12

‘THESE VALUABLE BUT HELPLESS PEOPLE’

1792–97

THE great wars between 1793 and 1815 were essentially between French land power and British sea power, and it follows that without victory at sea there could have been no success on land. If Jack did not exactly win the wars that redefined British history, he played the pivotal role in turning the tide, for forces could never have been launched against Napoleon in Europe without naval supremacy.1 But soldiers also served nobly, and Pitt the Elder’s dictum – ‘when we endeavour to exert our strength by sea we become the dread of the world; when by land the contempt of it’ – no longer held after the Peninsular War, let alone Waterloo. It could even be argued that France’s Navy, previously an aristocratic preserve, was so damaged and demoralized by the Revolution that Jack’s triumphs paled beside the harder-won victories of Wellington’s troops. For the first time, sailor and soldier stood shoulder to shoulder.

Insofar as terms of service were concerned, it may be fair to conclude that the Army was dealt the better hand. When a soldier enlisted during wartime it was for a set number of years. He had time to say farewells and order his affairs. He might never leave his native shore and would have opportunities for family contact. His pay was better too. An infantryman received a shilling a day, roughly 30 shillings a month, minus deductions. His two or three meals a day were usually of fresh produce and certainly of a higher standard than those dished up at sea.

Meanwhile, an Able seaman was still being paid 24 shillings per month of twenty-eight days, an Ordinary hand 19 shillings, with deductions for Greenwich Hospital and other benefits of 1s 6d. Such wages might attract men and boys from rural areas, but they had been unchanged for more than a century and discontent was on the rise: a London labourer expected two shillings a day and a craftsman three shillings. The problem was that the Admiralty stood under a constant budgetary lash. Precise figures for this period are hard to come by, but at times of war the Navy is estimated to have accounted for a quarter of government spending.2

When it came to battle, one of Wellington’s army officers offered this pertinent if rather blithe note after seeing an English brig blast a French corvette to smithereens in Biscay:

We came to the conclusion that sea-fighting was more agreeable than land-fighting as the crews of the vessels engaged without previous heavy marching, and with loose light clothing, there was no manoeuvring or standing for hours on the defensive, the wounded were immediately taken below and attended to, and the whole affair was over in a pleasingly brief period.³

Captain Rees Gronow had a point. Brevity was indeed typical of sea actions, based as they were on obtaining an advantageous position then discharging as much ordnance as possible from a shifting deck before the wind or current moved both sides on. And for harsh service it is hard to argue that even the sailor who spent month after winter month in the squalid misery of a 74 blockading Brest, constantly tacking close inshore against easterly winds and blasted by the storms of Biscay, had it tougher than the soldier to be seen tramping through savage Iberian wastes, sweating blood under blazing skies or freezing in snow on the sierras, and snatching a few hours’ sleep wherever his captain called a halt.⁴

But comparisons between terms of service invariably come back to one difference. A soldier enlisted. He went to war voluntarily. Although local militia were raised by ballot, men could buy their way out. They might be persuaded to join a regular regiment, but there was no legal coercion.5 Military conscription did not come into being for another century.

Impressment, on the other hand, was entrenched by custom and practice; and at the start of a new war, nobody – especially at the Admiralty – was willing to grasp alternative methods of mass mobilization. Naval conscription by another name intensified. So did the arbitrary and sometimes pitiless methods by which it was applied. Images of the press gang remain among the most enduring of the age – typically a band of thugs, cudgels in hand, tearing a forlorn figure from the bosom of a family cowering in the background. The caricatures of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson are not, self-evidently, historical records but cultural snapshots of an age when satire was at its savage zenith. Yet awareness of impressment reached all levels of society after 1793, partly because of a growth in libertarian values, but also because it was a practice that became increasingly visible.

