event
for the captain of the merchant vessel to offer a resistance, and then
there was a regular sea-fight between the British war ship and the
British merchantman, in which, of course, the latter was very soon
compelled to acknowledge the validity of the royal warrant.

In the ordinary course of things, however, the captain of the war
vessel sent an officer and a party of men on shore, and their business
was to make any captures they {265} pleased, in that part of the town
where men fit for service at sea were most likely to be found. There
are stories told, and told on historic evidence as truth, about young
husbands thus captured and thrown into prison to await their removal to
some war vessel off the coast, and whose wives or mothers could devise
no better means for their rescue than to obtain an interview with them
in the prison, and there contrive so to mutilate the hands of the
captives through the bars of the cell as to render them unfit for
service in the Royal Navy. Sometimes, when it became known that the
press-gang was about to visit that part of the town where seafaring men
were likely to be found, the population of the quarter rallied in
defence of their townsmen, and offered just such resistance to the
emissaries of the naval authorities as they would have offered to an
invading enemy. Streets were barricaded; from the high windows of
houses stones were hurled down and volleys of musketry were fired;
crowds of armed men, and even sometimes of armed women, met the
invaders in the street itself and disputed their progress inch by inch.

In the lower quarters of Portsmouth and other seaport towns such scenes
were of frequent occurrence. The whole system had among its other
harmful effects a very damaging influence on the Navy itself and on its
discipline. The press-gang was not very choice in making up its
contributions of recruits for the fleet. No great pains were taken
with a view to obtain certificates as to character and conduct. Those
who formed the recruiting expedition were only too ready to seize any
strapping young men whom they found loitering about the streets and
lanes of the lower quarters in a seaport town. These strapping young
men often turned out to be rising young men of the criminal classes,
but their limbs and muscles made them like some of Falstaff's recruits,
"good enough to toss--food for powder," and they were promptly swooped
upon and carried off to serve in his Majesty's