The eighteenth-century midshipman of the Royal Navy was a man of low social standing. His age varied from ten to forty-five, the older men having been promoted from before the mast. Mere boys, who knew but little about the ways of a ship, and in any case had had but little training, were given the rank of lieutenant. The country had so much fighting on hand that it badly needed men. Forty thousand men were voted in 1705, justices of the peace being authorised to seek out seamen and deliver them to the press-gangs. Whilst penalties were threatening for those who concealed seamen, rewards were held out to those who should discover and help to arrest them. Landsmen being eligible, it was not surprising that a raw, incompetent lot of gaol-birds had to do service for their country on the seas. But they were not even healthy of body. One has only to read Anson’s “Voyage Round the World.” Among the men that were sent to him by the authorities, thirty-two out of one batch of 170 were straight from the hospital and sick-quarters. Of the soldiery he was to carry, all the land forces that were to be allowed him were 500 Chelsea pensioners, consisting of men invalided for age, wounds, or other infirmities. But there were some very fine fellows in two branches of the merchant service. Hutchinson calls attention to these: “Those seamen in the coal and coasting trade to the city of London, are the most perfect in working and managing their ships in narrow, intricate, and difficult channels, and in tide ways; and the seamen in the East India trade are so in the open seas.” “The best lessons for tacking and working to windward in little room,” he remarks elsewhere, “are in the colliers bound to London, where many great ships are constantly employed, and where wages are paid by the voyage, so that interest makes them dexterous.” The mainmast of such craft stood further aft than was customary. Therefore they had a strong tendency to gripe, and so they often used their spritsail and all head sail for going to windward and making them manageable. In narrow channels, when the wind was blowing so strongly that all hands could not haul aft the fore sheet, this had to be done by the capstan. These little brigs had no lifts to the lower yards, no foretop bowlines, but short main bowlines, and snatch-blocks for the main and fore sheets. The main braces led forward so that the main and maintop bowlines were hauled and belayed to the same pin. “We have ships,” he says, “that will sail from six to nine miles an hour, upon a wind, when it blows fresh and the water is smooth, and will make their way good within six points of the wind, in still water, a third of what they run by the logg.”