Jean Marteille de Bergeraq, who died at Culenbourg in 1777, was condemned to serve on board the galleys in 1707 “in his quality of Protestant”; he must indeed have been a man of iron constitution as he lived to the age of ninety-five.  This is his description of the life of a forcat: 

“They are chained six to a bench; the benches are four feet wide covered with sacking stuffed with wool over which are thrown sheepskins which reach to the floor.  The officer who is master of the galley slaves remains aft with the captain to receive his orders; there are two under officers, one amidships and one at the prow; all of these are armed with whips, with which they flog the absolutely naked bodies of the slaves.  When the captain gives the order to row, the officer gives the signal with a silver whistle which hangs on a cord round his neck; the signal is repeated by the under officers and very soon all the fifty oars strike the water as one.  Imagine six men chained to a bench as naked as they were born, one foot on the stretcher the other raised and placed on the bench in front of them, holding in their hands an oar of enormous weight, stretching their bodies towards the after part of the galley with arms extended to push the loom of the oar clear of the backs of those in front of them who are in the same attitude.  They plunge the blades of the oars into the water and throw themselves back, falling on to the seat which bends beneath their weight.  Sometimes the galley slaves row thus ten, twelve, even twenty hours at a stretch, without the slightest relapse or rest, and on these occasions the officer will go round putting into the mouths of the wretched rowers pieces of bread soaked in wine to prevent them from fainting.  Then the captain will call upon the officers to redouble their blows, and if one of the slaves falls fainting upon his oar, which is a common occurrence, he is flogged until he appears to be dead and is then flung overboard without ceremony.”

The Italian captain, Pantero Pantera, of the Santa Lucia galley, in his work on “L’Armata Navale” published in 1614, gives it as his opinion that although soldiers and sailors could be obtained for service in the galleys if good pay were given, still no money could tempt any free man to adventure himself as a rower for any length of time owing to the intolerable sufferings which the “gallerian” was called upon to endure.  As, however, in the opinion of the captain it was most necessary that the galleys should be manned, he thought that all judges should in future send criminals aboard; those who had committed murder as “lifers,” those who had committed lesser crimes pro rata.  Those who by the nobility of their birth or their physical incompetence were unable to handle the oar should be called upon to pay for substitutes to act for them; these were called “Buone-Voglie.”

There was not much difference after all between the methods used by the seventeenth-century Italian to those actually in force in England at a much later date when the Press Gang swept the honest and the dishonest into its net in its midnight raids.