description of the man’s person.’

This was detailed, because the Admiralty did not intend that he should sell such a valuable document.

A high proportion of foreigners serving in the Royal Navy in wartime were doing so because they had volunteered, and the reason is not hard to find. Many of the men of the ports in the Baltic and Mediterranean could only make a living by serving in merchant ships. Places like Genoa, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia, Narvik, Oslo (then known as Christiania), Hamburg, Cuxhaven, Odense, Copenhagen and Malmo were thriving ports in peacetime and the bases of large merchant fleets. In wartime, with trade cut back or halted (because of the French occupation of Genoa, Leghorn and Civita Vecchia, for instance), there were no cargoes for ships and no work for seamen. If they were not to starve they had to serve under foreign flags, and this usually meant in British ships. If they served in a merchant ship they risked being accused of treason by the French if they were captured, so most chose the Royal Navy, where the chances of being taken prisoner were much less.

It is interesting to examine at random the muster books of Royal Navy ships. The small schooner Pickle, for example, brought back to England the dispatch describing Nelson’s death and the victory of Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. It was a bad voyage, with heavy weather and the fear of French privateers, but the ship’s company were mustered on 28 October. She had an official complement of forty, but only thirty-three men appeared in the muster list, and their nationalities were: seventeen English, nine Irish, one Scottish, one Welsh, one Channel Islander, two Americans and two Norwegians.

The muster book shows that one American, Thomas pascomb of New York, pressed in December 1804 in Plymouth, was discharged the following April in Bermuda. The ship’s second master was an American serving quite happily in the Royal Navy, George Almy, from Newport. Of the English on board, incidentally, five came from the West Country, two each from Kent and Sussex, and one from London.

A few weeks before the fleet under Sir Hyde Parker and Nelson sailed for Denmark and the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, the Admiralty ordered that all Danes, Norwegians and Swedes on board should be transferred to other ships.

The ship from which Nelson was to command the battle, the 74-gun Elephant, had only fourteen foreigners on board, and seven of them were Americans. All were listed as volunteers, two of them being senior petty officers and the rest able seamen. The 74-gun Ganges had the most foreigners in her ship’s company, which numbered less than the 700 allowed. Four Danes, two Swedes and a Norwegian were transferred by Admiralty order before leaving England, leaving behind twenty-seven other foreigners. These included fifteen Americans, two from Holland, India, and Goeree (an island off Senegal), and one each from Prussia, Martinique, Portugal, Hamburg, Hanover and ‘Africa’.

The third ship in the fleet, chosen at random because she was in the thick of the battle, was the 74-gun Monarch. She had a complement of nearly 700, and not one of them was a foreigner. Thus in three ships with a total complement of about 2,000 men, only forty-one were foreigners, plus the seven Scandinavians transferred before the ship sailed.

At Trafalgar, Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, had seventy-one foreigners on board four days before Trafalgar. The Britons on board comprised 441 English, 64 Scots, 63 Irish, 18 Welsh, 3 Shetlanders, 2 Channel Islanders, and 1 Manxman.

The 71 foreigners comprised 22 Americans, 7 Dutch, 6 Swedes, 4 Italians, 4 Maltese, 3 Frenchmen (volunteers and probably royalists), 3 Norwegians, 3 Germans, 2 Swiss, 2 Portuguese, 2 Danes, 2 Indians, 1 Russian, 1 from ‘Africa’ and 9 from the West Indian islands.

The pressing of Americans by the Royal Navy caused disagreements between the two countries and was one of the major factors leading to the war of 1812. Like most disagreements there were two sides to the question. The American view was quite straightforward she was now an independent nation and her people owed neither debt nor allegiance to Britain. The Royal Navy had no claim on American seamen, and to safeguard them the American Government, through its notaries, or commissioners of oaths (and later Customs officers), issued them with a Protection.

This was an impressive document headed with the Republic’s arms and ‘United States of America’ printed right across the top. The wording varied slightly, depending on the notary’s name and the state, and later it was adapted for use by Customs officers. A typical one, issued on 11 December 1795 to Daniel Robertson, said that ‘I,John Keefe, a public notary in and for the state of New York ... do hereby certify that Daniel Robertson, mariner.. . personally appeared before me, and being duly sworn according to the law, deposed that he is a citizen of the United States of America and a native of the State of Delaware, five feet ten and a half inches high and aged about twenty-four years, and I do further certify that the said Daniel Robertson being a citizen of the United States of America and liable to be called in the service of his country is to be respected accordingly at all times
by sea and land.’ The document was then signed and sealed by Keefe and, because he was illiterate, Daniel Robertson added his mark.

As far as the United States was concerned, Daniel Robertson now had a document affording him the freedom of the seas; if the Royal Navy sent a press gang on board the ship in which he was serving, even though she might be British, Robertson need only show his Protection to be immune from the press.

Seen from an American point of view, this seemed reasonable: here was one of the notaries ‘in and for the state of New York’ certifying in effect that Daniel Robertson was a native of the state of Delaware, 5 feet 101 inches high an4 ‘about twenty-four’. After 1796 a Customs officer could have issued a similar document.

The American Minister Plenipotentiary in London was frequently called upon to leave his residence in Cumberland Place to call on the Secretary of State to make a protest, while the consuls - in London (at Finsbury Square), Bristol, Falmouth and Liverpool, with a vice-consul at Poole - were frequently forwarding requests for named seamen to be released.

