What I'm Reading - November 2024

J. Ross Dancy, The Myth of the Press Gang, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015.

Although almost a decade old, this statistical analysis of recruitment into the Royal Navy in the first part of the Anglo-French Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, offers insights into the convict transportation system.

Six years after transportation to New South Wales began in 1787, Britain found itself at war with France, a conflict that was to last, with brief respite, for 22 years. Little attention has been given to the impact of the war on the Botany Bay system, but it resulted in a substantial increase in cost, changes to sailing patterns and the loss of several ships to privateers and mutineers, the diversion into active service of naval surgeons, who had been used to oversee the management of the convicts, and, for a time, a collapse in the number of convicts being shipped to the colony.

With few exceptions, British and Irish convicts were shipped to NSW on merchant vessels, so why should we be interested in a book about naval recruitment throughout the French Revolutionary Wars?

A significant number of convicts were shipworkers, ‘used to the sea’ (as the saying went), so the study of convict society will benefit from a better understanding of mariners’ lives.

With the outbreak of war, judges and magistrates offered some offenders the option of enlisting in the Royal Navy (or the army) as an alternative to transportation. In principle, such a study might help us better understand the criminal justice system which sent young men to the other side of the world, and might explain the decline in the numbers being transported through the middle of the 1790s.

I am particularly interested in the convict experience on the outward voyage, and thus the organization of merchant ships and the character of the men who sailed those vessels and interacted with the prisoners day by day. There are limited sources on merchant vessels in this period, and quality information about the experience of sailors on naval vessels, including a statistical analysis of recruitment, fleshes out the picture.

And of course, a detailed study of the recruitment and treatment of the men on the lower deck will assist us in comprehending Georgian society more broadly.

The title of Dancy’s book suggests it is primarily concerned with the press gang, but his PhD, from which the book is drawn, was a statistical analysis of recruitment into the Royal Navy between 1793 and 1801, the period of the French Revolutionary Wars. This is the first serious attempt to use statistics to understand the nature of British naval recruitment. Only N.A.M. Rodger had previously undertaken such an study, and he had confined himself to five ships commissioned during the Seven Years’ War.

Dancy sampled the muster books of three ships each year (a ship-of-the-line, a frigate and a sloop) commissioned at each of the naval ports (Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth): a total of 81 vessels over the nine years of his study. This resulted in a database with 27,174 seamen and petty officers, roughly 10 percent of the men who served in the Royal Navy throughout the French Revolutionary Wars. A second smaller database was constructed of around 4,000 men recruited under the Port Quota Act in London in 1795 (which, in the interests of space, won’t be discussed here).

This is a statistical study, so numbers are unavoidable, and the following is a brief summary of the ones that were of greatest interest to me:

• Over the nine years from 1793 to 1801, numbers on the Royal Navy vessels grew from 17,000 to more than 130,000. Impressment was unpopular, but it had long been understood that in times of war, when such large numbers were required to man the nation’s wooden walls, there was no alternative.

• Contrary to mythology, the overwhelming majority of seamen volunteered. In the period covered by Dancy’s study, 42%  joined as new volunteers, 41% were turned over from a previous ship, and only 10%  were newly pressed. (Another 5% were recruited as volunteers under the Quota Acts.) Taking into account the turnover men who had originally been conscripted, pressed men only account for 16% of the seamen.

• There was a higher rate of turnover from one ship to another among the petty officers than the ordinary seamen. Naval experience was highly valued, and in the final years of this period, the rate of turnover among the petty officers was higher again.

• The Royal Navy needed experienced sailors and young men, and that is where recruitment in general, and impressment in particular, were fopcused. 85% of pressed men were experienced seamen, and of those, three-fifths were able seamen or petty officers. ‘Skilled seamen were a precious commodity to both the Royal Navy and merchant ship owners. They knew their value and expected naval officers to treat them with fairness and respect.’ (p.117)

• The volunteer was also valued: ‘The image of a warship as a floating hell, where sadistic officers kept men in appalling conditions, was created by liberal reformers of the 1830s to support an agenda to abolish impressment and physical punishment’. (p.63)

So how is Dancy’s research relevant for the Botany Bay system? The following are some of the insights which I found of greatest relevance:

Landsmen made up a significant proportion of the lower deck on naval vessels in this period – 28% (compared with 38% able seamen and 24% ordinary seamen). Ships of war carried much higher crew numbers than merchant ships of comparable size, and with a smaller crew, maritime experience would have been of much greater value. But I was surprised by this number. It helps to explain why ex-convicts and escapees with no obvious background at sea (including my great, great grand uncle) were able to find a place amongst the crew of returning ships.

