Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution by Christopher P. Magra

Impressment, the coercion of men into naval service—whether by a man-of-war stopping a merchantman at sea or a press-gang capturing men ashore—is an issue most often associated with the War of 1812. In Poseidon’s Curse, however, Magra makes a compelling case that “the press,” as the abduction of mariners was colloquially known, played a pivotal role in justifying the movement for American independence. In arguing as much, Magra is swimming against the historiographical current to some extent. The received wisdom is that impressment was not common enough in British North America to motivate revolutionaries. Moreover, even when press gangs were resisted, crowd actions tended to be conservative rather than radical. Communities targeted particularly odious naval officers but did not consider these violent reprisals as part of any systemic critique of the British Empire. But Magra asks, if anti-impressment was largely apolitical, why was the practice mentioned in the Declaration of Independence as a core colonial grievance? As he shows, a more thorough investigation reveals the ways in which the issue of the press affected a wider array of interests than previously understood. When appreciated as an expansive Atlantic problem that implicated not only common sailors but also elite merchants, impressment serves as firm ground upon which to build a case for independence.The two communities of mariners and mercantile firms comprise the bulk of Magra’s analysis. His chapters detailing the struggles of ordinary seamen against Royal Navy press gangs cover well-worn historical terrain, but Magra’s account certainly manages to capture the anger and frustration of those who succumbed to military authority. His particular strength is in revealing how omnipresent the fear of forced service was within maritime communities across the colonies during the eighteenth century. It is almost impossible to find a manuscript account of life afloat that is not rife with anxiety about the possibility of capture. But, as Magra explains, impressment involved more than confinement aboard a warship or a fear of death in battle. Sailors’ complaints about the practice also had a material component. The pay for naval service was notoriously poor; in many instances, officers discharged men either without pay or with iou certificates that were nearly worthless. Oftentimes, years of wage-earning potential and productive labor were erased by an unlucky run-in with the press gang.This material critique of impressment allied seamen most closely with merchants. Magra’s innovative approach is to demonstrate that the commercial community frequently complained to Parliament, naval authorities, and royal governors that impressment threatened their bottom line. Mariners’ attempts to circumvent it made labor scarce and drove up wages. Coasting vessels avoided areas where the press was active, thus increasing prices of foodstuffs and goods as they became scarce. The Royal Navy, which also exercised its right to commandeer civilian craft of all shapes and sizes, was often slow to compensate for its interventions. Merchants regularly resorted to William Blackstone’s legal treatises and John Locke’s writings on rights in protest; impressment started to look like the state-sanctioned theft of property and a ruinous economic imposition, both hallmarks of what good Britons considered tyranny.Activists in mainland North America began to feel particularly abused after the powerful West Indian sugar lobby managed to secure certain legal protections from impressment in 1746. In Magra’s clever formulation, an anti-impressment “spirit of 1746” quickly emerged before a more general “spirit of 1776,” eventually joining up with other sources of agitation against Parliament, such as tax law and frontier policy. Scholars have suggested that colonial cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York were the real hotbeds of dissent during the post-1763 imperial crisis. If so, impressment was probably their longest-standing grievance. Hence, according to Magra, we cannot disentangle the press from revolutionary agitation. After a new 1775 edict stripped away even the slim protections against impressment that colonists enjoyed, closed New England’s access to the Newfoundland fishery, and ordered naval vessels to enforce those laws (patrol boats also required impressment to staff), the revolutionary die was cast. A new United States now proclaimed its citizens beyond the reach of press gangs.In an otherwise entirely convincing argument, however, Magra commits a single sin—omission, or, perhaps better stated, gendered omission. His narrative focuses exclusively on men wrestling with impressment, though women were just as thoroughly implicated. His silence about the plight of women is all the more curious given the book’

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