Meanwhile, Lieutenant McKinley had gotten drunk, fallen down a bank, and broken his sword. When he eventually returned to the vessel, anchored out in the estuary, he found that fourteen of the twenty impressed men had taken a boat and all the guns on board, and had vanished. A few weeks later he went on a drunken rampage in Gloucester. He lurched down the street shouting and swearing obscenities, causing a riot among the inhabitants. When he fired a pistol at the chest of an onlooker, he was arrested by the constables and thrown into jail “without any other damage to his person than the insult of some thousands.”
6
Another recruiting officer in the Bristol area suffered a humiliating experience at the hands of some determined women. Lieutenant McKenzie was in charge of the hired vessel
United Brothers,
which lay in the anchorage at Kingroad. In October 1805, he was in the village of Pill on the outskirts of Bristol, searching for suitable men to impress into the navy. Entering an inn kept by Joseph Hook, he spotted a seaman and was attempting to take him when he was attacked by Mrs. Hook, her daughter, and a female servant. The three women rescued the seaman and enabled him to escape through a back door. Writing afterward to Captain Barker, his superior officer, McKenzie complained that the women had violently assaulted him and torn his uniform. He was particularly upset that Joseph Hook had looked on throughout and made no attempt to prevent his family from attacking him.
7
It is little wonder that women should object to impressment. Their men were taken from them without warning, often leaving them with a house and children to support, and no income. Mary Creed was pregnant and living in lodgings at Mrs. James's on Griffin Lane, Bristol. A few days after Christmas 1806, she wrote the following letter to the secretary of the Admiralty:
Sir, You will be pleased to lay before the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty the deplorable situation I am in by having my husband, who is very sickly, and unfit for the service, taken from me by the Press Gang here. I am big with child, and have no other way of support but him, he likewise supporting his old father and mother, and if he was examined by any Doctor he would be found more fit for a hospital than a ship, having entirely lost the use of his right hand.
8
Mary Creed's husband, John, had served as a steward on a West Indiaman, and although he was rated as a landman rather than a seaman, the regulating captain in charge of the impressment service at Bristol reckoned that he was “a very stout able man.” His wife's plea was turned down, and John Creed was forced to join the Royal Navy.
Earlier the same year John Jacobs, the thirty-year-old boatswain of the merchant ship
Betsey,
was returning to Bristol in a convoy from the West Indies. His ship was intercepted by a vessel commanded by Lieutenant Lucas, and Jacobs found himself pressed into the navy. His wife, Mary Jacobs, immediately wrote to the Admiralty and begged their lordships to accept a substitute to serve in his place because “he is the sole support of me and four children.”
9
The regulating captain noted that John Jacobs was Swedish, but because he had married in Bristol he was still liable for impressment. The scribbled note on the back of the letter suggests that Mary Jacobs also lost her husband to the navy.
In July 1806, Lucy Castle wrote to the Admiralty from Princes Street, Bristol, on behalf of her husband, William, who had been taken by the press gang and confined on board the naval brig
Enchantress
until such time as he could be dispatched to Plymouth to serve on a warship. Mrs. Castle explained that her husband was a native of America, but her plea was set aside because he had married an Englishwoman. From his confinement in the
Enchantress,
William Castle wrote a pathetic letter to the authorities in which he pointed out that his wife was pregnant, and that she and her other children were in great misery and had nobody to maintain them. The regulating captain noted that William Castle was twenty-two years of age, was formerly chief mate of a merchant ship, and “being an able seaman in every respect fit for the service cannot be discharged.”
10
What most upset the merchant seamen and their families was not so much the forcible impressment, though that was bad enough; it was the fact that the men were prevented from seeing their friends and loved ones. “It seems shocking to the feelings of humanity,” wrote Spavens, “for a sailor, after he has been on a long voyage, endured innumerable hardships, and is just returning to his native land with the pleasing hope of shortly beholding a beloved wife and children, some kind relations, or respected friends, to be forced away to fight, perhaps to fall, and no more enjoy those dear connexions.”
11
William Richardson, another merchant seaman who had been impressed, thought the navy's practice of intercepting homecoming merchant ships was as bad as Negro slavery and pointed out that if a man complained about being prevented from seeing his wife or friends and relations he was likely to be flogged “much more severe than the Negro driver's whip, and if he deserts he is flogged round the fleet nearly to death.”
12
He reckoned that if men were allowed a few weeks' liberty after a long voyage, they would soon grow tired of shore life and return more contented to their ships.
The same message appears in many seamen's memoirs, and it is not surprising to find that this was one of the major grievances behind the Mutiny at the Nore in 1797. One of the nine articles of the document drawn up by Richard Parker and presented to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty expressed the seamen's demands in notably restrained language:
That every Man upon a Ship's coming into Harbour, shall be at liberty (a certain number at a time, so as not to injure the Ship's duty) to go and see their friends and families; a convenient time to be allowed to each man.
13
The more humane officers appreciated the men's situation, and when circumstances allowed they did give permission for shore leave. In June 1755, Admiral Hawke received a petition from seventeen men who had been on a two-year voyage to the East Indies. Their ship had been intercepted by a naval tender in the English Channel, and they had all volunteered for service. (The generous bounty persuaded many merchant seamen to volunteer for service in the Royal Navy.) In these circumstances volunteers tended to be treated exactly the same way as impressed men, and they were immediately dispatched to the fleet anchorage at Spithead and consigned to the
Prince George
under the command of Captain Rodney. The men got together and composed an eloquent letter to Hawke setting out their circumstances and explaining that “we have been so long out of land upon a very tedious voyage and several of us having wives and families who are in great distress by our long absence and others of us on private concerns we most humbly intreat your Honour that you would grant us leave of absence for three or four weeks. . . .”
