27,196. The vessels carried among them 5660 guns.[1] According to the account laid before the House of Commons by the Navy Office in 1791 which we have referred to on former occasions, the royal navy at the end of William's reign was of the estimated burden of 159,017 tons. A statement given on the authority of Pepys, the author of the Diary, who had been Secretary to the Admiralty in the reigns of Charles II. and James II., makes the number of ships, of fifty tons and upwards, forming the royal navy in 1695, to have been above 200, measuring in all above 112,400 tons, and manned by 45,000 sailors.[2] The entire number of seamen, therefore, which the kingdom could furnish at this time was probably above seventy thousand. It was in 1696, we may here mention, that the noble institution of Greenwich Hospital was founded for aged and disabled sailors (though not opened till 1705) by an act of parliament, which at the same time established a registry in which mariners, seamen, watermen, fishermen, lightermen, bargemen, keelmen, and other seafaring persons, between the ages of eighteen and fifty, were invited to enrol their names and places of residence, to the number of 30,000, on which they were to receive a bounty or retaining fee of 40s. annually, on condition of holding themselves at all times in readiness to man the royal navy.[3] This registry, however, which aimed at furnishing a substitute for impressment, was discontinued in 1710, on the alleged ground that it had not produced the good effects
- ↑ Note in Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, ii. 719. Macpherson, who does not quote his authority for this account, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of the figures in the case of the tonnage assigned to the Ipswich vessels. Chalmers, in Estimate, pp. 87, 88, refers evidently to the same account, as "A detail in the Plantation Office," although he assigns it to the year 1701, instead of 1702, and gives (apparently by a typographical error) the number of sailors as only 16,591.
- ↑ Given in Gibson's Translation of Camden's Britannia, 2nd edit. i. 234.
- ↑ 7 and 8 Will. III. c. 21.
