considerations for his capture were either withheld or recalled. On
the whole, considering the arduous and disagreeable nature of the
gangsman's calling, the Navy Board cannot be accused of dealing any
too generously by him.

"If ever you intend to man the fleet without being cheated by the
captains and pursers," Charles II. is credited with having once said
to his council, "you may go to bed." What in this sense was true of
the service afloat was certainly not less true of that loosely
organised and laxly supervised naval department, the impress ashore.
Considering the repute of the officers engaged in it, and the
opportunities they enjoyed for peculation and the taking of
bribes--considering, above all, the extreme difficulty of keeping a
watchful eye upon officers scattered throughout the length and breadth
of the land, the wonder is, not that irregularities crept in, but that
they should have been, upon the whole, so few and so venial.

To allow the gangsmen to go fishing for sea-fish or dredging for
oysters, as was commonly done when there was little prospect of a
catch on land, was no more heinous than the custom prevailing--to
everybody's knowledge--at King's Lynn in Norfolk, where the gang had
no need to go a-fishing because, regularly as the cobbles came in, the
midshipman attached to the gang appeared on the quay and had the
"insolence to demand Three of the Best Fysh for the Regulating
Captain, the Lieutenant and himself." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1546--Petition of the Owners of the Fishing Cobbles of
Lynn, 3 March 1809.] And if, again, rating a gangsman in choicest
quarterdeck language were no serious offence, why should not the
Regulating Captain rate his son as midshipman, even though "not proper
to be employed as such." And similarly, granting it to be right to