Neither was it denied by the representatives of the Admiralty that this was the case. On the 11th November of 1777, Mr. Temple Luttrell said in the Commons, “Your bounties procure few good seamen, and your press warrants, though enormously expensive, fewer still, while great numbers are daily deserting from your ships and hospitals to commit robberies and murders in the interior counties.... I am assured that fifty have lately deserted from the =Monarch= while in dock, forty from the =Hector=, and twenty-five from the =Worcester=, six of these are confined at Winchester for felonies, and there are two committed to Exeter jail on a charge of murder.” Lord Mulgrave’s answer was that fifty men had indeed deserted, from the =Monarch=, because Captain Rowley was humanely unwilling to treat his men as slaves, and that the deserters were not to be regretted, because “the health of the rest was preserved, as the service was freed from a number of men not to be depended on.” No reply was given on other points. Lord Mulgrave’s tone of jaunty flippancy was characteristic of the incompetent Government which led the country unprepared into the most disastrous of its wars. Yet in 1777 the navy was beginning to reap the benefit of the General Press warrant issues in October 1776, when the king and his ministers were at last forced to recognise that the rebellion in America was very serious. It was now possible to lay hands on good men by force. Until this was the case, our ships were not uncommonly manned in the fashion described in the following letter from Captain Price of the =Viper= sloop on the North American station in 1775, as quoted by Beatson in his _Naval and Military Memoirs_:— “I am very much distressed for Petty officers, as well as Warrants. My Carpenter infirm and past duty, my Gunner made from a livery servant, neither seaman nor gunner; my Master a man in years, never an officer before, made from a boy on board one of the guardships, he then keeping a public house at Gosport. Petty officers I have but one, who owns himself mad at times. A Master’s Mate I have not, nor anyone I can make a Boatswain’s mate. I have not one person I could trust with the charge of a vessel I might take to bring her in.” What complication of slovenliness and jobbery there was behind that master who had been borne as a boy on a guardship and yet kept a public-house at Gosport, we do not know, but it must be allowed that H.M.S. =Viper= differed vastly from the smart British man-of-war with her crew of fine seamen which is supposed to have represented the navy of the eighteenth century. It is probable, however, that she only differed in degree from the average vessel in commission at a time when jobbery was common, and there was no press at work to sweep in the thoroughbred seamen.