Alternatives had been proposed. As far back as 1777, in response to the torn loyalties of the American Revolution, a Bill was introduced to Parliament based on a plan for manning authored by Lieutenant Robert Tomlinson, whose first-hand experience had left him with an abhorrence of impressment and who proposed a limited service for volunteers of between three and five years. The Bill was defeated but the campaign continued for a decade.⁶

The next, similarly doomed, parliamentary motion by William Pulteney in 1786 was notable for an electrifying pamphlet from the pen of another naval officer. Lieutenant John Mackenzie pulled no punches in his passionate denunciation of ‘this abominable custom’, quoting directly from Magna Carta as evidence that the law was being violated and accusing those who cited ‘the force of custom’ as justification of sophistry and feudalism. They were also, he added, blind to an inherent nobility in the common seaman’s character:

The multitude of these men are wholly illiterate, their ideas wild, confused and indeterminate as the elements they have to combat with; their dispositions naturally generous, though turbulent; fearless, or rather thoughtless of consequences (from being inured to hardship and danger) they will run every risk to satisfy the caprice of the moment . . . Yet [they are] possessed of the strongest notion of personal freedom and their own independence; for out of the King’s service they are in general citizens of the world, they have a home in every climate.7

The Liberty of the Subject by Gillray passed a caustic comment on impressment as early as 1779 but the practice was to become more prevalent still.

This instinct for freedom, Mackenzie argued, made impressment counter-productive, as was evident from the high desertion rate. Indeed, the ‘forcible attempt to rob them of every social happiness [which] they were, after many dangers and fatigues, returning to enjoy’, served only to excuse the actions of ‘these valuable but helpless people’.

Lieutenant Mackenzie spoke from experience. He cited conditions in Jamaica where, due to the prevailing winds, ships sailed in the early morning, often before men could even remove personal effects from their berths after being pressed, let alone claim outstanding pay. Being then homeward bound, they had no prospect of recovering either. Losses, as he pointed out, extended to families in the event of a seaman’s death. There was an instance of men pressed out of returning Indiamen and sent on a ship to the West Indies, which went down with all hands. Because their details had not yet been logged, the families received neither the year’s wages due from the India House nor anything from the Admiralty.

Mackenzie’s fervour and his humanity did him credit, especially as this diatribe from a junior officer would have gone down at the Admiralty like a 42-pound ball over the side. His belief, he declared, was that almost every naval officer shared his disquiet, and he intended to write ‘an Essay towards a plan for manning the Royal Navy without expense to government, injury to trade, or oppression upon individuals’. The essay failed to appear.

A resumption of war in February 1793 against a French state consumed by revolution silenced the reform debate. No one had any expectation that a conflict ‘between all the order and all the anarchy in the world’ would continue into the next century; but tensions between the Navy with its need for seamen, and ship-owners and merchants with their demand for its protection, could only grow. Never was the essential truth of British maritime endeavour – that Jack was a resource on which his country depended – more clearly demonstrated than over the next two decades.

Jacob Nagle related the outbreak of war and his own impressment in a single sentence, as if they were interconnected – which of course they were. On being picked up in Portsmouth, he was sent on the 74-gun Hector. No hint of resentment shows over his thwarted plan to go home to America. Within a matter of days he was involved in a similar exercise himself when the Hector fell in with a homeward-bound Indiaman, the Ganges, in the Channel and took every man Jack out of her. Nagle was one of the topmen assigned to take the now-crewless Indiaman to the nearest port.

The port happened to be Falmouth on the Cornish coast, where Nagle and his fellows had to await a warship to escort the Ganges and other Indiamen to the Downs. A frigate, the Nymphe, duly came in under the command of one described by Nagle as ‘Capt’n Purlew’.8

Edward Pellew was that rare thing in the Navy – a common seaman who had risen to command. He came from a family of Cornish sailors and was raised in Penzance, where the sea opens on the Atlantic like a gateway to the world. Boys like Ned grew up looking not inwards to the hinterland, but out and into a space that shifted as rapidly as it did mysteriously. The sea offered allure as well as occupation to Britain’s coastal dwellers. It was, as Joseph Conrad observed, ‘the accomplice of human restlessness’. For Ned Pellew it was also a form of escape from a family fallen on hard times. Unhappy and rebellious at school, he was barely ten when he would run down to Penzance harbour to mix with the fishermen and sailors, then ‘spring into the first boat he found afloat, cast off and away to sea’.

It was Pellew’s fortune at the age of thirteen to come to the attention of Captain John Stott. Stott was Cornish himself, had just been given command of a frigate, and found himself with a severe shortage of hands. So he set off on a recruiting drive to his native county, taking on dozens of men and three local lads, including Ned Pellew. The boy took to the tops like a circus artist. A natural athlete, nimble yet strong, he revelled in the thrill and challenge of working at height. Before long he was performing gymnastic feats, including handstands out on the yards, that had older hands shaking their heads in bemused wonderment. ‘He was like a squirrel,’ one recalled.⁹

By the time he was fifteen, Ned had been rated Able and during the American war served with such flair and gallantry that he won promotion to lieutenant aged twenty-one. Disastrously, his captain and mentor was killed in battle soon afterwards, and for a young man of common origins – without ‘interest’ it was said – that signified, especially after the peace of 1782. While young officers with influence retained their commands, Pellew was sent ashore and spent most of the next decade back in Cornwall. He married and fathered a large brood but could not settle. His attempt at farming proved hopelessly inept even by a seaman’s standards; he once sold a neighbour’s cow in the belief that it was his own. The misery of failure was compounded by the farm’s setting on high ground looking out to sea. He remained desperate for a ship, as only one who had recognized his destiny could be.

Though painful, those years of peace taught Pellew lessons in patronage and, because he had already made a mark of sorts, he won the support of a local aristocrat who obtained him a command. In January 1793, three weeks before the outbreak of war, he was given the Nymphe, a frigate entirely without hands.10 Even after resorting to impressment just to get her to sea, Pellew wrote to the Admiralty: ‘Nymphe is under every embarrassment with so weak a ship’s company.’ It was at this point that he arrived in Falmouth to convoy the Indiamen, and Nagle came to his attention.

The convergence of their courses was brief. Nagle described it thus:

We ware sent on board the Nymph to assist in fitting hur out for see till there was an opportunity to send us round to Spithead. Capt’n Purlew made applycation to the Admaralaty to keep us, as we ware all call’d prime seamen and his ship was poorly maned, but he could not have his wish.¹¹

It is tempting to speculate what might have come from an association that would have forged an ideal blend of captain and seaman. Pellew rose higher than any other common seaman of his time, from being the Navy’s most successful frigate captain to admiral and viscount. It was a stormy voyage, marked by battles with his better-born peers and beset with lee shores thanks to his poor social navigation. Throughout, he retained an affinity with the lower deck, taking with him others of humble origins whose careers he nurtured and guided. Pellew, like Nagle, was a seaman first and foremost. Had Nagle joined the Nymphe he may well have been given a chance of promotion, and he would certainly have been assured of action and prize money of a kind that rarely if ever came Jack’s way.

As it was, Nagle departed the Nymphe. From a prospect of challenge and adventure in a frigate, he was transferred to the Brunswick, another 74, for what turned into a prolonged and miserably tedious spell in the Channel Fleet under Lord Howe. Boredom may have resolved him to desert anyway – but when an Indiaman captain offered him a handsome bounty, along with pay at least twice the naval rate, he barely hesitated.

Had he been caught, he would probably have escaped hanging but might well have been flogged round the fleet. Had he stayed, he would have been at the first major fleet battle of the war, the so-called ‘Glorious First of June’.

Instead he went off in the Rose to Calcutta, where he met a pair of convict girls he had known in New South Wales and who had managed their own kind of desertion, escaping the penal colony and making their way to India where they were doing very nicely as courtesans in nabob society. ‘A grand situation they ware in, sedans and chairs,’ Nagle observed wryly, ‘with two Negroes to carry them wherever they wished to go and a boy a long side to fan them’.12 Told that they kept no company besides officers and gentlemen, Nagle rejoiced to discover that in India even he counted as a gentleman.

