The Problem of Naval Recruitment
IT IS SOMETIMES ASSUMED that the‘press gang’was a permanent fixture throughout the era of the sailing navy, and that the deeply ingrained popular image of‘grabbing innocent victims from the streets’ and forcing them into naval service was just as prevalent in Pepys’s day as it is often taken to be in Nelson’s. In fact, the popular image of the press is not even strictly accurate for the latter period, and it was certainly not true for the former.1
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
In the first instance, the scale of the recruitment problem was entirely different in the seventeenth century. In the 1790s, it was estimated that there were about 118,000 British merchant seamen, and Parliament was voting for a navy of 120,000 men.2 The navy that fought the Anglo-Dutch wars consisted of no more than 30,000 men, and even in the 1690s the navy required a maximum of 40,000–50,000 men a year.3 Of course, there were many fewer merchant seamen too: contemporaries estimated that there were perhaps 40,000–60,000 men who met the age-old criterion for naval service, namely that they ‘used the sea’.4 Even so, the imbalance between the navy’s manpower requirement and the reserves available to it in the period of the Anglo-Dutch wars was nothing like as marked as it became in later wars. Moreover, before 1689 the major wars of the seventeenth century were very short: only the second Anglo-Dutch war extended into a third consecutive campaign, and even then no main fleet was set out during that disastrous summer of 1667. Admittedly, the 1650s were a period of unprecedented naval activity which saw unusually large numbers of ships kept at sea. Even in a ‘quiet’ period like the winter of 1657–8, the Commonwealth had some 11,500 men serving aboard its warships.5 But the Commonwealth’s ongoing high level of mobilisation was driven by its own deep sense of insecurity, and the costs of maintaining simultaneously a large navy and a great standing army contributed to the ruination of the state.6 After the Restoration, the operational navy in most peacetime years consisted of between twenty and forty ships, manned by about 3,000–5,000 men. The great majority of these were volunteers. Therefore, during most of the period the press was not an issue: it was simply not needed. But when it was, its legality and the manner of its execution became significant political issues.
THE LEGALITY OF IMPRESSMENT
Impressment originated in the feudal notion that in wartime, all men could be called on to give their service to the king, their ultimate superior in the social hierarchy. The right to press thus became a part of the royal prerogative, and in theory, at least, so it remained until the twenty-first century.7 Naturally, when the royal prerogative came under attack in the seventeenth century, so too did the principle of impressment. It was debated in Parliament in 1641, but was retained because it was simply too useful to those who took over the king’s responsibilities.8 A proposal to abandon pressing was put to the Admiralty in 1675 and effectively laughed out of court.9 The practice was attacked again after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when the royal prerogative came under scrutiny once more, and in the eighteenth century it was challenged in the courts, albeit to no avail.10 Alternatives to impressment were considered half-heartedly, but they hinged on degrees of centralisation, bureaucracy and efficient communications that seventeenth-century Britain entirely lacked. During the second and third Dutch wars, attempts were made to draw up accurate lists of seafarers in maritime counties, a tentative step towards the sort of compulsory registration used in France, but even such an apparently innocuous scheme came to nothing.11
The title page of Captain George St Lo’s England’s Safety (1693). The book advocated improvements to the recruitment system, but the illustration provides a rare contemporary insight into seamen’s clothing and some of the tools of his trade (notably the backstaff, the lead and line, and a shipwright’s maul).
