The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore

by J. R. Hutchinson

For safety's sake the transfer was generally effected by night, when that course was possible; but the untimely appearance of a press-smack on the scene not infrequently necessitated the shifting of the crews in the broad light of day and the hottest of haste. On shore all had been in readiness perhaps for days. At the signal off dashed the deeply laden boats to the frantic ship, the scratch crew scrambled aboard, and the regular hands, thus released from duty, tumbled pell-mell into the empty boats and pulled for shore with a will mightily heartened by a running fire of round-shot from the smack and of musketry from her cutter, already out to intercept the fugitives. Then it was:—

"Cheerily, lads, cheerily! there's a ganger hard to wind'ard;
Cheerily, lads, cheerily! there's a ganger hard a-lee;
Cheerily, lads, cheerily! else 'tis farewell home and kindred,
And the bosun's mate a-raisin' hell in the King's Navee.
Cheerily, lads, cheerily ho! the warrant's out, the hanger's drawn!
Cheerily, lads, so cheerily! we'll leave 'em an R in pawn!"

[Footnote: When Jack deserted his ship under other conditions than those here described, an R was written against his name to denote that he had "run." So, when he shirked an obligation, monetary or moral, by running away from it, he was said to "leave an R in pawn.">[

The place of muster of the emergency men thus became in turn the landing-place of the fugitive crew. Its whereabouts depended as a matter of course upon the trade in which the ship sailed. The spot chosen for the relief of the Holland, Baltic and Greenland traders of the East Coast was generally some wild, inaccessible part abutting directly on the German Ocean or the North Sea. London skippers in those trades favoured the neighbourhood of Great Yarmouth, where the maze of inland waterways constituting the Broads enabled the shifty sailor to lead the gangs a merry game at hide and seek. King's Lynners affected Skegness and the Norfolk lip of the Wash. Of the men who sailed out of Hull not one in ten could be picked up, on their return, by the gangs haunting the Humber. They went ashore at Dimlington on the coast of Holderness, or at the Spurn. The homing sailors of Leith, as of the ports on the upper reaches of the Firth of Forth, enjoyed an immunity from the press scarcely less absolute than that of the Orkney Islanders, who for upwards of forty years contributed not a single man to the Navy. Having on either hand an easily accessible coast, inhabited by a people upon whose hospitality the gangs were chary of intruding, and abounding in lurking-places as secure as they were snug, the Mother Firth held on to her sailor sons with a pertinacity and success that excited the envy of the merchant seaman at large and drove impress officers to despair. The towns and villages to the north of the Firth were "full of men." On no part of the north coast, indeed, from St. Abb's Head clear round to Annan Water, was it an easy matter to circumvent the canny Scot who went a-sailoring. He had a trick of stopping short of his destination, when homeward bound, that proved as baffling to the gangs as it was in seeming contradiction to all the traditions of a race who pride themselves on "getting there." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 579—Admiral Pringle, Report on Rendezvous, 2 April 1795, and Captains' Letters, passim.]

In the case of outward-bound ships, the disposition of the two crews was of course reversed. The scratch crew carried the ship down to the stipulated point of exchange, where they vacated her in favour of the actual crew, who had been secretly conveyed to that point by land. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 580—Admiral Lord Nelson, Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Whichever way the trick was worked, it proved highly effective, for, except from the sea, no gang durst venture near such points of debarkation and departure without strong military support.

There still remained the emergency crew itself. The most decrepit, crippled or youthful were of course out of the question. But the foreigner and our shifty friend the man in lieu were fair game. Entering largely as they did into the make-up of almost every scratch crew, they were pressed without compunction whenever and wherever caught abusing their privileges by playing the emergency man. To keep such persons always and in all circumstances was a point of honour with the Navy Board. It had no other means of squaring accounts with the scratch crew.

The emergency man who plied "on his own" was more difficult to deal with. Keepers of the Eddystone made a "great deal of money" by putting inward-bound ships' crews ashore; but when one of their number, Matthew Dolon by name, was pressed as a punishment for that offence, the Admiralty, having the fear of outraged Trade before its eyes, ordered his immediate discharge. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2732—Capt. Yeo, 25 July 1727.]

The pilot, the fisherman and the longshoreman were notorious offenders in this respect. Whenever they saw a vessel bound in, they were in the habit of putting off to her and of first inciting the crew to escape and then hiring themselves at exorbitant rates to work the vessel into port. On such mischievous interlopers the gangsman had no mercy. He took them whenever he could, confident that when their respective cases were stated to the Board, that body would "tumble" to the occasion.

Any attempt at estimating the number of seafaring men who evaded the gangs and the call of the State by means of the devices and subterfuges here roughly sketched into the broad canvas of our picture would prove a task as profitless as it is impossible of accomplishment. One thing only is certain. The number fluctuated greatly from time to time with the activity or inactivity of the gangs. When the press was lax, there arose no question as there existed no need of escape; when it was hot, it was evaded systematically and with a degree of success extremely gratifying to the sailor. Taking the sea-borne coal trade of the port of London alone, it is estimated that in the single month of September 1770, at a time when an exceptionally severe press from protections was in full swing, not less than three thousand collier seamen got ashore between Yarmouth Roads and Foulness Point. As the coal trade was only one of many, and as the stretch of coast concerned comprised but a few miles out of hundreds equally well if not better adapted to the sailor's furtive habits, the total of escapes must have been little short of enormous. It could not have been otherwise. In this grand battue of the sea it was clearly impossible to round-up and capture every skittish son of Neptune.

On shore, as at sea, the sailor's course, when the gang was on his track, followed the lines of least resistance, only here he became a skulk as well as a fugitive. It was not that he was a less stout-hearted fellow than when at sea. He was merely the victim of a type of land neurosis. Drink and his recent escape from the gang got on his nerves and rendered him singularly liable to panic. The faintest hint of a press was enough to make his hair rise. At the first alarm he scuttled into hiding in the towns, or broke cover like a frightened hare.