The great press of 1755 affords many instances of such panic flights. Abounding in "lurking holes" where a man might lie perdue in comparative safety, King's Lynn nevertheless emptied itself of seamen in a few hours' time, and when the gang hurried to Wells by water, intending to intercept the fugitives there, the "idle fishermen on shore" sounded a fresh alarm and again they stampeded, going off to the eastward in great numbers and burying themselves in the thickly wooded dells and hills of that bit of Devon in Norfolk which lies between Clay-next-the-Sea and Sheringham. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1486—Capt. Baird, 29 March and 21 April 1755.]
A similar exodus occurred at Ipswich. The day the warrants came down, as for many days previous, the ancient borough was full of seamen; but no sooner did it become known that the press was out than they vanished like the dew of the morning. For weeks the face of but one sailor was seen in the town, and he was only ferreted out, with the assistance of a dozen constables, after prolonged and none too legal search. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1486—Capt. Brand, 26 Feb. 1755.]
How effectually the sailor could hide when dread of the press had him in its grip is strikingly illustrated by the hot London press of 1740. On that occasion the docks, the riverside slums and dens, the river itself both above and below bridge, were scoured by gangs who left no stratagem untried for unearthing and taking the hidden sailor. When the rigour of the press was past not a seaman, it is said, was to be found at large in London; yet within four-and-twenty hours sixteen thousand emerged from their retreats. [Footnote: Griffiths, Impressment Fully Considered.]
The secret of such effectual concealment lay in the fact that the nature of his hiding-place mattered little to the sailor so long as it was secure. Accustomed to quarters of the most cramped description on shipboard, he required little room for his stowing. The roughest bed, the worst ventilated hole, the most insanitary surroundings and conditions were all one to him. He could thus hide himself away in places and receptacles from which the average landsman would have turned in fear or disgust. In quarry, clay-pit, cellar or well; in holt, hill or cave; in chimney, hayloft or secret cell behind some old-time oven; in shady alehouse or malodorous slum where a man's life was worth nothing unless he had the smell of tar upon him, and not much then; on isolated farmsteads and eyots, or in towns too remote or too hostile for the gangsman to penetrate—somewhere, somehow and of some sort the sailor found his lurking-place, and in it, by good providence, lay safe and snug throughout the hottest press.
Many of the seamen employed in the Newfoundland trade of Poole, gaining the shore at Chapman's Pool or Lulworth, whiled away their stolen leisure either in the clay-pits of the Isle of Purbeck, where they defied intrusion by posting armed sentries at every point of access to their stronghold, or—their favourite haunt—on Portland Island, which the number and ill-repute of the labourers employed in its stone quarries rendered well-nigh impregnable. To search for, let alone to take the seamen frequenting that natural fortress—who of course "squared" the hard-bitten quarrymen—was more than any gang durst undertake unless, as was seldom the case, it consisted of some "very superior force." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 581—Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 5 Aug. 1805.]
With the solitary exception of Falmouth town, the Cornish coast was
merely another Portland Neck enormously extended. From Rame Head to the
Lizard and Land's End, and in a minor sense from Land's End away to Bude
Haven in the far nor'-east, the entire littoral of this remote part of
the kingdom was forbidden ground whereon no gangsman's life was worth
a moment's purchase. The two hundred seins and twice two hundred
drift-boats belonging to that coast employed at least six thousand
fishermen, and of these the greater part, as soon as the fishing season
was at an end, either turned "tinners" and went into the mines, where
they were unassailable,
[Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 581—Admiral Berkeley, Report
on Rendezvous, 28 Sept. 1805.] or betook themselves to their strongholds
at Newquay, St. Ives, Newland, Mousehole, Coversack, Polpero, Cawsand
and other places where, in common with smugglers, deserters from the
king's ships at Hamoaze, and an endless succession of fugitive merchant
seamen, they were as safe from intrusion or capture as they would have
been on the coast of Labrador. It was impossible either to hunt them
down or to take them on a coast so "completely perforated." A thousand
"stout, able young fellows" could have been drawn from this source
without being missed; but the gangs fought shy of the task, and only
when they carried vessels in distress into Falmouth were the redoubtable
sons of the coves ever molested. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1.
579—Admiral M'Bride, 9 March 1795. Admiralty Records 1. 578—Petition
of the Inhabitants of the Village of Coversack, 31 Jan. 1778.]
On the Bristol Channel side Lundy Island offered unrivalled facilities for evasion, and many were the crews marooned there by far-sighted skippers who calculated on thus securing them against their return from Bristol, outward bound. The gangs as a rule gave this little Heligoland a wide berth, and when carried thither against their will they had a disconcerting habit of running away with the press-boat, and of thus marooning their commanding officer, that contributed not a little to the immunity the island enjoyed. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1439—Capt. Aylmer, 22 Dec. 1743.]
The sailor's objection to Lundy was as strong as the gangsman's. From his point of view it was no ideal place to hide in, and the effect upon him of enforced sojourn there was to make him sulky and mutinous. Rather the shore with all its dangers than an island that produced neither tobacco, rum, nor women! He therefore preferred sticking to his ship, even though he thereby ran the risk of impressment, until she arrived the length of the Holmes.
These islands are two in number, Steep Holme and Flat Holme, and so closely can vessels approach the latter, given favourable weather conditions, that a stone may be cast on shore from the deck. The business of landing and embarking was consequently easy, and though the islands themselves were as barren as Lundy of the three commodities the sailor loved, he was nevertheless content to terminate his voyage there for the following reasons. Under the lee of one or other of the islands there was generally to be found a boat-load of men who were willing, for a suitable return in coin of the realm, to work the ship into King Road, the anchorage of the port of Bristol. The sailor was thus left free to gain the shore in the neighbourhood of Uphill, Weston, or Clevedon Bay, whence it was an easy tramp, not to Bristol, of which he steered clear because of its gangs, but to Bath, or, did he prefer a place nearer at hand, to the little town of Pill, near Avon-mouth.
A favourite haunt of seafaring men, fishermen, pilots and pilots' assistants, with a liberal sprinkling of that class 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' assistants," 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' assistants 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' assistants, ousted by horses, fell an easy prey to the gangs. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 581—Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 14 April 1805.]