Sylvia's Lovers - Page 6/290

The servants of the Admiralty lay in wait for all merchantmen and

traders; there were many instances of vessels returning home after

long absence, and laden with rich cargo, being boarded within a

day's distance of land, and so many men pressed and carried off,

that the ship, with her cargo, became unmanageable from the loss of

her crew, drifted out again into the wild wide ocean, and was

sometimes found in the helpless guidance of one or two infirm or

ignorant sailors; sometimes such vessels were never heard of more.

The men thus pressed were taken from the near grasp of parents or

wives, and were often deprived of the hard earnings of years, which

remained in the hands of the masters of the merchantman in which

they had served, subject to all the chances of honesty or

dishonesty, life or death. Now all this tyranny (for I can use no

other word) is marvellous to us; we cannot imagine how it is that a

nation submitted to it for so long, even under any warlike

enthusiasm, any panic of invasion, any amount of loyal subservience

to the governing powers. When we read of the military being called

in to assist the civil power in backing up the press-gang, of

parties of soldiers patrolling the streets, and sentries with

screwed bayonets placed at every door while the press-gang entered

and searched each hole and corner of the dwelling; when we hear of

churches being surrounded during divine service by troops, while the

press-gang stood ready at the door to seize men as they came out

from attending public worship, and take these instances as merely

types of what was constantly going on in different forms, we do not

wonder at Lord Mayors, and other civic authorities in large towns,

complaining that a stop was put to business by the danger which the

tradesmen and their servants incurred in leaving their houses and

going into the streets, infested by press-gangs.

Whether it was that living in closer neighbourhood to the

metropolis--the centre of politics and news--inspired the

inhabitants of the southern counties with a strong feeling of that

kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations; or

whether it was that the chances of capture were so much greater at

all the southern ports that the merchant sailors became inured to

the danger; or whether it was that serving in the navy, to those

familiar with such towns as Portsmouth and Plymouth, had an

attraction to most men from the dash and brilliancy of the

adventurous employment--it is certain that the southerners took the

oppression of press-warrants more submissively than the wild

north-eastern people. For with them the chances of profit beyond

their wages in the whaling or Greenland trade extended to the lowest

description of sailor. He might rise by daring and saving to be a

ship-owner himself. Numbers around him had done so; and this very

fact made the distinction between class and class less apparent; and

the common ventures and dangers, the universal interest felt in one

pursuit, bound the inhabitants of that line of coast together with a

strong tie, the severance of which by any violent extraneous

measure, gave rise to passionate anger and thirst for vengeance. A

Yorkshireman once said to me, 'My county folk are all alike. Their

first thought is how to resist. Why! I myself, if I hear a man say

it is a fine day, catch myself trying to find out that it is no such

thing. It is so in thought; it is so in word; it is so in deed.'