British impressment and its discontents

The historiography of naval impressment in the Anglophone world is currently one of contrasts. North American historians have taken a capacious view of the subject, linking it to popular grievances during the American Revolution and to the issue of citizenship during the early American Republic, especially during the war of 1812, when it became a source of contention between Britain and America. ¹ By contrast, British naval historians have usually narrowed the subject to a matter of manning, marginalising the social impact impressment had on seafaring communities and glossing over its legal and constitutional implications. N. A. M. Rodger, for example, interprets the trouble over impressment on land as largely a function of the friction between local and central government. If magistrates did their job, so he claims, naval recruitment would have run smoothly, for impressment was not intrinsically unpopular, only inconvenient, the consequence of a governmental failure to find an alternative and confront a strong libertarian distaste for increasing the power of the state. ² Those who were impressed, Rodger continues, ‘seem very often to have regarded it as an incident of their profession, soon to be got over’. Harsh conditions on ship are dismissed as radical propaganda, in which issues like flogging or ‘starting’ were ‘a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a range of social and political targets’. ³

This radical clamour surfaced in the post-Napoleonic era rather than before, although in fact there was plenty of passion expended on the ‘unavoidable necessity’ of impressment in earlier decades. Little of this grumbling resulted in legal contention, Rodger claims, although magistrates were not above imprisoning reckless officers ‘under colour of law’. Indeed, because impressment was ‘unquestionably legal’, the legal struggles in the ports and at King’s Bench are written out of the narrative. ⁴ In this article, I propose to challenge these assumptions about British impressment, and in so doing dispute and re-contextualise the recent argument advanced by J. Ross Dancy, that impressment was statistically, politically, and culturally insignificant. I shall begin with an incident in Bristol at the height of the American War of Independence, whose significance will unfold as the article progresses.

On 12 July 1779, James Caton, an experienced sea captain who had worked for Bristol merchants in the Mediterranean trade, was impressed at the Bristol Exchange. Despite the entreaties of some of his friends who watched the arrest, Caton was whisked away to a house of confinement on Prince Street and subsequently, on the neap tide, taken down the river Avon to the naval tender at Kingroad. The regulating officer, Captain William Hamilton, refused to allow any friends to visit Caton, either at Prince Street or at the estuary. Three of them went to the tender the following morning to consult Caton about his affairs, ‘but they were peremptorily refused admittance’. At this point their only chance of rescuing Caton from the clutches of the navy was to go to London to apply for a writ of habeas corpus, for Hamilton had refused to reconsider the impressment in an audience with the Mayor.

Caton’s friends were in a position to do this. One of them, Paul Farr, was a well-known and well-connected merchant, master of the Merchant Venturers in 1776 and the brother to a Bristol alderman. Another was Thomas Mullett, a Wilkite radical who had acted as an intermediary between the Burke and Cruger parties in the general election of 1774. The two of them travelled post-haste to London in the new express coach, and had the Recorder of Bristol, John Dunning, apply for the writ at the Court of King’s Bench. Lord Mansfield unhesitatingly obliged, and Farr, Mullett and the Bristol MP, Edmund Burke, then went straight to the Admiralty Board to demand Caton’s discharge. The Admiralty chose not to contest Mansfield’s decision and signed the appropriate order, noting that the affidavits confirmed Caton as a former commander and part-owner of several trading ships and now ‘a merchant & a man of considerable property’. ⁵ Captain Hamilton was reputedly ‘mortified and confounded’ by this decision, and prevaricated on the discharge until he was threatened with legal action. He made Caton’s friends wait six hours, but at 7pm on 15 July 1779, four days after his impressment, the ex-commander was formally released.

Why did Hamilton impress Caton? He had some experience as a regulating officer, having begun his duties in Bristol towards the end of the Seven Years’ War, resuming command of this station when impressment began in earnest in 1777. He must have known merchant captains were exempted from impressment and that the visible arrest of Caton at the Exchange would be regarded as a provocative act. A month earlier, he had released William Lewis, a freeman of Bristol on the advice of the mayor, Sir John Durbin, because it might interfere with Durbin’s efforts to launch a loyalist address to his Majesty on the war effort. Hamilton released Lewis because he had ‘left off the going to Sea some time’, grounds that could have been applied to Caton, a retired sea captain. Hamilton later assured the Admiralty that his decision to impress Caton was ‘neither actuated by private pique, nor wantonness of malice’, but done ‘with the sole view of serving my Country, as it allways has been the Chief wish of my heart’. ⁶ This confession betrayed Hamilton’s political motivations. Caton was a vocal pro-American, suspected by paranoid Tories of relaying information about naval shipbuilding in Bristol to either the French or the Americans. He was the kind of ‘Anglo-Yankee’ that had drawn the ire of John Wesley in his popular Calm Address, and Hamilton probably thought he was doing loyalists a service in muzzling, humiliating and banishing this troublemaker for the duration of the war. ⁷

In the wake of the quayside arson of John the Painter, which revitalised loyalism in Bristol, Hamilton likely calculated he could get away with it. As it was, the impressment backfired badly. Hamilton and his lieutenant were sued in court for a phenomenal £5000 by the irate ex-commander, who marshalled some legal heavyweights to press his claim. The Admiralty, for its part, washed its hands of the affair. Hamilton was told it was ‘a cause in which their Lordships cannot give any advice’. ⁸ Hamilton was lucky to come off as lightly as he did. Before a crowded court, the special jury in Bristol awarded Caton £150 and costs, a fraction of what he wanted. Even so, this totalled just over £375, a large sum for a naval captain to pay. Hamilton pleaded with the Admiralty to have the Navy Board foot the bill and redeem it slowly from his pay and expenses. The Admiralty simply took it under consideration. ⁹

The use of impressment for partisan purposes is not something British naval historians are particularly interested in confronting. With very few exceptions, one searches in vain for any sustained discussion of the press-gang infractions, whether that meant victimising troublemakers, mobilising press gangs as bruising militias in elections, ¹⁰ or making the arbitrary interventions in quayside pubs and markets that so preoccupied successive solicitors of the Admiralty. In N. A. M. Rodger’s account, impressment is characterised as a fairly humdrum, orderly affair in which irregular activity and litigation is exceptional. One would not know from The Command of the Ocean that over 700 habeas corpora were issued in the American and French Revolutionary wars for the release of seamen, or that the Admiralty consistently evaded suits that might open up the statutory or constitutional regulations governing impressment. ¹¹ In Rodger’s narrative, the legal context of impressment is cast in the most general terms, as a disagreeable but constitutional necessity. There is little effort to look at impressment as a contested terrain of legal action, whether it was an unconstitutional exercise of the prerogative power or an arbitrary exercise of state power unrestrained by the statutory or civil controls placed upon it. These questions are consistently elided in Rodger’s predominantly administrative history. They are overwhelmed by the imperatives of manning.