The British Government took an entirely different view, which was based on various factors - emotional and legalistic. The first concerned nationality. The British Government then held that a man born a British subject remained British: he could not renounce his nationality (and thus his pbligations) simply by going to another country and living there.

It was prepared to accept that when a British colony revolted and achieved its independence its inhabitants took on a new nationality, but in 1793, at the beginning of the war, there was not an American subject over the age of twenty-three (apart from immigrants) who had not been born a British subject. And, almost as important, how did a man prove anything?

The British Government could, and the Royal Navy certainly would, point to Daniel Robertson and his Protection as being a good example of the uselessness of American Protections. A British Protection, like the discharge given to a foreign seaman, bore ‘a description of this man’s person’, and it was detailed. Robertson’s US Protection gave only two identifying details, his height and his apparent age, a vague enough fact. They argued that it gave no details of the colour of his hair, type of complexion, build, and so on. A British Protection, in other words, gave a complete physical identification of its owner, a description which would fit perhaps one man in a hundred, so that it could not easily be sold to someone else, or stolen and used by another man. In contrast, an American Protection could be used by anyone of approximately that height and ‘apparent’ age.

That was far from being the main British objection to a Protection. There was no way of proving that a man was an American subject. With the country only officially in existence for twenty-three years, there was no such thing as a real American accent; nor could a genuine American citizen produce a birth certificate because it did not exist. The only thing an American citizen could do was what the Protection required him to do - go before a notary and depose that his name was so and so and he was born in such a state. The notary could run the rule over him and insert the height and he had to accept the man’s word for his age. But no documents were produced; Daniel Robertson did not have to produce a certificate from the minister of his parish, nor a letter from a local leading citizen.

In other words, a Daniel Robertson - or any other name the man chose to use - of Stepney, London, could arrive in New York on board a British merchant ship, and go before Mr Keefe or one of his fellow notaries and swear that he was an American citizen born in, say, Delaware, and Mr Keefe had to accept the deposition and grant a Protection. Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that Mr Keefe suffered from an excess of Anglophilia; he would be well disposed towards anyone applying for a Protection. In any case he was not certifying that Daniel Robertson was American-born; he was certifying that Robertson had deposed that he was.

The fact that a Daniel Robertson could so easily get a US Protection was, the British Government argued, far from being the worst part of the system, even though the Protection merely certified that Robertson deposed that he was an American. There was nothing to prevent Daniel Robertson calling at all the other notaries in New York and collecting a Protection from each of them - there was no central register recording who had received Protections; the only record was that kept by each notary, who was required to note any depositions taken or certificates issued to anyone about any subject. A few days in New York could yield Daniel Robertson a score of Protections, and if the British ship he was serving in was calling at other American ports along the eastern seaboard he could call at notaries in each of them and acquire even more Protections.

If Daniel Robertson was in fact a Cockney from Stepney instead of a Jonathan from Delaware (‘Jonathan’ by now being the English nickname for an American person or ship), he had not only a legal but fraudulent Protection of himself, but he had a pocketful of American Protections to sell to any other Britons of his height and age who had the wish to leave the King’s service - and the necessary a £5 or more, which by the third year of the war was the minimum price for a black-market US Protection.

The British Government cared not at all that a fraudulent Daniel Robertson made a considerable profit from his visits to American notaries; it was much more concerned that, if Robertson had a couple of dozen spare Protections, the Royal Navy was about to lose a couple of dozen men.
There was, incidentally, no fear that the US consuls in London, Bristol and Falmouth, and the vice-consul at Poole, would become suspicious when one Daniel Robertson after another sought their assistance in getting their discharge from the Royal Navy: the original man would not of course give the same name to each notary. What he had to sell was a handful of Protections referring to a man of the same height and roughly the same age as himself - that would be the only similarity, and the result would be that within a few months the Royal Navy would lose a-number of men of similar age and height. Ironically, each man would be issued with a certificate signed by his captain, saying that he was a discharged foreigner - and giving on the back a detailed physical description of the man.

As far as the British Government was concerned, then, there was a defect in the method of issuing American Protections, which meant in effect that a Royal Navy lieutenant in charge of a boarding party used his own discretion. A seaman claiming to come from New York, for instance, might have to answer some searching questions about the port if the lieutenant had ever been there, and if his answers were unsatisfactory his Protection would be assumed to have been obtained fraudulently.

The ease by which any man could fraudulently obtain a genuine American document which backed up a fraudulent claim to American nationality, plus the British view that a man born in Britain remained British - he could not in effect sign a separate peace with the enemy by claiming another nationality - were the two main legal objections.

The third objection was emotional, whether seen from the American or the British point of view. The War of Independence had ended only sixteen years earlier and was therefore fresh in everyone’s mind. The war had lasted eight years and cost the new republic £15 million, while the cost to Britain had been a £115 million increase in the national debt and the loss of half a continent.

The material factors were of less consequence than the fact that the revolting colonists had accepted the help of France; the French had helped fight the British on land and at sea. Now Britain was fighting a republican France. The royalist France of Louis XVI which had helped the former British colonists get their freedom and establish themselves as independent Americans no longer existed; Louis had been executed, the mob had stormed the Bastille. America was very slow to understand that the new France was concerned with enslaving countries - it had begun at once with Holland - not freeing them; within half a dozen years the French occupied most of Europe, setting up an iron tree of liberty in every town as the army and tax collectors began to reduce the inhabitants to submission.

