 All right let's see we're all good. Okay so I want to start today with a quote talking about sailors. Your fleet and your trade have so near a relation and such a mutual influence upon each other they cannot be well separated. Your trade is the mother and nurse of your semen. Your semen are the life of your fleet and your fleet is the security and protection of your trade and both are the wealth, strength, security and glory of Britain. This quote makes clear the the tie between the merchant service, the Royal Navy, and the semen that both services were dependent on. Now understanding British naval manpower during the 18th century is by no means simple. Naval recruitment particularly impressments has been a subject of scholarly fascination for more than a century now and from the start the fundamental importance of the subject has explained only a small part of its attraction. Just as it did in the 18th century today impressment matters more for its political and moral implications than for its administrative history as a mechanism for manning the Navy and unlike naval administration it is still capable of arousing emotion and passion. Historians have generally been more interested in the symbolic value of impressment rather than its practical machinery. Effectively impressment and the infamous press gang has become what most people and many historians think of as the standard of Royal Navy recruitment during the age of cell. Fiction and history alike have filled the popular mindset with images of press gangs dragging semen and landsmen alike off to serve in what amounted to a seaborn dungeon. Similar themes have also emerged in modern research such as the popular idea that press gangs were out to conscript anyone they could find and that deficiencies in skilled mariners were made up by pressing unskilled landsmen. The prevailing view of 18th century British naval manning is that the majority of men were forced into service and this fits very well with a traditional view of navies in the age of cell and that is of course the infamous image of rumsotomy in the lash. The problems that undermine our understanding of impressment are entirely based on or sorry are the problems that undermine our understanding of impressment are entirely based on historians having done a poor job of research. There is great value certainly in the cultural and political analysis of impressment but without understanding the mechanisms of British naval manning including the frequency of impressment along with volunteering and being men being turned over from ship to ship we cannot hope to come to grips with the topic. Historians engaging with naval manning have long called for data to better understand the subject and until recently we haven't had that data because the subject suffers from an evidence problem. Mainly there's too much of it. The primary evidence for understanding how the Royal Navy manned its ships are ships muster books. If only a dozen of these ships musters survived they would have no doubt exhaustively been analyzed. However more than a hundred thousand muster books exist in the British National Archives and working through them even only a few of them can prove exceptionally difficult. Trying to examine more than a handful quickly turns into a laborious task. Further organizing and investigating the enormous amount of enormous quantity of data that these books provide is virtually impossible without using computers and understanding how database programs work. Therefore with the difficulty involved in analyzing the primary source material and historians desire to use impressment for its political and moral implications until recently there hasn't been a detailed study of what British naval impressment was or how it worked. Now the press gang itself is one of the first images that come to mind when people think of the Royal Navy and the age of cell. It's often an image of landsmen being dragged off to sea and the Royal Navy as effectively a seaborne dungeon. Now here we have two of those images. These are from the 1780s and the 1790s. Effectively it's a group of the press gang consisted of a group of oversized brutal men directed by a sadistic lieutenant looking for anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path and we can see in most cases this one on the left is a little bit whoops. Oh what have I done? Oh there we go. That's what I want. Okay here we go. This is a little bit left on the little bit dark on the left here but this gentleman here is being pressed and he is obviously not a sailor. This is the Tower of London in the background and over here we can see this guy being dragged off by the press gang and you can see clearly there are scissors and a tape measure in his pocket. He is a tailor and either of these gentlemen in these images are sailors. The general view is that the Royal Navy was a place where the majority of the men were forced to serve and most historians have come down to say somewhere between 50 and 75% of the men in the Navy were pressed. American historians tend to use a higher number particularly when they're discussing the War of 1812. And the historical reception of Impressment actually supports that idea. So how do we get from those landsmen being dragged off to Naval Service to the sailor on the cover of my book? This image is a watercolor by Gabriel