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That clause was directed of course against the swindling practices of the boarding-house crimps. It had never struck me it would apply to everybody alike no matter what the motive, because I believed then that people on shore did their work with care and foresight. "I was confounded at the idea, but Mr. Powell made me soon see that an Act of Parliament hasn't any sense of its own.
The ambition of the King was to form a brigade of giants, and every country was ransacked by his agents for men above the ordinary stature. These researches were not confined to Europe. No head that towered above the crowd in the bazaars of Aleppo, of Cairo, or of Surat, could escape the crimps of Frederic William.
This apex necessarily touched the coast at a point contiguous to the ocean tracks of the respective trades in which the ships sailed; and here, in some spot far removed from the regular haunts of the gangsman, an emergency crew was mustered by those indefatigable purveyors, the crimps, and held in readiness against the expected arrival.
To make it seem less suspicious, they associated themselves with a lot of crimps who were on the lookout for our sailors, who were going ashore that night too. I'd my suspicions that a couple of those men might be waiting for me at the end of the wharf. I left the ship just a minute or two before the sailors did. Then I met you. That meeting, my lad, was my first step toward salvation.
"When I think of leaving Dad, and home, and going off to England, and having to make friends of awful women with high cheek bones, and mats of crimps coming down to their eyebrows, it scares me to death!" And both girls laughed gayly. They were having tea in Julia's drawing-room on a cold bright afternoon in May. "I'll miss Dad most," pursued Barbara seriously.
Not a word was spoken after they had thus left the shore, and presently they might all have been ghosts, for the silence of the party. Barnaby True was too full of his own thoughts to talk and serious enough thoughts they were by this time, with crimps to trepan a man at every turn, and press gangs to carry a man off so that he might never be heard of again.
"If you take one glass you'll take another and another, till you won't know what you are about, and then ten to one you'll fall into the hands of crimps who'll fleece you of every shilling in your pocket, or you'll get picked up by a press-gang and be carried on board a man-of-war, not to regain your liberty for years to come."
Most of the crimps get one or two of them to watch the sailors as the boys of the village watch our men, and give notice when they are going to make a raid. I don’t think, therefore, that there is any fear of your being refused, especially when I say that one of you has got into great trouble from refusing to aid in throwing us off the scent when a lugger is due.
I was delighted to find that he was to sail with us; and we passed that evening together. During the evening the master said, "I hear there are plenty of good men stowed away by the crimps at different places. I wish we could only find out where they are, and get hold of them.
There are jail-birds who have had the offer of release on condition that they enter the navy; there are farm-labourers who don’t know one end of a boat from the other; there are drunkards who have been sold by the crimps when their money has run out; but, Lord bless you, it don’t make much difference what they are, they are all knocked into shape before they have been three months on board.
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