any number of men who
seemed to them suitable for their purpose, and dragged them as
prisoners on board war vessels, where they were compelled to serve
until such time as their help might be no longer needed.

The literature of England, almost down to our own times, is diversified
here and there by illustrations of the scenes which were created in our
seaport towns by this practice. Smollett has more than one animated
picture of this kind. The sea stories of Captain Marryat's days abound
in such illustrations, and even romance of the higher order, and poetry
itself, have found subjects for picturesque and pathetic narrative in
the stories of young men thus torn from their families without a
moment's {264} notice, and compelled to go on a ship of war and fight
the foreign enemy at sea. The pay of an able seaman in a ship of war
was, in those times, very poor; the life was one of hardship, and there
was little to tempt a young man of ordinary ways and temperament to
enter the naval service of his sovereign. The seaport towns and the
towns on the great rivers were called upon by royal authority to supply
a certain proportionate number of men for service in the Navy, and the
local governing bodies did their best, we may be sure, by the offer of
bounties and other encouragements, to induce young men to volunteer for
the sea. In times of war, however, when sudden demands were made on
the part of the Crown for the efficient manning of the Navy, these
encouragements and temptations often failed to procure anything like
the required amount of voluntary service, and then it was that the
press-gang came into work to meet the demand by force.

[Sidenote: 1835--Resisting the press-gang]

During the long wars which followed the outbreak of the French
Revolution the press-gang had a busy time of it. Vessels of war were
in the constant habit of summoning merchant vessels to hand over a
certain number of their seamen, and the merchant vessels were brought
to just as if they had been the cruisers of the enemy, and were boarded
by force, whenever force seemed necessary, and compelled to supply the
requisite number. It sometimes happened that the captain of a vessel
failed to understand the meaning of the peremptory summons issued to
him, and he was then promptly brought to an understanding of the
situation by the shot of the war vessel and the appearance of an armed
boarding party on his own decks. Nor was it even a very unusual