List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

“If that beast doesn’t belay his jaw, stuff his mouth full of shingle and gag him.”

I guessed that this gang were satisfied with picking up three men that night, for they looked neither to right nor left for more, and headed on a straight course for their boat. After the ruffian astern of me had been thumped into silence scarce a word was uttered. The sailors seemed weary, as though they had had a long bout of it, and the officer, perhaps, was too sensible of being under the influence of drink to venture to define his state by more words than were absolutely needful. I had heard much of the brutality of the press-gang, of taunts and kicks, of maddening ironic promises of prize money and glory to the miserable wretches torn from their homes or from their ships, of pitiless usage, raw heads, and broken bones. All this I had heard of, but I witnessed nothing of the sort among the men into whose hands I had fallen. In silence we marched along, and the tramp of our feet was returned in a hollow echo from the houses we passed, and the noise, of our tread ran through the length of the feebly lighted street, which the presence of the King’s seamen had desolated as utterly as though the plague had been brought to Deal out of the East, and as though the buildings held nothing but the dead.

By the time we had arrived at that part of the beach where lay the boat—a large cutter, watched by a couple of seamen armed with cutlasses and pistols—my mind had in some measure calmed down. The degradation of being collared and man-handled was indeed maddening and heart-subduing; but then I was beginning to think this—that first of all it was very probable I must have lost my ship, press-gang or no press-gang, seeing that I could not get a boat to put me aboard her; next, that my being kidnaped, as I call it, would find me such a reason for my absence as Captain Spalding and the owners of the vessel must certainly allow to be unanswerable. Then, again, I was perfectly sure of being released and sent ashore when I had represented my condition to the captain or lieutenant of the frigate; and I might also calculate upon old Tom Martin communicating with my uncle, who would, early in the day, come off to the frigate and confirm my story.

These reflections, I say, calmed me considerably, though my mind continued very much troubled and all awork within me, for I could not forget the horrible picture of the gibbet and the prodigious flash of fire which had delivered the dead hanging son to his wretched mother; and I was likewise much haunted and worried by the thought of the poor woman sitting upon the sand under the gibbet, fondling the loathsome body and whispering to it, and often looking over the billowy waste of glimmering sand, that would now be whitened by the moon, in the direction I had taken, expecting, perhaps, that I should return or send some human soul to help her bury the corpse, that it might not be hooked up again.

The Downs were now full of life. There was a pleasant fresh breeze blowing from the southward, and the water came whitening and feathering in strong ripples to the shingle. The moon was riding over the sea south of the southernmost limit of the Goodwin Sands. She was making some light in the air, though but a piece of moon, and a short length of her silver greenish reflection trembled under her. Almost all the vessels had got under weigh and were standing in groups of dark smudges east or west. It was impossible to tell which might be the Royal Brunswicker, but I could see no craft answering to her size in that part near the frigate where she had brought up.

When we were come to the cutter we three pressed men were ordered to get into her. I quietly entered, and so did one of of the other two, but the third—the man who had cursed and raged as he had walked along—flung himself down upon the shingle.

“What you can’t carry you may drag,” he exclaimed, and he swore horribly at the men.

“In with the scoundrel!” said the lieutenant.

And now I saw what sort of tenderness was to be expected from press-gangs when their kindness was not deserved, for three stout seamen, catching hold of the blaspheming fellow, one by the throat, as it seemed, another by the arm, and a third by the breech flung him over the gunwale as if he were some dead carcass of a sheep, and he fell with a crash upon the thwarts and rolled, bloody with a wound in the head and half stunned, into the bottom of the boat.

The lieutenant sat ready to ship the rudder, others of the men got into the boat, and the rest, grasping the line of her gunwale on either hand, rushed her roaring down the incline of shingle into the soft white wash of the breakers, themselves tumbling inward with admirable alertness as she was water-borne. Then six long oars gave way, and the boat sheared through the ripples.