Bray. He was a young lieutenant in the Royal Navy at the time and it was painted aboard HMS Palace around 1775. So who are the skilled men that the Royal Navy wants or wanted I should say? Now this image itself comes from around 1930. It is from an Allen Villars film. It was a silent film that was then later dubbed over called The Last of the Cape Horners and it's a film really documenting the end of the age of sail for the merchant marine. And even up until really the eve of the Second World War, the very long distance of voyages that weren't time dependent were often carried by sailing ships. So in this case, it's the grain trade from Australia going to Britain. They were carried aboard sailing ships. But importantly, the reason I chose this image is for these gentlemen right here. Because effectively these are the same men that the Royal Navy was looking for in the 18th century. So if British Naval recruitment had been based on dragging unskilled the unskilled dregs of society off to sea, then where did the necessary number of these gentlemen here come from? Because the problem is, is that let's see if we go one more, we can compare the two images. These men here have to be able to go up in the rigging. It doesn't matter if it's 30 degrees and the wind's blowing at 60 knots. They have to be able to go up in the rigging, because the ship depends on it. Okay, that takes lots of skill, they're required to work of lofts. And generally, this took five or more years of skill to become an able seaman to be able to proficiently do this on a regular basis. But it also took the strength of a full grown man and the agility of youth. So it's actually a fairly narrow window that we're talking about. They needed to originally go to sea when they were sort of 14 to 15, to be able to gain those years of experience. And then by about the time they're sort of 20 or so they become able seaman. And then really by the time they're 28 or even 30, they've acquired enough injuries and they've lost a lot of that agility to go up in the rigging. So they're no longer really feasible to do that job. So it's a narrow window that these men need to come out of. And effectively, these this man here, this being pressed in front of Tower Hill, cannot be these men here. That this guy is not a sailor and has no sea skills. It's pretty obvious from the way he's dressed. So one of the issues here is really understanding the historiography of how Naval Impressment has been dealt with. And really, it boils down into two different groups of researchers with two different agendas. And this has produced the modern debate about Impressment. The first group, and this is a large, these are broad, general groups, there are large subdivisions within them. But the first group looks at Impressment for its political and social implications. Now, that does not mean that this is this is not something important. It certainly is. But it's a perception of the Royal Navy being heavily manned by press gangs, which calls social friction within 18th century society. Part of that social friction that was actually caused is because press gangs were very visible. They were often what landsmen saw of the Navy, because it actually happened on short, whereas most of what the Navy does happens out, happened out of sight. And certainly volunteering as well. Volunteering often happened without much notice. Men went and signed up for the Navy and were taken off to a ship. There was no scuffle or anything like that to go with it. The second group examines press Impressment as a naval function, or I should say more widely, naval manning as a naval function. It's not simply naval Impressment. How successful was the practice? Who was pressed? Who volunteered? And how did manning practices affect desertion, discipline, and the general effectiveness of the Navy? Now, I'm not discounting the first group by any means. However, one of their primary arguments is the Impressment was a function of a tyrannical government that forced men to fight wars that they did not benefit from nor support. On the way to making this argument, they have vastly overstated the number of men pressed. And generally, as I said, these estimates are north of 50% of the men, usually somewhere between 50 and 75. And I've even seen one reference to 80% of the men being pressed. But this argument suffers from a lack of data. And currently much of the received concept of Impressment is that, again, of brutality, where seamen are taken off against their will, much like this gentleman over here. Now, I want to talk a little bit about history of Impressment and then talk about what I've done and look at some of those statistics that I've created in my work. Now, Impressment, I work primarily on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but Impressment was not new to the end of the 18th century. Even in the 1660 Charles, in the 1660s, Charles II's Navy relied heavily on ship's officers to man the fleet and captains would send out lieutenants with a handful of men ashore to recruit men for the English Navy, whether through Impressment or accepting volunteers. There was little in the way of organization in this. There was a constant shortage of volunteer skilled manpower. So Impressment was a necessity to produce skilled seamen. And even at that point in time, it was considered a medieval prerogative