The Lascars Who Sailed the East Indiamen
By 1800, Indian seamen crewed much of Britain's eastern trade and were paid a fraction of English wages. Imogen traces their recruitment in Calcutta, their voyages and their winters in London.
Pressed: One Sailor's Year on a Frigate, 1805
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Show notes
Twelve months of one pressed man
John Hart was a Portsmouth dock labourer taken by a press gang in February 1805. The muster book of HMS Phoebe records his rating, his pay and his punishments. One letter to his sister survives. From these, Imogen rebuilds a year at sea: the watches, the food, the floggings, the prize money and the battle he nearly missed.
- How the press gang actually operated in a dockyard town
- A day on a frigate, watch by watch
- Food, pay and what a pressed man could send home
- Punishment entries in the log and what they meant
- Trafalgar from the deck of a ship that arrived late
The muster book pages are reproduced on the episode page.
Transcript
Hello, I am Imogen Hale and this is Dead Reckoning: Lives at Sea, maritime history told from the lower deck, where almost nobody wrote a memoir. We start in Portsmouth in February 1805, with a dock labourer called John Hart. One evening a press gang took him from a tavern, and the next morning he was on the muster book of a frigate called Phoebe, rated landsman, pay a little over a pound a month. That muster book survives. So does the ship's log, and so does one letter he sent to his sister. From those three documents we can rebuild his year almost day by day: the watches, the food, two floggings, a share of prize money, and the morning the news of Trafalgar reached a ship that had arrived too late to fight. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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