By 1799, less than a third of the way through the war, Britain stood alone against France and Spain. France had, by comparison, limitless manpower, having been the first nation to introduce universal conscription. The only way that Britain could fight back was at sea - and for that she needed seamen. She did not claim that she could seize foreigners and force them to serve in her ships, but she did insist that her own people could not escape their obligations by fraudulently obtaining Protections and then claiming to be foreigners.

The United States, being a new and thriving nation (her exports to Britain increased from £8,800,000 in 1793 to £14,500,000 by 1801), needed both new citizens and prime seamen. Few difficulties were put in the way of British seamen when they went before an American notary, or bought a Protection. Britain was determined to fight to prevent the French Empire spreading from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean; the Americans were determined to fight off what they considered to be renewed British interference in American affairs. Its leaders were not concerned that France had occupied the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the Rhineland, most of the states in Italy, and Poland.

Although it did not accept the claim of the United States for immunity for every man claiming to be American, Britain was very careful to avoid provocative acts. Her ambassador, Mr Robert Liston, was more than anxious to ensure that relationships were good.

Writing from Philadelphia to Lord Grenville, the Secretary of State, in August 1796 on ‘the quality of an American citizen’, he noted that ‘It seems natural that the British Government should wish to confine the term to natives of America and those who were settled in the territory of the United States at the period of the establishment of their independence, while the Congress on the other hand appear desirous of extending their protection to persons who may have been naturalised by the laws of any of the individual states’ or by earlier Acts of Congress.

By one of these, passed in 1790, aliens were entitled to claim citizenship after a residence of two years, while by another Act in 1795 they could claim it after five years residence ‘within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States’. This included service in American ships.

Liston assured Lord Grenville that ‘the present administrators, though not satisfied at the propriety of these acts, have thought themselves bound to take measures for carrying them into execution, as appears by the enclosed circular letter from the department of the Treasury to the Collectors of Customs’. This was a result of an Act just passed by Congress ‘for the relief and Protection of American seamen’.

Liston told Grenville that he had discussed it with the American Secretary of State: ‘On my mentioning... the little probablity there was that the British Government would admit the principles laid down in the Act.., he acknowledged the difficulties that stood in the way of an amicable agreement between us.’ This Act allowed seamen to get Protections from a Customs officer. The new type of Protection, signed only by a Customs agent, gave no more details and did not require any oath to be taken.

On the same day that he wrote about the new Act, Liston was complaining to Lord Grenville about the behaviour of a British naval officer towards the master of an American ship: It is with great concern I observe that the complaint of acts of injustice and insult committed by our officers against American citizens continue and increase, and that the pains taken by certain factions in this country to propagate and exaggerate the account of every unfriendly transaction have but too much effect in irritating the minds of the people against the British nation and government.

A deep impression has in particular been made upon persons of all ranks by the enclosed statement of an outrage offered to Mr William Jesup, master of the American ship Mercury which has been
published in every newspaper in the United States.

The law exempted boys under the age of eighteen and men over fifty-five from the press gang, but the Admiralty was not bothered by that. ‘It is incumbent on those who claim to be exempted to prove the facts,’ ruled its law officers, and in an age before universal birth certificates the age limits were merely words. A boy or man was as old as he appeared in the eyes of the regulating captain (the title of the captain in command of a particular depot), and appearances depended on demand. Mr Alexander Stephens, a clerk in the Navy’s Transport Office, complained in May 1813 that his thirteen-year old son George had been taken up by the press gang.

Apprentices had to step warily. Those serving at sea could not in theory be pressed during the first three years after signing their indentures (which were usually for seven years), and if they were their
masters could - if they wished, and few could be bothered – sue the Admiralty for damages or claim them under a writ of Habeas Corpus. There was, however, one loophole in the three-year rule - it only applied if the apprentice had not served at sea before signing the indentures. This usually meant that the lieutenant in charge of a press gang seized any boy that looked more than eighteen years
old, claiming he had previously ‘used the sea’ and anyway was over the age limit. The apprentice on land was protected, if that was the right word, by the age limit, not by his indentures as such.

Merchant seamen were exempt for the first two years they spent at sea. This was laid down by the law of 1740 which, in theory, settled the whole impressment question. The aim of the law was to avoid merchant ships, and thus the nation’s trade, being crippled by raids from press gangs. Again, the Admiralty could usually ignore it because a man could rarely if ever prove that he had been at sea less than two years. Even if he could show from the ship’s books that he had been on board only a year, he could not prove that he had never previously served in another ship.

The Admiralty was forced to exempt certain officers and warrant officers, men who had spent years learning their jobs and who were vital to a ship. Masters, mates, bosuns and carpenters were exempt - providing they had an affidavit sworn before a justice of the peace and describing their qualifications. But no acting mate, bosun or carpenter was protected, as William Richardson had discovered.

Yet masters and mates had to be wary: if one of their ship’s company proved to be a deserter from the Royal Navy it was useless to claim (probably correctly) that they did not know. ‘Harbouring a deserter from the fleet’ made their protections and affidavits useless: the penalty was impressment.

No mate or apprentice liked being lent to another ship that was short-handed. Even though the ship might belong to the same owner, if the press gang caught him he could be pressed: his Protection was valid only if he was serving on board the ship in which he had signed on.

