One all-important consideration, in the case of tenders employed for the storing and detention of pressed men prior to their dispatch to the fleet, was that the vessel should be able to lie afloat at low water; for if the fall of the tide left her high and dry, the risk of desertion, as well as of attack from the shore, was enormously increased. Whitehaven could make no use of man-storing tenders for this reason; and at the important centre of King's Lynn, which was really a receiving station for three counties, it was found "requisite to have always a vessel below the Deeps to keep pressed men aboard," since their escape or rescue by way of the flats was in any anchorage nearer the town a foregone conclusion. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1486--Capt. Baird, 27 Feb. 1755.] On board the tenders the comfort and health of the pressed man were no more studied than in the strong-rooms and prisons ashore. A part of the hold was required to be roughly but substantially partitioned off for his security, and on rare occasions this space was fitted with bunks; but as the men usually arrived "all very bare of necessaries"--except when pressed afloat, a case we are not now considering--any provision for the slinging of hammocks, or the spreading of bedding they did not possess, came to be looked upon as a superfluous and uncalled-for proceeding. Even the press-room was a rarity, save in tenders that had been long in the service. Down in the hold of the vessel, whither the men were turned like so many sheep as soon as they arrived on board, they perhaps found a rough platform of deal planks provided for them to lie on, and from this they were at liberty to extract such sorry comfort as they could during the weary days and nights of their incarceration. Other conveniences they had none. When this too was absent, as not infrequently happened, they were reduced to the necessity of "laying about on the Cables and Cask," suffering in consequence "more than can well be expressed." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1439--Capt. A'Court, 22 April 1741; _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1497--Capt. Bover, 11 Feb. 1777, and Captains' Letters, _passim_.] It is not too much to say that transported convicts had better treatment.