John Nicol managed to elude the press a little longer. He too was back in home waters after his fruitless pursuit of Sarah Whitlam and hoping to sign on another Indiaman. His romantic nature always inclined him for travel rather than battle and when the brig bringing him from Lisbon reached Gravesend and a man-of-war came alongside, Nicol stowed himself away below among the cargo. This time he was lucky. He donned his best shore outfit and thus disguised made his way ‘to Wapping where I took up my old lodgings’.¹³

Presumably he retained a landsman’s appearance while living in this seafaring enclave, where press gangs were most active, for he managed to find his Indiaman, the Nottingham, bound for China. Although he still intended to resume the quest for Sarah, it was no longer with quite the same passion and he had by now to admit that her departure from India without waiting for him, ‘showed she cared less about me than I cared for her’.¹⁴

The fact is he no longer felt the same wanderlust either. He was almost forty and even the prospect of China did not stir his imagination as it once had. The Nottingham’s log shows the voyage to have been full of frustration – a fast, new Indiamen of 1,200 tons held back by a fleet of seventy-seven sail – until they rounded the Cape, hit some hard gales and shed the slow dogs. As so often, a long spell at sea helped put matters in perspective. When Nottingham came to at Whampoa, five months after leaving the Lizard, Nicol had cast Sarah from his thoughts and was resolved. He would return to Scotland and settle. ‘I had some cash and had seen all I could see.’

The Nottingham’s log picks up the story as they sighted the Downs in the summer of 1795:

July 23: An armed Boat from the Venerable of 74 guns with an officer came to press the People . . . At 4pm the Venerable’s boats finished taking the People, their chests, etc.15

Virtually the entire crew, seventy-seven men, had been pressed. After a year off in the Eastern Seas, and with no more than a glimpse of England, they found themselves in the dark bosom of a 74. Some would have been dreaming of home, some yearning for nothing more than a Wapping cruise. All were about to be swept off to war without so much as a word or touch with family.

Nicol, shrewd old hand that he was, had anticipated it – growing a beard and cultivating an especially unkempt appearance in an attempt to show that here was one Jack no self-respecting captain would want. When the press gang departed he did a little jig. But the next day one of the pressed men was returned with a leg injury, and this time Nicol’s camouflage had no effect. He was taken:

Thus were all my schemes blown into the air . . . I found myself in bondage . . . and no hopes of relief until the end of the war.¹⁶

Here again is seen the press at its most indefensible, snatching a man away when he was not only in sight of home, but as he was about to be paid for a year’s work – for it often happened that ship-owners, who were as vociferous as any in condemning Admiralty policy, made no great effort to ensure that men pressed at the end of a voyage received their wages. Yet Nicol, like many of his fellows, had become almost inured to loss of freedom: ‘I made up my mind to it and was as happy as a man in blasted prospects can be.’

Sent on board the Edgar, a 74, Nicol was soon subjected to further deprivation when she came to anchor in Leith roads near his Edinburgh home, and was refused shore leave by a lieutenant who said ‘it was not safe to allow a pressed man to go on shore at his native place’.17 By now we may discern symptoms that in Nicol’s case amounted less to resignation than a loss of spirit. He had been at sea for almost twenty years and the regime defined by a captain’s orders and a bosun’s pipe could ultimately have the effect of eroding precisely the same boldness on which its success depended.

The most prolonged strain on maritime manpower in history pushed the Navy to desperate measures. From a low of 16,613 in the final year of peace, the number of mustered hands rose fourfold in a matter of months to 69,868. By 1797, during the Navy’s greatest crisis – essentially over wages – it had reached 118,788 and two years later 128,930.¹⁸ These numbers were obtained in the face of a daily withering by death from disease, accident and action. Ultimately, after the short-lived Treaty of Amiens (1802–3), it reached a peak of 147,047.^*

So, how were these men found?

The number of Impress Service rendezvous centres around the country grew from twenty-three to thirty-four. They flew flags, dispensed ale and displayed patriotic appeals to:

Englishmen willing to defend their country against all Republicans and Levellers, and against the designs of our natural enemies who intend this year to invade Old England, to murder our gracious King as they have done their own; to make whores of our wives and daughters; to rob us of our property, and teach us nothing but the damned art of murdering one another.19

Volunteers were paid the standard bounty of £5 for an Able man, £2 10s for Ordinary hands and £1 10s for Landsmen. And, naturally, many seamen – when confronted by a press gang – took the money and were entered as volunteers.

