Читать книгу The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore - J. R. Hutchinson - Страница 7

In another important article of contentment the sailor was hardly better off. The system of deferred pay amounted practically to a stoppage of all leave for the period, however protracted, during which the pay was withheld. Thus the Monmouth's men had in 1706 been in the ship "almost six years, and had never had the opportunity of seeing their families but once." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1468-Capt. Baker, 3 Nov. 1706.] In Boscawen's ship, the Dreadnought, there were in 1744 two hundred and fifty men who "had not set foot on shore near two year." Admiral Penrose once paid off in a seventy-four at Plymouth, many of whose crew had "never set foot on land for six or seven years"; [Footnote: Penrose (Sir V. C., Vice-Admiral of the Blue), Observations on Corporeal Punishment, Impressment, etc., 1824.] and Brenton, in his Naval History, instances the case of a ship whose company, after having been eleven years in the East Indies, on returning to England were drafted straightway into another ship and sent back to that quarter of the globe without so much as an hour's leave ashore.

What was true of pay and leave was also true of prize-money. The sailor was systematically kept out of it, and hence out of the means of enjoyment and carousal it afforded him, for inconscionable periods. From a moral point of view the check was hardly to his detriment. But the Navy was not a school of morals, and withholding the sailor's hard-earned prize-money over an indefinite term of years neither made for a contented heart nor enhanced his love for a service that first absorbed him against his will, and then, having got him in its clutches, imposed upon and bested him at every turn.

Although the prime object in withholding his pay was to prevent his running from his ship, so far from compassing that desirable end it had exactly the contrary effect. Both the preventive and the disease were of long standing. With De Ruyter in the Thames in 1667, menacing London and the kingdom, the seamen of the fleet flocked to town in hundreds, clamouring for their wages, whilst their wives besieged the Navy Office in Seething Lane, shrieking: "This is what comes of not paying our husbands!"

Essentially a creature of contradictions, the sailor rarely, if he could avoid it, steered the course laid down for him, and in nothing perhaps was this idiosyncrasy so glaringly apparent as in his behaviour as his country's creditor. He "would get to London if he could." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2732—Capt. Young, 12 Dec. 1742.] "An unaccountable humour" impelled him "to quit His Majesty's service without leave." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 480—Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, 12 Sept. 1746.] Once the whim seized him, no ties of deferred pay or prize-money had power to hold him back. The one he could obtain on conditions; the other he could dispose of at a discount which, though ruinously heavy, still left him enough to frolic on.

The weapon of deferred pay was thus a two-edged one. If it hurt the sailor, it also cut the fingers of those who employed it against him. So exigent were the needs of the service, he could "run" with impunity. For if he ran whilst his pay was in arrears, he did so with the full knowledge that, barring untimely recapture by the press-gang, he would receive a free pardon, together with payment of all dues, on the sole condition, which he never kept if he could help it, of returning to his ship when his money was gone. He therefore deserted for two reasons: First, to obtain his pay; second, to spend it.

The penalty for desertion, under a well-known statute of George I., [Footnote: 13 George I., art. 7.] was death by hanging. As time went on, however, discipline in this respect suffered a grave relapse, and fear of the halter no longer served to check the continual exodus from the fleet. If the runaway sailor were taken, "it would only be a whipping bout." So he openly boasted. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1479—Capt. Boscawen, 26 April 1743.] The "bout," it is true, at times ran to six, or even seven hundred lashes—the latter being the heaviest dose of the cat ever administered in the British navy; [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 482—Admiral Lord Colvill, 12 Nov. 1765.] but even this terrible ordeal had no power to hold the sailor to his duty, and although Admiral Lord St. Vincent, better known in his day as "hanging Jervis," did his utmost to revive the ancient custom of stretching the sailor's neck, the trend of the times was against him, and within twenty-five years of the reaffirming of the penalty, in the 22nd year of George II., hanging for desertion had become practically obsolete.