Yet these questions bothered contemporaries, especially as wars became longer, more frequent, more fiscally demanding, and more intrusive. The constitutionality of impressment had been challenged in the mid-seventeenth century by the Levellers and radically inspired seamen; it was questioned more widely in the eighteenth as the demand for men increased. James Oglethorpe’s Sailors Advocate denounced impressment as a violation of English freedom, incompatible with Magna Carta and the Petition of Right. Englishmen, Oglethorpe claimed, had a ‘native liberty and are born with many privileges no other Kingdom enjoys; neither their bodies nor their purses are at the King’s arbitrary disposal’. ¹² It was patently unfair that poor men should bear the burden of naval service and their families suffer the consequences, especially when it was possible for richer men to bribe their way out of trouble if they were confronted by the gangs. Published in 1728, the pamphlet ran through eight editions in 50 years, selling at an accessible price of sixpence by July 1777. By then it was supplemented with observations from Granville Sharp, who was busy mustering evidence to contest Justice Foster’s opinion in Rex v. Broadfoot [1743] about the constitutionality of impressment. This was a case in which the crew of the Bremen Factor demanded to see the lieutenant and warrant of the press gang that had tried to board the vessel off the Holmes in the Bristol Channel. ¹³ The Lieutenant was not present, the intent to press was illegal, and when the gang ignored the warning to stand off, one of its members was shot. Subsequently, Alexander Broadfoot was indicted for murder at the Bristol assizes.

In the seventeenth century, L. C. J. Holt might have regarded the killing as justifiable resistance; he would also have condoned the actions of bystanders who might have intervened to oppose an unlawful warrant. ¹⁴ This ruling potentially opened to door to collective resistance to impressment. Bristol Recorder Michael Foster chose to regard Broadfoot’s armed resistance as manslaughter, in the light of the illegally administered warrant he could do little else, but well aware of Holt’s quite capacious ruling he also sought to reinforce the legitimacy of impressment to inhibit further protests against the custom. He argued that impressment was implied in various statutes, and grounded in custom and prerogative law, a braided definition that made it difficult to launch challenges based on rights. Over time, the case became authoritative, yet Granville Sharp bridled at its argument and chose to regard it as an ‘opinion’, not a ‘judgment’. In the seventh edition of the Sailors Advocate, Sharp zoned in on one of the central claims of Justice Foster, that the legitimacy of impressment was grounded in ‘necessity’. Sharp thought this ‘a tyrant’s plea’, equivalent to the justification for ship money in the seventeenth century. It was an unbounded rationale for state action open to considerable misuse. Indeed, impressment was not only a violation of liberty, it was a scam, a money-making racket for the Admiralty who profited from protections (licensed exemptions from impressment) and for press gangs who fingered many sailors of their private trade on the homeward bound run. ¹⁵

Sharp’s additions to the pamphlet were heeded by the London public. The slippery doctrine of ‘necessity’, which we have recently seen applied to select Muslim immigrants to the USA under Trump, received a good airing in the debate at Coachmakers’ Hall at the end of the 1777, a debate which over 300 attended. We know this from Sharp’s notes and from Parker’s detailed account of the debate in the General Advertiser. ¹⁶ Indeed, the London debaters revealed a familiarity with other arguments in the Sailors Advocate, which had been extracted in the American press as well as the British. ¹⁷ All this suggests an expansive and ongoing debate about the legitimacy of impressment and considerable scepticism that Justice Foster’s opinion in 1743 was, or should be, the last word. A law fundamentally grounded in the royal prerogative was not one everyone was prepared to accept after the civil wars and the unpopular example of ship money, which, like impressment, had been upheld on the grounds of necessity or state emergency. And on the matter of due process, some continued to prefer Justice Holt’s view that resistance to unlawful arrest was legitimate and reasonable. His opinion, and also that of Justice Hale, was cited at the Old Bailey in 1779 in the trial of Mary Adey, who had fatally stabbed the constable who had come to impress her lover. ¹⁸ Here, one of the presiding justices, Sir Henry Gould of the Court of Common Pleas, accepted the argument that violence was justified if liberty was denied by illegal means. ‘Any person’, Gould declared, ‘would be justifiable in killing the man who was illegally depriving another of his liberty’. ¹⁹ These sentiments undoubtedly encouraged resistance to impressment.

Resistance there certainly was, and it could take a variety of forms: from straightforward evasion, to manipulating statutory exemptions to the press, to magisterial prevarication, to outright confrontation with the gangs. In the period 1739–1805, there were over 825 affrays over impressment, many involving large clusters of sailors and sometimes large-scale mobs. The scale and frequency of these protests makes them comparable to labour disputes and bread riots during Britain’s long eighteenth century. ²⁰ Conservative historians such as Ross Dancy have attempted to disparage these figures by suggesting they represent a miniscule proportion of the number of seamen recruited, roughly one affray for every 500 men borne in the mid-century wars, increasing thereafter; or if one was to assume that impressment accounted for a third of all seamen before 1793, a ratio of 1:165 in the mid-century wars, and perhaps 1:250 in the American War of Independence. ²¹

Yet such calculations ignore the number of participants who resisted the press gang. They routinely topped 50, and sometimes involved whole communities, particularly in places like Whitby and Shields. Moreover, the gross numbers ignore the very serious fallout in terms of major injuries and deaths. As a proportion of all confrontations they ran at 31 per cent in the major mobilisations up to 1788, declining to 24 per cent in the French Revolutionary wars and 16 per cent in the Napoleonic Wars. ²² These figures very likely underestimate the physical toll and injury in British ports where access to infirmaries and surgeons was socially uneven. They make impressment confrontations the most dangerous and fatal form of collective violence in eighteenth-century Britain, although there were periods, in the 1740s among south-east smuggling gangs and in the 1760s among Irish Whiteboys, when the battles with authorities or landlords and their agents were as violent and certainly as brutal. ²³

