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north of here.”
    â€œOh la,” he said, writing. “Let us set down London. Go with these fine marines, you and your uncle, and you will have excitement and adventures, and money in your pocket the rest of your days.”
    I said, because I had not thought of it, “Money?”
    â€œSeven pounds a year for a boy,” the officer said. He smiled to himself, perhaps at the difference between that and his own pay.
    â€œShall I be able to send it to my mother?”
    â€œOf course!” he said.
    My uncle tried again. “Sir, have pity on—”
    â€œEnough!” said the officer sharply, and thumped the table. The flame of the lamp flickered wildly. And the marines pulled us out of the room, as he turned his attention to Will.
    It was Will, as things turned out, who was the only one of us to escape being pressed. I remember that night only as a blur of noise and shoving and stumbling, with my wits still fuzzled by the blow on my head. But I know that maybe twenty of us, out of the crowd in that first room of pressed men, were taken through the streets to the River Medway, upstream from the dockyard, and hustled down a flight of slippery stone steps to a jetty, and then into a broad open boat. Some of the men had irons on their legs or arms, but the press gang had run through their stock of irons just as Will, my uncle and I were brought down, and so we were not chained.
    It was dark. The water was very black and it smelled dank, like a ditch. We were pushed down into the boat, to sit there in a huddle between the sailors taking their places at twelve big oars. A wind was picking up, and small waves smacked at the sides of the boat. The tossing was strange to me, for I had never been in a boat before in my life. We werepushed off from the jetty, and the boat lurched to and fro as the sailors raised their oars and waited for the order to row. There was a lantern swaying over the back of the boat, but we were in the front, in shadow. Will was near me; I noticed he took care to press himself against the side of the boat, well ahead of the first oarsman.
    Suddenly my uncle gave a great shriek from the other side of the mass of chained men. “A rat!” he howled. “I am bitten! There are rats in this boat!”
    There was a hubbub at once. Everyone fears rats. The other men began to shout and shift about. “Rats!” they cried. “Beware the rats!”
    The boat tossed from side to side, even though it was a broad, heavy thing, and the officer in charge shouted angrily. The marines in the boat thumped out at the men with their gunstocks to keep them still—though I noticed that even they peered warily round the bottom of the boat as they did so. In a while, there was a command—“Oars—ready—row!” The seamen began to pull, and gradually we moved out into the middle of the river, heading for the estuary where the great ships were at anchor.
    Will was no longer beside me. It was too dark for me to see where he had gone, so I curled myself into an unhappy lump on the bottom of the boat, and thought about my mother, and tried not to cry. I found out later that Will was no longer in the boat at all. In the moments while everyone was distracted by my uncle’s shriek, he had slipped over the side into the water. My uncle told me afterward that theyhad planned it together, whispering hastily in the only few minutes they could snatch. Unlike the rest of us, he said, Will could swim like an eel. He was the son of a fisherman and had grown up on and in the water every summer. He knew that if he had just an instant’s chance to get into the sea, he could dive down and swim silently away below the surface. So my uncle gave him his chance.
    The water was choppier as we headed out into the estuary. I grew more and more miserable as the boat tossed, and I felt sick. Before long I threw up in the bottom of the boat, and made my poor neighbors miserable too. I