In the declining days of the practice a grim game at life and death was played upon the deck of a king's ship lying in the River St. Lawrence. The year was 1760. Quebec had only recently fallen before the British onslaught. A few days before that event, at a juncture when every man in the squadron was counted upon to play his part in the coming struggle, and to play it well, three seamen, James Mike, Thomas Wilkinson and William M'Millard by name, deserted from the Vanguard. Retaken some months later, they were brought to trial; but as men were not easy to replace in that latitude, the court, whilst sentencing all three to suffer the extreme penalty of the law, added to their verdict a rider to the effect that it would be good policy to spare two of them. Admiral Lord Colvill, then Commander-in-Chief, issued his orders accordingly, and at eleven o'clock on the morning of the 12th of July the condemned men, preceded to the scaffold by two chaplains, were led to the Vanguard's forecastle, where they drew lots to determine which of them should die. The fatal lot fell to James Mike, who, in presence of the assembled boats of the squadron, was immediately "turned off" at the foreyard-arm. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 482—Admiral Lord Colvill, 10 July 1760; Captains' Logs, 1026—Log of H.M.S. Vanguard.]

Encouraged in this grim fashion, desertion assumed alarming proportions. Nelson estimated that whenever a large convoy of merchant ships assembled at Portsmouth, at least a thousand men deserted from the fleet. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 580—Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] This was a "liberty they would take," do what you could to prevent it.

Of those who thus deserted fully one-third, according to the same high authority, never saw the fleet again. "From loss of clothes, drinking and other debaucheries" they were "lost by death to the country." Some few of the remainder, after drinking His Majesty's health in a final bowl, voluntarily returned on board and "prayed for a fair wind"; but the majority held aloof, taking their chances and their pleasures in sailorly fashion until, their last stiver gone, they fell an easy prey to the press-gang or the crimp.

While the crimp was to the merchant service what the press-gang was to the Navy, a kind of universal provider, there was in his method of preying upon the sailor a radical difference. Like his French compeer, the recruiting sergeant of the Pont Neuf in the days of Louis the Well-Beloved, wherever sailors congregated the crimp might be heard rattling his money-bags and crying: "Who wants any? Who wants any?" Where the press-gang used the hanger or the cudgel, the crimp employed dollars. The circumstance gave him a decided "pull" in the contest for men, for the dollars he offered, whether in the way of pay or bounty, were invariably fortified with rum. The two formed a contraption no sailor could resist. "Money and liquor held out to a seaman," said Nelson, "are too much for him."

In law the offence of enticing seamen to desert His Majesty's service, like desertion itself, was punishable with death; [Footnote: 22 George n. cap. 33.] but in fact the penalty was either commuted to imprisonment, or the offender was dealt with summarily, without invoking the law. Crimps who were caught red-handed had short shrift. Two of the fraternity, named respectively Henry Nathan and Sampson Samuel, were once taken in the Downs. "Send Nathan and Samuel," ran the Admiralty order in their case, "to Plymouth by the first conveyance. Admiral Young is to order them on board a ship going on foreign service as soon as possible." Another time an officer, boarding a boat filled with men as it was making for an Indiaman at Gravesend, found in her six crimps, all of whom suffered the same fate. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1542—Capt. Bazeley, 7 Feb. 1808. Admiralty Records 1. 1513—Capt. Bowater, 12 June 1796.]

Men seduced by means of crimpage bounty were said to be "silver cooped," and the art of silver cooping was not only practised at home, it was world-wide. In whatever waters a British man-o'-war cast anchor, there the crimp appeared, plying his crafty trade. His assiduity paid a high compliment to the sterling qualities of the British seaman, but for the Navy it spelt wholesale depletion.

In home ports he was everywhere in evidence. No ship of war could lie in Leith Roads but she lost a good part of her crew through his seductions. "M'Kirdy & M'Lean, petty-fogging writers," were the chief crimps at Greenock. Sheerness crimps gave "great advance money." Liverpool was infested with them, all the leading merchant shippers at Bristol, London and other great ports having "agents" there, who offered the man-o'-war's-man tempting bounties and substantial wages to induce him to desert his ship. A specially active agent of Bristol shipowners was one Vernon Ley, who plied his trade chiefly at Exeter and Plymouth, whence he was known to send to Bristol, in the space of six months, as many as seventy or eighty men, whom he provided with postchaises for the journey and 8 Pounds per man as bounty. James White, a publican who kept the "Pail of Barm" at Bedminster, made a close second in his activity and success. Spithead had its regular contingent of crimps, and many an East India ship sailing from that famous anchorage was "entirely manned" by their efforts, of course at the expense of the ships of war lying there. At Chatham, crimpage bounty varied from fifteen to twenty guineas per head; and at Cork, a favourite recruiting ground for both merchantmen and privateers, the same sum could be had any day, with high wages to boot.