Quantitative evidence of this kind is arguably a blunt instrument for measuring the impact of resistance to impressment. It is quite possible that the Admiralty recruited well while sustaining serious setbacks and injuries. Liverpool and Newcastle, for example, witnessed ongoing battles with the press gangs, which sometimes stymied recruitment, yet on the resumption of war in 1803, both ports returned over a thousand men at per capita rates below the national average. ²⁴ Certainly we need more research on the particular dynamic of recruitment in ports to resolve this paradox. What is clear, though, is that the Admiralty encountered great resistance to the establishment of rendezvous during the Seven Years’ War. Opposition came from magistrates who discouraged constables from aiding impressment and cautioned gangs against exceeding their powers. Such was the case in Yarmouth, where a Justice of the Peace ‘proclaimed himself a defender of Liberty … and threaten’d to commit any officer that should be guilty of an Act of Violence’. ²⁵ Much of it came from the seamen themselves, who were often tipped off about the arrival of press warrants and made themselves scarce. In North Shields, for example, Captain O’Bryen acted discreetly in mustering his gang, but found that merchants and coal fitters had alerted seamen to its arrival so that he ‘was not able to procure one Man fitt for his Majestys Service’. The same experience confronted Captain Wheeler in Newcastle and Lieutenant Bottrell in Sunderland. One of Wheeler’s scouts was delighted at seeing ‘at least five hundred fine fellows in Blue Jackets and Trowsers’ swaggering through town, but by the time the gang was mobilised the north-east coal town was an evacuation zone. ²⁶ Similarly, Bottrell reported he had ‘the mortification to see droves of seamen leaving this place with their pillowcases and bundles of clothes’. When he ‘rummaged the Town from one End to the Other’, the return on recruitment was derisively small. ²⁷

The Tyne and Wear provided slim pickings for the Admiralty at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. In some of the other ports, the atmosphere was stridently confrontational. In Liverpool, for example, Captain Fortescue reported that he needed two men of war and some of their crews to help impress seamen in the port. When he began the task he reported that every seamen was ‘fought hard for, there being a number of men in their Town continually armed to defend themselves against my Gangs, and rescue what men they can from us’. The crew of HMS Vengeance helped raise men, ‘tho at the risque of many of our Lives, being stoned by the Mob upon us of near Three Thousand People, and opposed by every letter of Marque [privateer] that came in’. ²⁸ Four years into the war, Fortescue had yet to establish a permanent rendezvous in the town, and when he tried again in 1761 ‘a riotous Mob assembled with fire Arms’ and threatened to pull it down. Within five months, the Liverpool crowd was as good as its word. The ‘rondy’ at the Talbot Inn was gutted, despite the presence of some soldiers guarding it. And although the Mayor managed to arrest two rioters and send them to Lancaster gaol, the attempt to establish a press-gang headquarters had to be abandoned. This was not the result of civic timidity, as N. A. M. Rodger has argued; ²⁹ the popular resistance against impressment was simply too formidable.

Similar conditions prevailed in Bristol. Here, impressment was initially complicated by a divided command, with different officers stationed at the estuary of the Avon and in town. Even so, the momentum of resistance to the press gang was from the seamen themselves. In 1758, Captain Thomas Saumarez sent some of his men to impress seamen on the river, only to encounter ‘a great number of Seamen and the Bristol Mob’ arming themselves and threatening to sack the gang’s lodgings and drive them from the town. This confrontational stance boded badly for the new regulating officer in 1759, Captain Thomas Gordon, whose men were shot at and wounded in a Marsh Street affray, and whose two gangs were subsequently beaten into inactivity. One important local recruiter, a prize fighter named Cornelius Harris, who had a knack for ferreting out hidden seamen, was savagely tortured and left for dead at Long Ashton. This reprisal prompted Gordon to abandon the rendezvous in the centre of Bristol and try his luck at Kingroad, but here he found the local pilots were adept at landing homecoming crews on the north Somerset shore before they reached the estuary of the river and the tenders awaiting them. The result was that between October 1759 and October 1760 the Bristol press gangs only raised 164 men, substantially fewer than smaller ports like Gravesend and Dover, and less than half the return of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. For a city of Bristol’s size and importance – it was the leading Atlantic port at the time – this recruitment was derisively small. Merchants and magistrates were prepared to be co-operative but there was little they could do when confronted with a wall of plebeian resistance and a determination to keep press gangs at arm’s length at almost any cost. Nationally, impressment affrays increased by 170 per cent during the Seven Years’ War compared to the previous conflict; recruitment by 143 per cent. These figures, and the experience of leading ports like Bristol and Liverpool, revealed the huge difficulties the Admiralty had in laying the foundations of a land-based service. ³⁰

By the beginning of the American War of Independence an impress service was in place, although the opposition to it still remained formidable. The revised figures for impressment affrays reveal that the total number of confrontations peaked in this war, rising from 160 affrays in the Seven Years’ War to 187 during the American, or from an average of 22.9 to 26.7 per annum. In terms of actual recruitment, the frequency of confrontations was roughly the same, as was the level of violence and the number of mutinies on the tenders. ³¹ Both wars registered a decline in the number of affrays in London relative to the 1740s, although this decline was not linear, since London was the scene of some very fierce confrontations in 1776–1779, especially in the final three months of 1776 when impressment began in earnest. During the American War, roughly a third of all affrays centred on the metropolis, but as in the previous war, the confrontations were distributed widely, with a fifth emanating from the south west and 27 per cent coming from the north. Over 50 different locations witnessed substantial anti-impressment protests, a few of them inland, as at Stourbridge, where five impressed seamen escaped from the rendezvous.

So the popular pressure against impressment remained high during the American War, especially in leading maritime centres like Liverpool, Bristol and Tyneside. What was also noteworthy were the legal challenges to impressment. Such challenges were to be anticipated once parliament and the Admiralty granted exemptions to the press in an effort to make state imperatives compatible with the commercial. Vessels carrying coal and harvesting industrial resources like whale oil were given exemptions or protections from the press for their crews, and these statutory provisions were supplemented by Admiralty concessions to mercantile crews to ensure that trade was not significantly disrupted by war recruitment. By the mid-century, over 50,000 protections were in circulation, and this inevitably opened the door to disputes over entitlements, especially when the Admiralty instituted a ‘hot press’ or an extraordinary recruiting drive that overrode departmental exemptions. The scale of protections also encouraged mercantile commanders to exploit these concessions to evade impressment; by employing experienced seaman as apprentices, for example, or using the exemptions for mates of medium to large vessels for other members of the crews. The trade in protections was such that some regulating officers in the ports became cynically impatient, if not intolerant, of the exemptions and of the certification that supported them. ³²

Yet over and above these disputes, there was an increasing disposition to challenge naval impressment in the courts. Sergeant Foster’s judgment of 1743, like others before him, acknowledged that press gangs had to observe due process. They were supposed to consult the civil power when entering pubs and houses to search for potential recruits, at the very least to have constables present. Proper warrants had to be shown. These conditions were sometimes honoured in the breach, opening the door to legal challenges to the gang’s authority, to complaints of public disturbance, assault and trespass that would be handled in the local courts. What the naval records reveal, especially those of the Admiralty Solicitor, is that the public knew the law and was not intimidated from challenging the authority of lieutenants and midshipmen on their recruiting drives. ³³ Publicans and prominent tradesmen were not averse to pursuing errant press gangs in the courts, especially if there had been wanton violence and coroner’s inquests to reinforce their claims. Very few regulating officers in large ports served out the duration of a war without having to deal with mayors and magistrates about the excesses of their gangers or the indiscretions of their petty officers; and in cases where they felt the complaints or suits vexatious, they would have to seek the advice and legal aid of the Admiralty Solicitor.

