seeing their families but once." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1468-Capt. Baker, 3 Nov. 1706.] In Boscawen's ship, the
_Dreadnought_, there were in 1744 two hundred and fifty men who
"had not set foot on shore near two year." Admiral Penrose once paid
off in a seventy-four at Plymouth, many of whose crew had "never set
foot on land for six or seven years"; [Footnote: Penrose (Sir V. C.,
Vice-Admiral of the Blue), _Observations on Corporeal Punishment,
Impressment, etc.,_ 1824.] and Brenton, in his _Naval History_,
instances the case of a ship whose company, after having been
eleven years in the East Indies, on returning to England were
drafted straightway into another ship and sent back to that quarter of
the globe without so much as an hour's leave ashore.

What was true of pay and leave was also true of prize-money. The
sailor was systematically kept out of it, and hence out of the means
of enjoyment and carousal it afforded him, for inconscionable periods.
From a moral point of view the check was hardly to his detriment. But
the Navy was not a school of morals, and withholding the sailor's
hard-earned prize-money over an indefinite term of years neither made
for a contented heart nor enhanced his love for a service that first
absorbed him against his will, and then, having got him in its
clutches, imposed upon and bested him at every turn.

Although the prime object in withholding his pay was to prevent his
running from his ship, so far from compassing that desirable end it
had exactly the contrary effect. Both the preventive and the disease
were of long standing. With De Ruyter in the Thames in 1667, menacing
London and the kingdom, the seamen of the fleet flocked to town in
hundreds, clamouring for their wages, whilst their wives besieged the
Navy Office in Seething Lane, shrieking: "This is what comes of not