However, no man was really protected, even though he might have the required affidavit - also called a Protection - in his pocket ready to show the press gang, unless he stayed at sea. The moment he set foot on land (unless he could prove he was on ‘ship’s business’) he could be pressed, and usually was. The exception was that a mate remaining with a ship could register his name at the impress office (usually called 'the Rendezvous'), but he had to get there in the first place without the gang catching him.

A merchant ship going into port to unload even a part of her cargo therefore exposed her master, mates, bosun, carpenter and seamen to danger, and it was a brave or careless man that stepped on shore unless he could prove he was on ‘ship’s duty’. Being given a few hours leave was not enough -William Tassell, mate of the Elizabeth in the port of Lynn, in Norfolk, was given leave by his captain to stay on shore until 8 p.m. but when the press gang visited the local inn at 10 p.m. they found Tassell still drinking and pressed him. Tassell argued in vain that his captain did not object to him being two hours late; the Admiralty backed the regulating captain and kept Tassell in the Royal Navy. Tassell was probably unlucky in choosing Lynn, which, although small, boasted a captain as its regulating officer, at 20s a day, whereas most other ports of the same size had lieutenants at 5s a
day, with 2s 9d a day subsistence.

Robert Hay had joined the Royal Navy in 1803 as a boy of thirteen, and was twenty-one years old and serving in the Amethyst frigate when she was wrecked in a storm in Plymouth Harbour. About thirty men were drowned as her boats smashed up in the heavy seas, but Hay managed to escape on a floating hatch cover, and when he found himself safe on land on a pitch dark night he decided to desert. He found a ‘safe’ lodging-house in Plymouth but, with an old shipmate, a fellow Scot, decided it was too dangerous to visit his home in Scotland. The shipmate ‘offered to purchase me woman’s clothes and take me for his wife, or gentleman’s clothes and take me as his master, or to travel with me by night and conceal ourselves by day’. Hay decided against it and signed on in a merchant ship, the Edward, bound for Jamaica.

He gives a good description of the plight of any merchant ship approaching a British port at the end of a voyage, knowing the press gang would be waiting to welcome them. As the ship approached Jamaica they began making stow holes, but the nature of the cargo prevented them making more than two. ‘What with carpenter’s warrants, apprentices’ indentures and so forth, all on board were protected from the press but four,’ wrote Hay, and he was one of the four. They drew lots for the two stow holes and Hay was one of the losers, which meant that he and the second man had to be on deck when the gang arrived.

My exposed partner dressed himself in greasy clothes, blackened his face with grease and soot, with intention of passing for ship’s cook. I, on the other hand, with the assistance of some landsman’s clothes, dressed myself like a footman, assumed an air of flippancy, and intended to pass for ship’s steward. The cook is usually the most useless man on board, and the steward is in general no seaman. By assuming these characters we imagined the press officers would not think us worth removal.

In fact the ship put into Old Harbour, passing Port Royal, ‘that hot bed of the press’, at night, so neither disguise nor stow holes were tested. Within a short time Hay, who had been doing some woodwork, was made carpenter when the original man quit the ship, accepting £7 a month.

The Edward was the slowest ship in the convoy of more than seventy returning to England, and by the time she was sailing up the Bristol Channel Hay reflected that ‘unless the press is very hot, a carpenter’s warrant is generally considered a sufficient protection from it, but I had no warrant to show. The captain . . . did not wish to be at the expense of having one drawn up at Jamaica.’

As soon as the pilot came on board to take the Edward up the Severn he told how a press boat the previous day had been damaged going alongside a merchant ship, which had sent her carpenter on board to make repairs. No sooner had the carpenter finished than he was pressed, the lieutenant saying he was just the sort of handy fellow the Navy needed.

Hay ‘resolved to put more faith in my stow hole’ than in either the verbal agreement with the Edward’s captain making him carpenter or the press gang’s mercy. As the gang came on board at night, Hay fled below ‘and in a twinkling found myself beneath two tiers of sugar hogsheads, trembling like an aspen leaf. Hay’s fear was, of course, as much his fate if recognised as a deserter from the Amethyst as serving in the Royal Navy.

He was lucky to have chosen a stow hole so far down - the gang searched the hold, and ‘thrust their cutlasses down to the hilt among the interstices of the sugar hogsheads. Happily I was more than a cutlass length down.’ The gang in fact took the only two unprotected men they could find on board, although Hay had a very difficult time getting on shore without being detected.

After various adventures and within a day or two of his twenty- second birthday, Hay ‘purchased a long coat, breeches-and other corresponding vestments, and assuming as much as possible the looks and gait of a landsman, set out on foot for Bath, thence to take coach for London’.

The purchase of breeches points out one sartorial difference between a seaman and a landsman: trousers were garments worn by seamen; nearly everyone else wore breeches. Trousers (more usually spelt ‘trowsers’) had wide bottoms which could be rolled up to avoid them getting wet when decks were scrubbed or seas were breaking on board. Breeches were worn only by officers.

Hay was successful in reaching London and, having ‘gained a sight of the vessels’ masts, had in imagination procured a passage, allotted the time for reaching Leith, and was considering within my own mind in what manner I should conduct my introductory visit to my friends.

‘In the midst of this agreeable reverie I was when crossing Tower Hill accosted by a person in seaman’s dress who tapped me on the shoulder, inquiring in a familiar and technical strain, “What ship?”