Once a recruit was in the custody of the press gang and confined in a lockup or a tender, the only way to obtain his release was through a writ of habeas corpus. The use of this legal instrument had customarily been constrained by cost and accessibility. The fees were not prohibitive, but they were certainly out of the reach of an impecunious sailor. The vaunted liberty from arbitrary imprisonment was in practice a socially restrictive right, which helps explain why most seamen sought freedom through the rough justice of the street. Moreover, writs could only be processed in the London courts of Common Pleas and King’s Bench, which was inconvenient to those who lived and worked 20 miles or more from London. Before 1758, such writs could only be obtained in term time, but in that year the judges began to allow applications out of term. ³⁴ The result was that habeas corpora became a noteworthy strategy for releasing men from the navy, particularly among merchants and tradesmen likely to lose their apprentices, mates or skilled workers to the navy, even their slaves before the Somerset case of 1772. We can track the growth in applications using the legal correspondence of the Admiralty in the ADM 2 series. ³⁵ Before 1758, cases involving habeas corpora appear sparingly. But in 1759 and 1761 they topped 30 per year, rising to 65 in 1776, the first year of major press-gang activity during the American War. Although the numbers fell a little in the years 1777–1779, they started to climb once more in 1780, rising from 52 to 108 in 1781 and peaking at 124 in 1782. That meant that at the end of the war there was an application for habeas corpus on average every third day. Indeed, there were over 450 applications for habeas corpora during the American War to release seamen from the navy, a figure that troubled the navy, especially since some of the applications came from petty attorneys, small landlords of lodging houses, even relatives and seafaring friends. In 1761, the Admiralty was troubled by a woman who attended Haslar Hospital to solicit foreigners and procure writs of habeas corpus for them. At the time the Attorney Solicitor was told to approach Lord Mansfield to ‘consider whether some stop cannot be put to it, for otherwise by the number of men discharged in this manner some of His Majesty’s ships will be disabled from proceeding to sea’. ³⁶ In view of the flood of applications that confronted the Admiralty by the early 1780s, such considerations became more urgent.

By the beginning of the war against America, the Admiralty was experiencing a pincer-like resistance to impressment. On the one hand, the press gangs were confronted with robust physical resistance to the impress, with hundreds of East and West Indian seamen fending them off with ‘broomsticks, bludgeons and cutlasses’ in London in the autumn of 1776, ³⁷ and waves of protest reaching other major ports such as Bristol, Greenock, Liverpool and Newcastle within months. On the other hand, regulating officers were being legally harassed for the release of seamen, not only through writs of habeas corpus, but by demands for the release of seamen with debts of over £20, and by suits for assault, trespass and false imprisonment. Samuel Sedden reported to the Admiralty that bailiffs were besieging boats at the Nore, demanding the return of seamen who owed more than £20 to civil creditors. He was distressed that sheriff’s officers were ‘permitted to take away the Persons so arrested’ and advised their Lordships to devise some means whereby the Nore was considered open sea and outside civil jurisdiction. ³⁸

If the Admiralty Solicitor found the volume of litigation troublesome, the naval officers found it vexing. Many naval officers had a gentlemanly esprit de corps even if they were not themselves descended from the gentry. They did not care for the officious attitude of civil officers whom they thought to be socially inferior and preoccupied with low, humdrum affairs of government. In October 1778, Captain Richard Sherwin, who had impressed a deserter named John Benyon in Haverford West, was confronted by the local sheriff, Thomas Williams, ‘in a most rude un-gentleman-like manner, threatening me with Prosecutions, and much Violence, Claiming him [Benyon] as Master of one of his sloops’. Sherwin retorted: ‘I had done no more than my Duty – that he was welcome to Act as he thought proper – but Desired he would desist from his ill behavior for that I would not be treated unlike a Gentleman’. ³⁹ This did not stop Williams serving him with a writ of trespass at the Court of Exchequer. A few months earlier, Lieutenant Lowe had fallen out with two headboroughs as he was on a late-night prowl for men in London’s Shadwell. One of the headboroughs asked him what business he had at such as hour, to which Lowe pertly replied ‘that he had a Right to be upon his Duty at any Time as well as he, and that he would do it’. In the scuffle that followed, Lowe became so enraged with civil officers tugging on his collar that he drew his sword, and very likely struck one of them with the flat of it, an action that put him in very bad position with the local JP, John Sherwood. The justice charged him with assault and threatened to commit him to prison if he did not procure bail, insisting he ‘would protect the Civil Power’ from such ‘outrageous’ behaviour. ⁴⁰ For his part, Lowe was unrepentant, thinking the headboroughs an ‘anonymous and scurvy crew’, beyond contempt.

Incidents like these consumed a considerable amount of the Admiralty Solicitor’s time, especially where the headstrong attitude of naval officers and their men resulted in casualties and/or suits for heavy damages. It was often up to the solicitor whether the Admiralty would foot the bill for an officer’s indiscretions. In flagrantly partial acts of injustice, such as the impressment of James Caton in Bristol, the public took a very keen interest in the legal proceedings, hoping in that case that a hefty fine would rein in the arrogant and arbitrary actions of regulating officers and their minions. The Caton affair and the subsequent trial of Captain Hamilton engaged the attention of no less than eight London newspapers, not to mention a substantial number in the south west: from Bath, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford and Winchester, as well as Bristol. The case was also covered in national monthlies and weeklies, as well as in a few newspapers from the Midlands and Ireland. The print scrutiny of press gangs was not fuelled by narrow, partial prejudice, as some naval historians seem to think. It was wide-ranging and politically broadly based.

