The second method of recruiting was to intercept incoming merchant ships. Sometimes this was carried out by a warship coming alongside a merchant ship as she approached a port. On other occasions a naval party would be sent out by a captain in one of the ship's boats. Sometimes the navy hired tenders for the purpose: these were usually brigs or sloops manned by a naval officer and a crew of armed seamen. The legal basis of a system which was universally hated and involved the kidnapping and forcible abduction of hundreds of merchant seamen and fishermen had occasionally been challenged in the courts. The conclusion of the judges was that 'the power of pressing is founded on immemorial usage, allowed for ages,' and that 'His Majesty . . . has a right to demand the service of these people whenever the public safety calls for it.' So in times of war every captain was issued with press warrants. These were printed forms, signed by the Lords of the Admiralty, which began: 'We do hereby Impower and Direct you to impress or cause to be impressed so many Seamen, Seafaring Men and Persons whose Occupations and Callings are to work in Vessels and Boats upon Rivers, as shall be necessary either to Man His Majesty's Ship under your Command or any other of His Majesty's Ships, giving unto each Man so impressed One Shilling for Prest Money.'
Few naval officers were in favour of impressment and it was generally reckoned that one volunteer was worth three men who had been pressed into the navy. Nevertheless most captains had to resort to the press gangs to make up the necessary numbers and the system undoubtedly produced results. Captain Pasley managed to get hold of fifty-two men from the rendezvous at Tower Hill. Two dozen merchant seamen were impressed from West Indiamen in the Thames Estuary, and a party of seamen sent ashore at Sheerness rounded up another dozen unwilling recruits. By the middle of August the Bellerophon was ready to sail.
High tide on 16 August was early in the morning. As the tide began to turn, Captain Pasley gave the order to get under way. A slip-rope which led from the ship to the ring of the mooring buoy was let go and the foretopmen, perched perilously high up on the yards of the foremast, let loose the topsail. The fresh easterly breeze filled the sail and the Bellerophon slowly began to gather way. The bellowed orders of the ship's officers carried across the water to the dockyard but her departure was scarcely noticed among the constant activity out on the river. The comings and goings of warships were as familiar a sight to the workers in the dockyard then as the comings and goings of buses would be nowadays to workers on a building site in central London. However, Commissioner Proby was informed of the ship's departure and later that day he sent a letter to the Admiralty informing their lordships that His Majesty's ship Bellerophon had this day sailed to join the fleet at the Nore.
FOUR
Preparations for War
1790-4
On 31 August 1790 the Bellerophon sailed out of the Thames Estuary, rounded the North Foreland, sailed past Ramsgate and the chalk cliffs lining the great sweep of Pegwell Bay and Sandwich Bay, and headed for the Downs. There, in the sheltered waters off Deal, she rounded up into the wind, dropped anchor and fired a 13-gun salute to the admiral of the fleet of warships gathered in the anchorage. For three years she had been part of a fleet in mothballs, a hulk without masts and guns: one ship in a line of thirty or forty similar hulks, rising and falling with the tide on the River Medway. Now for the first time she joined the fleet as an armed and operational ship of the line. For the next month she was part of the extraordinary activity which took place whenever a fleet was gathered in the Downs.
It is hard for us to picture the scene which would have greeted an onlooker on the beach at Deal in those days. When the steamships came along in the nineteenth century the Downs lost the key role which it had played for centuries in the lives of seamen sailing up and down the English Channel. Today the once famous anchorage has no significance for the crews of the container ships and bulk carriers passing through the Dover Straits, or for the thousands of passengers on the cross-Channel ferries from Dover and Ramsgate. And yet in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century it was not unusual for several hundred ships to be gathered in the Downs, waiting for favourable winds to take them down the English Channel or up around the North Foreland and into the Thames Estuary. A first glance at a chart of the area suggests that it is an unlikely place to choose as an anchorage. The shore is bleak and exposed with no coves to provide sheltered landing places for boats. The shingle beach shelves steeply into deep water and boats have to be launched and landed through the surf. And 4 miles offshore lie the Goodwin Sands, notorious as one of the greatest hazards to shipping in the world. But although the Goodwin Sands were, and are, a graveyard of ships they also provided shelter from easterly and south-easterly winds for ships anchored in the Downs; while the white cliffs of the South Foreland and the angle of the coast at this point provided shelter from the full blast of south-westerly gales. So for weeks at a time the waterfront at Deal, and the anchorage beyond, were as busy as the Pool of London. Ships of all sizes and many nationalities waited there for fair winds. Anchored among the fishing boats and the merchantmen were the warships, easily distinguished by their flags and pennants streaming in the wind, and the constant booming of their guns. During the three weeks that the Bellerophon was anchored in the Downs she fired a 19-gun salute for the anniversary of the King's accession, she fired her guns to salute the comings and goings of admirals, she fired guns to draw attention to various signals, and she devoted one whole morning to gunnery practice, 'exercising the great guns'.
In addition to the forest of vessels anchored offshore there was a constant coming and going of small craft: bumboats filled to the gunwales with baskets of bread, fish, fruit and vegetables for the warships and Indiamen; naval longboats weighed down with barrels of water, rum and beef; gigs ferrying naval officers from ship to shore; local boats taking pilots out to the ships; and fishing boats being hauled up the beach with the aid of capstans. The Bellerophon spent a busy three weeks anchored amidst this bustle of activity. She took in water and provisions, had her sides painted, sent a press gang to take hands off some West Indiamen, and on 25 September set sail down the Channel to Portsmouth. Two days later she dropped anchor at Spithead, the fleet anchorage in the Solent, opposite the entrance to Portsmouth harbour. There were warships everywhere, their commanders awaiting orders to put to sea. For the next two months the crew of the Bellerophon passed the time blacking and tarring the rigging, painting the gun carriages, stowing ballast, and getting drunk. Pasley punished several seamen with two dozen lashes for drunkenness, neglect of duty and theft. And early one morning William Knight, an able seaman, fell into the harbour from the jib boom and was drowned.
By the end of October 1790 it was clear that the threatened conflict with Spain was not going to happen. Britain's warlike preparations had made a considerable impression on the Spanish. An agreement was reached in which Spain abandoned her claims to exclusive trading rights to the north-western coast of America and she also agreed to pay reparations for the damage inflicted on the British ships. On 21 November the Bellerophon, in company with five other ships of the line, was sent back to Sheerness. A year later she was back on her moorings in Chatham. Her crew were paid off, her masts were taken out, her guns removed, and she resumed her place in the long line of decommissioned ships on the Medway waiting for the next call to arms.