up the press-gang, of parties of soldiers patrolling the streets, and sentries with screwed bayonets placed at every door while the press-gang entered and searched each hole and corner of the dwelling; when we hear of churches being surrounded during divine service by troops, while the press-gang stood ready at the door to seize men as they came out from attending public worship, and take these instances as merely types of what was constantly going on in different forms, we do not wonder at Lord Mayors, and other civic authorities in large towns, complaining that a stop was put to business by the danger which the tradesmen and their servants incurred in leaving their houses and going into the streets, infested by press-gangs.

Whether it was that living in closer neighbourhood to the metropolis—­the centre of politics and news—­inspired the inhabitants of the southern counties with a strong feeling of that kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations; or whether it was that the chances of capture were so much greater at all the southern ports that the merchant sailors became inured to the danger; or whether it was that serving in the navy, to those familiar with such towns as Portsmouth and Plymouth, had an attraction to most men from the dash and brilliancy of the adventurous employment—­it is certain that the southerners took the oppression of press-warrants more submissively than the wild north-eastern people.  For with them the chances of profit beyond their wages in the whaling or Greenland trade extended to the lowest description of sailor.  He might rise by daring and saving to be a ship-owner himself.  Numbers around him had done so; and this very fact made the distinction between class and class less apparent; and the common ventures and dangers, the universal interest felt in one pursuit, bound the inhabitants of that line of coast together with a strong tie, the severance of which by any violent extraneous measure, gave rise to passionate anger and thirst for vengeance.  A Yorkshireman once said to me, ’My county folk are all alike.  Their first thought is how to resist.  Why!  I myself, if I hear a man say it is a fine day, catch myself trying to find out that it is no such thing.  It is so in thought; it is so in word; it is so in deed.’

So you may imagine the press-gang had no easy time of it on the Yorkshire coast.  In other places they inspired fear, but here rage and hatred.  The Lord Mayor of York was warned on 20th January, 1777, by an anonymous letter, that ’if those men were not sent from the city on or before the following Tuesday, his lordship’s own dwelling, and the Mansion-house also, should be burned to the ground.’