Contrary to popular perception, pressing was constrained within clearly defined limits. Technically, it was not actually pressing at all, but ‘impresting’ – providing men with an advance of money that guaranteed their service. But this gradually gave way to ‘pressing’, with its connotations of compulsion, and that simple semantic change affected how the process was perceived and how it was carried out.12 Pressing was not permitted from outward-bound vessels, and this injunction was enforced strictly; hence, much pressing was carried out by ships’ boats or tenders, intercepting homeward-bound ships at their customary landfalls or harbours of refuge. Even then, enough men had to be left aboard to enable the ship to reach her destination. Masters of merchantmen sought to take advantage of the situation by not paying the wages of pressed men, and the crown had to step in to make up the shortfall.13 Other prime targets for the press were the fisheries and the collier fleets, especially those plying on the east coast. There were also less obvious locations where men who had at least a vague idea of the seaman’s trade might be found. In both 1666 and 1672 a press of 200 men was ordered from the Fens, partly from among the bargemen but also from those who ‘do skulk and hide themselves’ in those parts.14
Press gangs did operate ashore, but again, within defined limits. They were meant only to recruit able-bodied mariners, aged between eighteen and sixty, who were given ‘the king’s shilling’, a certificate and orders to report to a given dockyard or anchorage; specially appointed ‘conductors’ oversaw them on the journey, for which they received conduct money of 1½d a mile. Press officers received a per capita allowance for the number of men they recruited, so there was an inevitable tendency towards overzealousness. Officers who pursued men into inns or private houses were reprimanded for exceeding the terms of their warrants, although the authorities sometimes contemplated relaxing these strictures, as in 1664 when a proposal to seize men from church services seems to have been discussed.15 The activities of such gangs therefore tended to be confined to obvious concentrations of seamen, such as Wapping, Rotherhithe and other Thames-side communities. In wartime, the larger ships had their own pressing tenders, commanded by one of their junior officers, and the gangs ashore delivered their recruits to these.16
The press was indiscriminate, and even if it was confined to a relatively small number of coastal locations and to incoming or coastal shipping, it inevitably swept up men from further afield who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The 119 men pressed for the Reserve at Bristol in 1673 included twenty-nine local men along with fourteen Irishmen, thirteen Devonians, eleven from Somerset and smaller numbers from as far afield as Shropshire, Breconshire, the Scilly Isles and Scotland.17 Despite the emphasis on recruiting only qualified seamen, problems inevitably arose, with pressmasters being accused of (or admitting to) sweeping up all ranks of society from gentlemen to ploughmen. In June 1653 it was claimed that there were 5,000 landsmen serving in the navy.18 The men pressed from Cornwall in the autumn of 1664 included several landsmen, one of whom had four children and a fifth on the way, while it was said of another that ‘he can better manage a threshold than lower a topsail’.19 In 1666 Pepys himself witnessed
poor patient labouring men and housekeepers’ being taken up by the press and carried off to sea with their women weeping ‘over every vessel that went off, thinking they might be there, and looking after the ship as far as ever they could be moonlight – that it grieved me to the heart to hear them … it is a great tyranny.20
LOCAL AUTHORITIES
After the Restoration, the Lord High Admiral also issued a warrant to the vice-admiral of each county to raise a given number of men, and these were backed up by letters from the Privy Council to the Lords Lieutenant and JPs, ordering them to assist the vice-admiral in his task. In addition, each Privy Councillor was to take at least one county under his wing to correspond privately with its authorities and receive accounts of the success (or otherwise) of the recruiting drive from the JPs and vice-admiral. In both 1665 and 1672 a total of 5,300 men were ordered to be recruited in this way: the largest individual contingents were 700 from Devon, 500 each from Bristol and Norfolk, 400 from Suffolk (and Cumberland and Westmorland combined) and 350 from the Cinque Ports.21 The Bishop of Durham, who claimed independent Admiralty jurisdiction as part of the rights of his ‘palatinate’, was ordered to recruit 120 men in 1665 and another 150 in 1666.22 The number requested from these authorities almost doubled to 10,100 in 1678, when 1,300 men were demanded from Devon and 950 apiece from Bristol and Norfolk. Requests were also made directly to the mayors of prominent maritime communities; in 1664 the mayor of Bristol was asked to raise 500 men, those of Dartmouth and Yarmouth 150 each. In practice, it was often the parish constable who ended up with the task of choosing the recruits from his locality, and constables were often unable to cope with avoidance or outright intimidation by their neighbours.23
Bristol, an important recruiting centre for naval seamen, as it was portrayed in a map drawn in 1671.
