crimps at Greenock. Sheerness crimps gave "great advance money."
Liverpool was infested with them, all the leading merchant shippers at
Bristol, London and other great ports having "agents" there, who
offered the man-o'-war's-man tempting bounties and substantial wages
to induce him to desert his ship. A specially active agent of Bristol
shipowners was one Vernon Ley, who plied his trade chiefly at Exeter
and Plymouth, whence he was known to send to Bristol, in the space of
six months, as many as seventy or eighty men, whom he provided with
postchaises for the journey and 8 Pounds per man as bounty. James
White, a publican who kept the "Pail of Barm" at Bedminster, made a
close second in his activity and success. Spithead had its regular
contingent of crimps, and many an East India ship sailing from that
famous anchorage was "entirely manned" by their efforts, of course at
the expense of the ships of war lying there. At Chatham, crimpage
bounty varied from fifteen to twenty guineas per head; and at Cork, a
favourite recruiting ground for both merchantmen and privateers, the
same sum could be had any day, with high wages to boot.

In the Crown Colonies a similar state of things prevailed. Queen's
ships visiting Jamaica in or about the year 1716 lost so heavily they
scarce dared venture the return voyage to England, their men having
"gone a-wrecking" in the Gulf of Florida, where one armed sloop was
reputed to have recovered Spanish treasure to the value of a hundred
thousand dollars. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1471--Capt.
Balchen, 13 May 1716.] Time did not lessen desertion in the island,
though it wrought a change in the cause. When Admiral Vernon was
Commander-in-Chief there in the forties, he lost five hundred men
within a comparatively short time--"seduced out," to use his own
words, "through the temptations of high wages and thirty gallons of
rum, and conveyed drunk on board from the punch-houses where they are