A fruitful source of the widespread belief that our navy in the old days was chiefly manned by recourse to compulsion, is a confusion between two words of independent origin and different meaning, which, in ages when exact spelling was not thought indispensable, came to be written and pronounced alike.  During our later great maritime wars, the official term applied to anyone recruited by impressment was ‘prest-man.’  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and part of the eighteenth century, this term meant the exact opposite.  It meant a man who had voluntarily engaged to serve, and who had received a sum in advance called ‘prest-money.’  ‘A prest-man,’ we are told by that high authority, Professor Sir J. K. Laughton, ’was really a man who received the prest of 12d., as a soldier when enlisted.’  In the ‘Encyclopaedia Metropolitana’ (1845), we find:—­ ’Impressing, or, more correctly, impresting, i.e. paying earnest-money to seamen by the King’s Commission to the Admiralty, is a right of very ancient date, and established by prescription, though not by statute.  Many statutes, however, imply its existence—­one as far back as 2 Richard II, cap. 4.’  An old dictionary of James I’s time (1617), called ’The Guide into the Tongues, by the Industrie, Studie, Labour, and at the Charges of John Minshew,’ gives the following definition:—­’Imprest-money.  G. [Gallic or French], Imprest-ance; Imprestanza, from in and prestare, to lend or give beforehand....  Presse-money.  T. [Teutonic or German], Soldt, from salz, salt.  For anciently agreement or compact between the General and the soldier was signified by salt.’  Minshew also defines the expression ’to presse souldiers’ by the German soldatenwerben, and explains that here the word werben means prepare (parare).  ‘Prest-money,’ he says, ’is so-called of the French word prest, i.e. readie, for that it bindeth those that have received it to be ready at all times appointed.’  In the posthumous work of Stephen Skinner, ‘Etymologia Linguae Anglicanae’ (1671), the author joins together ‘press or imprest’ as though they were the same, and gives two definitions, viz.:  (1) recruiting by force (militescogere_); (2) paying soldiers a sum of money and keeping them ready to serve.  Dr. Murray’s ‘New English Dictionary,’ now in course of publication, gives instances of the confusion between imprest and impress.  A consequence of this confusion has been that many thousands of seamen who had received an advance of money have been regarded as carried off to the navy by force.  If to this misunderstanding we add the effect on the popular mind of cleverly written stories in which the press-gang figured prominently, we can easily see how the belief in an almost universal adoption of compulsory recruiting for the navy became general.  It should, therefore, be no matter of surprise when we find that the sensational reports published in the English newspapers in 1803 were accepted without question.