In the Crown Colonies a similar state of things prevailed. Queen's ships visiting Jamaica in or about the year 1716 lost so heavily they scarce dared venture the return voyage to England, their men having "gone a-wrecking" in the Gulf of Florida, where one armed sloop was reputed to have recovered Spanish treasure to the value of a hundred thousand dollars. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1471—Capt. Balchen, 13 May 1716.] Time did not lessen desertion in the island, though it wrought a change in the cause. When Admiral Vernon was Commander-in-Chief there in the forties, he lost five hundred men within a comparatively short time—"seduced out," to use his own words, "through the temptations of high wages and thirty gallons of rum, and conveyed drunk on board from the punch-houses where they are seduced." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 233—Admiral Vernon, 5 Sept. 1742. A rare recruiting sheet of 1780, which has for its headpiece a volunteer shouting: "Rum for nothing!" describes Jamaica as "that delightful Island, abounding in Rum, Sugar and Spanish Dollars, where there is delicious living and plenty of GROGG and PUNCH."]

At Louisberg, in the Island of Cape Breton, the North American Squadron in 1746 lost so many men through the seductions practised by New England skippers frequenting that port, that Townsend, the admiral in command, indited a strongly worded protest to Shirley, then Governor of Massachusetts; but the latter, though deploring the "vile behaviour" of the skippers in question, could do nothing to put a stop to it. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 480—Townsend, 17 Aug.; Shirley, 12 Sept. 1746.] As a matter of fact he did not try.

On the coast of Carolina many of the English merchantmen in 1743 paid from seventeen to twenty guineas for the run home, and in addition "as many pounds of Sugar, Gallons of Rum and pounds of Tobacco as pounds in Money." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1 1479-Capt. Bladwell, 1 July 1743.]

The lust for privateering had much to answer for in this respect. So possessed were the Virginians by the desire to get rich at the expense of their enemies that they quite "forgot their allegiance to the King." By the offer of inordinately high wages and rich prizes they did their utmost to seduce carpenters, gunners, sailmakers and able seamen from His Majesty's ships. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1480—Capt. Lord Alexander Banff, 21 Oct. 1744.] Any ship forced to winter at Rhode Island, again, always counted upon losing enough men to "disable her from putting to sea" when the spring came. Here, too, the privateering spirit was to blame, Rhode Island being notorious for its enterprise in that form of piracy. Another impenitent sinner in her inroads upon the companies of king's ships was Boston, where "a sett of people made it their Business" to entice them away. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1440—Capt. Askew, 27 Aug. 1748.] No ship could clean, refit, victual or winter there without "the loss of all her men." Capt. Young, of the Jason, was in 1753 left there with never a soul on board except "officers and servants, widows' men, the quarter-deck gentlemen and those called idlers." The rest had been seduced at 30 Pounds per head. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2732—Capt. Young, 6 Oct. 1753. The "widows' men" here humorously alluded to would not add much to the effectiveness of the depleted company. They were imaginary sailors, borne on the ship's books for pay and prize-money which went to Greenwich Hospital.]

So it went on. Day in, day out, at home and abroad, this ceaseless drain of men, linking hands in the decimation of the fleet with those able adjutants Disease and Death, accentuated progressively and enormously the naval needs of the country. For the apprehension and return of deserters from ships in home ports a drag-net system of rewards and conduct-money sprang into being; but this the sailor to some extent contrived to elude. He "stuck a cockade in his hat" and made shift to pass for a soldier on leave; or he laid furtive hands on a horse and set up for an equestrian traveller. In the neighbourhood of all great seaport towns, as on all main roads leading to that paradise and ultimate goal of the deserter, the metropolis, horse-stealing by sailors "on the run" prevailed to an alarming extent; and although there was a time when the law strung him up for the crime of borrowing horses to help him on his way, as it had once hanged him for deserting, the naval needs of the country eventually changed all that and brought him a permanent reprieve. Thenceforth, instead of sending the happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care felon to the gallows, they turned him over to the press-gang and so re-consigned him, penniless and protesting, to the duty he detested.