How Do You Crew a Navy Nobody Wants to Join? Take the Men

The crown claimed an ancient prerogative right to require subjects to serve at sea, and that right was recognised by the courts repeatedly, so the practice was lawful rather than piratical. It was limited in principle to men who used the sea for a living, meaning merchant seamen, fishermen and watermen, on the reasoning that the navy needed trained hands rather than bodies and that such men owed the service their trade implied. Apprentices, certain skilled trades and men in particular occupations were exempt and carried certificates to prove it. In practice the limits were exceeded constantly, and the courts heard a steady stream of applications from men seized outside the permitted categories.

The system was administrative rather than a matter of gangs roaming ports at random:

• •A service with officers, offices and rendezvous points in major ports
• •Parties operating ashore in towns and inland along rivers
• •Tenders sent out to stop and search incoming merchant ships at sea
• •Merchant crews taken as their ships arrived, before reaching land or pay
• •Quotas imposed on counties and towns to supply men
• •Bounties paid for volunteers, who were preferred and were never enough

The demand for men expanded enormously in wartime, with the fleet requiring many tens of thousands beyond peacetime strength within months, and voluntary recruitment could not supply that. Conditions explain the reluctance. Pay was lower than in the merchant service and was frequently years in arrears. Discipline was severe. Disease killed far more men than combat. Service continued until the ship was paid off, which might be years, and leave ashore was rarely granted precisely because men would not return. A merchant seaman taken from a homeward-bound ship lost the wages of the entire voyage. Those conditions produced desertion on a scale that itself required more men to be taken.

Resistance was constant and took several forms, some of them effective. Men carried and forged exemption certificates, and a trade in false papers existed in every port. Crews of incoming merchant ships were landed secretly by boat before the ship was boarded, or hid aboard in prepared spaces. Communities fought the parties in the street, and a number of officers were killed doing the work, with local juries reliably unwilling to convict anybody for it. Wives and mothers petitioned the Admiralty in large numbers, and those petitions survive and are among the richest surviving records of working lives of the period. And men applied to the courts for release, which sometimes worked.

The practice was never abolished by statute and simply stopped being used, which is a peculiar ending. The last substantial use was during the wars ending in 1815, after which the navy contracted and demand fell. Reforms through the nineteenth century made service more attractive, with continuous service engagements from 1853 offering a career, pensions and regular pay rather than employment for one commission, which produced enough volunteers. Public opinion had turned decisively against the practice. The legal power was never repealed and is generally regarded as having lapsed rather than been removed, which occasionally produces a newspaper story asserting that it technically survives.

The crown held a recognised legal power to require sea service, limited in principle to men who used the sea for a living and exceeded constantly in practice. An organised service with offices and quotas ran it rather than roaming gangs. Low arrears-ridden pay, severe discipline, disease and service lasting years made voluntary recruitment impossible in wartime. Continuous service engagements from 1853 produced enough volunteers and the practice lapsed.