13016
W. Britain
Limited Edition of 400.
The Jack Tars & Leathernecks collection features both Marines and Naval personnel of Great Britain and the United States. As the collection grows W. Britain will include most of the great powers that had a significant presence on the high seas.
This newest set represents the ever present problem of manning the ships of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Impressment, or being seized for service, was used as far back as Elizabethan times. With the growing tension in Europe Quota Acts were passed to supplement recruitment to the navy, but impressment into service was still aggressively used. The need for manpower during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 -1815 included the taking of American citizens that may have worked on British merchant ships or had married a British woman. Officially, no foreigner could be impressed however, these limits were often ignored and the impressment of Americans into the British navy became one of the main causes of the American War of 1812.