Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 15, 2025
For Hans, after filling the pockets of his huge trunk hose with our money by assuming the character of a native, would, as soon as a pressgang appeared, lay claim to the privileges of an alien. The intruders would soon rule every corporation. They would elbow our own Aldermen off the Royal Exchange. They would buy the hereditary woods and halls of our country gentlemen.
Now a pressgang passed along, dragging a number of unwilling captives to serve on board the fleet, some resigned to their fate, others with frowning brows resenting the treatment they had received, and some glancing round, hoping against hope for an opportunity to escape.
Rapid as the pressgang had been in their movements, the alarm had been given outside, and a mob was already collecting in the street, evidently with the intention of rescuing the prisoners. There was no time, therefore, to be lost. Mr Foley ordered his men to drag them out and hurry them along, each of the pressgang holding a pistol to the head of his prisoner.
Our trunk and bags were put in; we shook hands with Uncle Kelson, and having taken our seats just inside in the front part, with plenty of straw for our feet to rest on, the waggoner whipped up his four sturdy horses, and we began to move on. My dear wife pressed closer to my side, and we began to breathe more freely; she thought I was safe from the pressgang.
"Hearty, though the old gentleman did take on when you were carried away by the pressgang. If ever I saw him inclined to run a-muck, it was then. We had a hard matter, I can tell you, to prevent him from posting off to London to see the First Lord of the Admiralty, to grapple him by the throat if he did not send an order down at once to have you liberated.
"I'll keep out of their clutches, depend upon that, for, as I am not a seaman, a pressgang can't catch hold of me." "Well, do you be wise, my boy, and don't forget what I say," remarked Ben. "But if we stand talking here we shan't get the boat finished, so come along, and don't let us trouble ourselves about the frigate.
A pressgang could have forced Columbus to labour as a common seaman; but not all the population of Europe could have forced him to discover a world beyond the Atlantic; for the mass of his contemporaries, until his enterprise proved successful, obstinately refused to believe that there was such a world to discover.
The town was awakened with the din as with the cry of fire; and lights came starting forward, as it were, to the windows. The women were out with lamentations and vows of vengeance. I was in a state of horror unspeakable. Then came some three or four of the pressgang with a struggling sailor in their clutches, with nothing but his trousers on his shirt riven from his back in the fury.
But this was not ordered to happen; for, when the Tobacco trader was lying in the harbour of Virginia in the North Americas, a pressgang, that was in need of men for a man-of-war, came on board, and pressed poor Charles, and sailed away with him on a cruise, nobody, for many a day, could tell where, till I thought of the Lord Eaglesham's kindness.
"In the boat the men lay on their oars, with faces white below the tan o' wind and weather, and then hurriedly she came astern, and Neil McKillop sprang on the quay, and to his mother, and the pressgang boat shot into the haze off the land, and the mother and son went back to the croft on the hillside."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking