After Knowles threatened to bombard the town, the British governor of Boston, William Shirley, persuaded him to release the Bostonians in exchange for the hostages.
[2] During the War of the Austrian Succession, the Royal Navy again expanded its domestic use of impressment: the practice of forcing men, usually merchant seamen, into naval service.
A captain who found himself shorthanded would send a "press-gang," armed with cudgels and cutlasses, onto a merchant ship to capture sailors for his own crew, often with the cooperation of local authorities.
They resented this treatment for the same reasons that made recruiting difficult in the first place: the work was hard and dangerous, and for skilled sailors especially, the wages were low.
[3] In the continental American colonies, British law governing impressment had been different and became subject to dispute; by the Trade to America Act 1707 (6 Ann.
During King George's War a similar ban on impressment in the West Indies was enacted by the Sugar Trade Act 1745 (19 Geo.
Furthermore, because Boston depended on its seamen to transport food and fuel to the city, Governor Shirley made a point when issuing impressment warrants of limiting them to non-residents of Massachusetts on inbound vessels.
"[8] During the 1740s, Admiral Charles Knowles[note 1] provoked some of the largest impressment riots in the history of Britain's American and Caribbean colonies.
[9] In the fall of 1747, a squadron under Knowles's command was anchored at Nantasket[10] in Boston Harbor, being repaired and restocked in preparation for a trip to the West Indies.
Desperately in need of personnel, Knowles flouted tradition when he sent press-gangs to round up sailors in the harbor and along the waterfront without first obtaining a warrant from Governor Shirley.
[13] On the morning of 17 November, a mob of about 300 locals, wielding cutlasses and clubs, captured a lieutenant of the Lark in retaliation for what they considered an illegal press.
Thomas Hutchinson, then the Speaker of the House and an outspoken critic of impressment, managed to persuade the mob to release the lieutenant, who had not been part of the press-gang, and brought him to the governor's mansion for safekeeping.
[16] After the mob left, the governor headed to the Town House at the corner of King and Cornhill Streets, which was home to the Massachusetts General Court.
Town officials claimed that "the said Riotous Tumultuous Assembly consisted of Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negros & other Persons of mean & vile condition."
In addition to sailors and other maritime workers, the crowd likely included most of Boston's militia, as well as some middle-class shopkeepers and merchants, women, and others whose lives were affected by impressment.
[20] Several militia officers who were assembled on the first floor were forced up a narrow staircase into the Council Chamber, creating a bottleneck which halted the mob's progress and gave the governor a chance to address them.
The spokesman then issued a thinly veiled threat, asking Shirley if he remembered the Porteous Riots in Edinburgh, in which the Captain of the City Guards had been "hang'd upon a sign post."
He added that he would be dining with Knowles later that day, and asked them to persuade the townspeople to stop the riot, promising that it was within his power "to set all things right" with their assistance.
This was the first time a natural rights argument was used to justify resistance to the authority of the Crown by American colonists, which was beginning to be perceived as foreign and tyrannical.
He is of obscure parentage, in his youth served aboard the navy in the meanest stations, & from some unaccountable whim or humour of some of the officers (thus some ladies take a liking or fancy to a monkey, lapdog or parrot)...he is arrived to be a warrant Commodore in America, where like a beggar on horseback he rides unmercifully...hated by the common sailors, & not beloved by his best officers; laboriously indefatigable in running to & fro, & in expending of paper, true symptoms of madness.
The following year in Jamaica he was much more cautious, advertising for recruits, offering financial incentives, and consulting with local authorities before resorting to impressment.