Abstract
Googling images of the Royal Navy’s notorious press gang throws up numerous depictions of innocent men being ripped from the bosom of their wives, family and community by the evil machinations of the impress service to feed the navy’s unquenchable thirst for manpower during the long wars with France. This has created a problem for historians, for if this picture is accurate and unwilling impressed men made up such a large proportion of the Royal Navy’s landsmen, ordinary and able seamen, why were they so effective in naval operations with the enemy? In fact, the title of Dancy’s book should be ‘Manpower problems’, for his important study addresses two historical issues. The first is the functional one of how did the navy obtain its manpower? The second is cultural, how the ‘myth of the press gang’ came to be created and how that inaccurate portrayal is now being ripped apart by the velocity of digital humanities.
To deal with the myth busting first, the view of many generations of historians is that the Royal Navy relied heavily upon compulsion to force many British and foreign citizens to serve in its warships to solve the eternal problem of finding enough men to crew its ships. Poor pay and ‘the image of a warship as a floating hell, where sadistic officers kept men in appalling conditions’ (p. 63) dissuaded many from volunteering – at least according to much of the historiography which estimates the navy relied upon volunteers for as little as 25% and no more than 50% of its manpower. The remaining black hole was, so it must follow, filled by impressment. Much of the ‘traditional’ historiography, Dancy argues, has its roots in the liberal reforming agenda starting in the 1830s and propagated by those who had never been aboard a Royal Navy warship (pp. 63–65). It was continued throughout the twentieth century because historians relied too heavily upon a small number of sensationalist memoirs published post 1815 within the reforming context and because many naval historians have felt compelled to tie history with contemporary policy within the context of empire, merchant shipping and naval expenditure.
That has always led to a fundamental problem for historians working in this period, for we are led to believe that Britain was fighting the good fight for liberal freedoms against the tyrannical, violent despotism of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Of course, that is as much a myth as ‘the myth of the press gang’ itself. As recent work by Roger Knight in his Britain Against Napoleon (London, 2013) has shown, in some respects while fighting for liberal freedoms Britain actually became more repressive than France. While that might be true in a number of ways, it is certainly not in terms of the problem of manning the Royal Navy. Work by the doyen of modern naval historians, N.A.M. Rodger, and others has gone some way to question the duties, impact and reputation of the Royal Navy’s impress service, better known to layman as the ‘press gang’, and have questioned the popular imagery associated with it, but it has taken until now and Dancy’s in-depth statistical analysis to lay a new keel for others to build upon.
To return to the first problem, in order to answer exactly how did the Royal Navy obtain its men Dancy has implemented a qualitative statistical analysis of the seamen and petty officers that made up 75% of naval manpower. They were always the most problematic to find, and during the entire age of sail the navy never had enough of them to man all its ships in wartime. (There were, in comparison, always too many officers available for posts and a large part, sometimes up to 50%, of officers were without employment.) Dancy draws his data from a sample of Royal Navy muster books of ships that were commissioned at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth between 1793 and 1801. The muster books from three ships from each year from each port were analysed and data extracted. This might sound like a small sample, but the process created a database that has details of 27,174 men, or around 10% of the total number of men who served in the navy between 1793 and 1802. Dancy also constructed a smaller database from the 1795 Port Quota Act returns from London to compare results.
Dancy’s method and work is impressive, marking as it does the first attempt to utilize the power of digital humanities with regard to big data problems such as gaining an accurate picture of manning the Royal Navy. After explaining the intricacies of British naval administration and his statistical method, the analysis of the data falls into three major chapters dealing in turn with volunteers, impressment and the much maligned Quota Acts.
As Dancy admits, his method is by no means complete, for example his statistical analysis does not cover the problems of manning on overseas stations in the Mediterranean, West Indies, North America or India. Nor does his data cover the period after 1802. This is important, for the Royal Navy post-1805 evolved in a manner which made it a very different organization from the pre-1805 period. Before 1805 the role of the navy was to secure control of global sea-lanes; after 1805 it was about exercising that command to contribute to the defeat of France. As a consequence, major changes occurred to materiel (with an increase in the number of smaller ships) and the resultant changes to the role of officers, with an increased number of junior commands.
Nevertheless, Dancy’s findings are compelling and (especially for my first-year students studying British naval power in the age of Nelson at Exeter) at times surprising. In each year between 1796 and 1801 ‘volunteers accounted for around 70% of seamen aboard British warships’ (p. 78). Impressment did have a role to play, accounting for 23% of able and ordinary seamen and 7% of landsmen. Here it is clear that ‘press gangs sought skilled men, rather than scraping the dregs of society for anyone they could find’ (p. 40). When general volunteering and the 1795 Quota Act volunteers are taken together for the 1793 to 1801 period, they comprised around 82% of seamen aboard warships. The same can be said for petty officers where volunteers and Quota Act volunteers made up 80%.
Dancy’s excellent study goes beyond debunking myths about the impress service that still remain popular today to also analyse many of the issues historians continue to face about humanizing the Royal Navy of this time – in other words, to learn more about who served and why they did so. His data shows that the majority of seamen were unmarried, in their early twenties, and more than 51% of the lower deck were English. Of the other nationalities, the much maligned Irish comprised only 19% (much lower than previously thought), 10% were Scots and 3% Welsh. ‘Foreigners’ provided only 8%, with 9% of unknown origin. Of the Irishmen who entered the navy between 1793 and 1801, 45% joined ships at Plymouth which was also the major destination for Welsh sailors (54%). Moreover, the data has shown that Scots made up 12% and ‘foreigners’ 11% of able seamen. As with the impress service, which was used more to ‘improve the skill quality, not quantity, of the men aboard’ (p. 2), men who were not English were valued by the navy for their seamanship. The Royal Navy of this period was interested in a certain skill set, rather than just sweeping up men off the streets.
In this book Dancy has shown how historians can exploit digital humanities. By doing so he has implemented a sea-change in the way we view how the Royal Navy manned its ships. By stating that ‘volunteers made up the vast majority of men aboard British warships throughout the French Revolutionary Wars’ (p. 39), he has well and truly debunked ‘The Myth of the Press Gang’.