The Evil Necessity

British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Denver Brunsman

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813933528
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

A fundamental component of Britain's early success, naval impressment not only kept the Royal Navy afloat—it helped to make an empire. In total numbers, impressed seamen were second only to enslaved Africans as the largest group of forced laborers in the eighteenth century.

In The Evil Necessity, Denver Brunsman describes in vivid detail the experience of impressment for Atlantic seafarers and their families. Brunsman reveals how forced service robbed approximately 250, 000 mariners of their livelihoods, and, not infrequently, their lives, while also devastating Atlantic seaport communities and the loved ones who were left behind. Press gangs, consisting of a navy officer backed by sailors and occasionally local toughs, often used violence or the threat of violence to supply the skilled manpower necessary to establish and maintain British naval supremacy. Moreover, impressments helped to unite Britain and its Atlantic coastal territories in a common system of maritime defense unmatched by any other European empire.

Drawing on ships' logs, merchants' papers, personal letters and diaries, as well as engravings, political texts, and sea ballads, Brunsman shows how ultimately the controversy over impressment contributed to the American Revolution and served as a leading cause of the War of 1812.

Early American HistoriesWinner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies

PART Empire

I

CHAPTER 1 | Imperial Design

n November 1794, the sailors of the northeastern English seaport of North Shields received a temporary respite from naval impressment. The port's three press gangs announced that during performances in the local theater of John O'Keefe's comedy The World in a Village, seamen would not be at risk of capture. Officers in the press gangs advertised the terms of their offer in the theater's playbill: “Lieutenant Kelly, Lieutenant King, and Lieutenant Bevis, Pledge their Words of Honour, that no Seaman whatever shall be molested by their People, on Play Nights, from the Hours of Four in the Afternoon to Six the following Morning, after which time the indulgence ceases.” Press gangs always had to negotiate their authority with local civil officials in Atlantic seaports, and many possible explanations exist for the limited amnesty program in North Shields. Perhaps the navy's recruiting officers had to promise the town's officials they would not ruin the production of O'Keefe's play. Or the amnesty might have been a ploy by the officers to lure local seamen into a false sense of security. Then again, the press gangs just might have wanted some time off to attend the theater.¹

Whatever the case, the amnesty underscored the relentless pressure that sailors faced from impressment. The implication of the lieutenants' offer was that, under normal circumstances, seamen were always in danger of being “molested.” One wonders how nonsailors, or landsmen as they were known, reacted to the announcement in the playbill. Most probably did not give it a second thought because they had become so familiar with navy press gangs during Britain's nearly constant state of warfare in the second half of the eighteenth century. Others might have felt relief that on play nights, at least, the taverns and waterfront of North Shields would be free from the usual disturbances that went along with impressment. Finally, just maybe some of the town's landsmen might have meditated on what it meant that some of their fellow British subjects did not have the liberty to go out in public in wartime without risking being forced into the nation's service.

We begin with a story from the end of the period covered by this book to highlight the extraordinary evolution of impressment. Although it started in the Middle Ages and had many timeless qualities, the eighteenth-century institution was a product of several changes in the late seventeenth century. Before then, the bumbling, endearing Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II (1597) was as likely to be the Englishman's frame of reference for a recruiting officer of the crown as the professional naval lieutenants stationed in North Shields. Between these two eras, impressment shifted from a semi-voluntary, seasonal duty to a condition of involuntary, continuous service in wartime.

The underlying cause was empire. From the late 1600s, the emerging British Empire expanded its naval and commercial focus. By controlling the world's sea lanes with its navy, Britain challenged and ultimately triumphed over its larger European continental rivals. British naval supremacy depended on not just any labor but the work of skilled seafaring professionals. The demands of empire helped to transform impressment from a class-based to a skill-based institution. By virtue of their talents, mariners carried a disproportionate share of Britain's imperial burden in the eighteenth century. The exploitation of their labor was not without serious consequence or controversy. The following pages will trace how impressment developed from a form of labor tribute in the Middle Ages and source of bemusement in the pages of Shakespeare to a centerpiece of Britain's imperial war machine.

ORIGINS

The practice of impressing men for naval service was a fixture of England's early history. Dating to Anglo-Saxon times, forcing men to sea was a royal prerogative that functioned according to feudal-like principles; select English ports had the duty of providing ships and men in naval campaigns in exchange for special trading rights and privileges. The custom survived the Norman Conquest of 1066. In 1216, less than a year after agreeing to Magna Carta, King John commissioned twenty-two seaports to provide manned vessels for his service. In 1588, impressed seamen helped to defeat the Spanish Armada. With each of England's revolutions and regime changes in the seventeenth century—1649, 1660, and 1688—impressment only grew stronger. Thus, by the time the medieval invention began expanding into a global manning system in the late seventeenth century, it had already existed for centuries.²

Law aided the survival of impressment. From the Middle Ages, its legal rationale remained remarkably constant: A monarch had the power to call on his or her subjects to defend the realm. The same obligation applied originally to seafarers and men on land, who could be forced to serve in the militia and army. Into the seventeenth century, the royal prerogative to impress included a wide variety of groups, including rope makers; shipwrights and carpenters, who built or repaired the king's ships; and masons, who built cathedrals and other structures. The crown could also impress any number of goods and commodities, from fish and biscuits to horses and carriages.³

As a royal prerogative, the power to impress various forms of labor and goods was legal within English common law and did not require the statutory approval of Parliament. Over time, however, Parliament severely restricted or abolished numerous royal prerogatives, but naval impressment persisted. Parliament first recognized its legality in 1378 during the reign of Richard II by providing for the punishment of mariners who deserted the king's ships after receiving their wages. Thereafter, Parliament passed dozens of additional statutes that helped to define impressment, often by exempting certain groups, yet it never removed the crown's fundamental legal right to force seamen into naval service. By the early eighteenth century, seamen were the last group of laborers that the monarchy could compel to service without Parliament's approval.⁴

The administrative structure for capturing sailors also descended from medieval times. In the 1740s, the Royal Navy began to dedicate officers and ships solely to recruiting, which evolved into a formal organization known as the Impress Service. Before then, English monarchs impressed seamen in one of two ways: either through local administrative bodies or by having ship captains man their own vessels. The crown's oldest method for securing naval manpower involved calling on particular seaports to provide men for a specified amount of time, usually the first fortnight of a campaign. The monarchy also depended on the same ports to provide ships, since there was no formal Royal Navy with a fleet independent of the merchant marine until the Tudor era of the sixteenth century. The crown shared one of its oldest arrangements—dating to the eleventh and twelfth centuries—for obtaining ships and men with the Cinque Ports. An ancient confederation, the Ports consisted originally of Romney, Hastings, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich but grew to more than thirty communities in southeast England stretching from Beachy Head to the mouth of the Thames. The confederation wielded disproportionate influence due to its ability to control movement across the Narrow Seas to Flanders and Calais, and received special tax exemptions and trading privileges in exchange for its loyalty and pledge of fifty-seven ships, each manned by twenty-one men, for fifteen days of service every year.⁵

The use of local institutions to raise navy seamen expanded during the Tudor era. The Privy Council, acting on the monarch's behalf, distributed press warrants to the vice-admirals and other authorities of selected counties, who in turn gave them to local magistrates and officials such as mayors, sheriffs, and constables. The officials left directly in charge of collecting recruits became known as “press-masters” or “prest-masters,” harbingers of later press gangs. The different terms reflected the etymology of “impressment.” Prior to the late seventeenth century, impressing meant to enlist men in either the army or navy by means of “prest” money, also known as the “king's shilling.” Prest came from a French word meaning “ready.” The word's Latin root was “imprestare,” or “to advance.” Thus to take prest money was to accept an advance, thereby obligating oneself to join the army or navy.⁶

