If you were anything but a king's ship, and flew a flag that only king's ships were entitled to fly, you were guilty, in the eyes of every right-seeing naval officer, of another piece of ill manners so gross as to be deserving of the severest punishment the press was capable of inflicting upon you. You might fly the "flag and Jack white, with a red cross (commonly called St. George's cross) passing quite through the same"; likewise the "ensign red, with the cross in a canton of white at the upper corner thereof, next to the staff"; but if you presumed to display His Majesty's Jack, commonly called the Union Jack, or any other of the various flags of command flown by ships of war or vessels employed in the naval service, swift retribution overtook you. Similarly, the inadvertent hoisting of your colours "wrong end uppermost," or in any other manner deemed inconsistent with the dignity of the service which permitted you to fly them, laid you open to reprisals of the most summary nature. Before you realised the heinousness of your offence, a gang boarded you and your best man or men were gone beyond recall. The joy of waterside weddings--occasions prolific in the display of wrong colours--was often turned into sorrow in this way. Inability to do the things you professed to do involved grave risk of making intimate acquaintance with the gang. If, for example, you were a skipper and navigated your vessel more like a 'prentice than a master hand, some one belonging to you was bound, in waters swarming with ships of war, to pay the piper sooner or later. "A few days ago," writes Capt. Archer of the _Isis_, "a ship called the _Jane_, Stewart master, ran on board of us in a most lubberly manner--for which, as is customary on such occasions, I took four of his people." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1448--Capt. Archer, 17 May 1795.] Ability to handle a musical instrument sometimes proved as fatal to one's liberty as inability to handle a ship. Queen Anne was directly responsible for this. Almost immediately after her accession she signed a warrant authorising the pressing of "drummers, fife and haut boys for sea and land." [Footnote: _Home Office Military Entry Books_, clxviii, f. 406.] Though the authorisation was only temporary, the practice thus set up continued long after its origin had been relegated to the scrap-heap of memory, and not only continued, but was interpreted in a sense much broader than its royal originator ever intended it should be. This tendency to take an ell in lieu of the stipulated inch was illustrated as early as 1705, when Lieut. Thomson, belonging to the _Lickfield_, chancing to meet one Richard Bullard, fiddler, "persuaded him to go as far as Woolwich with him, to play a tune or two to him and some friends who had a mind to dance, saying he would pay him for it"--which he did, when tired of dancing, by handing him over to the press-gang. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1467--Capt. Byron, 13 July 1705.]