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She would tempt Patsy into further descriptions of the Twin Valleys, the Bay of the Abbey Burn, the bold deeds of the smugglers, and the fights of the Free Bands against the press-gangs. But always, by all roads and bypaths, she would bring her back to the Bothy of the Wild of Blairmore. Was she sure that there was the possibility of any decent comfort in such a place at such a season?
The only possible way of ingress was by a shutter in the wall which overlooked the brook and communicated with the hiding-place in which his father lay secreted. This shutter had been little used since the days of press-gangs.
Press-gangs, composed of desperate men, headed by resolute and unscrupulous officers, were constantly on the lookout for men, and took them, sometimes after hard fighting, and dragged them away to undergo the horrors of slavery on board a man-of-war!
In short, the grievance is so crying, that one dare not stir out after dinner but well-armed. If one goes abroad to dinner, you would think one was going to the relief of Gibraltar. You may judge how depraved we are, when the war has not consumed half the reprobates, nor press-gangs thinned their numbers!
At that time the system of impressment was in vogue, and when Britain wanted sailors she took them, wherever and whenever she could find them. Press-gangs were sent out, under one or more officers, by ships of war in port needing more men.
Our seamen and marines were secretly and suddenly formed into press-gangs. The command of one of them was conferred on me.
No fish was caught, for the fishermen dared not venture out to sea; the markets were deserted, as the press-gangs might come down on any gathering of men; prices were raised, and many were impoverished; many others ruined. For in the great struggle in which England was then involved, the navy was esteemed her safeguard; and men must be had at any price of money, or suffering, or of injustice.
They were often sold for debt or inability to pay a rent, as happened in Scotland even during the eighteenth century; they were deluded to take ship by the flaming promises which the captains of vessels issued in the ports of different countries, to recruit their crews, or with the wickeder purpose of kidnapping simple rustics and hangers-on of cities; they sometimes came to a vessel's side in poverty, and sold their liberty for three years for the sake of a passage to the fabled Ind; press-gangs sometimes stole and smuggled them aboard of vessels just ready to sail; very young people were induced to come aboard, indeed, one or two cases happened in France, where a schoolmaster and his flock, who were out for a walk, were cajoled by these purveyors of avaricious navigators, and actually carried away from the country.
The admiralty pursued its course of seizing men of the mercantile marine, taking them aboard ships, keeping them away for months from the harbours of the kingdom, and then, when their ships returned, denying them the right of visiting their homes. The press-gangs did not confine their activities to the men of the mercantile marine.
Cobbett and Cartwright, and all the old reformers who kept the lamp of Freedom alive in the dark days of Pitt and Liverpool and Wellington, bore witness to the "deep sighing" of the agricultural poor, and noted with indignation the successive invasions of their freedom by Enclosure Acts and press-gangs and trials for sedition, and all the other implements of tyranny.
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