Note 13 — IX ON BOARD OUR FLAGSHIPS AT TRAFALGAR

Having regard to the number of foreigners on board the Victory, these facts are in point. For more than fifty years previous to 1794, foreigners were permitted by Act of Parliament to enter on board British merchantmen trading overseas to the extent of three-quarters of the crew. After 1794, “for the encouragement of British seamen,” an Act was passed reducing the proportion of foreigners to one-quarter of the ships’ companies, which, however, still left a large number available at various places for the purposes of impressment for the Navy. As to the “Impress Service”: in 1805, to keep up the supplies of men, forty-three permanent stations or “rendezvous” were maintained in Great Britain and Ireland, with an establishment of twenty-seven captains and sixty-three lieutenants, permanently on duty, established “in those parts of the United Kingdom where seamen chiefly resort, at which stations volunteers and impressed men are asked, and deserters from the Naval Service are apprehended.” They were distributed as follows: London and Thames, two captains and ten lieutenants; Deal and the Downs, Liverpool, and Dundee, a captain and three lieutenants at each place; Falmouth, Hull, Cork, Cowes, Poole, Waterford, Bristol, Londonderry, Leith, Shields, Dublin, Portsmouth, and Gosport, a captain and two lieutenants at each place; Newcastle, Sunderland, Yarmouth, Glasgow and Greenock, Dunbar, Limerick, Southampton, Romsey, Exeter, Lynn, Swansea, Folkestone, Ramsgate, Margate, Lerwick, and the Isle of Man, a captain and one lieutenant, or a lieutenant independently, at each place.