During the long wars which followed the outbreak of the French Revolution the press-gang had a busy time of it. Vessels of war were in the constant habit of summoning merchant vessels to hand over a certain number of their seamen, and the merchant vessels were brought to just as if they had been the cruisers of the enemy, and were boarded by force, whenever force seemed necessary, and compelled to supply the requisite number. It sometimes happened that the captain of a vessel failed to understand the meaning of the peremptory summons issued to him, and he was then promptly brought to an understanding of the situation by the shot of the war vessel and the appearance of an armed boarding party on his own decks. Nor was it even a very unusual event for the captain of the merchant vessel to offer a resistance, and then there was a regular sea-fight between the British war ship and the British merchantman, in which, of course, the latter was very soon compelled to acknowledge the validity of the royal warrant. In the ordinary course of things, however, the captain of the war vessel sent an officer and a party of men on shore, and their business was to make any captures they {265} pleased, in that part of the town where men fit for service at sea were most likely to be found. There are stories told, and told on historic evidence as truth, about young husbands thus captured and thrown into prison to await their removal to some war vessel off the coast, and whose wives or mothers could devise no better means for their rescue than to obtain an interview with them in the prison, and there contrive so to mutilate the hands of the captives through the bars of the cell as to render them unfit for service in the Royal Navy. Sometimes, when it became known that the press-gang was about to visit that part of the town where seafaring men were likely to be found, the population of the quarter rallied in defence of their townsmen, and offered just such resistance to the emissaries of the naval authorities as they would have offered to an invading enemy. Streets were barricaded; from the high windows of houses stones were hurled down and volleys of musketry were fired; crowds of armed men, and even sometimes of armed women, met the invaders in the street itself and disputed their progress inch by inch.