EMBARGOES
The moratorium on pressing from outward-bound shipping could be evaded by imposing embargoes. These were used only sparingly because of their detrimental effect on trade and the concomitant risk of offending powerful merchant interests, especially in the City of London. In the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars, embargoes were imposed at the beginning of each major campaign, and usually again in November or December on shipping bound overseas, which would not necessarily be back before the main manning effort in the spring.24 An exception was made over the winter of 1666–7, but even then shipowners had to give in bonds to ensure their ships’ return by 20 April.25
THE TURNOVER
Strictly speaking, the turnover was not a method of recruitment, for the men involved were already serving in the navy. However, the practice of simply turning over men from one ship that was going out of service to another that was bound for sea again was highly controversial and bitterly resented by the seamen, for it went directly against the principle that a man signed on for a specific ship or captain, and for one expedition alone. For the naval administration, though, the turnover was a way of reducing the need for further pressing, which might provoke political and mercantile opposition, and of avoiding the need to pay the men who had been turned over for their service in their previous ship.26 If a recruitment effort was failing, men might also be turned over from less seaworthy ships into more effective ones.27 Turning over was common practice during the Interregnum, and it was used frequently during the later Anglo-Dutch wars (and in 1678). In November 1665 an order was issued to rely on the turnover to man the ships going out in the winter rather than pressing from colliers, which might have led to a serious shortage of coal.28 This was repeated in 1672, when men were turned over from the First and Second rates into the Thirds and Fourths that were intended for winter service.29
PROTECTIONS
Both whole groups and specific individuals were exempted from the press. If a merchant ship gave up a quarter or more of its crew to the navy, the remainder were often protected. Protections were given en masse to the employees of the Navy, Ordnance and Victualling offices, and to many employees of Trinity House. Fisheries were often protected during their season, as was the coal trade. Specific protections were given to the crews of the boats that carried passengers from London to Gravesend, and in 1672 to the bargemen of the River Avon plying between Tewkesbury and Stratford.30 Individual protections often depended on good connections. In 1665 the Queen Mother’s personal fishermen were exempted from the press; in 1677 the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, intervened on behalf of the husband of the nurse attending her illegitimate son by the king. Ministers, courtiers and MPs intervened to spare others from the press.31
Gravesend in 1662. A thriving seamen’s community and the limit of the bounds of the Thames watermen, Gravesend’s location made it an obvious centre of naval recruitment.
RESISTANCE
Many men simply hid. When the Hound attempted to press 150 men at Ipswich in 1664, her officers found only nine, for many had run inland or hidden themselves in houses.32 Seamen hid in barns and woods, or took back lanes to avoid the press gangs on the main roads between maritime towns. Bribery of press officers was commonplace, and sometimes the officers themselves took the initiative, extorting money from merchant shipowners or skippers to leave their men alone. Many owners were desperate to retain good men, and adopted such ploys as landing them before they came to a known haunt of press boats, collecting them later on once the coast was clear.33 Magistrates often colluded with the seamen, violence was commonplace, and entire towns could turn against press gangs. In December 1666 a serious riot against pressing occurred at Deptford, where the mob beat up the constable and broke into his house to rescue the pressed men.34 A few years later, the seaman-poet John Baltharpe gained first-hand experience of the degrees to which a mob could go to rescue one of their townspeople from the press (as well as seemingly providing an early reference to the use of a cricket bat as a weapon). They came at him, he said,
And knocked us down like unto rats;
There came a barber with his pole,
And knocked me down upon my soul.35
In 1674 it was claimed that pressed men were being rescued by mobs of seamen, up to a hundred strong and waving black flags, who were ‘walking up and down the town for that purpose’.36
THE EXTENT OF PRESSING
The evidence for the number of pressed men serving at any one time in the seventeenth century is comparatively slender, but even so, it is clear that pressed men only rarely constituted a majority of any ship’s company. In peacetime, almost all crews were made up exclusively of men who had volunteered for the service. Even in wartime, the navy still attracted substantial numbers of volunteers, and could also draw on soldiers to make up the numbers. A number of ships’ pay books from the third Anglo-Dutch war give information on the proportions of their crews that were volunteers, pressed men, soldiers or men turned over from other ships (who would include a mixture of men who had originally volunteered or been pressed).37 These show that the proportions of volunteers and pressed men varied considerably, no doubt owing in part to the popularity of individual captains or the particular circumstances of where and how each ship was attempting to recruit men, and that there was no obvious preference for smaller ships, which might have been thought to have a better chance of obtaining prize money (see table).
ORIGINS OF A SAMPLE OF NAVAL CREWS DURING THE THIRD ANGLO-DUTCH WAR
