These documents were jeered at by the English naval lieutenant and his boarding gang, who kidnapped from the forecastle such stalwart tars as pleased their fancy.The victim who sought to inform an American consul of his plight was lashed to the rigging and flogged by a boatswain's mate.The files of the State Department, in 1807, had contained the names of six thousand American sailors who were as much slaves and prisoners aboard British men-of-war as if they had been made captives by the Dey of Algiers.One of these incidents, occurring on the ship Betsy, Captain Nathaniel Silsbee, while at Madras in 1795, will serve to show how this brutal business was done.
"I received a note early one morning from my chief mate that one of my sailors, Edward Hulen, a fellow townsman whom I had known from boyhood, had been impressed and taken on board of a British frigate then being in port....I immediately went on board my ship and having there learned all the facts in the case, proceeded to the frigate, where I found Hulen and in his presence was informed by the first lieutenant of the frigate that he had taken Hulen from my ship under a peremptory order from his commander to visit every American ship in port and take from each of them one or more of their seamen....I then called upon Captain Cook, who commanded the frigate, and sought first by all the persuasive means that I was capable of using and ultimately by threats to appeal to the Government of the place to obtain Hulen's release, but in vain....It remained for me only to recommend Hulen to that protection of the lieutenant which a good seaman deserves, and to submit to the high-handed insult thus offered to the flag of my country which I had no means either of preventing or resisting."After several years' detention in the British Navy, Hulen returned to Salem and lived to serve on board privateers in the second war with England.
Several years' detention! This was what it meant to be a pressed man, perhaps with wife and children at home who had no news of him nor any wages to support them.At the time of the Nore Mutiny in 1797, there were ships in the British fleet whose men had not been paid off for eight, ten, twelve, and in one instance fifteen years.These wooden walls of England were floating hells, and a seaman was far better off in jail.He was flogged if he sulked and again if he smiled flogged until the blood ran for a hundred offenses as trivial as these.His food was unspeakably bad and often years passed before he was allowed to set foot ashore.
Decent men refused to volunteer and the ships were filled with the human scum and refuse caught in the nets of the press-gangs of Liverpool, London, and Bristol.
It is largely forgotten or unknown that this system of recruiting was as intolerable in England as it was in the United States and as fiercely resented.Oppressive and unjust, it was nevertheless endured as the bulwark of England's defense against her foes.It ground under its heel the very people it protected and made them serfs in order to keep them free.No man of the common people who lived near the coast of England was safe from the ruffianly press-gangs nor any merchant ship that entered her ports.It was the most cruel form of conscription ever devised.Mob violence opposed it again and again, and British East Indiamen fought the King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their crews and left helpless.Feeling in America against impressment was never more highly inflamed, even on the brink of the War of 1812, than it had long been in England itself, although the latter country was unable to rise and throw it off.Here are the words, not of an angry American patriot but of a modern English historian writing of his own nation:* "To the people the impress was an axe laid at the foot of the tree.There was here no question, as with trade, of the mere loss of hands who could be replaced.Attacking the family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs were the tentacles, struck at the very foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief as poignant as death.
...The mutiny at the Nore brought the people face to face with the appalling risks attendant on wholesale pressing while the war with America, incurred for the sole purpose of upholding the right to press, taught them the lengths to which their rulers were still prepared to go in order to enslave them."** The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore, by J.R.Hutchinson.