But the impressment centre, or ‘rondy’, had a darker aspect too. The regulation that only men who used the sea could be impressed was abandoned. Now, in a ‘hot press’, gangs really did seize men with no experience of the sea – men like Michael Quick, whose fate may have been decided by living with his family in the Seven Dials, a slum notorious for London outcasts, ‘knife-grinders and street-singers, bird-dealers and shoe-makers, hawkers of prints and sellers of herring’.²⁰ It was also a stalking ground for the oldest rondy in the city, St Katharine’s Stairs in Wapping, with its press room – in reality a dungeon where men were held pending transfer to a tender. Admiralty records are not short of petitions from women like Mary Quick, declaring her husband – a coach spring-maker – to be:

. . . no seaman, nor seafaring man, nor ever worked upon the water nor any business relating thereto. He now lies onboard a Tender in the River. Your petitioner with 2 small children and pregnant has no other support, which must soon bring her and them to ruin unless he is speedily released.²¹

This petition, written in a neat hand on Mary’s behalf by a member of the parish and certified by Quick’s employer, H. Wildey, a coach spring-maker of Soho, was referred to the captain of the tender holding Quick. Whether he was released is unknown.

The abuse of ‘protections’ became routine. Those supposedly exempted from the press included not only those already in service but certain categories of men who used the sea – fishermen, ferrymen and colliers among others. Although it had been established practice that protections might be ignored in times of war when the Admiralty authorized a ‘hot press’, the extent of violations touched new levels after 1793.

The damage to families grew. The case of Mary Jones – executed twenty years earlier for stealing £5 worth of muslin after the impressment of her merchant-seaman husband – was revived as a cause célèbre, a rallying cry for campaigners. But it was not only the wives and children of pressed hands who suffered. When men of the labouring class volunteered for the Navy and left home for years on end, their dependants were made vulnerable, especially those without family networks to call on. Severe hardship gave rise to the Navy Act of 1795, which was designed to improve the system by which seamen could allocate a portion of their wages to wives or other dependants. The money was distributed every twenty-eight days at payment centres in London, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham; otherwise it could be collected at the nearest tax or customs office. That still meant travel of some distance for many wives as the money had to be collected in person, unless the recipient could produce a certificate of infirmity from a clergyman or surgeon. Impersonation was a felony punishable by death. And if the seaman died in service, payment ceased directly.22

Still there were not enough Jacks. A year after the onset of war, figures show a rough equivalence between the number of hands in navy and merchant ships – 83,891 and 81,534 respectively.²³ As more sailors were plundered, the Admiralty came under fire from the mercantile sector for damaging trade. Homeward-bound merchant captains entering the Channel would break away from convoys to evade the navy ships awaiting them, only then to fall prey to other predators, French privateers. At bottom, the needs of the two sectors were irreconcilable because the demands of waging war did not diminish the need for raising the economic means to sustain it.

Another method of keeping ships at sea was scarcely less reviled and, as one admiral said, ‘became vexatious by growing into a practice, instead of being used only occasionally, as an emergency’:

I mean the plan of turning the men over to newly commissioned ships on their return from foreign service, and perhaps again sending them abroad or what was worse, keeping them at home without the opportunity of leave.24

William Richardson was one to suffer the double blow. He was in an Indiaman in Calcutta when war started and was promptly pressed into the frigate Minerve. On reaching home in 1794 – after two years away – he was among thirty-seven hands turned over directly into the Prompte, ‘without a moment’s liberty on shore after being so long abroad in unhealthy climates’. As he put it: ‘Here was encouragement for seamen to fight for their king and country! A coolie in India was better off!’²⁵

The next recruitment drive was embodied in legislation known as the Quota Acts, passed in 1795 and 1796, requiring local authorities to raise a certain number of volunteers for naval service or pay a fine in lieu. The influence of the Acts is disputed. Criminals and vagrants were supposedly barred, but one respected historian has claimed that it introduced to the Navy a corps of troublemakers: ‘Counties tended to select their “bad boys”, their vagrants, tramps and idlers . . . towns sent beggars, minor thieves and pickpockets.’²⁶ A more recent study states that quotas produced only about 30,000 hands during the entire war, and they no criminals but respectable men in need of work.²⁷ Whatever else, the inclusion of convicted smugglers did at least add craft as well as experience to the mix.