Of particular interest to the press was the attitude of the City of London, without whose co-operation impressment in the country’s major port would be seriously impaired. The City showed its colours in the Falklands Island crisis of 1770–1771, when a number of aldermen exercised extraordinary vigilance against the gangs’ excesses in the hope of making their jurisdiction an impressment-free zone. In this endeavour, they were helped by the Lord Mayor, Barlow Trecothick, who deliberately delayed backing press warrants, thereby creating some uncertainty over the legality of press-gang operations. ⁴¹ For radicals on the city council, press warrants were of the same status as general warrants, instruments of arbitrary state power.

During the American War of Independence, City opposition to press warrants acquired a political edge, for many radical aldermen and councillors were opposed to the war and believed the North ministry should at the very least negotiate a peace. Opposing press warrants was a way of frustrating the war effort, and once impressment on the Thames began in earnest in October 1776, three lieutenants and their gangs were taken up and committed to the Wood Street Compter for breaking the peace while carrying out their recruiting operations. They were only released when the grand jury of the City of London sessions failed to find a true bill of indictment against them, for two of the men impressed declined to stand witness against them.

The radical aldermen who committed the officers were not simply interested in hindering the press. They hoped to ‘gain a legal determination of the grand question respecting press warrants’. ⁴² Specifically, they hoped that the impressment of City freemen would provide them with an opportunity to challenge the legality of impressment, tout court, particularly if a capacious definition of ‘freemen’ could be made to stick at law, thereby vindicating British rights to freedom from arbitrary imprisonment under the Magna Carta. Given the fact that some major ports were freeman boroughs with active and potentially expanding constituencies, this could have been a huge problem, even allowing for a restrictive definition of freemen based on city charters. ⁴³ Two opportunities offered themselves: one involved a City waterman named John Tubbs; the other a Thames lighterman and liverymen of the Needlemakers’ company named John Millachip. In the first instance, the city’s lawyers requested a rule to discharge Tubbs on grounds of exemption by ‘ancient usage’, which the Admiralty and the courts took to mean the customary exemptions of watermen from impressment. Yet there were Tudor statutes and more informal agreements that compromised this exemption, and in the end the City had to settle for a solution that allowed for the discharge of the waterman without any wider claims being advanced. ⁴⁴

The second case proved equally inconclusive. A committee of city radicals attempted to claim Millachip’s release under the City charter, but after Mansfield’s ruling in the Tubbs case, the success of this strategy seemed unlikely. In fact, the City’s lawyers were very reluctant to pursue it energetically and initially applied for a writ of habeas corpus without a rule to show cause; in other words, without demanding that the Admiralty explain its refusal to discharge the lighterman. The City was only pushed to the prospect of a general determination when the Attorney General, sensing division within City ranks, presented a surprise return to the writ that disputed Millachip’s illegibility to the press as a freeman and a liveryman. Before the issue could be resolved, Millachip fell off a barge and drowned. ⁴⁵

Granville Sharp, who had been watching these cases closely through the medium of his brother on Common Council, was disappointed. He concluded that writs of habeas corpus were blunt instruments for challenging the general principle of impressment. And he was probably right. Despite the huge volume of applications for writs of habeas corpus, the Admiralty rarely put itself into a position where issues of general eligibility came into play. It ducked potentially damaging rulings by simply refusing to offer a return on the rule; instead, it allowed individual plaintiffs in sticky cases to be discharged. This meant that habeas corpus applications involved particular – rather than general – matters pertaining to impressment. From the Admiralty’s point of view, such applications were irritating and time consuming, but in the end they were not legally damaging to the principle of coerced recruitment. Indeed, under Ellenborough, a Lord Chief Justice who was very sympathetic to the navy, the Admiralty managed to build up a small body of case law on impressment that bolstered its recruitment strategies. ⁴⁶

In the middle of the American War, however, the Admiralty faced a proliferating number of legal challenges. As the Millachip case was unfolding, the navy made the mistake of trying to impress James Blake, the assistant to grocer James Axford, the deputy of John Wilkes’ ward, Farringdon Without. Axford was not a strong pro-American, but he was not about to let the navy take up his apprentice on the grounds he had taken a few voyages to the East and West Indies prior to settling down in the grocery business. He summoned a constable to prevent Blake’s confinement by the gang, and this intervention, together with that of an angry crowd around St Paul’s, facilitated Blake’s escape. ⁴⁷ Lieutenant Roberts went to the presiding magistrate, John Sawbridge, to try to recover his recruit, only to find Sawbridge extremely punctilious about impressment procedures and very willing to charge Roberts and his midshipman with assaulting Axford and Blake on the grounds that the press warrant had been irregularly administered. Axford persuaded Common Council to finance such a suit, and the Admiralty backed off, with the Solicitor General admitting it was an impolitic impressment and attempting to settle it out of court. The City declined the offer and pursued the case, and so it was left to Lord Mansfield to find the two naval officers guilty of trespass and assault, for which he fined them two nobles and a month in King’s Bench prison. ⁴⁸

The Blake case did not set a precedent, but it certainly made the news. It was the context for James Gillray’s famous print, ‘The Liberty of the Subject’. Another case in Ipswich had greater potential for stymying impressment. It involved an affray in a pub in which Thomas Nichols, a local innkeeper, was killed trying to prevent the press gang beating up the landlord. ⁴⁹ The coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of wilful murder against the gang, and it went to the Suffolk assizes at Bury St. Edmunds. There, Justice Ashhurst persuaded the jury to find a special verdict, and so it was passed on to King’s Bench for deliberation. In June 1779, the prosecutor, Mr. Jones, went on the offensive. He established that the gang had acted illegally, for the officer responsible for the warrant was completely absent from the scene, being in Harwich rather than Ipswich at the time of the affray. Consequently, Jones argued that the gang had assembled for an illegal act, making the doctrine of malice propense pertinent to every ganger present. Jones went on to claim that impressment was intrinsically violent in its operation and ‘in its origins … Derivations and Executions’ completely illegal. ⁵⁰ The presiding judge, John Willes, admitted the impressment had been irregularly executed, but he would not support greater claims, believing the press gang had not intentionally sought bloodshed. In any case, because the light in the room was poor, it was impossible to determine who was actually responsible for the death of Nichols. Willes, in his wisdom, therefore discharged the gang.

