During Watt’s stay in London he was in a great measure prevented from stirring abroad by the hot press for sailors which was then going on. As many as forty pressgangs were at work, seizing all able-bodied men they could lay hands on. In one night they took not fewer than a thousand men. Nor were the kidnappers idle. These were the agents of the East India Company, who had crimping-houses in different parts of the city for receiving the men whom they had seized upon for service in the Indian army. Even when the demand for soldiers abated, the kidnappers continued their trade, and sold their unhappy victims to the planters in Pennsylvania and other North American colonies. Sometimes severe fights took place between the pressgangs and the kidnappers for possession of those who had been seized, the law and police being apparently powerless to protect them. “They now press anybody they can get,” Watt wrote in the spring of 1756, “landsmen as well as seamen, except it be in the liberties of the city, where they are obliged to carry them before the Lord Mayor first; and unless one be either a prentice or a creditable tradesman, there is scarce any getting off again. And if I was carried before my Lord Mayor, I durst not avow that I wrought in the city, it being against their laws for any unfreeman to work even as a journeyman within the liberties.”[64] What a curious glimpse does this give us into the practice of man-hunting in London in the eighteenth century! [64] Letter to his father quoted in Muirhead’s ‘Life of Watt,’ p. 39.