About History: Press-ganging

Impressment, colloquially known as ‘the press’ or the ‘press gang’, was a means by which European navies could forcibly compel men into service during the 17th century and up to the early 19th century either to crew their fleets at the outbreak of war or to replace men lost to death or desertion. Essentially no different to conscription employed by the British Army, the Royal Navy’s system began in 1664, although the practice can be traced back to the time of King Edward I of England. Impressing was intended to solve a basic problem during wartime that there were never enough professional seamen to crew both a fully mobilised navy and the merchant fleet.

By modern standards, the average 18th century sailor experienced harsh working and living conditions in the Royal Navy. The size of a naval crew was determined by the number needed to man a warship’s guns. In Nelson’s navy this was typically about four times more than the number of crew needed to simply sail the ship. With so many more sailors, life aboard would lack basic privacy and the cramped, unhealthy conditions increasing the risk of illness and disease spreading through the crew. On lengthy voyages, shipowners and governments routinely estimated that 50% of the sailors would die due to scurvy. Yet, for many the food supplied by the Navy was plentiful, regular, and of good quality by the standards of the day. So, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was not at all unusual for impressed men to view life in the navy, hard though it was, as preferable to their previous lives on shore. Volunteering for further service when the opportunity came to leave the ship was not at all unusual.

What is more, naval pay in the 1750s remained an attractive prospect for many men, even though its value would be steadily eroded by rising prices as the century progressed (Roger, 1986, 137). Naval wages had been set in 1653 and were not increased until April 1797 after the Spithead mutiny by sailors of the Channel Fleet. Moreover, the Royal Navy was notorious for paying wages up to two years in arrears, that is until reforms in the 19th century improved conditions. The Navy also employed a policy of always withholding six months' pay to discourage desertion. In comparison, the pay on merchant ships was somewhat higher during peacetime and could increase to double the naval rate during wartime [1]. Despite the disparities, there were still many volunteers for naval service. 

The main problem with naval recruitment, especially during wartime, was a shortage of qualified and experienced seamen. The Royal Navy had to compete with the Merchant Navy and privateers to recruit from a small pool of ordinary and able seamen leaving all three groups short-handed. The Navy’s solution was to impress ‘eligible men of seafaring habits between the ages of 18 and 55 years’, but this included many merchant sailors as well as men from other, mostly European, nations. Men could be impressed ashore or directly from ships at sea. Non-seamen were sometimes impressed as well, though rarely; the Navy had little trouble recruiting unskilled ‘landmen’ by using the simple expedient of offering them a bounty. The recruitment figures presented to Parliament for the years 1755–1757 list 70,566 men, of whom 33,243 were volunteers (47%), 16,953 pressed men (24%), while another 20,370 were listed as volunteers separately (29%) (Hill, 2002, 135–137). Precisely what the distinction was between “volunteer” and “pressed man” is not recorded. It is likely that those who "volunteered" did so to get a sign-up bonus, two months' wages in advance and a higher rating in the Navy, which came with a commensurately higher wage. Volunteers were also protected from their creditors as British law forbade collecting any debts accrued before enlistment. One significant difference between volunteers and pressed men centred on the punishment meted out to those who deserted. If captured, volunteers were liable to execution while pressed men were simply returned to service (Hill, 2002, 135–137).

The popular image of press gangs, as illustrated right, is one of men being forcibly taken. While violence might have been threatened it was rarely used as dead or injured seamen were of no use to the Royal Navy. The last recorded press was in 1814 towards the end of Britain’s long war with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, yet press-ganging remained legal for another 50 years. Despite a public campaign for abolition, the government retained the right to impress until the 1860s when it finally created an effective Naval Reserve to crew the fleet in an emergency.

References:

Hill, J. R., (2002), ‘The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy’, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lambert, A., (2023), ‘How common was press-ganging?’, Q&A, BBC History Magazine (July edition), p. 37.

Rodger, N.A.M., (1986), ‘The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy’, New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Endnotes:

1. During the 18th century, after deductions a Royal Navy Able Seaman was paid the princely sum of 22 shillings and 6 pence per month. As the Navy used a 28-day lunar month, the sailor’s annual rate of pay was somewhat more than 12 times this. In contrast, a farm worker of the era might earn around only a quarter to a third as much. However, wages on merchant ships were higher: 25 to 30 shillings per lunar month, and this increased further during wartime (merchant pay rates of 70 shillings per month at London and 35 shillings at Bristol were offered during the Seven Years' War). That said, dishonest ship-owners routinely cheated merchant crews of their pay in several ways (Roger, 1986, 124-136).