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Updated: May 3, 2025
The historical evidence on which the belief in the prevalence of impressment as a method of recruiting the navy for more than a hundred years is based, is limited to contemporary statements in the English newspapers, and especially in the issues of the periodical called TheNavalChronicle, published in 1803, the first year of the war following the rupture of the Peace of Amiens.
I have examined the muster-book of every ship mentioned in the Admiralty letter to the Board of Ordnance above referred to, and also of the ships mentioned in TheNavalChronicle as fitting out in the early part of 1803. There are altogether thirty-three ships; but two of them, the Utrecht and the Gelykheid, were used as temporary receiving ships for newly raised men.
When we come to consider the sensational statements in TheNavalChronicle of 1803, it will be well to remember what the penalty for infringing the colliers' privilege was.
The description in TheNavalChronicle might be applied to events which when impressment had ceased for half a century occurred over and over again at Portsmouth, Devonport, and other ports when two or three ships happened to be put in commission about the same time. We shall find that the 600 reported as impressed had to be considerably reduced before long.
On the 12th March the Admiralty notified the Board of Ordnance that twenty-two ships of the line the names of which were stated were 'coming forward' for sea. Many of these ships are mentioned in TheNavalChronicle as requiring men, and that journal gives the names of several others of various classes in the same state. The number altogether is thirty-one.
Readers of Captain Mahan's works on Sea-Power will remember the picture he draws of the activity of the press-gang in that year, his authority being TheNavalChronicle. This evidence will be submitted directly to close examination, and we shall see what importance ought to be attached to it.
A system under which more than 37,000 volunteers come forward to serve and less than 2000 men are obtained by compulsion cannot be properly called compulsory. The Plymouth reporter of TheNavalChronicle does not give many details of the volunteering for the navy in 1803, though he alludes to it in fluent terms more than once.
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