Impressment - Basis of Impressment

Basis of Impressment

At the time of the Battle of Trafalgar over half of the Royal Navy's 120,000 sailors were pressed men. The power of the Impressment Service to conscript was limited by law to seafarers, including merchant seamen, longshoremen and fishermen. There is no basis to the widespread impression that civilians without any seafaring background were randomly seized from home or workplace by press gangs or that the latter were employed inland away from coastal ports.Convicted petty criminals were however often given the option of volunteering for naval service as unskilled "quota men" by inland courts (see below).

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 on occasion 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 Seaman. 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 King's 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 an 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.

Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of men pressed were taken from merchant ships at sea. This was legal as long as the Navy replaced the man they took and many Naval captains would take the best seamen, replacing them with malcontents and landsmen from their own ship. It was also common for "trusted" volunteers to act as substitutes; they would then desert as soon as the merchant ship docked, and return to their Navy ship. Outbound merchant ships, officers and apprentices were exempt from impressment. When war broke out the Navy would blanket the coast with cruisers ready to intercept every inbound merchantman, many of which would flee to Ireland to offload their best men before returning to England. In 1740, a merchantman fired on a cruiser attempting to impress its crew; similar violence to avoid being pressed was not uncommon, especially with the East India ships whose crews had been away from their families and England for a considerable time. In times of an extreme shortage of men, the Navy would "embargo" the coast for a short time; merchantmen had to supply a portion of their crew in exchange for permission to sail. Many merchant ships had hiding places constructed where their best crew could hide when approached by a Naval vessel.

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. The down side of the Quota System was the frequent introduction of disease, especially typhus, to healthy ships.