‘I assumed an air of gravity and surprise and told him I presumed he was under some mistake as I was not connected with shipping. The fellow, however, was too well acquainted with his business to be thus easily put off. He gave a whistle and in a moment I was in the hands of six or eight ruffians who I immediately dreaded and soon found to be a press gang.'

Hay was taken before a lieutenant, still protesting he had nothing to do with the sea, but the palms of his hands showed he was used to hard work and were ‘perhaps a little discoloured with tar’. He was soon being persuaded to join the Navy, being told by an officer:

‘Take my advice, my lad.. . and enter the service cheerfully, you will then have a bounty and be in a fair way for promotion.’ Hay refused to volunteer and was sent below ‘with these words thundered in my ear, “A pressed man to go below.”

The Navy’s habit of offering every pressed man the chance of ‘volunteering’ was simply a way of giving them a chance of receiving the bounty, but it means that muster books are useless in subsequently determining how many of a ship’s company were pressed. Only stubborn men like Hay were marked down as ‘press’d’ in the ‘Whether Vol. or press’d’ column, and it was an expensive gesture, costing him the £5 bounty.

The story of Robert Hay has a happy ending: sent to the Ceres atthe Nore, he and a shipmate made a daring escape, swimming to the shore one night using bladders. By 30 October 1811 he arrived back at his home in Paisley, Dunbartonshire, ‘after an absence of eight years and three months’.

One of the most important workers in the country was the harvester, a man who went from farm to farm, providing the extra labour needed at harvest time, whether it was getting up the potatoes, cutting and stooking the grain, haymaking or fruit-picking. The harvester always carried a certificate with him, his ‘Protection’, signed by the minister and churchwardens of his home village and stating that he was indeed a harvester. As such the press gang could not touch him.

Although there were few categories as lucky as harvesters who had almost automatic Protections, a few men ‘using the sea’ were given Protections - men working ferries in difficult places, for instance, boatmen in anchorages like Spithead who were needed to handle the small cutters taking officers out to ships, and pilots recognised by Trinity House. ‘Gentlemen’ were generally ignored by the press gangs, although the only qualification was that of dress. A ‘gentleman’ dressed in old clothes and wandering far from home was likely to be taken up.

The sea, as far as the Admiralty was concerned, covered most of the country in one way or another. A man operating a ferry across a river a hundred miles inland, the hand on a wherry carrying a cargo of hay along one of the inland waterways in Norfolk, a man fishing from a boat in sight of Windsor Castle, a man hunting mussels, whelks and oysters as the tide went down - all were liable to be pressed, although certain groups, such as the nearly 600 men working the trows on the Severn and Wye, had (thanks to the Association of Severn Traders) managed to get protections.

Fishermen working at sea had partial protection until 1801- up to then the master, one apprentice, one seaman and one landsman were exempted in every sea-going fishing vessel. After 1801, in an attempt to save the fishing industry, anyone whose full-time occupation was fishing was protected - and that included men working at curing and selling the fish as well.

There were several types of Protections, ranging from those issued by the Admiralty to the ones given by Trinity House to it’s pilots, but there were two universal rules concerning them. First each had to describe its owner accurately and in detail, and, second, it had to be carried all the time and ‘produced upon demand’.

An Admiralty Protection was headed, ‘By the Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admiral of Great Britain ... and of all of His Majesty’s Plantations’ and said:

You are hereby required and directed not to impress into His Majesty’s service providing his name, age and description be inserted in the margin hereof, and that he does not belong to any of His Majesty’s ships. And in case the Protection shall be found about any other person producing the same on his own account, then the officer who finds it is hereby strictly charged and required to impress the said person and immediately to send the Protection to us. And we do hereby direct that this Protection for securing the forementioned person, and him only, from the press, shall continue in force for three months.

The Protection, signed and dated, was addressed ‘To all Commanders and officers of His Majesty’s ships, and all others whom it doth or may concern.

The lieutenants or midshipmen in charge of press gangs were sharp-eyed and ruthless in the interpretation of the two rules, that a Protection must always be carried and must describe its owner. The beard or moustache a man grew when his Protection described him as clean-shaven was more than enough to turn him into a sailor, and the man who accidentally left his Protection at home was liable to spend many years in the Royal Navy before he opened his front door again. A brown-haired man whose hair turned white, a fair-haired man who started going bald, a bearded man who wanted to shave - all had to be careful of their Protections, except that the majority of them knew nothing about such things; often the first they knew of the danger of the discrepancy between the description and the fact was the lieutenant of a gang signalling to his men.

Very occasionally - rarely more than once a year - there was a sudden crisis requiring ships to be manned in a great hurry, and the Admiralty gave the order to ‘press from all Protections’. The order usually concerned a particular area - Portsmouth and Plymouth, for instance, or the Medway towns and the Thames - and it meant just what it said: the press gangs went out and seized the necessary number of men, whether or not they had Protections. Once the particular fleet or squadron concerned had enough men, Protections were honoured once again.

The idea that a press gang was simply a group of seamen under a lieutenant or midshipman sent on shore to find a dozen or so men to fit out a ship’s company is not incorrect but gives no idea of the Impress Service.

