The servants of the Admiralty lay in wait for all merchantmen and
traders; there were many instances of vessels returning home after
long absence, and laden with rich cargo, being boarded within a
day's distance of land, and so many men pressed and carried off,
that the ship, with her cargo, became unmanageable from the loss of
her crew, drifted out again into the wild wide ocean, and was
sometimes found in the helpless guidance of one or two infirm or
ignorant sailors; sometimes such vessels were never heard of more.
The men thus pressed were taken from the near grasp of parents or
wives, and were often deprived of the hard earnings of years, which
remained in the hands of the masters of the merchantman in which
they had served, subject to all the chances of honesty or
dishonesty, life or death. Now all this tyranny (for I can use no
other word) is marvellous to us; we cannot imagine how it is that a
nation submitted to it for so long, even under any warlike
enthusiasm, any panic of invasion, any amount of loyal subservience
to the governing powers. When we read of the military being called
in to assist the civil power in backing up the press-gang, of
parties of soldiers patrolling the streets, and sentries with
screwed bayonets placed at every door while the press-gang entered
and searched each hole and corner of the dwelling; when we hear of
churches being surrounded during divine service by troops, while the
press-gang stood ready at the door to seize men as they came out
from attending public worship, and take these instances as merely
types of what was constantly going on in different forms, we do not
wonder at Lord Mayors, and other civic authorities in large towns,
complaining that a stop was put to business by the danger which the
tradesmen and their servants incurred in leaving their houses and
going into the streets, infested by press-gangs.
Whether it was that living in closer neighbourhood to the
metropolis--the centre of politics and news--inspired the
inhabitants of the southern counties with a strong feeling of that
kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations; or
whether it was that the chances of capture were so much greater at
all the southern ports that the merchant sailors became inured to
the danger; or whether it was that serving in the navy, to those
familiar with such towns as Portsmouth and Plymouth, had an
attraction to most men from the dash and brilliancy of the
adventurous employment--it is certain that the southerners took the
oppression of press-warrants more submissively than the wild
north-eastern people. For with them the chances of profit beyond
their wages in the whaling or Greenland trade extended to the lowest
description of sailor. He might rise by daring and saving to be a
ship-owner himself. Numbers around him had done so; and this very
fact made the distinction between class and class less apparent; and
the common ventures and dangers, the universal interest felt in one
pursuit, bound the inhabitants of that line of coast together with a
strong tie, the severance of which by any violent extraneous
measure, gave rise to passionate anger and thirst for vengeance. A
Yorkshireman once said to me, 'My county folk are all alike. Their
first thought is how to resist. Why! I myself, if I hear a man say
it is a fine day, catch myself trying to find out that it is no such
thing. It is so in thought; it is so in word; it is so in deed.'