This was a disappointing verdict for those who wanted to establish the right of lawful resistance to irregular impressments along the lines of L. C. J. Holt. But, like the Caton case with which this article began, the Ipswich matter intensified the press gang’s unpopularity. In the summer of 1779, in fact, press gangs were under attack from many quarters. Between 1775 and 1779, there were regular confrontations between the gangs and seafarers in major ports: 46 in London, and a further 25 on Tyneside and Merseyside. Of these affrays, over a quarter involved fatalities. As the demand for more men rose with the entry of France and then Spain into the war, the Admiralty’s situation became dire. It found it could not man its fleets to confront the prospect of a Bourbon invasion. Consequently, less than two weeks after Willes’ judgment on the Ipswich case, the Attorney General, Alexander Wedderburn, rose in the Commons to move a bill for ‘removing difficulties’ in the manning of the navy. ⁵¹ The bill suspended all exemptions to the press, statutory as well as departmental, for five months, retrospectively from 16 June 1779. This had to be done, Wedderburn maintained, to prevent a torrent of litigation in the courts. The bill also suspended habeas corpus, making it impossible for individuals to appeal to King’s Bench for the recovery of impressed men and to sue the Admiralty for unfair arrest, even in the week or so before the bill actually became law. Essentially, the bill left every ship and every person who ‘used the sea’ or ‘worked on rivers’ at the mercy of the press gangs since the government proclaimed an embargo on outward-bound shipping at the same time. To man new ships and disarm the formidable resistance to impressment, the Admiralty broke the law and then asked for a retrospective indemnity.

The bill encountered some opposition from both houses, largely because it was contrary ‘to every principle of law justice and humanity’ and rushed through at the midnight hour. Sir Philip Jennings Clerke tartly remarked that ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolate’ exemptions were swept away on grounds of ‘necessity’, but Wedderburn insisted that ‘the distresses or miseries of a few ought not to be permitted to controul the safety and preservation of the state’. With a looming threat of invasion, MPs acquiesced to the emergency legislation, although the noblemen insisted that their own watermen be protected. ⁵² God forbid their lordships should ever be inconvenienced. The result was that 6500 seamen were recruited in this grand press, although London brought in proportionately fewer than other large ports, only 11 per cent of the total, which suggests that recruiting officers there were very leery of impressing in such a contested terrain. ⁵³ Nine serious affrays occurred across the country during this peak period of recruiting. Returning whalers battled gangs in Shields in an affray that wounded many and cost two lives. Cornish tinners defied the legislation and rescued men, prompting a reading of the Riot Act. Even after the expiry of the Act, the anger of seamen was registered in the large number who refused to volunteer to fight the Bourbon powers, whose fleets threatened the sugar islands. From October 1780 to October 1781, a time when Britain lost one Caribbean island after another to the French, 53.8% of the 13,000 seamen recruited for the war onshore had to be impressed. ⁵⁴

During the American War, the Admiralty survived a series of legal challenges to its recruiting, and in 1777, with the government’s help, it defeated a motion from Temple Luttrell to replace impressment with a voluntary, well-paid registry. Yet it failed to win the assent of seamen to the principle of impressment, even in a period when Britain’s empire was crumbling in America and threatened in the Caribbean. Impressment was essentially propped up by the judges and ministerial supporters in the Commons. Seamen’s liberties went by the board when ‘necessity’ beckoned, as these lines sardonically noted:

While privilege shall be the law o’th’land

Their Habeas Corpus and Magna Charta

Shall magna verba prove, or magna f—ta. ⁵⁵

It therefore comes as something of a surprise to learn that during the next war, this time against revolutionary France, volunteering soared and impressment dwindled to insignificance – at least according to J. Ross Dancy. From a sample of muster books for ships commissioned and manned in Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth for the period 1793–1801, Dancy estimates that 73 per cent of all recruits volunteered, 9 per cent entered under the Quota Acts of 1795–1796, and only 16 per cent were pressed. These figures bundle landsmen with seamen in counting the number of volunteers. They also factor in the large numbers who are listed as being ‘turned over’ from other vessels (41 per cent of the total) by assuming that the proportion of volunteers to pressed men in this category would correspond to that of the previous three years. This ‘closed circuit’ factoring is open to the objection that seamen were not necessarily turned over from the same fleet – it did not hold at Trafalgar, for example. And lumping landsmen with seamen is not very helpful if one is interested in the reaction of seamen to impressment. If one recalculated the figures, using for the moment the factored returns, then the proportion of volunteer seamen to impressed men is three to one. This is still high. It is higher than the reliable figures Roland Usher produced for the American War, which ran at roughly two to one and even lower when landsmen are eliminated. ⁵⁶ It is also conspicuously higher than the returns of Admiral Arthur Phillip in the early years of the Napoleonic Wars. This return, which involved over 14,800 seamen from 30 ports in England and Scotland, reveals that the proportion of volunteer seamen to impressed men was 56:44; and if seamen recruited by the civil power are included, almost 1:1. ⁵⁷ So Dancy’s figures look exceptional. They are not the rule, despite Dancy’s willingness to generalise from them about how misled historians have been over impressment.

So why were there so many volunteers in the French Revolutionary wars? And are Dancy’s figures actually reliable? He sets great store by them, but they are actually not as rock solid as he imagines. Halfway through his book he actually admits that seamen entered as volunteers in the muster books might not have been what they appeared. ⁵⁸ This is because the Admiralty tacitly acknowledged the discretionary powers of local regulating officers to determine who volunteered and who was pressed, instructing commanders at the naval stations to ensure that ‘spontaneous’ volunteers had the berth they requested, leaving ‘reluctant’ volunteers to be assigned anywhere. Between the lines this meant that the Admiralty recognised that men cornered by the gangs were being allowed to volunteer, partly as a face-saving strategy for the gangs themselves, who learnt from bitter experience how difficult it was to handle mobs of recalcitrant seamen. Such practice was not unprecedented. One admiral in Portsmouth commented in 1741 that seamen ‘are all volunteers as soon as they find they can’t get away’. Admiral Smith thought the same in 1755. In his view, ‘seven out of eight [volunteers] take that name only for the bounty, and are as improper to be trusted as those who appear as impressed men’. ⁵⁹ However exaggerated Smith’s observation might appear, the practice does seem to have been widely connived at, or tolerated, at the beginning of the French Revolutionary wars, and it wreaks havoc upon Dancy’s figures. A coerced volunteer is an oxymoron. In admitting they existed, Dancy hoists himself by his own petard.