But the great majority of those selected as ‘volunteers’ were not the ablest nor fittest members of their communities. Nor were they seamen; and it follows that quota men attracted resentment and suspicion from real hands, partly because of their backgrounds but also because they were paid an absurdly high bounty for signing on – up to £70 in some cases, compared with £5 for a volunteering Able hand. One officer thought the quota bounty ‘the most ill-advised and fatal measure ever adopted by the government for manning the fleet’, adding how:

. . . one of these objects, coming on board with £70 bounty was seized by a boatswain’s mate who, holding him up with one hand by the waistband of his trousers, humorously exclaimed ‘Here’s a fellow that cost a guinea a pound!’28

Fringe industries flourished. Crimps in various guises, from tavern keepers to prostitutes, came up with profitable methods of procuring hands. A related enterprise was directed at seamen’s pay: Eleanor Mahoney presented herself at Deptford to claim almost £50 due to her son Timothy, an Irish hand late of the Medway. Her efforts to reproduce an Irish accent alerted clerks to the fact that she was not Mrs Mahoney at all but a Poll working with a publican and a Drury Lane milkman.²⁹

All the while the Marine Society continued to recruit boys, providing ‘a nursery of seamen for the public service’, and they at least went relatively willingly. Along with an outfit of jacket, waistcoat, trowsers, shirts, shoes, knife, pillow, blanket and one of Hanway’s religious tracts, some 22,973 Marine Society protégés entered the Navy between 1793 and 1815.³⁰

Underlying all manning figures for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars lies a mystery. Just what proportion of navy hands were pressed? The question has stimulated an intense academic debate.

Until relatively recently it was accepted that in the early years of the Revolutionary War about 50 per cent of naval hands were pressed. This ratio, it was argued, increased in the later years to 75 per cent; but the case was also made that the data is so conflicting that no accurate estimate is possible.³¹

These figures have been challenged by a recent study based on the musters of eighty-one ships in service between 1793 and 1801. The claim is made that entries for the 27,174 men whose details are recorded show that 42 per cent arrived as new volunteers, 41 per cent had been turned over from other ships, and some 5 per cent were ‘quota men’. Only 10 per cent were newly pressed. Allowing for the fact that some of those turned over had already been pressed, and that impressment intensified towards the end of the war, the study concludes that perhaps 16 per cent of all Jacks had been taken.32 (It does not pursue this case into the Napoleonic War when press-gang excesses undoubtedly became more blatant.)

An accurate figure will remain elusive. Ships’ musters, though a valuable resource for research, are not absolute records. Many of those entered as volunteers were pressed men who, when facing the inevitable, took the bounty. No figure is offered here to contest the specialist studies cited above, but while 50 per cent could be too high, 16 per cent appears too low. For anecdotal evidence it may be added that virtually every Jack given a voice in this narrative was pressed at one time or another, some repeatedly – a fact proved by the musters. And whatever the proportion was during the Revolutionary War, it certainly rose in the Napoleonic War, when – as we shall see – a mass demobilization at the Treaty of Amiens gave way to a frantic and at times criminal scramble to reman the Navy a year later.

One case from court-martial records points up the paradoxes during such demanding times. A body of enemy prisoners – including French, Dutch and Spaniards – were noted to have volunteered for the Navy in 1801 when they seized the Charlotte tender en route to the Nore, casting the master, a mate and two men down the hatchway. Eleven escaped in a cutter but seventeen were recaptured and tried. The master, in his testimony, admitted uncertainty over the identity of those active in the ‘mutiny’. Six men were found guilty and sentenced to fifty lashes, followed by internment as prisoners of war. That the eleven acquitted were then offered a chance to re-enlist is some indication of the Navy’s desperate need for hands.³³

Seamen voted against impressment with their feet in unprecedented numbers. No less an authority than Horatio Nelson believed 42,000 men deserted between 1793 and 1802, and that figure may have been too low.³⁴ Meanwhile, public hostility reached new levels – as did resistance. In the first year of the war, press gangs were confronted by angry mobs on at least twenty-seven occasions.³⁵

Nagle sighted England again from the tops of the Rose, back from Calcutta, as she ghosted up the Channel. He knew what to expect. Fortunately, so did the captain of the Rose, who saved his best men by sending them to hide down among the cargo. Yet by the time a lieutenant from the Diamond had taken his pick of the rest, and another from the Garland followed suit the next day, thirty out of fifty-four hands had been pressed.36

Behind these spare facts lies a drama of coincidence. When Nagle and his shipmates looked out across the anchorage where dozens of sail lay below Dover Castle, they would have sighted the Nottingham where, that same day, 23 July, John Nicol was trying vainly to conceal himself from another press gang. The Indiamen returning in the summer of 1795, it is plain, offered rich pickings. Nagle and Nicol had again passed in one another’s wake.

