Mr. King had
misapprehended St. Vincent's meaning; reading, from a mass of records
then before him, a letter of the admiral to Sir William Scott, Judge
of the High Court of Admiralty, "asking for counsel and advice, and
confessing his own perplexity and total incompetency to discover any
practical project for the safe discontinuance of the practice." "You
see," proceeded Lord Castlereagh, "that the confidence of Mr. King on
this point was entirely unfounded."[153]

Wherever the misunderstanding lay, matters had not advanced in the
least towards a solution when Monroe reached England, in 1803, as
King's successor. Up to that time, no tabular statement seems to have
been prepared, showing the total number of seamen impressed from
American vessels during the first war, 1793-1801; nor does the present
writer think it material to ascertain, from the fragmentary data at
hand, the exact extent of an injury to which the question of more or
less was secondary. The official agent of the American Government, for
the protection of seamen, upon quitting his post in London in 1802,
wrote that he had transferred to his successor "A list of 597 seamen,
where answers have been returned to me, stating that, having no
documents to prove their citizenship, the Lords Commissioners of the
Admiralty could not consent to their discharge." Only seven cases then
remained without replies, which shows at the least a decent attention
to the formalities of intercourse; and King, in his letter of October
7, 1799, had acknowledged that the Secretary to the Admiralty had
"given great attention to the numerous applications, and that a
disposition has existed to comply with our demands, when the same
could be done consistently with the maxims and practice adopted and
adhered to by Great Britain." The Admiralty, however, maintained that
"the admission of the principle, that a man declaring himself to
belong to a foreign state should, upon that assertion merely, and
without direct or very strong circumstantial proof, be suffered to
leave the service, would be productive of the most dangerous
consequences to his Majesty's Navy." The agent himself had written to
the Secretary of the Admiralty, "I freely confess that I believe many
of them are British subjects; but I presume that all of them were
impressed from American vessels, and by far the greater proportion are
American citizens, who, from various causes, have been deprived of
their certificates, and wh