In its original form, “presting” involved more coercion than overt violence. The lengths that recruiting officers, such as Shakespeare's Falstaff, went to get a shilling into the hands of an army or naval recruit became the stuff of English legend. One popular wives' tale warned sailors to drink only out of glass-bottomed pewters, the better to see if a king's shilling had been slipped into one's ale before swallowing. Until the late 1600s, prest men made their own way to port after taking the shilling; the navy provided conduct money for the journey. The early English sailor was not above using this and other opportunities to desert. After men ran away from his 1596 expedition against the Spanish, Sir Walter Raleigh grumbled, “The pursuivant found me in a country village, a mile from Gravesend, hunting after runaway mariners, and dragging in the mire from ale-house to ale-house.”⁷

Still, in this early period, most sailors found their way to port and kept to their ships. For those who did not, royal proclamations threatened the “paine of imprisonment.”⁸ The larger challenge for the early Royal Navy was upholding the quality of its recruits. Magistrates saw impressment as an opportunity to rid their localities of idle, infirm, and criminal elements. Corruption also plagued manning efforts; in 1597, the going rate to get free from officials overseeing the press was £1. That same year, the Earl of Essex complained of “men utterly unsufficient and unserviceable taken up by pressmasters” who did “not know any one rope in the ship.”⁹

Historians have long mistaken naval impressment as an institution primarily for emptying jails and clearing streets of socially dangerous or undesirable individuals. But, if the stereotype ever had merit, it was during the Tudor period. Then pressing was based largely on class and served as a form of “preventive policing” of idle and unwanted persons in English towns. The same groups might have ended up as galley slaves in Mediterranean states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but England did not have galley fleets. Instead, Vagrancy Acts dating from the Elizabethan era provided the means by which convicts, vagrants, and vagabonds could be conveyed on board navy ships as an alternative to laboring in workhouses. Until the mid-seventeenth century, impressment had as much in common with the Elizabethan Poor Laws as it did with the eighteenth-century Impress Service.¹⁰

Over time, the Royal Navy became far more discriminating about whom it would accept between the wooden walls of its sailing vessels. The second customary method of impressment—by individual ship captains—generally provided more qualified recruits. The crown issued press warrants to ship captains at the openings of conflicts from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars. A warrant from 1335 that authorized a shipmaster in the service of Edward III “to seize and bring on board seamen and others whom he may need for the ship” resembled one in 1778 directing a captain “to Impress, or cause to be Impressed, so many Seamen, Seafaring Men, and Persons whose Occupations and Callings are to work in Vessels and Boats upon Rivers, as shall be necessary either to Man His Majesty's Ship under your Command, or any other of His Majesty's Ships.” In each case, the captain had a greater interest than a local official in locating men with seafaring skills.¹¹

The crown's dependence on localities for seamen meant that in its early history, pressing took place almost exclusively on land. But the system gradually shifted so that by the eighteenth century, the reverse was true: The majority of impressments happened at sea. The early Stuart navy first moved in this direction. In 1626, the Lord High Admiral under Charles I, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, instructed constables to press “Seamen or fishermen or that are practesed in sea fareing and noe unskilfull meake decrepit impotent maymed or unfit persons for his Majestie's service.”¹² The following year, the Privy Council granted navy captains the power to take men from passing vessels at sea; pressing directly from merchantmen was the surest way for warships to obtain experienced sailors. Mayors, justices, and constables still raised the majority of navy seamen on land, but the Royal Navy's preference for skilled mariners had begun to shape the impressment system.¹³

The timing of these changes was no accident. By the early seventeenth century, England was competing with other European nations for New World riches. Professional deepwater seamen were necessary for expanding any nation's economic and military might. English mercantile thinkers had long understood the relationship between sea power and national wealth; as early as 1600, Raleigh proclaimed, “Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.” Yet, England was still a second-rate power and far from commanding the sea, much less the world. Perhaps there was no better sign of the English state's weaknesses than Charles I's clumsy attempts to build a modern navy without political consensus, which instead helped to propel the country to civil war in the 1640s.¹⁴

The subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate governments of Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard had more appreciation than any previous monarchy for the value of sailors as an imperial resource. Oliver Cromwell understood that England would never be a global power if it could not command the loyalty of its own seamen. By the mid-seventeenth century, more English mariners completed long-distance voyages in Dutch bottoms than in English merchant vessels. Edward Coxere, a Dover native, had worked so long in Dutch ships that when he first sailed in an English merchant vessel in the 1650s, he “did not know the names of all the ropes in English.”¹⁵

Under Cromwell, Parliament challenged Dutch maritime supremacy by passing the Navigation Act of 1651. The act and subsequent Navigation Acts in 1660, 1663, 1673, and 1696 collectively established that English colonial trade could be carried only on English-owned ships in which the master and at least half—and later three-fourths—of the crew were English. Further, the most important English colonial commodities, such as sugar and tobacco, had to ship from their colony of origin to either England or another English colony. The act of 1651 led almost immediately to war between England and the Netherlands because the Dutch had so much at stake as the leading commercial middlemen between Europe and the New World. As primarily trade conflicts, the three Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–54, 1665–67, 1672–74) had few territorial consequences, save for New Netherland becoming New York in 1664, but all bolstered the English Royal Navy and defended the principle of the Navigation Acts.¹⁶

England's new control over its own merchant seamen and the export of its major colonial staples helped to revolutionize its economy. From the early 1600s, when the country's chief export was still wool, to the late 1600s, English exports and reexports increased by upwards of 400 percent; the expansion came primarily from new overseas trade and development in the Mediterranean, Far East, and New World. In the eighteenth century, British overseas trade expanded particularly to the western hemisphere. By the mid-1700s, a hundred years after the first Navigation Act, almost half of all of Britain's foreign shipping engaged in some form of transatlantic commerce involving Africa, North America, or the British West Indies. No doubt by then many foreign seafarers knew a ship's ropes by their English names.¹⁷

The English state successfully nationalized its merchant marine with the Navigation Acts through regulation without resorting to compulsion. This approach did not mean that England's republican government objected to using the press for military purposes. Both crown and Parliament turned to impressment to man ships and armies during the English Civil War (1642–49). Parliament's decision disappointed its radical supporters, particularly the Levellers, who deemed impressment a tyranny “worse then that of a Turkish Gally-slave” and “nothing more opposite to freedom.”¹⁸

Parliament ignored such protests and continued to impress both soldiers and sailors after winning the war. Having abolished the monarchy, it could no longer justify impressment as a royal prerogative and therefore passed impressment acts almost annually in the 1650s. On the heels of the First Dutch War, the English republic pursued Oliver Cromwell's “Western Design” to conquer the Spanish Caribbean in 1654–55. The campaign made the most explicit connection between forced labor and empire to date in England's history. Forced naval service was just one of many forms of coerced labor and migration Cromwell used. The Lord Protector's men enslaved, kidnapped, indentured, spirited, and “barbadosed” thousands of his political and religious enemies along with the usual suspects—the poor, idle, and lawless—from across England, Scotland, and Ireland. Despite this ambitious experiment in state-sponsored misery, England failed in its main objective of seizing Hispaniola before managing to take the lightly defended Jamaica.¹⁹

After 1660, the restored Stuart monarchy reversed many of Parliament's policies from the Commonwealth era, but it affirmed Cromwell's goal of monopolizing the labor of English seafarers. Besides passing new and more restrictive Navigation Acts, the late Stuart governments refined the state's procedures for impressing seamen into the Royal Navy. The Privy Council continued to shift responsibility for pressing to the navy itself; the authority first resided with the service's single head, the Lord High Admiral, and later, in the eighteenth century, within its administrative body, the Board of Admiralty. Better known as the “Lords of Admiralty” or simply the “Admiralty,” the board was composed of a First Lord and six subordinates. The Admiralty requested authority from the crown to press at the beginnings of wars and whenever the navy faced manning emergencies. The Privy Council approved the distribution of press warr...