_From an English engraving, illustrating an old song._] To fully appreciate this, the chief cause of the War of 1812 between the United States and England, one must first know well how the crews of the British naval ships of that day were recruited and what manner of life these crews led when in actual service. As to the manner of recruiting, the facts are, no doubt, well known to almost every reader. Gangs of men, under the lead of petty officers, and commonly piloted by a crimp, were sent ashore in home ports by the captain who found his ship short-handed. These gangs went to the resorts of seamen in the port where the ship happened to lie, and there took by force every English-speaking sailor they could find and carried him on board the warship. Failing to find a resource in the sailors’ boarding-houses, they knocked down any able-bodied man encountered in the street, and he was then carried instantly to the ship. Failing in getting enough men in this fashion--as, for instance, when the ship was in a foreign port or on the high seas--it was the custom, the every-day custom, to send the press-gang, on board any ship where it was supposed that English-speaking sailors might be found, and there take and carry off all such sailors. The life that the crews so recruited led cannot, of course, be described here in full detail. The reader will readily imagine that the officers who snatched a man away from his home without even the poor privilege of telling his wife and children of his fate would not show any great care for the feelings or comfort of the man when on board the ship. But any picture of the life there which an American, at the end of the nineteenth century, might base on the mere fact that sailors were kidnapped, would be wholly inadequate, for the reason that no American of these days, unacquainted with the facts, could imagine such a degraded state of slavery. That the crews were ill-fed; that they were worked to the limit of their endurance; that the pay was as nothing (it is on record that one kidnapped man received £14 2s. 6d. for serving two and a half years); that the kidnapped men were not allowed to go ashore and were not allowed to write letters to their families where any effort was likely to be made for their release--all these conditions are, or were, a matter of course. It was in the matter of preserving what the officers called discipline--in keeping these unfortunate slaves in subjugation--that the real brutality of the British naval officers appeared. For the officers, who depended on clubs and manacles to recruit their crews, made no appeal to them save through their fears--used nothing to enforce an order but the cat-o’-ninetails. One undenied description of the flogging of a man on a British man-o’-war--a man-o’-war well known later on in the annals of the American navy--shall serve as an illustration of the ordinary punishments inflicted there.