The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore | Page 8

it touched high-water mark in the
unprecedented total of one hundred and twenty-nine thousand men in
actual sea pay. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 7. 567-Navy Progress,
1756-1805. These figures are below rather than above the mark, since
the official returns on which they are based are admittedly deficient.]
Beset by this enormous and steadily growing demand, the Admiralty,
the defensive proxy of the nation, had perforce to face the question as
to where and how the men were to be obtained.
The source of supply was never at any time in doubt. Here, ready to
hand, were some hundreds of thousands of persons using the sea, or
following vocations merging into the sea in the capacity of colliers,
bargemen, boatmen, longshoremen, fishermen and deep-sea sailors or
merchantmen, who constituted the natural Naval Reserve of an Island
Kingdom--a reserve ample, if judiciously drawn upon, to meet, and
more than meet, the Navy's every need.
The question of means was one more complicated, more delicate, and
hence incomparably more difficult of solution. To draw largely upon
these seafaring classes, numerous and fit though they were, meant
detriment to trade, and if the Navy was the fist, trade was the backbone
of the nation. The sufferings of trade, moreover, reacted unpleasantly
upon those in power at Whitehall. Methods of procuration must
therefore be devised of a nature such as to insure that neither trade nor
Admiralty should suffer--that they should, in fact, enjoy what the
unfortunate sailor never knew, some reasonable measure of ease.
In its efforts to extricate itself and trade from the complex difficulties
of the situation, Admiralty had at its back what an eighteenth century
Beresford would doubtless have regarded as the finest talent of the
service. Neither the unemployed admiral nor the half-pay captain had at

that time, in his enforced retirement at Bath or Cheltenham, taken
seriously to parliamenteering, company promoting, or the concocting of
pedigrees as a substitute for walking the quarter-deck. His occupation
was indeed gone, but in its stead there had come to him what he had
rarely enjoyed whilst on the active service list--opportunity. Carried
away by the stimulus of so unprecedented a situation as that afforded
by the chance to make himself heard, he rushed into print with projects
and suggestions which would have revolutionised the naval policy and
defence of the country at a stroke had they been carried into effect. Or
he devoted his leisure to the invention of signal codes, semaphore
systems, embryo torpedoes, gun carriages, and--what is more to our
point--methods ostensibly calculated to man the fleet in the easiest,
least oppressive and most expeditious manner possible for a free people.
Armed with these schemes, he bombarded the Admiralty with all the
pertinacity he had shown in his quarter-deck days in applying for leave
or seeking promotion. Many, perhaps most, of the inventions which it
was thus sought to father upon the Sea Lords, were happily never more
heard of; but here and there one, commending itself by its seeming
practicability, was selected for trial and duly put to the test.
Fair to look upon while still in the air, these fruits of leisured
superannuation proved deceptively unsound when plucked by the hand
of experiment. Registration, first adopted in 1696, held out undeniable
advantages to the seaman. Under its provisions he drew a yearly
allowance when not required at sea, and extra prize-money when on
active service. Yet the bait did not tempt him, and the system was soon
discarded as useless and inoperative. Bounty, defined by some
sentimentalist as a "bribe to Neptune," for a while made a stronger
appeal; but, ranging as it did from five to almost any number of pounds
under one hundred per head, it proved a bribe indeed, and by putting an
irresistible premium on desertion threatened to decimate the very ships
it was intended to man. In 1795 what was commonly known as the
Quota Scheme superseded it. This was a plan of Pitt's devising, under
which each county contributed to the fleet according to its population,
the quota varying from one thousand and eighty-one men for Yorkshire
to twenty-three for Rutland, whilst a minor Act levied special toll on
seaports, London leading the way with five thousand seven hundred
and four men. Like its predecessor Bounty, however, this mode of

recruiting drained the Navy in order to feed it. Both systems, moreover,
possessed another and more serious defect. When their initial
enthusiasm had cooled, the counties, perhaps from force of habit as
component parts of a country whose backbone was trade, bought in the
cheapest market. Hence the Quota Man, consisting as he generally did
of the offscourings of the merchant service, was seldom or never worth
the money paid for him. An old man-o'-war's-man, picking up a
miserable specimen of this class of