Why did the Admiralty openly relax the distinction between volunteer and pressed man in 1793? It is not a question naval historians have cared to ask. Various factors come into play. The Admiralty needed a rapid mobilisation to confront revolutionary France. It did so in a polarising climate in which there was considerable sympathy for France in radical circles, in which Painite ideas were circulating across an expanding and imponderable frontier. In the circumstances, the Impress Service could not afford the kind of fallout it had experienced in the previous war, when press gangs had to confront violent opposition on the quays and legal prevarication and prosecution in the courts. Even before press warrants were issued, the Admiralty had a taste of what might ensue on Tyneside, where striking seamen were up in arms about the possibility of impressment and, under the auspices of a Magna Carta club, circulated their ideas about its unconstitutionality to other ports. ⁶⁰ Mass resistance to impressment and general naval unrest could seriously handicap the war effort. Especially troublesome were the mutinies aboard tenders, with the result that the navy scrambled to find ways to improve conditions in holds that confined both impressed men and volunteers in unhealthy, fetid conditions, especially when adverse winds prevented the vessels from sailing promptly. In January 1793, Lieutenant Okes of Newcastle offered his thoughts on how the security of the tenders might be improved, which the Admiralty quickly passed on to the Navy Board. ⁶¹

Yet alongside the practical considerations for a smooth mobilisation, there were broader ideological considerations at stake. In the months prior to the war, there had been some unprecedented efforts to persuade the lower classes of the benefits of loyalty to the British constitution. Cheap tracts and prints contrasted the anarchy of a France under the Terror with the commercial prosperity and liberty of living in Britain. Approximately 1500 loyalist societies sprang up across the country, sometimes aggressively soliciting signatures door to door. In some places, they were accompanied by ritual executions of Tom Paine, convicted in absentia in December 1792 of seditious libel for writing the Rights of Man. These mock executions varied in format, but they were accompanied by festive cheer of some sort, barrels of beer to toast ‘King and Country’, even an ox roasted whole. These events were often patronised by local squires or financed by public subscriptions from the middling sort, offering the labouring poor some festive cheer in what had proved to be a hard winter after a failed harvest. Although loyalist propaganda was often couched in the language of political economy, in which market forces would generate growth that would ultimately percolate downwards, it was not without its paternalist variants. As one remarked: ‘It must be right for the Lower & Poor Class to see that the Opulent are willing to protect & provide for them’. ⁶² This was all the more necessary because 1792–1793 saw precarious shortages in the older industrial districts of the south west and food riots as far afield as Inverness, Dundee, Leicester, Yarmouth, Swansea and Cornwall. In Yarmouth, seamen had been involved in the market protests and the rescue of rioters from prison. Two of them, Thomas Bully and John Houghton, were sentenced to two years in prison. ⁶³ Within this context, anti-Painite parades served a double function: they excoriated popular republicanism as a foreign virus of illusory freedom, while providing festive doles for the poor. In fact, we could say a triple function, because there was a significant cluster of Paine effigy-burnings in trouble spots: on Tyneside and in the south west where there was a potentially explosive conjunction of political and industrial grievances; and in Manchester and its environs, where radical clubs and a press were establishing themselves. Here, loyalists intervened aggressively to command political and social space and stem the tide of radicalism. ⁶⁴

The ne plus ultra of loyalism, of course, was a commitment to defend the nation. Loyalists publicly encouraged ‘every true Briton’ to ‘shed his blood’ in defence of the constitution. By the time war was declared, loyalist associations were busily advertising bounties for seamen and raising funds for the families of volunteers ‘who shall die in the noble cause of fighting for their King and Country’. ⁶⁵ These top-ups were extremely important to heads of families on the edge of destitution and an inducement to volunteer. Two bounties and two months’ advance pay could go a long way for a struggling family. And because volunteering was in a way the litmus test of popular loyalism, the Admiralty and the press gangs went a long way towards facilitating it.

Two examples must suffice as to how this practice worked. The first, and most explicit, concerns Captain William Carthew, the commander of the armed sloop Prince Edward at the Nore. He wrote to the Admiralty in September 1793 to report that he had received 19 seamen who had come to him as pressed men, but who were ‘desirous of becoming Volunteers’. He thought they were ‘worthy of such indulgence’ and that they ought to get the bounty as well ‘for the purpose of more effectually attatching [sic] them to the Service’. ⁶⁶ Here is a commander using his discretion to change the rank of seamen, alerting the Admiralty to the fact. In my second example, the discretion is more implicit. It concerns the regulating officer at Liverpool, Captain Smith Child, whose recruiting practices were compromised by divisions in local government and the eagerness of Clayton Tarleton, the outgoing mayor and prominent slave trader, to back press warrants before the Impress Service was ready to receive recruits. As a result of a few hasty impressments and civilian inaction, a ‘lawless rabble’ of carpenters and seamen destroyed the two rendezvous in town, an action that made Child think twice about acting in a heavy-handed way. Child had already received some complaints from volunteers on the Ann tender, who more or less threatened a mutiny unless they were paid the corporation bounty before they left for Plymouth, and when he was asked by the Admiralty to begin a hot press in November 1793, he backed off. He told their lordships he had little confidence in the new mayor or his colleagues. ‘I am sorry to say a great number of the most respectable merchants are disloyal’, he complained, ‘and the present Mayor is elected by the Mob, and dictated to by them’. ⁶⁷ In the circumstances, he feared ‘there is too much reason to apprehend that prest Men put on board the receiving tender would be liberated and there is too much reason to suppose that an attempt to Press on shore in our present situation would occasion the Death of every officer and the men under them’. Smith Child’s discretion was reflected in the returns. During the first 12 months of war, he delivered 976 volunteer landsmen, 688 volunteer seamen, but only 136 pressed men. ⁶⁸ This was a singularly smaller return than in 1776–1780 or 1803–1805, when the war resumed after Amiens. On those occasions, the proportion of impressed men to all recruits in Liverpool, including landsmen, was 78 per cent and 36 per cent respectively, not 7.5%. The inference that can be drawn is that Child entered many potentially pressed men as volunteers. He could not, or would not, take the heat of a climate so hostile to impressment.

