History of Press Gang


As I was born and bred in Portsmouth, England which is the home of the Royal Navy, I thought I would write about the press gang and its history. Some commentators have called press gangs an urban myth but researching its history has taught me that press gangs really did impress merchant seaman and unemployed sailors. In England, impressment began as early as the Anglo-Saxon period and was used extensively by the Royal Navy under Elizabeth I, Charles I, and Oliver Cromwell.

"Press gangs" forcibly seized and carried individuals into service in wartime, as a means of crewing English warships, although legal sanction for the practice goes back officially to the time of Edward I of England.
The Impress Service was formed to force sailors to serve on naval vessels (there was no concept of joining the navy as a fixed career path for non-officers at the time), seamen were attached to ships for the duration of its commission. They were encouraged to stay in the Navy after the commission but could leave to seek other employment when the ship was paid off.

Impressment was based on the legal power of the King to call men to military service, as well as to recruit volunteers (who were paid a bounty upon joining, unlike pressed men). it flourished in port towns everywhere, as "recruiters" searched through waterfront boardinghouses, brothels, and taverns. They often chose vagabonds or prisoners. Impressed men were forced into service through violence or coercion and were held to their duty by brutal discipline.
The Royal Navy impressed many British merchant sailors, as well as some sailors from other nations. People liable to impressment were eligible men of seafaring habits between the ages of 18 and 45 years, though, albeit rarely, non-seaman were impressed as well.
In Elizabethan times impressment as a form of recruitment became a statute and with the introduction of the Vagrancy Act in 1597, men of disrepute were drafted into service.
In 1703 an act was passed limiting the impressment of men to only those under 18 years of age. A further act in 1740 raised the age to 55. Although no foreigner could be pressed, if they married a British woman, or had worked on a British merchant ship for two years they lost their protection. Some governments, including Britain, issued "Protections" against impressment which had to be carried on the person at all times but in times of crisis the Admiralty would order a "Hot Press" which meant that no one was exempt.



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The press gang would try to find men aged between 15 and 55 with seafaring or river-boat experience but this was not essential and those with no experience were called "Landsmen". From 1740, Landsmen were legally exempt from impressment but this was ignored in wartime unless the person seized was an apprentice or a "gentleman". Two Landsmen were considered by captains to be the equivalent of an Able Seamen. If a Landsman was able to prove his status to the Admiralty he was usually released. A man in the street would first be asked to volunteer and if he refused he was often plied with alcohol or simply knocked out and taken. A commonly held belief of a trick used in taverns was to surreptitiously drop a Kings shilling ("Prest Money") into his drink as by "finding" the shilling in his possession he was deemed to have volunteered, and that this led to some tavern owners putting glass bottoms in their tankards. However, this is another urban legend; press officers were subject to fines for using trickery and a volunteer had a "cooling-off" period in which to change his mind.

One of the largest impressment operations occurred in the spring of 1757 in New York City, then still under British colonial rule. Three thousand British soldiers cordoned off the city, and plucked clean the taverns and other sailors' gathering places. "All kinds of tradesmen and Negroes" were hauled in, nearly eight hundred in all. Four hundred of these were "retained in the service."
The Royal Navy also used impressment extensively in British North America from 1775 to 1815. Its press gangs sparked resistance, riots, and political turmoil in seaports such as Halifax, St John's, and Quebec City. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy extended the reach of its press gangs into coastal areas of British North America by the early nineteenth century. In response, sailors and residents fought back with a range of tactics. They sometimes reacted violently.
The riots in St John's in 1794 and Halifax in 1805 led to a prohibition on impressment on shore for much of the Napoleonic Wars. The protest came from a wide swath of the urban community, including elites, rather than just the vulnerable sailors, and had a lasting negative impact on civil–naval relations in what became Canada. The local communities did not encourage their young men to volunteer for the Royal Navy.
In addition to impressment, England also used the quota System (or The Quod) from 1795 to 1815, whereby each county was required to supply a certain number of volunteers, based on its population and the number of its seaports. Unlike impressment, the Quota System often resulted in criminals serving on board ships as counties who failed to meet their quota offered prisoners the option of completing their sentence or volunteering.

Impressment was strongly criticized by those who believed it to be contrary to the English constitution; at the time, unlike many of its continental rivals, England did not conscript its subjects for any other military service, aside from a brief experiment with army impressment in 1778 to 1780. Though the public opposed conscription in general, impressment was repeatedly upheld by the courts, as it was deemed vital to the strength of the navy and, by extension, to the survival of the realm.

The Royal Navy also impressed seamen from inbound British merchant ships at sea, though this was done by individual warships, rather than the Impress Service. Impressment, particularly press gangs, were consistently unpopular with the British public (as well as in the American colonies), and local officials often acted against them, to the point of imprisoning officers from the Impressment Service, or opposing them by force of arms.
The impressment of seamen from American ships caused serious tensions between England and the United States in the years leading up to the war of 1812 when England burnt down the old White House. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, England ended the practice, and it has never been resumed.


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