of the crown. These efforts were often not enough and had to be supplemented by emplacing embargoes on outward bound shipping. So they literally close a port down until enough men could be raised for the English Navy. And this was, of course, to inspire merchants to provide sailors for naval service. Now, it's important to recognize that the Navy of the 17th century really only employed seasonally. They fought primarily in local waters in the North Sea. They would mobilize for war every year in the spring. They would campaign in the summer and then sometime around October and November, all the ships would be put into dock. All the sailors would be turned out of them and then they would repeat the practice the next year. So if you were pressed or you volunteered for service, most you're committing to six or eight months of service at a time. However, with we in the third and 1689 and the Glorious Revolution, this all changed. Suddenly when the primary enemy of the English and later Britain became frats and wars became more and more colonial in nature, the Navy's began mobilizing year round and wars became longer and longer. And this graph that we're looking at here is effectively the size and manpower numbers of the British Navy from 1688 all the way through till 1815. The peaks are the wars and of course the troughs in the middle are the pieces and then there's lots of little mobilizations when weird political things happen and the British think they're going to war and then it turns out not to. So you see all these tiny spikes in between the larger ones. But you can basically count the wars of the 18th century with these peaks. So as the 18th century progresses, wars are progressively fought on a longer basis. The Navy's are mobilized throughout the year. They're in distant waters and the fleets become much larger and are employed over much longer periods of time. And manning the Navy in a haphazard function, basically captains sending out lieutenants of their own ships became less and less feasible as the Navy got larger and larger. They just simply weren't able to recruit the manpower numbers that they needed in that manner. There was even the Admiralty was was really concerned with this throughout the 18th century. There was even an attempt to create a Siemens register, which was effectively having all sailors sign up in a major list. And then in the similar sense today as to sign up for the draft, the idea was when work came around, they would call it whoever needed it. But this was an offense to English liberties and sailors much more like the idea of the press game, which you could avoid if you or at least had a chance of avoiding if you wanted to. However, it wasn't until the Admiralty took the manning issue out of the hands of ships officers and organized a dedicated recruiting service that they really made major progress towards supplying their vastly expanding naval force with the necessary manpower. And this is where we get the beginning of the Impress Service. Impress Service was an administrative branch of the Royal Navy. It became as at the end of the 18th century, the primary means by which the Navy recruited manpower. It originated in the War of Austrian Secession, so the 1730s and 40s, with the introduction of two regulating captains in the City of London. These regulating captains inspected the men taken by the press gang, streamlined the process of Impressment and ensured the men being pressed were mariners, not criminals or vagrants, because the Navy wasn't interested in the unskilled drags of society. In the Seven Years' War, in the 1750s and 60s, this was vastly expanded. The Impress Service itself was actually established. And regulating captains were first posted in several coastal cities throughout Britain, including London, Bristol, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Newcastle, Yarmouth and Edinburgh. And it was expanded in 1756 and 1759 and again in 1762 because it was successful. And by the end of the war, regulating captains were posted in most of the major cities in the South and East Coast of Britain, which included Gloucester, Winchester, Redding, South Hampton, Aberdeen, Exeter and Cork. Regulating captains supervised press gangs. And press gangs themselves operated out of a rendezvous. And usually the rendezvous would be a local inn. It was, importantly, a point for volunteers to join the Navy. So the Impress Service is where men who voluntarily want to join the Navy would go as well. So this minute was always highly visible. It was marked with flags. It often had drummers and men marching up and down the streets, playing patriotic tunes and, of course, many recruiting posters. And it was important that a rendezvous was not an ominous place, as such places had little chance of attracting volunteers. And so here we have an example of a recruiting poster from 1797 in Shoram. And in the poster, I won't go through and read the entire thing, but the reposter has lots of patriotic language in it, references to good hearts, love of the king and the country and religion, and of course, people who hate the French and damn the Pope. Not a friendly Catholic environment in England of the 1790s. So the actual gang itself was made up of five to ten tough men and not sailors. They were usually made up of locals because sailors were much more valuable on