30th. Up, and to the office, and mightily troubled all this morning with
going to my Lord Mayor (Sir Thomas Bludworth,

[As his conduct during the Great Fire fully proved, when he is said
to have boasted that he would extinguish the flames by the same
means to which Swift tells us Gulliver had recourse at Lilliput.--B.]

a silly man, I think), and other places, about getting shipped some men
that they have these two last nights pressed in the City out of houses:
the persons wholly unfit for sea, and many of them people of very good
fashion, which is a shame to think of, and carried to Bridewell they are,
yet without being impressed with money legally as they ought to be. But
to see how the King's business is done; my Lord Mayor himself did scruple
at this time of extremity to do this thing, because he had not money to
pay the pressed-money to the men, he told me so himself; nor to take up
boats to carry them down through bridge to the ships I had prepared to
carry them down in; insomuch that I was forced to promise to be his
paymaster, and he did send his City Remembrancer afterwards to the office,
and at the table, in the face of the officers, I did there out of my owne
purse disburse L15 to pay for their pressing and diet last night and this
morning; which is a thing worth record of my Lord Mayor. Busy about this
all the morning, at noon dined and then to the office again, and all the
afternoon till twelve at night full of this business and others, and among
these others about the getting off men pressed by our officers of the
fleete into the service; even our owne men that are at the office, and the
boats that carry us. So that it is now become impossible to have so much
as a letter carried from place to place, or any message done for us: nay,
out of Victualling ships full loaden to go down to the fleete, and out of
the vessels of the officers of the Ordnance, they press men, so that for