The Impress Service was an organisation covering every port in Great Britain in one way or another. Each major port had a captain in charge (paid £1 a day) while each smaller port had a lieutenant, who was paid 5s a day, with 2s 9d ‘subsistence’. In 1799, six years after the war began, twenty-nine captains were at work, ranging from the American-born Jahleel Brenton in Edinburgh to Benjamin Hulke at Dover, and from Sylverius Moriarty at Cork to Thomas Hawker in Bristol. Under them were sixty lieutenants. Some were based at the same place as their captains; others spread the net more widely. ‘London and the River Thames’ had two captains and seven lieutenants. Yarmouth (Norfolk), Poole, Dover, Appledore (Devon) and Liverpool were among the places that needed a captain and two lieutenants; Bristol, Faimouth, Lynn, Southampton and Swansea each had a captain and a lieutenant. But Deal, Exmouth, Faversham, Gosport, Harwich and Littlehampton were among several ports that had only a lieutenant.

In each of these places - nearly fifty ports, and the countryside round them - the press gangs were at work. Their victims rarely had the tiny satisfaction of having been seized by brave tars who had fought for their country in a sturdy ship of the line and were led by an officer resting from one desperate cruise before the Admiralty sent him off on another.

The officers, with very few exceptions (Jahleel Brenton was one), were men for whom there was no other employment. Captains otherwise on half pay (Sylverius Moriarty in Cork was the last of the ‘first fifty on the List’ receiving 10s a day) were glad to be employed in the Impress Service; half-pay lieutenants who had long since given up hope of being made post were only too glad to join and live comfortably at the Admiralty’s expense. Setting up the Impress Service in a port or town was a job of no great difficulty. The senior officer, whether captain or lieutenant, was called the Regulating (or Examining) Officer, and the house chosen as the headquarters was known as the Rendezvous. If the regulating officer was a lieutenant he might have one midshipman under him and three or four gangs of men.

Having rented the Rendezvous, the regulating officer then hired some tough men as ‘gangers’ 97 the men who would form the press gang. In exceptional cases they were seamen drafted from a ship; usually they were the bullies of the town, hired on the strict understanding that they would not be pressed; local toughs who were quick enough to spot the safest way of getting immunity.

The regulating officer then sent out the gangs. Some were led by lieutenants, others by midshipmen. Where no officer was available, the most intelligent man in a gang was put in charge. A gang did not just remain in the town: its presence very quickly became known and wise men vanished, to stay with relatives or friends in some distant place, or those that had to stay made sure they did not walk the streets without knowing that ‘the gangers’ were elsewhere.

The gangs roamed the surrounding villages and towns and were paid for travelling. An officer could claim 3d a mile and each ganger 1d a mile ‘road money’. The gangs covered considerable distances ‘the lieutenant at Ilfracombe claimed for 1,776 miles in 1795 (a daily average of nearly thirty miles) and the captain at Swansea 1,561 miles, although with every mile representing 3d or 1d the word ‘mile’ might have been an intention rather than a measurement.

The midshipmen in charge of gangs were far from being the curly-haired, rosy-cheeked boys so favoured in Victorian prints; most were mature men, gangers with some education. Once the gangers had seized a man - a group if they were far from their base - they took him off to the Rendezvous, a building whose rooms had sound locks. There the man was held until the regulating officer could inspect him and (unless he was obviously a cripple or halfwitted) certify him as fit for service. If the man claimed he was ruptured or suffering some other physical defect, the regulating officer would send for the local surgeon, who was usually only too anxious to examine the gangers’ haul for the shilling a man offered by the Admiralty.

Sometimes the gang did not have to look for a victim: a merchant seaman or anyone ‘using the sea’ and liable to be pressed knew he was at the mercy of anyone who took it into his (or her) head to inform the press where he was. Such a tip was usually worth a pound reward. In a village or town ‘forming the press’ was a way of paying off old scores; a rival for a young woman’s hand, a jealous mistress, an angry wife - all could rely on the press solving their problems. A labourer trimming a hedge, a drover taking a flock of sheep to market, a tinker wheeling his barrow to the next village and crying out for knives to grind, a huckster with a leather satchel over his shoulder containing his wares - many of them played the game of hunt-the-sailor, which involved keeping a weather eye open for a man wearing trousers or looking uncomfortable in breeches and coat, a man who walked with a roll and seemed to have blisters on his heels through being unused to wearing shoes.

Robert Hay, as a deserter hiding in a house at North Corner in Plymouth, not one hundred yards from the beach, watched through the window. ‘Watermen’s skiffs, merchantmen’s yawls, warships’ launches, pinnaces, cutters, gigs etc were every moment landing.

Porters were trudging along under their ponderous burdens, women of pleasure flirting about in all directions, watching for their prey.’ And he described how ‘the jolly tar himself was seen with his white demity trousers fringed at the bottom, his fine scarlet waistcoat bound with black ribbon, his dark blue broadcloth jacket studded with pearl buttons, his black silk neckcloth thrown carelessly about his sunburnt neck. An elegant hat of straw, indicative of his recent return from a foreign station, cocked on one side; a head of hair reaching to his waistband; a smart switch made from the backbone of a shark under one arm, his doxy under the other, a huge chew of tobacco in his cheek, and a good throat season of double stingo [very strong ale] recently deposited within his belt by way of fending off care.’

Hay then gave the other side of the coin: the seaman he described belonged to a ship of war; the man serving in a merchant ship never dared to step out like that: ‘Few days elapsed without my being doomed to witness the kidnapping operations of the press gang. This gang greatly damps all the enjoyment which sailors experience
ashore.’