a ship and it was much cheaper to hire locals who didn't have a job. So we'd hire five to ten locals. It would be commanded by a naval lieutenant who was issued with a press warrant, which gave him legal right to take men for naval service. And it also detailed the men who were eligible to be pressed, basically people who whose occupations involved the sea and some means or another. Similarly, there were impressed tenders controlled by the Impress Service and these operated in coastal waters and often pressed men off of incoming merchant ships. The Impress Service continued to grow after the Seven Years War and by January of 1793 on the eve of the French Revolutionary Wars, the Impress Service was already fully deployed in Britain. The Admiralty saw this, saw the war coming, so the Impress Service was fully deployed. It was armed with signed press warrants that lacked only a date to make them legal. So basically they've sent out all the warrants, the men are in place and literally they've just got to write the day on it and go once war was declared. The creation of an administrative branch of the Navy specifically dedicated to naval manning made the process of mobilization significantly more efficient. This was a clear Admiralty strategy. They understood that more efficient manning resulted in a more effective naval force, especially during the early stages of war. So how did the Royal Navy recruit this necessary manpower? During the French Revolutionary Wars, there were approximately 250,000 men that served in the Navy between 1793 and 1802 and if you take the entire span of the French Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars, so 1793 to 1815 into effect, as many as 650,000 men would have served in the Navy over that period of time. So was the press gang really the source of the Royal Navy's power as popular concept has us to believe? Were press gangs really setting out to grab anyone unlucky enough to cross their paths? Did anyone actually volunteer for what some historians have described as a floating dungeon? My book is the result of a research project that has attempted to answer those questions with new research. The heart of my book is the first substantial statistical study on recruitment. My primary aim was to examine the mechanism of British Naval Manning. I constructed a database that analyzed Royal Naval manpower, which includes impressment, but all forms of recruiting as well. The database was compiled from ship's muster books, 81 muster books in total between 1793 and 1801. It was a random sample from the French Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars, which covered 27,174 men. And each man in the database has 26 data points. So that's a total of just over 700,000 individual data entries. And the sample cuts across nine years of war and is large enough to provide reliable statistics across its breadth. Following my book, I've continued that research and looked at the Napoleonic Wars where I looked at the muster books of 54 ships. I looked at the odd years, 1803 through 1813. So 1803, 05, 0709, 11, and 13. A random sample from the Napoleonic Wars, it covers 15,000 and 30 men and 390,000 data entries. So all told, I have information for 42,204 men and the entire database consists of about 1.1 million data entries, all done by hand. The data comes from ships muster books. And here's an example of what one of them looks like. This is the front page of a muster book. These are all housed in the British National Archives. And we can zoom into the top here and we can see this is from HMS Dreadnought. It was a 98-gun, second-rate ship, had a complement of 738 men, and it was commissioned in Portsmouth on the 29th of June, 1801. And we can go on and look at a page within the muster book. And this is what it actually looks like. And the muster books were used ultimately to pay the men. It showed when they joined the ship, what their rating was, if they were promoted at any time during that period. And at the end, when they left the ship, this is how they would be paid. So we can look at the individuals. There's a couple here. So we've got, what is this? I think this is Samuel Cooper. He was an ordinary seaman. On the 20th of August, he was promoted to a midshipman. He is from... Where's that? I made an odd angle here. Bedford, sorry. Yeah, he's from Bedford. He's 20 years old. We can see he showed up on the 29th of July. When he began payment and he received two pounds, 10 shillings as a bounty for volunteering. He was also a volunteer. We can see right here from Portsmouth. Below him, you've got Jason Coates from Somerset, 23, an able seaman, five pound bounty and a volunteer as well. We can go on and there are many examples of this. Basically every page of a ship muster has 20 men on it. And it will cover everybody that's on the ship. It's also it's not only for pay, but it's also for victualing. So this is how the ship received the necessary number of supplies. It knew how many men were on board and how much food and whatnot it would need when it was going abroad. So this all this data basically flipping page by page and a number in a muster book and entering it by hand into a database is how I got to my research. And effectively from that, once it's all entered into a database, we can pull all kinds of information out of that. We can tell how men were