Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild

Author:Adam Hochschild [Hochschild, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Press victims were not only from the working class. The fact that his father was a ship's captain did not save the young John Newton from the press. Men from the privileged classes were given written "protections," but even this wasn't foolproof: What if you didn't have your papers with you and couldn't get word to anyone before being shut under iron gratings in the hold of a ship about to sail? And when the navy was desperate for men, the Admiralty would order a "hot press" in which protections were ignored.

Societies of all kinds have had military conscription, but the press was not an orderly draft that followed bureaucratic rules. It was kidnapping by armed men, and people in seaports—including London—lived in constant fear. Prints from the time show press gangs barging into homes, grabbing men in their beds, or hauling the groom out of a wedding procession while the bride screams in horror. In one cartoon, a press gang with tricornered hats and wooden staves hustles a man away while his wife, on her knees, implores, "For goodness sake dear your Honour, set him free, he maintains his Father, Mother & Wife." An officer replies, "Let them starve & be damned, the King wants Men, haul him on board."

Many sailors seized by press gangs fought back. Between 1740 and 1805 more than five hundred violent brawls between press gangs and their victims were serious enough to be reported, and doubtless many more never made it into court records or the newspapers. After several months' work in Bristol in 1759, every member of a press gang there had been wounded, and one killed. When a London press gang passed a whaling dock with three sailors in custody, reported the lieutenant in charge, "they were violently assaulted by some hundreds of Men ... who not only rescued the Men the Gang had Procured, but almost killed three of the press gang by Cutts and Bruises in their Heads and some broken Ribbs."

In the American Revolutionary War, the press kidnapped more than eighty thousand men, provoking riots in at least twenty-two British seaports. An Admiralty official investigating the resistance found it "very remarkable That almost every Inhabitant in the town of Deal saw the Rioters and yet they all pretend they can't name or with any Degree of certainty describe [them]." Britain had a tradition of strong local government, and justices of the peace and even the Lord Mayor of London intermittently refused to cooperate with the navy. Sometimes women attacked press gangs with mops, trying to rescue their husbands. In Bristol, a navy man with a pressed citizen in tow was halted by a local merchant "who raised a Mob and took the man from him in the course of which he, the Petty Officer, was very much beat," said an Admiralty report. Angry families filed a flood of private lawsuits against navy officials, including Equiano's former owner Pascal. When in charge of the press gang in the port of

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