8 - Naval Impressment in Bristol, 1738–1815

Summary

Bristol was a city of spires and masts. Alexander Pope was struck by the hundreds of ships at Broad Quay and the Backs, ‘their masts as thick as they stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable’. ‘The streets are as crowded as London’, he remarked, ‘but the best image I can give of it is, Tis as if Wapping and Southwark were ten-times as big, or all their people run into London.’

It was the ‘swarming vessels’, to echo Richard Savage, that particularly attracted the Admiralty. Swarming vessels meant seamen, and seamen, especially experienced topmen, were what the navy needed to man its ships in wartime. Between 1738 and 1815 Britain was at war roughly two in every three years, and as fleets grew in size, her demand for men was insatiable. At the beginning of the war of Jenkins’ Ear in 1738, 23,000 men were borne by the navy; that is, registered on the ships’ books. That number rose dramatically in subsequent wars peaking at 85,000 in the Seven Years’ War, over 100,000 in the American, and at an amazing 140,000 towards the end of the Napoleonic wars. This was a six-fold increase in the space of roughly seventyfive years, and it could only be sustained by appropriating seamen from the merchant marine, whose own numbers could only be sustained by relaxing the official requirements of the Navigation Acts, which insisted on British and colonial ships managed by a high proportion of home-grown mariners. Because wages in the merchant marine were always higher than those of the royal navy, and appreciably higher in wartime, men had to be coerced into joining His Majesty's fleets. Precisely how many men were pressed into service is impossible to say. The figures are fragmented and fraught with problems. The best we currently have, derived from the Shelburne papers for the American war, suggests that 37.5 per cent of all seamen enlisted on land were impressed, and probably 34 per cent of the 235,000 men recruited ashore and afloat. As the historian who compiled these figures admitted, some of those who technically ‘volunteered’ for the navy did so under duress. It was either a case of come quietly and accept the bounty for a volunteer; or be pressed and be damn'd.