Seamen from merchant ships scarcely dared show their faces before it was dark. ‘After the shades of night had fallen, and after getting their courage excited by a glass or two of good Jamaica [rum], they would sometimes sally out to take a ramble, but generally as their spirits and courage rose their prudence and watchfulness forsook them. Many, very many, instead of finding themselves in the morning in the arms of Polly would find themselves in the press room of a receiving ship in the more rough and unceremonious hands of a corporal of Marines.

The gangers’ pay varied - when the Navy was particulary short of men, it could reach 10s a week or more, but a ganger’s official pay was all too often a small part of his income. The Impress Service gave impoverished and often unscrupulous captains, lieutenants and gangers immense power over most of their fellow men. Any of them could in effect point to a man in the street or drinking a mug of ale and send him to sea, where he would serve into the distant future. Such a man taken to the Rendezvous put little or no extra money into a ganger’s pocket. At one time he would share a shilling with his colleagues, and once it went as high as ten shillings. But the man about to be carried off might have a prosperous small business; he could offer the gangers a bribe - as Falstaff had found - to walk away without seeing him. £10- which would mean £2 for each ganger ‘was a small price to pay for freedom, and often it was paid.

A sturdy butcher seeing the gang and a lieutenant pausing outside his shop once a week would be wise to provide a parcel of meat for the regulating officer, and the grocer and baker might add to the provisions as a wise insurance to make sure they stayed in business.
Commander David Shuckforth had been one of the Navy’s most senior lieutenants (his name was seventeenth in the fifty lieutenants retired with the rank of commander and a pension of 6s a day) but until then he was a lieutenant of the Impress Service at Chester. When he heard of his promotion on retirement, which also ended his appointment with the Impress Service, he wrote a letter to his successor warning him of the regulating officer, Capt P’:

I have been with him six months here and if it had not been that he is leaving the place I would have wrote to the Board of Admiralty to have been removed from under his command....

Be very careful not to introduce him to any family that you have a regard for, for although he is near seventy years of age, he is the greatest debauchee you ever met with - a man of no religion, a man who is capable of any meanness, arbitrary and tyrannical in his disposition.

This city has been several times just on the point of writing against him to the Board of Admiralty. He has a wife and children grown up to man’s estate. The woman he brings over with him is Bird the builder’s daughter. To conclude, there is not a house in Chester that he can go into but his own and the Rendezvous. One can assume Bird the builder’s labourers were safe from the gangers.

The vigorous ‘Capt P’ left Chester and went to Waterford, where he was to be the new regulating officer. His reputation preceded him and as soon as the owner arrived the local fish wives set about wrecking his house. His lieutenants complained about him to the Admiralty, who ordered an inquiry. This lasted ten days, because of the number of charges against him, and most of them were proved, bringing a long and venal career to an end.

The Admiralty was well aware what could go on with Impress Officers and their gangs - indeed, as if their Lordships had read Falstaff, the officers’ warrant ordered them to take care ‘not to demand or receive any money, gratuity, reward or any other consideration whatsoever for the sparing, exchanging or discharging any person or persons impressed or to be impressed’. But neither the man paying out to avoid impressment, nor the ganger or regulating officer accepting a present, was likely to make a fuss.

There were exceptions, though: the owners of fishing cobles working out of King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, sent a petition to the Admiralty dated 8 March 1809, less than four years after Trafalgar, complaining that as the cobles came in with their catch the midshipman leading the local press gang ‘had the insolence to demand three of the best fish for the regulating captain, the lieutenant and him-self.

A press gang, whether belonging to the Impress Service or from a particular ship, was part of the life of the times and some men regarded it as others might a bad illness. William Spavens was returning to England in a merchant ship just before the previous war began:

On our return we did not come through the Downs and wished to shun Yarmouth Road to avoid the press; but the wind veering and blowing a strong gale, we were forced in, and soon after boarded by a boat belonging to the Augusta’s tender, and two of our crew were impressed; and when we reached Hull I shared the same fate, and was hauled on board the John and Joyce, tender to the Culloden.

During my confinement, a scheme was formed by the impressed men, to take the ship from the crew, and run her on shore to regain their liberty; but the plot being discovered, Lt Kirby sent notice of it to Capt Smelt, the regulating captain on shore, to send him a reinforcement, which he no sooner received than he doubled the guards, giving them positive orders to fire amongst us if we attempted to mutiny.

Spavens was soon a member of a press gang himself. He was serving in the Vengeance frigate, sent to Ireland ‘to procure men for the service’. The Vengeance had two cutters and a wherry to attend her. The wherry, with an officer and twenty men on board, sailed out along the coast from Dublin Bay towards the high land of Wicklow, ‘and when we perceived a ship coming in, we concealed ourselves, and let only the wherry men be seen, who were pilots for the bar and polebeg’.

The sailors on board the incoming ship were wide awake. One day, Spavens writes, the Dublin arrived from New York and ‘we steered under her lee, asking if they wanted a pilot. The captain said they did, and told us to come alongside; but the men having some suspicion of our design bid us keep off, or they would fire upon us.

The Vengeance fired guns to bring her to, and then sent a cutter with an officer and boarding party. The Dublin’s men would only allow the officer up the ladder, so the Vengeance arranged for two cutters, the yawl and wherry to try to board her as soon as it was dark.

