All down through the century similar incidents, crowding thick and fast one upon another, relieved the humdrum routine of the pressed man's passage to the fleet, and either made his miserable life in a measure worth living or brought it to a summary conclusion. Of minor incidents, all tending to the same happy or unhappy end, there was no lack. Now he sweltered beneath a sun so hot as to cause the pitch to boil in the seams of the deck above his head; again, as when the _Boneta_ sloop, conveying pressed men from Liverpool to the Hamoaze in 1740, encountered "Bedds of two or three Acres bigg of Ice & of five or Six foot thicknesse, which struck her with such force 'twas enough to drive her bows well out," he "almost perished" from cold. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2732--Capt. Young, 8 Feb. 1739-40.] To-day it was broad farce. He held his sides with laughter to see the lieutenant of the tender he was in, mad with rage and drink, chase the steward round and round the mainmast with a loaded pistol, whilst the terrified hands, fearing for their lives, fled for refuge to the coalhole, the roundtops and the shore. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1498--Complaint of the Master and Company of H. M. Hired Tender _Speedwell_, 21 Dec. 1778.] To-morrow it was tragedy. Some "little dirty privateer" swooped down upon him, as in the case of the _Admiral Spry_ tender from Waterford to Plymouth, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1500--Dickson, Surveyor of Customs at the Cove of Cork, April 1780.] and consigned him to what he dreaded infinitely more than any man-o'-war--a French prison; or contrary winds, swelling into a sudden gale, drove him a helpless wreck on to some treacherous coast, as they drove the _Rich Charlotte_ upon the Formby Sands in 1745, [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1440--Capt. Amherst, 4 Oct. 1745.] and there remorselessly drowned him.
Provided he escaped such untoward accidents as death or capture by the enemy, sooner or later the pressed man arrived at the receiving station. Here another ordeal awaited him, and here also he made his last bid for freedom.
Taking the form of a final survey or regulating, the ordeal the pressed man had now to face was no less thoroughgoing than its precursor at the rendezvous had in all probability been superficial and ineffective. Eyes saw deeper here, wits were sharper, and in this lay at once the pressed man's bane and salvation. For if genuinely unfit, the fact was speedily demonstrated; whereas if merely shamming, discovery overtook him with a certainty that wrote "finis" to his last hope. Nevertheless, for this ordeal, as for his earlier regulating at the rendezvous, the sailor who knew his book prepared himself with exacting care during the tedium of his voyage.