Daniel Defoe, more famous today as the author of Robinson Crusoe than for being a government agent and political writer, gave much thought to trade, naval protection, and colonisation. He had a lifelong interest in the problem of naval manning and wrote about it at length at least three times: in his Essay on Projects, written in 1692–3 and published in 1697; in a letter to a select committee of the House of Lords in 1705, and in a lengthy pamphlet, Some Considerations on the Reasonableness and Necessity of Encreasing and Encouraging the Seamen, which appeared in 1728.
Defoe proposed that the state should employ all sailors, who could be hired out to merchants as needed. During peacetime, naval and merchant pay were roughly equal. In wartime, naval expansion drained the number of seamen available for the merchant service, and merchants were forced to pay a premium for them.[1] Defoe argued that his scheme would be more efficient: there would be manpower enough for the fleet, no need for press gangs, no escalation of merchant marine wages in wartime, and less desertion. Seamen would benefit, too. They could count on a regular wage because under his scheme they would get half pay even when not at sea.
Defoe believed that pressing was illegal and he wanted parliament to act against it. His view of sailors was by no means sentimental. He described them as brutal by nature: ‘Tis their way to be violent in all their motions … they swear violently, whore violently, drink punch violently, spend their money when they have it violently … in short they are violent fellows and ought to be encouraged to go to sea’.[2] But he understood their national importance. He also appreciated that their economic value had all sorts of ramifications: as sometime owner of a brick and pantile factory in Tilbury, he had won a government contract in 1697 to supply some of the bricks needed to build the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich.
Modern historians have evaluated Defoe’s proposals for manning the fleet, and similar ideas for registering seamen, chiefly as solutions to a long-standing problem and dismissed them as impractical. N.A.M Rodger considers that nearly all such commentators wrongly assumed that deep-sea sailors were plentiful. In fact there were only 40,000 or so in the whole country. The wartime demand for seamen greatly exceeded the peacetime supply, not least because the seamen’s skills took a long time to learn.[3] Impressment from merchant ships, leaving them dangerously short-handed, proved an insoluble problem throughout the age of sail.[4]
But if Defoe’s proposals are read in context, they can also reveal something of the culture of the port cities he knew and visited. The recent publication of the Cambridge edition of Defoe’s correspondence, edited by Nicholas Seager, makes it easy to consult his 1705 proposal to the House of Lords and trace the development of his thinking.
Defoe often paid tribute to sailors’ courage. In his account of the great storm of 1703, he wrote, ‘The Fury of the Sea is the least thing our Sailors fear: Keep them but from a Lee Shore, or touching upon a Sand, they'll venture all the rest’.[5] It was not fear that made sailors ‘Skulk, and hide Themselves from the Public Service’ when the press gang was around.[6] It was a question of wages. After all, why should a man fight for the crown, when he could earn twice as much in the merchant service, with less risk of injury?
Other details in Defoe’s proposal suggest the character and finer workings of port cultures. He saw that churchwardens and other civic authorities were prone to collude with seamen and keep them hidden within the community in order to prevent their families becoming chargeable to the parish. Contemporary newspapers often give accounts of women helping to resist press gangs, but clearly there were other economic forces at work.
In his 1728 proposal, Defoe points out that officers in charge of press gangs were sometimes corrupt, taking money to release able seamen and filling up their complement with raw, unsuitable recruits. Their gangs robbed houses and picked pockets, under the pretence of pressing seamen. They could be hot-headed, and when sailors resisted their efforts to recruit them for the navy, there were violent quarrels and sometimes murder.[7]
Port communities suffered other disadvantages under the manning system. Besides violence, irregular pay was a problem. Sailors often spent time idle on shore, quite out of money and causing trouble. In wartime, merchant seamen could be persistent and insolent, knowing that they could command high wages. The whole navy might be paid and kept in provisions throughout the winter, at great expense, because the authorities feared to lose men before the summer fighting season. Yet Defoe observed that naval seamen were not visibly better off: they mostly squandered their pay.
Defoe described Portsmouth in the first volume of his A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), when he was struck by the city’s expansion. ‘These docks and yards are now like a town by themselves’, he wrote.[8] Before the 1688 Revolution, Portsmouth had only been populous in time of war, but naval and merchant activity had increased. Now the city was as active during a peace as previously in time of war. These observations may have encouraged Defoe to add in his 1728 proposal that sailors onshore in peacetime could be employed in the naval yards and stores, making sure that all was in good repair.
Nothing came of Defoe’s proposals. He insisted that they were never rejected just laid aside, and ironically due to some government scruples about compulsion. Impressment remained cruel and inefficient.
https://www.port.ac.uk/research/research-groups-and-centres/centre-for-port-cities-and-maritime-cultures
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-cambridge-edition-of-the-correspondence-of-daniel-defoe-book-review-margarette-lincoln/
[1] J. Ross Dancy, The Myth of the Press Gang (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), 16.
[2] Quoted in Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 1998), 13.
[3] N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 208–9.
[4] Roger Knight, Convoys: The British Struggle Against Napoleonic Europe and America (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2022), 34, 54n.
[5] Daniel Defoe, The Storm (London: G. Sawbridge, 1704), 21.
[6] Daniel Defoe, The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe, ed. Nicholas Seager (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022), 123–4.
[7] James Davey, Tempest: The Royal Navy and the Age of Revolutions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023), 46.
[8] Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Penguin, 1971), 151.