Dancy admits that there was ‘a vast grey area between a “spontaneous” and a “coerced” volunteer’, although he continues to regard volunteering as a patriotic endeavour and even claims it was ‘likely the greatest popular movement in Great Britain’. ⁶⁹ Certainly the newspapers puffed up stories of volunteers marching happily to the recruiting stations with flags flying and drums beating. ⁷⁰ They were good for public morale. Many early reports focused on the Plymouth area, a recruiting ground for loyalism despite, or because of, the disaffection in the dockyards, and it may well be that some seamen were swept up by the loyalist junketing. At the effigy-burning of Paine in Plymouth in early December 1792, recruiting parties were much in evidence, and at Plymouth Dock, the government departments staged a huge jamboree that drew the attention of thousands. ⁷¹ Yet is worth reminding ourselves that Devon was a county of industrial decline and deepening poverty, with a precarious food supply that was aggravated by the demands of the navy itself. It was the scene of some very substantial market interventions in 1795–1796, when rioters sold goods at ‘fair’ prices, sometimes with the help of militiamen, as at Plymouth and Plymouth Dock. ⁷²

Dearth bred volunteers. This was particularly the case in Ireland, where over-population, under-employment and heavier taxes on conacre land made Irish peasants turn to the navy in thousands. Few of these men had any particular attachment to the British establishment; those who were political were keen to challenge the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. With the passing of a militia act in 1793 that conscripted Catholic peasants into the service of the state, Defenderism was resurgent and rife. ⁷³ At the same time, the Protestant volunteer movement of Belfast and Dublin showed great sympathy for the French and was beginning to regard itself as a guardian of national liberation. Dublin Castle found itself increasingly incapable of controlling the heady mix of anti-government, sectarian anger that surfaced from this crisis. ⁷⁴ To compound matters, Dublin city was reeling from a credit crisis and escalating food prices, which induced many to enlist out of need. ‘So great are the distresses of the working poor from their being discharged from their labor in consequence of the great shock that private credit has received’, remarked the Dublin Chronicle, ‘that many of them are now actually starving. Last Monday a number of manufacturers who are out of employment went down to the quays to enter as able-bodied landsmen’. ⁷⁵ Distress and disaffection influenced the decisions of the recruiting officer, Lambert Brabazon, who entered thousands as a safety valve. Brabazon was not shy of impressing seamen as his conduct later in the war would reveal. Yet quite astoundingly, in the first six months of 1793, he enlisted over 2100 volunteers and not one pressed man. ⁷⁶ This was surely by design.

The lesson to be learned from this is that number crunching requires close contextualising for decent explanations to emerge. We do not see much of this in Dancy’s account of the volunteers. One further example must suffice. This concerns the Sea Fencibles, the naval volunteer force formed in 1798 and expanded in 1803 when the threat of a Napoleonic invasion loomed large. Dancy says very little about this organisation despite the fact it is the naval volunteer force par excellence. He just lumps it in the patriotic camp, as an endorsement of his general comment that volunteering was the ‘greatest popular movement’ of the time, a patriotic flourish that owes a lot to Cookson and Colley. ⁷⁷

The story of the Sea Fencibles is that volunteering came in many guises and did not fit one prototype. The government had anticipated that a coastal volunteer force could be created out of the small craft which thronged the coast, operated by fishermen, pilots, coastal trowmen and perhaps the odd sailor who was really too old for the navy. The Admiralty presumed these men were settled members of their communities, with a stake in their craft, people whom the navy would not normally have recruited, although later it demanded quotas from some of them. What the Admiralty did not bargain for was that seamen enrolled in the Sea Fencibles to escape the navy. Admiral Phillip attempted to deal with this problem in 1803, recognising, for example, that the mackerel and lobster fishermen of Eastbourne and Pevensey were ‘in general [a] very stout and able set of young men’ fit for navy duty rather than some auxiliary force. ⁷⁸ Phillip found that many pilots and fishermen eluded him, and the Admiralty realised he was unable to entangle the diversity of coastal seafarers in ways that would benefit both navy and the Sea Fencibles. It therefore sent Admiral George Berkeley to investigate. He revealed what Phillip had sensed and what the Admiralty feared. The Sea Fencibles offered great opportunities for evading naval service. High rates of evasion, in particular, could be found in Salcombe and most Cornish villages. Berkeley wrote despairingly: ‘A very considerable portion of the finest Seafaring Men have sheltered themselves under the protection of the Sea Fencible System, and have by this means evaded all the services to which every other class of men in the country are subject’. In fact it angered Berkeley to see that ‘exemption from the Impress & Ballot is now claimed as a sort of Right by these men, established by custom & rivetted by the Sea Fencible System’. On ‘many parts of the coast’, he noted, ‘every sort of service has been absolutely refused which could in the least interfere with their private occupations’. ⁷⁹

These men were prepared to defend their country in the last resort. Yet they did not have the church-and-king zeal of an ardent loyalist, the sort of zealotry John Reeves craved and General Maitland hoped for when he said seafarers evinced ‘every degree of attachment to their country, & to the cause in which we are engaged’. What they had was a commitment to their pays, their neck of the woods, and under circumstances that would not radically change their lives. What they resented, and Maitland recognised this, was the intrusive authoritarianism of the navy: to be forced into the navy and serve without leave, to face harsh and arbitrary discipline, something that led to the dismissal of over a hundred officers in the Spithead mutiny of 1797, to suffer poor pay and no pay at all for seamen who were wounded. These were smouldering grievances that kept many seamen at arms length from the royal navy, even if it meant working in mines and quarries. Maitland thought that many had a deep aversion to enlisting and would ‘abscond and submit to every distress rather than put themselves in the way of being pressed’. ⁸⁰

The enquiries into the Sea Fencibles at the turn of the century, then, revealed the extent to which seamen were evading the press gangs. Confrontations with the gangs continued. The resumption of war in 1803 generated the highest number of annual affrays for the period 1738–1805, with 106 breaking out across the whole country, from Guernsey to the Shetlands. The heaviest concentrations were in London and the Thames (30) and the North Sea ports (21), followed by the south west (18). Apart from 1777, in which there were 57 reported affrays, this was more than twice the number in any single year. 1803 revealed the extent to which hostility to impressment remained a dramatically potent issue. Once again, it helps to put the abnormally low figures of impressed men in the early 1790s into perspective. Those low figures, I have argued, were the consequence of efforts by the Admiralty and their regulating officers on the ground to manage recruitment seamlessly, so that it appeared that the British seamen were indubitably loyal, ready to risk their lives against the revolutionary virus of an insurgent France. The navy did not want the embarrassment of contested recruitment at a time when political loyalties in the country were uncertain. The problem with British naval historians is that they too frequently ignore the political and economic contexts in which recruitment takes place. There is no politics of recruitment, only a manning problem. ⁸¹ Yet a better narrative and politics of recruitment is necessary if we are to move beyond triumphal histories of naval power to a consideration of how the late-Stuart and Georgian state operated in wartime. What impressment tracked was the struggle of coastal people to assert their ‘birthright’. In the law courts and at the rivers and quays, seafarers, maritime workers and their families struggled with a system in which the state demanded their liberty to defend others. Indeed, the resurgence of British power in the eighteenth century was reliant on, and facilitated by, its command of the ocean; and this, in some very crucial measure, rested on coercion.