Nagle thanked his stars that he was not immediately taken. Aware of his peril since deserting from the Navy, he had concealed his identity by serving in the Rose under an alias – Jacob Lincoln.³⁷ But one narrow shave was just the start. These Indiamen hands had returned to a country in turmoil, gripped by rumours of invasion. Captain Alexander Gray, who had him flogged when he tried to desert in Bengal, now made an astonishing gesture – lending Nagle and the remaining hands pistols and swords with which to defend themselves on the road to London. Formidable force appeared to be everywhere across a Kent countryside swarming with fired-up soldiers. On reaching Wapping they had to pass through no fewer than four press gangs. They did this by hiring coaches and advancing through Poplar with men standing atop, flourishing pikes and discharged pistols until they reached Leadenhall Street and reported to East India House. Here they received their wages and handed over the Company’s weaponry.

Nagle was still in dangerous waters. He took shelter at the White Swan while sending word to his old boarding house keeper. Mr Goodall escorted him to Tower Hill but pointed out that he could not stay in hiding indefinitely; so a meeting was set with the captain of the local ‘rondy’, who offered a compromise: Nagle agreed to sign on with the Navy again; in return he received the standard £5 bounty and a ‘protection’ notionally exempting him from impressment; and, as the 44-gun Gorgon was not ready for sea, he was given a clear two months before he had to join her. With a full purse, the old Nagle would have gone off on a Wapping cruise. Instead, he took a quite different tack.

Nagle had made acquaintances among local families, including a boat builder named Pitman who had a daughter named Elizabeth. Out of the blue, the impulsive Nagle ‘took a liking to [her], a lively hansome girl in my eye, and maried hur’.38

Of Elizabeth Pitman, or Mrs Jacob Nagle, little is known other than her respectable if simple origins. They were married at St Botolph’s Aldgate in August 1795, an occasion that goes undescribed in his journal, where she is referred to only as ‘my wife’. Although they had at least two children, they too are unnamed. Nagle was not so restrained in describing tarts like Liddy, and it appears that grief still clouded memories of his family when he was writing. Only one incident of their life together is recorded. Almost inevitably, it involved a press gang.

They were walking in the ghostly wilds of St Katharines when the gang came. Nagle said he belonged to the Gorgon and had a protection in his room, at which one of the gang:

. . . begin to make free with my wife and I nock’d him down, and a nother coming up, I made him stager. I told a midshipman of the gang I would go where he pleased but not to allow his vagabons to insult my wife. He said they should not. Then I walked on with them, and my wife with me.³⁹

With his protection, Nagle negotiated a passage to the Gorgon and was given a liberty ticket to spend a month with his wife. One final temptation came his way, an offer from his last ship Rose of a passage back to India at a wage of £10 a month – five times the naval rate – if he would desert again. But, as he put it, ‘I [k]new death would be my portion if caught again, therefore I would not attempt it.’

Nagle’s parting from his wife might recall one of those daubs, so popular in its day, of The Sailor’s Farewell, with a few lines which were no less resonant for being doggerel:

The topsails shiver in the wind, The ship she’s bound to sea;

But yet my heart, my soul, my mind, Are, Mary, moored with thee.

After the Gorgon sailed for the Mediterranean, Mrs Nagle accompanied her parents to Portsmouth. Unlike many seamen’s wives left without resources and forced to seek parish relief, she was reasonably placed to await her husband’s return. When he did, two years had passed and Nagle was father to a child he had never seen before.

* Despite the manpower conflict between them, the figures for merchant seafarers held up remarkably over the same period. When naval manning was at its highest recorded level, in 1813, the mercantile sector stood at 115,380. (David Starkey, ‘Britain’s Seafaring Workforce 1650–1815’, in Fury, ed., The Social History of English Seamen)