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 compassing 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 anticipated, 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 substitutes for the real thing. It was patriotic, cheap, simple as kissing your hand. All you had to do was to take the fisherman, the longshoreman and other stalwarts who lived "one foot in sea and one on shore," 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 hoary 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 document 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 attitude of the British naval officer towards the American sailor. Whenever he could be laid hold of he was pressed, and no matter what documents he produced in evidence of his American birth and citizenship, those documents were almost invariably pronounced false and fraudulent. There were weighty reasons, however, for refusing to accept the claim of the alleged American sailor at its face value. No class 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 pass 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 passes." 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 passes 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 circumstances 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 documents themselves. Thus a gentleman of colour, Cato Martin by name, when taken out of the Dolly West-Indiaman at Bristol, had the assurance to produce a white man's pass 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 associated 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 pass dated in America the 29th of May and viséd 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 identity 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]