recruited, how old they were, where they came from of all kinds of information. Their age, their skill levels, all types of stuff. So I want to go to this first. This is a this is a graph that looks at the number of men in the Royal Navy during from 1792 through 1815. And we can see that 1793 the Royal Navy mobilizes and really through 1798 it is growing the entire time and it plateaus in 1798. Effectively what's happened is all the ships that were in ordinary or mothballed in normal terms have been mobilized at this point. And they're working on new construction to grow the Navy. So you see sort of a spike here in 1800, 1801. And then the piece of Amiens, which is a 14 month piece in the Great Wars will France comes and then the Navy immediately remobilizes again and peaks out at its highest point in 1813 at 147,000 men. So it grows from about 17,000 1792 to 120,000 no sorry 120,000 in 1798 I think about 130 and 1801 and then ultimately 147 is the height of the size of the Royal Navy. It's the biggest point of the Royal Navy in the age of sale. So we can also compare that we can lay that on top of and this information comes from the Lloyd's Insurance Company and know how many sailors were effectively employed in the Merchant Service at the same time. So the big blue bar on the bottom is the is foreign and coastal shipping. The pink line in the middle are the watermen. So the the boatman and intercoastal waterways. There is a tiny green stripe in here that just is visible in a couple of points. That is privateers. There were very few of them and then the Royal Navy on top here. So you can get an idea of how large the the number of seamen in Britain are. And the important thing here is, is to remember and we'll talk a little bit about landsmen being recruited into the Navy is that landsmen recruited in the Navy, they weren't very useful to the Navy at times, but then they were gaining skill the entire time. So effectively the Navy is training sailors. So the total number of sailors in Britain grows over this period of time. We'll talk a little bit about the consequences of that here in a minute. But some of the major stuff has come out of my data. If we're looking, this is from 1793 to 1801. So the Napoleonic Wars. But importantly, with once we're able to factor out Turned Over Men, which I'll also talk about in a minute. This is the key number that comes out. It's 16% of the Royal Navy is actually pressed into service. Now this is of course a clear departure from the historiography. Some have arrived at more conservative numbers than the tradition, but very few arrive at a number less than 50% for impressment. However, what I found is 73% of the men were volunteers during the French Revolutionary Wars. And if we add the quota act volunteers into that, that brings us to 82% of the Royal Navy was actually there of their own free will. That's four out of five men aboard the ships were there on their own cognition. We can take this and look at a recruitment by year and see all that changed over time from 1793 to 1801. Over here is the factored data, which is just looking at new recruits. So it's not the men that are turned over turned over men would be men that when one ship comes in for major repairs or is decommissioned, then they would be taken and put into another ship. So if we look the graph on the right is actually everybody that's on the ship. So these are men that had served in previous ships. But if we just look at men who have not served in previous ships, we can see that this yellow line here are the numbers of volunteers by year. The blue line down here are your pressed men, the green are quote acts. And then there's some other really small categories in there as well. We can see that volunteers are the vast majority of the men you're on here. Now that goes down over time. And we can see as the war begins, there are very few turned over men because there are not ships to turn them over from. But we can see that the volunteer numbers decline and the number of men turned up, turned over, you're on your increase. But importantly, Impressment never comes close to reaching the number of volunteers. Now, we can also look at raw recruitment. So this is the this is the raw recruitment data. This is 1796 through 1800. And one of the key things here when we looked a minute ago, we saw that in 1798 is the point when the Navy really quits growing fast and it sort of plateaus off. Interestingly enough, that's the year that turned over men are half of the crews aboard warships. And every year after that, they grow more and more of the men aboard the ships are men who have come from previous ships rather than are being freshly recruited can go on. And this is a an area graph. This pink bar at the bottom is again the turned over men. And we can see this is the piece of Amiens right here when the Navy decommissions and recommissions. But we can see if we take the piece of Amiens out of the equation and look at it sort of is a continuous point of war. Effectively turned over men are pretty steady after 1798. They peak at 1798. They continue to rise slowly, but they're making up the majority of the men aboard ship. The yellow here is the volunteers. The green are the Quodak men. This blue stripe that's relatively the same size all the way through those are pressed men in naval service. So they make up a fairly