Rodney

by David Hannay

You are hereby required and directed to proceed on board the Frederick and William tender, taking with you forty men from His Majesty’s ship under my command, and immediately proceed to the eastward of the Isle of Wight, and cruise for the space of eight days between that island and Beachy Head, using your best endeavours to impress or otherwise procure all such seamen as you possibly can for His Majesty’s service. At the expiration of eight days you are to return to Spithead for further orders. Given under my hand February 14th.

G. B. R.

Lieutenant Bickorton was one of many officers in command of the tenders then swarming in the Channel, waiting all of them for the homeward-bound merchant ships and their crews, which were returning in ignorance of what was waiting for them. One can imagine the feelings of the merchant sailors when they were stopped in sight of shore, and carried off to serve King George for nobody knew how long, without as much as an hour given them to put a foot on dry land. A letter written by Rodney in June of this year to Sir Edward Hawke, now commanding at Portsmouth, will show what one crew thought of it all.

Sir—Lieutenant Robert Sax of His Majesty’s ship under my command, who was sent on board the Princess Augusta tender in order to procure seamen for His Majesty’s service, is returned this morning with fifteen men which he pressed out of the Britannia, a ship from Leghorn bound for London. He acquaints me he fell in with the said ship at 5 o’clock in the morning on June 1st off Portland, and ordered them to bring to. The master desired he would defer pressing the men till they got out of the Race of Portland—to which desire of the master’s Mr. Sax acquiesced; but observing after they got out of the Race of Portland the ship continued to crowd all the sail she possibly could set, Mr. Sax fired a shot athwart her, and ordered them to bring to again, upon which the master of the Britannia hailed the tender and acquainted the Lieutenant that his men refused to obey his commands, and desired the said Lieutenant would board him. Mr. Sax after acquainting the men several times the Channel was full of tenders, and that it was not possible for them to escape being pressed, and could not prevail upon them to submit, they answered with three cheers, and fired a shot at him, on which Mr. Sax boarded them with the tender; but [I] am sorry to acquaint you three men on board the said ship was killed in boarding, tho’ Mr. Sax assures me he gave positive orders to his men not to fire. The ship is now come into Spithead, and I shall take particular just care to send a sufficient number of good and able men to navigate her to London. I should be glad to receive your directions how I am to proceed in this affair, and what is to be done with the men that was killed, as I find they are still on board.

Rodney’s composition was hasty, or his clerk’s copying was careless, as we may see from the two sentences jumbled into one in the middle of his letter (“the men that was” is quite good grammar of the time), but the meaning is clear enough. Composition and meaning are alike luminous in Hawke’s answer.

By Sir Edward Hawke, Knight of the Bath, Vice-Admiral of the White Squadron, and Commander of His Majesty’s ships and vessels at Spithead and Portsmouth

You are hereby required and directed to cause the utmost despatch to be used by the surgeons to whom the accompanying order is directed in finishing their examination of the wounds of the three men killed the 1st inst. on board the Britannia merchant ship. Then you are without a moment’s loss of time to put on board her men sufficient in number and quality to navigate her in safety to her moorings in the river Thames, directing them as soon as they get without St. Helen’s to throw the dead bodies overboard. For which this shall be your order.

Given under my hand on board His Majesty’s ship St. George at Spithead, this June 2nd 1755.

Ed. Hawke.

This brief official letter, and the laconic order which is its answer, bring before one, all the more effectively because of their business-like calm, the most cruel phase of the press-gang. It was necessary, no doubt, that men should be found for the defence of the country, and at all times in all nations the State has compelled the service of its subjects. At this time the French had (as they still have) an inscription maritime, which spares no part of the maritime population; and nobody needs to be told in these days that the obligation to render military service is universal in nearly all the nations of the old world. But a conscription works on a definite system. The burden it imposes is known, foreseen, and adjusted with some approach to equality and justice. The press-gang was utterly erratic. It was, in fact, a survival of the prerogative by which Edward the Third could order the Lords Marchers to bring up just as many Welshmen as he wanted for his French wars. Time and the growth of the “freedom of the subject” had limited the incidence of the prerogative (if the expression is permissible) to the levies for the sea service, but in that restricted though still considerable field it worked as it had done in the fourteenth century. Men were seized wherever they could be found, with little or no regard to aught save the convenience of the service. As a matter of course, the easiest thing to do was to wait for the home-coming merchant ships, and take the men out of them close to port. This could be done without stopping the trade, and so raising a clamour among the merchants who possessed a vote. Moreover, it saved the press-gangs an immense amount of trouble in hunting for men in the back streets of towns and on the high roads. For the sailors seized in this fashion at the end of a long sea voyage it was a cruel fate, and one’s heart is sore for the three poor fellows who only came back to the sight of Portland Bill to die by the hands of their own countrymen.