This was done, but the Dublin’s men were, Spavens reported, at close quarters - they had barricaded themselves below, lashing down the hatches. ‘We scuttled [made holes in] their decks with axes and fired down amongst them, while they kept firing up at us where they saw the light appear. After having shot one of our men through the head, and another through both his thighs, they submitted and we got sixteen brave fellows.’

Liverpool was a tough neighbourhood and before the Impress Service was established there pressing ‘had been deemed impracticable’. However, some of the local citizens mentioned this to the Vengeance’s captain, who regarded it as a challenge. One night he sent in a cutter ‘with some officers and a suitable reinforcement of men’.

Spavens described how they ‘soon picked up sixteen men, but only one of them being a seaman, him we detained and the rest we set at liberty.

The next day, 25 July, was Liverpool’s fixed fair, so, ‘mustering a gang of eighty men, we went ashore; and after picking up several stragglers, we surprised the Lion’s crew in the Customs house just as they were about renewing their protections.

‘We secured seventeen of them, and guarding them along the streets, several hundreds of old men, women and boys flocked after us, well provided with stones and brickbats, and commenced a general attack; but not wishing to hurt them, we fired our pistols over their heads, in order to deter them from further outrage; but the women proved very daring, and followed us down to low water mark, being almost up to the knees in mud.

‘We also pressed sixteen men out of the Nancy and fourteen out of the Jenny; the latter (being determined to preserve their liberty if possible) had confined their captain and chief mate in order to fight their way through; and the cook had got a pot full of boiling tallow to scald us with as we got up alongside; but the wind being foul and not having a pilot, and the second mate not daring to take charge of her in the river, they submitted to their fate.’ The Ingram, arriving from Tortola, in the West Indies, lost twenty-six men to the gang, and several of them were flogged on board the Lion for firing into the press gang’s boats.

The men pressed by gangs sent out from ships were obviously taken straight out to these ships, but those caught by the Impress Service and locked up in the various Rendezvous were taken to the nearest receiving ship, which could be anything from an old frigate to a hulk, and there locked up in the press room.

Despite having the gang men of the Impress Service roaming the countryside, drinking in the alehouses and swinging their clubs along the quiet lanes (usually only the gangs from ships regularly carried cutlasses), the King’s ships were always short of men. The complement of each ship was laid down by the Admiralty and a captain would consider himself lucky if he had three-quarters of his complement. Captain Glascock, writing ten years after the end of the war and with considerable detachment, commented that in wartime ‘the very best disciplined ships, to the regret and dread of every officer who has a respect for his ship’s company. are fain to recruit their crews from the hulks and jails of the Kingdom. The influx of such a tide of corruption must overwhelm all discipline, were not the mounds of authority strongly reinforced by increased vigilance and severity.’

He quotes a letter from the captain of the Princess Royal with the Channel Fleet off Brest which said: ‘I am upwards of seventy men short of complement; and I was obliged to take sixty convicts to fill up the number I have.’

By contrast, when fifty convicts were sent on board the 74-gun Bellona, the captain assembled them on the quarterdeck and described the need for good behaviour and obedience in a ship of war. Referring to ‘the unhappy circumstances’ under which they had been brought on board, he assured them that he would begin by regarding them ‘as men without fault’ but that any of them who subsequently committed an offence in the Bellona would get double the punishment. This had such a good effect, according to a contemporary account, that only one of the fifty men received punishment during the next four years.

The receiving ships, in which the men taken by the Impress Service were kept until they were transferred to ships in commission and needing men, were floating prisons. Midshipman Jeffery Raigersfield was serving in the Vestal frigate when she went to the Nore, ‘and soon after myself, with a party of men, was sent on board to take the charge of a three-decker line of battleship that was lying here to receive pressed men; all her guns were out, and she had stumps stepped for masts. ‘There were above eleven hundred men on board, the sweepings of all London, tailors, barbers, watermen, livery servants, waiters &c, and such a motley group I never before beheld so compactly lodged.’

A seaman ‘compactly lodged’ saw it differently, and one of the most vivid descriptions by a pressed seaman describes how ‘a hot and pestilential effluvia rose and enveloped me. I looked through a heavy wooden grating across which was a strong iron bar with a huge padlock attached to it; and I saw that which threw me back almost fainting with horror.. . a crowded mass of disgusting and fearful heads, with eyes all glaring upwards from that horrible den; and heaps of filthy limbs, trunks and heads, bundled and scattered, scrambling, laughing, cursing, screaming and fighting at one moment.’

Robert Hay was a great deal luckier when he was sent on board the Resolue at Plymouth in August 1803. She was ‘a kind of examination ship appointed to receive and cleanse all the newly raised levies that arrived in this port. After being thoroughly washed in a number of cisterns which were fitted around the sides of this vessel we were examined while in a state of nudity before a committee of surgeons. Those who had any appearance of disease or uncleanness were kept on board for cure or purification. The rest. . . were sent on board the Salvador del Mundo, which at that time lay guard ship in the harbour.’

The main reasons why pressed men were closely guarded from the moment they were picked up by the gangers until they were taken on board the ship in which they would eventually serve was that they were not subject to the Articles of War until their names had been entered in a ship’s muster book and they had been rated ‘noted down as landsmen, ordinary seamen or able seamen. It was impracticable to muster them in receiving ships so, from the time they were taken to the Rendezvous until they were mustered in their ships, they came under civil law.

This article is from Life in Nelson’s Navy by Dudley Pope