The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore | Page 4

form. The ancient
pains and penalties were indeed no more; but for the back of the sailor
who was so ill-advised as to defy the press there was another rod in
pickle. He could now be taken forcibly.
For side by side with the negative change involved in the abolition of
the old punishments, there had been in progress, throughout the
intervening centuries, a positive development of far worse omen for the
hapless sailor-man. The root-principle of direct coercion, necessarily
inherent in any system that seeks to foist an arbitrary and obnoxious
status upon any considerable body of men, was slowly but surely
bursting into bud. The years that had seen the unprested seaman freed
from the dread of the yardarm and the horrors of the forepeak, had bred
a new terror for him. Centuries of usage had strengthened the arm of
that hated personage the Press-Master, and the compulsion which had
once skulked under cover of a threat now threw off its disguise and
stalked the seafaring man for what it really was--Force, open and
unashamed. The dernier ressort of former days was now the first resort.
The seafaring man who refused the king's service when "admonished"
thereto had short shrift. He was "first knocked down, and then bade to
stand in the king's name." Such, literally and without undue
exaggeration, was the later system which, reaching the climax of its
insolent pretensions to justifiable violence in the eighteenth century, for
upwards of a hundred years bestrode the neck of the unfortunate sailor
like some monstrous Old Man of the Sea.
Outbursts of violent pressing before the dawn of the eighteenth century,
though spasmodic and on the whole infrequent, were not entirely

unknown. Times of national stress were peculiarly productive of them.
Thus when, in 1545, there was reason to fear a French invasion,
pressing of the most violent and unprecedented character was openly
resorted to in order to man the fleet. The class who suffered most
severely on that occasion were the fisher folk of Devon, "the most part"
of whom were "taken as marryners to serve the king." [Footnote: State
Papers, Henry VIII.--Lord Russell to the Privy Council, 22 Aug. 1545.
Bourne, who cites the incident in his Tudor Seamen, misses the
essential point that the fishermen were forcibly pressed.]
During the Civil Wars of the next century both parties to the strife
issued press warrants which were enforced with the utmost rigour. The
Restoration saw a marked recrudescence of similar measures. How
great was the need of men at that time, and how exigent the means
employed to procure them, may be gathered from the fact, cited by
Pepys, that in 1666 the fleet lay idle for a whole fortnight "without any
demand for a farthing worth of anything, but only to get men." The
genial diarist was deeply moved by the scenes of violence that followed.
They were, he roundly declares, "a shame to think of."
The origin of the term "pressing," with its cognates "to press" and
"pressed," is not less remarkable than the genesis of the violence it so
aptly describes. Originally the man who was required for the king's
service at sea, like his twin brother the soldier, was not "pressed" in the
sense in which we now use the term. He was merely subjected to a
process called "presting." To "prest" a man meant to enlist him by
means of what was technically known as "prest" money--"prest" being
the English equivalent of the obsolete French prest, now _prêt_,
meaning "ready." In the recruiter's vocabulary, therefore, "prest" money
stood for what is nowadays, in both services, commonly termed the
"king's shilling," and the man who, either voluntarily or under duress,
accepted or received that shilling at the recruiter's hands, was said to be
"prested" or "prest." In other words, having taken the king's ready
money, he was thenceforth, during the king's pleasure, "ready" for the
king's service.
By the transfer of the prest shilling from the hand of the recruiter to the
pouch of the seaman a subtle contract, as between the latter and his
sovereign, was supposed to be set up, than which no more solemn or
binding pact could exist save between a man and his Maker. One of the

parties to the contract was more often than not, it is true, a strongly
dissenting party; but although under the common law of the land this
circumstance would have rendered any similar contract null and void,
in this amazing transaction between the king and his "prest" subject it
was held to be of no vitiating force. From the moment the king's
shilling, by whatever means, found its way into the sailor's possession,
from that moment he was the king's man, bound in heavy penalties to
toe the line of duty, and, should