14
Hawke secured permission from the Admiralty and directed Captain Rodney to allow the men three weeks' leave. This was by no means an isolated instance, but when the demands of war put captains and admirals under pressure to get their ships to sea, there was an obvious reluctance to allow men ashore and risk losing them through desertion.
W
HILE MUCH HAS
been written about the horrors of the press gang in Britain, it is often forgotten that the system was operated on a similar scale on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed impressment was one of the causes of the War of 1812, which was fought by America for “Free Trade and Sailors' Rights.” The war tends to be played down in British history books, partly because it was overshadowed by the events in Europe leading up to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, and partly because the British suffered several humiliating defeats at sea during the course of the war in actions against formidable American ships such as the USS
Constitution.
Throughout the eighteenth century, British warships sent press gangs into the ports along the east coast of America and forcibly recruited men for the Royal Navy. During a period of five months in 1745 and 1746, press gangs from the 14-gun HMS
Shirley
impressed 92 men from Boston. In 1771, HMS
Arethusa
took 31 men during a cruise along the coast of Virginia. One of the most draconian raids was a night raid on New York in 1757, when the navy sent in 3,000 seamen and impressed 800 men.
15
Nearly half of this number were subsequently found to be unsuitable and were released, but operations like this fueled the fury of all sections of the community. The merchants feared the effects on trade, the townspeople saw their communities devastated by the seizure of so many able-bodied men, the women lost husbands and sons, and the seamen themselves no longer felt safe in their own towns.
The American newspapers and the minutes of town meetings frequently recorded official protests, riots, and violent responses to the raids of the press gangs. There were three days of rioting in Boston in November 1747. An angry crowd that included Negroes, servants, and hundreds of seamen stormed the Town House where the General Court was sitting and demanded the seizure of the impressing officers and the release of the men they had taken. During the course of the riot, they besieged the governor's house, laid hold of a naval lieutenant, assaulted a sheriff, and put his deputy in the stocks.
16
In Newport, Rhode Island, in June 1765, around 500 seamen, boys, and Negroes went on a rampage in protest after suffering five weeks of impressment.
After the American Revolution of 1776, in which the British colonies achieved their independence, the Royal Navy could no longer impress American seamen. Any operations by British captains in American ports or aboard American ships were restricted in theory to searching for deserters from the navy, and the men who were seized were therefore not impressed but recovered. In practice, the navy did continue to impress American seamen. The British argued that a man who was born British remained a British subject and that applied to any man born in America before she achieved her independence. In an effort to safeguard their citizens, the American government issued their seamen with a document called a protection, a certificate headed by the seal of the United States and bearing a declaration signed by a public notary or customs officer that stated the bearer was an American citizen and was “to be respected at all times by sea and land.” The name, age, and height of the bearer were included in order to identify him. In practice many American seamen found that a protection was no protection at all.
The experiences of an American sailor who was on the receiving end of the press gang are recounted in the memoirs of Captain William Nevens.
17
Born in Danville, Maine, in 1781, he was trained as a carpenter, but at the age of seventeen he joined the crew of a brig from Liverpool and sailed to Boston. After several voyages to the West Indies in different merchant ships, he sailed from Boston on the whaling ship
Essex
under the command of Captain Kilby and arrived in Barbados in February 1800. The ship was in such a poor state that the crew were paid off and Nevens planned to sail home in a schooner bound for Boston. He went ashore one evening with some of his shipmates, and as a precaution against the press gangs they armed themselves with clubs. After an evening of merrymaking, four of them wandered down to the beach to enjoy the cool sea breeze and work off the effects of the tamarind punch they had been drinking. They were taken by surprise when an officer and ten or twelve armed sailors surrounded them and hauled them into a boat. There they found ten other impressed seamen. The boat put off from the shore, and they were rowed among the anchored vessels until they came alongside a British warship, the 18-gun
Cyane.
The next morning, Nevens was interviewed by the ship's captain. When Nevens informed him that he was an American, the captain demanded to see his protection. Nevens produced the document from his pocket. The captain glanced at it and said, “You are an Irishman. What business have you with a protection? There are plenty of Nevenses in Ireland but there never was one born in America,” and with that he tore up the protection and threw it overboard. Nevens managed to get a message to Captain Kilby, who came on board the warship, confirmed that Nevens was American, and demanded his release. The British captain swore that he knew Nevens's father in Ireland. He declared that Nevens was a damned Irish rebel and told Captain Kilby to get off his ship. Seeing his situation was hopeless, Nevens asked Kilby to take home his sea chest and bedding and if he did not return within a year to send them to his parents. “Having made these dispositions,” writes Nevens, “I bade adieu to my liberty, and settled myself to the consoling prospect of serving Great Britain a few years for nothing.” He noted that every vessel in the British Navy at this period had several Americans on board and though several escaped, the majority were compelled to serve under threat of flogging.
William Nevens was determined to escape, and his opportunity came when the
Cyane
sailed to St. Kitts. To prevent the crew deserting the captain anchored her three miles offshore, but Nevens saw that there was an American sloop of war anchored between the
Cyane
and the shore. He slipped overboard at night and swam toward the American sloop. Unfortunately, the tide swept him past her, and he was forced to continue swimming for nearly two hours before he came alongside another ship. This was a Scottish brig,
Sally
of Greenock, which was bound for New York. Her captain agreed to take him, and he eventually got back to Boston, where he married an English girl from Liverpool.
As with so much of maritime history, there are many accounts of men who were victims of the press gang but few accounts of what happened to the women whose husbands were taken from them. However, there were two women whose experiences were so unusual that they were recorded in some detail. They were Margaret Dickson, whose extraordinary story was published in the
Newgate Calendar,
and Ann Parker, who found herself at the center of one of the most notorious events in British maritime historyâthe Mutiny at the Nore.