steady amount. Now we can do a couple of things with this. We can compare years. So if we look at 1800 and 1809, which are effectively according to N. A. M. Rogers and Roger Knight, the worst years of both the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars, we can see that recruitment and those years looked very much the same. So basically in both cases this is seven years into the war, six to seven years into the war. We see that turned over men are making up 68% and 67% respectively. In both cases, pressed men are responsible for 8% of the men aboard these warships. Now we can also make other comparisons. We look up here at the top and this is one of the most interesting slides for me or most interesting comparisons is these top two graphs side by side because this is 1793 which is the very beginning of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. 1803, 10 years later, is immediately after the peace of Amiens. So Britain has only been at peace for 14 months but we can see very quickly that volunteers flocked back to the Navy even after almost a decade of war, volunteers were willing to come back to the Navy in enormous numbers. In both cases, 77%. We can come back up here and look at this and there's an actual reason behind this. I'll go back to the idea that the Royal Navy was training landsmen and giving them skills so the overall number of seamen in Britain is increasing. But when the Navy decommissions in 1802, it dumps 100,000 men on the beach and these men need jobs and the merchant marine does peak a little bit but it cannot handle that many men because it's been operating at a relatively steady rate the entire time. So what it means is when they go back to war in 1803 there are lots of sailors without employment and they are more than willing to go back to naval service which does not suggest that this is a floating dungeon where men didn't want to be. They're willing to go there. This graph is also interesting because if you look at the end when the wars end you can see the merchant marine expanding into the vacuum of international deep sea trade that Britain to a large extent had created by blockading France. So a lot of the colonial mess that is sort of left in this open vacuum British sea trade is able to expand into it because there's an enormous number of sailors that are just dumped onto the beach at the end of the war. So the manpower is actually there and they're able to build the ships and expand into that vacuum. Now if we go back to this slide we can also compare 1805 1800 and 1805 and see again that just a couple of years after the Napoleonic Wars kick off it's right back to this this grind of turning men over whoops sorry of turning men over year after year again and again. Now we can look at these these are the new men brought into service 1803 through 1813 we can see that Impressment in its worst year in this case which is 1813 only accounted for 34% of the men. We can also see this is an interesting number these are the POWs in 18 well there's POWs in each year but 1807 to 1813 there's a large number of them and these are actually British citizens that are being brought back to Britain after they've been captured and there's a large number that come into the Royal Navy in these years. This is basically when Spain starts falling apart a little bit and ultimately later on sues for peace and I'm pretty sure this is coming from the American War but I've still got to do some research on these guys this summer when I make it back to Britain. Now we can also look at things like skill levels with this so we can see that year on year high numbers of skilled men were going to the Royal Navy this yellow line here are the Abel Seaman and we can see the Abel Seaman and petty officers make the vast majority of the men that are being recruited or make a large majority of the men that are being recruited in the Naval Service and if you add ordinary seaman in then literally 72% of the men being recruited by the Naval Service are men with sea experience. Okay so they're not unskilled landsmen even though landsmen were actually useful on board ships because lots of the ships rigging actually led to the deck where basically they needed several strong guys to heave on a rope and you need one experienced guy to direct them. So they did have value and they gained skill as they were there. Now we can look at the differences in skill level between pressed men and volunteers and see that volunteers almost 42% of volunteers were unskilled landsmen whereas smaller numbers were petty officers, able seaman and ordinary seaman. If we look at the pressed men we see that only 16% of pressed men were volunteers and there were some sorry only 16% of pressed men were landsmen. There were landsmen that had skills that the Navy wanted like carpenters and shipwrights but they didn't have sea skills so they wouldn't be considered a seaman at least not when they first joined. The vast majority of people being pressed are petty officers able seaman and ordinary seaman. So it's clear that the men the pressed gang salt were skilled men. So one of the problems with the historiography is the idea that impressment was scraping the dregs of society to drag men off the streets but this is clear that that is not the case. There are not that many unskilled men being brought in. We can also look at