Naval Recruitment Research Articles

Fugitive Harbour: Labour, Community, and Marronage at Antigua Naval Yard

ABSTRACT This article examines for the first time the history of labour at Antigua Naval Yard in English Harbour during the eighteenth century. It demonstrates the existence of a successful multi-year effort to smuggle fugitives from slavery aboard Royal Navy warships. Using original material from the dockyard, including administrative correspondence, and analysis of shipbuilding labour and the built environment, this article contends that this was a community effort that brought together ‘King’s Negroes’ enslaved by the crown with other Black Antiguans across the island. This article narrates and analyses this fugitive activity with two goals in mind. First, it uses the dockyard’s unique and largely unexamined history to make new contributions on subjects like British crown slavery, petit marronage, and naval labour. The article also uncovers conflict between the Royal Navy and colonial slaveholders and uses it to analyse tensions between slavery as a system of labour and slavery as a system of property. Second, by examining fugitives’ role in the previously-documented phenomenon of naval recruitment of fugitives, this article argues for the necessity of seeing fugitive activity at any scale as collective and provides one example of how historians can do so.

Ordenanza de Matrícula para Cartagena de Indias (1777)

La presente transcripción corresponde a una copia de un reglamento cuyo original se encuentra en el Archivo General de Simancas, sobre el ordenamiento y función de la provincia marítima de Cartagena de Indias y la condición civil y militar de la gente de mar y maestranza dentro del sistema de reclutamiento naval llamado Matrícula de Mar en dicha provincia. El documento es rico sobre información relacionada con la producción de documentos, funciones burocráticas, competencias institucionales, actividades económicas y obligaciones de artesanos y pescadores que habitaban las costas del virreinato neogranadino a finales del siglo XVIII.

Towards a transnational history of the eighteenth-century British Navy

The “long” eighteenth-century British Navy is the subject of a vast and growing secondary literature. Almost all of it, however, has an exclusively national focus. This would not be problematic, given the Navy’s character as a national institution, were it not for the fact that many seamen serving in it – likely at least 14% of crews in foreign stations – were not British or Irish. This article suggests that integrating them into the study of the Navy can significantly affect several ongoing historiographical debates, for example on the modalities of naval recruitment, or on the quality of life in the service, as well as, more predictably, discussions of seamen’s patriotism. The aim is to propose the Navy as an example of how a transnational perspective can be enlightening even in the most unlikely historical context.

British impressment and its discontents

This article restates the argument that naval impressment was a contentious issue in the eighteenth century. It was subject to legal challenges during the American War of Independence. It engendered mutinies and affrays and a growing volume of litigation as the century progressed. The notion that impressment was insignificant is based on an atypical set of years during which the Admiralty strove to make naval recruitment as seamless as possible by allowing regulating officers in the ports to volunteer men who might otherwise have been impressed. The Admiralty had no wish to make impressment a contentious issue in the volatile political climate of the 1790s. It was aided in this endeavour by the circumstance of dearth and destitution, and the willingness of local authorities to augment existing bounties. As the example of the Sea Fencibles subsequently revealed, volunteering was an imperfect index of patriotic endeavour, despite claims to the contrary.

Singing for the Nation: Balladry, naval recruitment and the language of patriotism in eighteenth-century Britain

During the eighteenth century the ballad was one of the most important vehicles of mass communication. The Royal Navy was a consistent and popular subject for ballads and hundreds of songs were published with a distinct naval theme. This article analyses the nature of naval ballads, and investigates their potential political, social and cultural roles. It also studies the language of these ballads, to show how they shaped ideas about the navy, and in turn assess their role in naval recruitment. By considering the social–cultural milieu in which decisions about volunteering took place, it argues that patriotism, duty and identity played an important role in encouraging men to join the navy.

Assessing the Efficacy of Armed-Forces Recruitment Advertising: A Reasoned-Action Approach

SUMMARY In an all-volunteer military service system, advertising is expected to fulfill a vital role in lead generation, which ultimately influences enlistment. The present study employed the theory of reasoned action to assess the efficacy of U.S. Naval recruitment commercials on relevant behavioral beliefs, social norms, interest, and behavioral intention. As expected, exposure to the commercials significantly enhanced beliefs toward the Navy, but Structural Equation Modeling revealed that exposure failed to enhance the influence of beliefs on interest in the Navy, with only social norms exerting a strong influence. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Optimal Ship Routing and Personnel Assignment for Naval Recruitment in Thailand

Two problems related to the Royal Thai Navy’s recruitment effort are the optimal assignment of draftees to branch naval bases and the optimal routing of ships for transporting draftees from the branch bases to the main base. The first problem was solved as a transportation model and the second with an exact integer programming formulation.

Fourpenny Dark and Sixpenny Red

One of Britain's persistent problems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to find sufficient men for the armed services. It required more than patriotic pleas to fill the places. The word 'crimp', which came into the English language in the 1630s, denoted a person actively associated with military and naval recruitment.1 The London crimp riots over a century later bear witness to its continued usage. In 1794 and 1795 mobs of several thousand attacked crimps, crimping houses and the constabulary. These riots were the most serious the capital had experienced since the Gordon Riots (1780) both in size and dura tion. They have been attributed to the post French Revolution influence of certain groups, especially radical societies, attempting to create dis order by catalysing the deep-seated hatred of impressment as a means of recruiting for the French Wars.2 By the middle of the nineteenth century crimping had become a civilian occupation. The crimp was now an agent who procured seamen for captains who needed crews. His rewards were numerous. He took the seaman's advance note,3 if the seaman was leaving port, and discounted it for him. Any debts the seaman had were paid (lodging, clothing, liquor etc.) and the crimp demanded a fee for himself. Sometimes the ship's captain also paid a fee (known as 'blood money') in order to obtain a crew. The crimp was often the runner of a boarding house proprietor, if not the boarding-house keeper himself, or a publican. He usually made a profit whether seamen were embarking, discharging or spending time ashore. Crimps boarded a vessel the moment it berthed. Often they used small boats to pull alongside incoming ships or those riding at anchor. In each case they would ply the crew with liberal quantities of cheap liquor and induce them to desert. The victims would be promised any thing and led off to the boarding house, or hotel, and provided with accommodation of a very suspect quality. Here the seaman would have his advance note cashed at a very high discount rate and whenever drunk he ran the risk of being robbed of both money and clothes. When the sailor sobered up again he might find himself in the crew of a strange vessel, probably penniless and only possessing the clothes he wore. The shipmaster would have paid a sum to get this sailor and there would

U.S. Naval Recruitment and Training

(1941). U.S. Naval Recruitment and Training. Royal United Services Institution. Journal: Vol. 86, No. 544, pp. 667-673.