North Atlantic press gangs: Impressment and naval-civilian relations in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, 1749--1815

Press gangs were detested throughout the North Atlantic world. For any seafarer, fisherman or maritime labourer, impressment was both a constant annoyance and an occupational hazard. It disrupted thousands of families and handicapped maritime trade. Although the British Navy had squadrons in Halifax and St. John's in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this is the first study of press gangs in Atlantic Canada. It traces the origins of impressment in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in the wider Atlantic world from 1749 to 1815. The New England planters brought a shared history of resistance to impressment to Nova Scotia in the late 1750s and 1760s. Local authorities used these Yankee roots to battle press gangs during the American Revolution and to seize control of impressment during the Napoleonic Wars. They won this battle so decisively that by the War of 1812 the Navy could no longer man its ships in Nova Scotia, and naval-civilian discord spilled out onto the streets of Halifax. Impressment in Newfoundland, by contrast, was shaped by events in the British Isles. The Newfoundland fishery was a nursery for seamen---a training ground for the Navy---but for most of the eighteenth century naval recruitment occurred in the English West Country and Ireland, not in Newfoundland. After statutory restrictions against impressment on the island were lifted in 1775, and impressment ravaged the labour market in the British Isles in the 1770s and 1790s, the Navy turned to Newfoundland as an alternative source of manpower. Thousands of men entered the fleet there during the Napoleonic Wars. Naval guard boats in St. John's harbour were the engine of impressment in Newfoundland, but naval officers also received recruits from a cooperative civil power. While impressment was a common feature of maritime life in the North Atlantic world, this thesis maintains that it had divergent origins and histories in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.