this in the Napoleonic Wars and we can see as the Napoleonic Wars go on this is impressive and these are landsmen at the top. So the pressed men become more skilled as the war goes on and volunteers become less skilled. So by the end of the war just over 60% of the volunteers are unskilled landsmen in the Napoleonic era. Now we can do other types of things too. I'm going to go quickly through these but we can see that that being a sailor aboard an able ship even if you were an able seaman was a young man's game. The numbers fall off really quickly by the time you get into your late 20s able seaman lasts a little bit longer but basically there's very few people over 35 years old on board these ships. It drops off really, really quickly even with the petty officers the petty officers are really going downhill by 40 and there are very few of them. So being on a ship was certainly a naval ship at least was certainly a young man's game. We can also see the Admiralty's concern with with the seaman so they change the pay scale in 1797 in 1807 before this time it hadn't been changed in almost 150 years and it doesn't go up a whole lot on the bottom. It goes up a little bit. So this is if you're not used to looking at Old British money this is Pound Schilling's Pets or the two sides here. So it doesn't go up a lot at the bottom but importantly it gets steeper. That's what they increase it to which means the Navy values experience they won't mend to stay around. So you've got landsmen down here at the bottom and up here we've got master's rates at both the ship of the line level and a sixth rate level. But that the idea of experience staying in for a longer period of time is going to pay more. Yes. How long was that for a year? Oh, sorry. This is by the 28 day lunar month. So there's 13 pay periods in a year. So four weeks on a pay period is what this was for. Also in 1808 the Navy changed the way prize money worked and petty officers basically doubled their share of prize money before 1808 a quarter one eighth of prize money would be shared amongst petty officers. After 1808 that became a quarter and that was actually taken out of the captain's prize money share from before. So they they're showing that they value these men they want to keep them around and they want them to stay and they of course will pay them more over time. Yes. What is it in two days dollars those pounds what does that translate into today's dollars. I don't know in today's dollars this was a little bit this this was this was a quits equivalent to what an agricultural labor would make at the time. Now also remember that sailors didn't have to pay for food or board. So there's there's that that adds to it. And they usually got this as a lump sum once the ship paid off at the end because there's no there's no way to spend it while your own ship. So they would be given most of that and one big chunk as they paid as they paid off. So if you're wise with it you could actually do something with that. If you weren't you might just be broken a couple of months. Yes. Most of the men in the Navy were single. The Navy allowed after the 17 after 1756 I think for men to assign part of their wage to a close family member. So perhaps your wife or your mother somebody could go pick up half of your wage at the naval pay office and in any major port town. And very few men took advantage of that which suggests that not many of them are married and also if they're if they've been sailors since they were 15 years old chances of them you know there's not a lot of opportunity for them to get married. So. Any rate. The function of impressment was to provide the Royal Navy with the necessary skilled and experienced men especially Topman. The shortage of seamen volunteers was constant and therefore pressing lasted throughout any given conflict. Impressment was always difficult and few of those involved in the practice actually enjoy the experience. However, no matter how disliked impressment was it proved to be a potent tool for adding skilled seamen to British warships and aided the Navy in achieving a high ratio of skilled to unskilled men. Though it's been claimed that landsmen were pressed in large numbers it was not legal and only only anecdotal evidence has been proved to suggest that as war went on landsmen were being pressed in greater quantity. Further statistics show that landsmen formed only 16% of pressed men. The reality was that the Royal Navy had no desire to recruit men without seafaring skills. The notorious press gang was indeed crucial to manning but this was because it concentrated on finding experienced seamen who made up an essential leavening for any crew. In the end, impressment may have been an evil but it was a lesser evil. Seaman accepted naval conscription is unavoidable. Evidence by the fact that in all of the grievances of the mutineers spithead and nor in 1797 impressment was not mentioned. In his own memoirs William Spavin showed no resentment to being pressed. British fleets of the French Revolutionary Wars were not manned by impressed men. Rather, pressed men formed a supplement to a mainly volunteer force and functioned to raise the overall skill level of the lower deck. In the end, seaman were conscripted into the Royal Navy by press gangs because their skills were one of Britain's most prized military assets. Thank you.