Dancy confirms this was a young man’s game. 70% of the lower deck were 29 years of age or younger, and 44% were under 25. The peak age for landsmen and ordinary seamen joining ships was 20; for able seamen it was 22, for petty officers, 30. ‘Being a sailor was certainly a life for young men, and in maritime communities it seemed to be what young men did for several years before taking up lives ashore. Those who stayed until middle age generally sought their own merchant commands.’ (p.88)

These ages are comparable to those of the convicts, male and female, who were being sent out to NSW in the late 18th century, and it helps to explain the bonds that formed between prisoners and their overseers throughout the voyage.

English-born men accounted for around half of the lower deck. Irishmen made up 19%  (a much lower percentage than has often been claimed), Scotsmen 10%  (although a higher proportion of petty officers and able seamen) and the Welsh only 3%. 8% came from outside the British Isles and 9% were of unknown nationality.

10% of the volunteers were born in London, followed by Devon and Dublin (6%  each), then County Cork (4%), Kent and Cornwall (3% each). However, the proportions differed based on their skills. A higher proportion of the Irish volunteers were landsmen, which Dancy argues demonstrates ‘the attractiveness of naval service to agricultural labourers’. On the other hand, the English accounted for a disproportionately high number of the petty officer volunteers (60%) than the Irish (10%). Within England, Devon provided around the same percentage as London (both 11%): the high numbers drawn from the south-west are consistent with what we see from studies of the Botany Bay trade.

Only 24 of the volunteers were recorded as having been born in Africa, but this is misleading, since the majority of fugitive or freed slaves would have started their lives in the United States or in the West Indies. And since many of those with African roots had Christian names, it is impossible to know how many of the volunteers were black. This was of interest to me because of the significant proportion of the First Fleet convicts who can be identified as black were seamen.

Prisoners of war had been recruited into the Royal Navy in previous wars (although French POWs were supposed to be excluded), and the numbers who volunteered throughout the French Revolutionary Wars were small: Dancy could only identify 50. In part this was because of a change of policy in 1759, following a mutiny by POWs on the frigate Raven. This was of particular interest to me because of the Lady Shore, a transport carrying female convicts and military recruits to NSW in 1797, which was seized by some of the soldiers and taken into Spanish South America as a prize of war. The master and the first mate had been killed in resisting the uprising.

The leaders of the mutiny were French prisoners of war with naval experience who had been permitted to enlist in the NSW Corps on condition that they served in the colony for some years. The fact that the Royal Navy had been careful about signing up prisoners of war as seamen, and had prohibited the employment of French POWs, makes the decision of Major Francis Grose, the officer in command of the NSW Corps, to accept French prisoners even more reckless.

Only 19 of the seamen in Dancy’s sample were reported as having come from a civil prison – two able seamen, 12 ordinary seamen and five landsmen. However, 14 of these men were found on the same ship, which might indicate that many of those who joined the naval service in this way were not reported in the musters as convicted criminals. It is easy to understand why.

In looking at the Old Bailey trials following the outbreak of war, it is difficult to ascertain the number of convicts whose sentence was respited on condition of serving in the military. In 1793, for example, at least 21 prisoners were respited on condition of serving in the army and seven in the navy, making up 6.3 percent of the total number convicted that year. The court transcripts for subsequent years are not as clear, and there are no explicit mentions of respites based on naval service. However, Dancy concludes that more men were sent into the navy from the lower courts:

‘It is important to point out that while criminals, especially thieves, were not recruited into the Navy, as they clearly posed a threat to morale aboard ship, minor offenders, such as for riot, drunkenness, and debt, were sometimes allowed to volunteer, especially if they had the seagoing skills that were so highly prized aboard warships.’ (p.33).