Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

of the hot press, when men were desperately needed, the gangs would seek out their victims (not always seafarers) far beyond the seaport town limits, and it is reported that the men of Pennard (10 miles from Swansea) would take refuge and live, while danger persisted, in the caves and holes along the Gower coast. If this is true, one sometime occupant of the caves might have been John Jenkin, of Cliff Cottage, High Pennard, the great-great-great-grandfather of Mr. W. H. Jenkins who now lives in Bishopston. We shall hear more of John Jenkin later. A story of a press-gang operating in Swansea that has come down to us via proud grand-children and which was reported by C. D. Morgan some hundred years after the event, runs as follows :(6) 'During the American War, Mr. John Voss (of Nicholaston Hall in Penmaen), was one day going back to Gower across the sands near Swansea, with his neighbour John Smith, "a very powerful and strong man". On the way they were stopped by a press-gang of twelve sailors under a Lieutenant, and the gang made to seize John Smith. Voss questioned their right to do so, but the Lieutenant ignored his protest, so Voss leapt from his horse and fought back to back with Smith who had already stretched two sailors with single blows of his tremendous fists. Fighting well and strongly, Voss continued to hold his end up whilst he and Smith retreated slowly backward in the direction of Brynmill, but the Lieutenant managed to get behind Voss and struck him across the shoulder with his cutlass, nearly severing his shoulder from his body, but at the very next second Voss had struck him and laid him out, and despite his nearly helpless condition continued to resist the rest, Smith meantime fighting like a veritable lion with sailor after sailor going down before him on every side; and about this time Voss's brother, with three or four other men, came up and the press-gang fled. Voss was carried back to Swansea where his wound was dressed, and it seems that he made something of a recovery'. According to C. D. Morgan, the press-gang was from the Admiralty tender Caesar, in Swansea on one of its missions to raise men for the Navy. John Voss will feature again in the story. And long, long after, caught in a cleft A slumbering mammoth of wood is left, Eyeless, limbless, dumb and deaf. The ill-fated Caesar set sail for Plymouth from Bristol in 1760 in the middle of the Seven Years' War. During the previous four years Prime Minister Pitt had been leading the struggle against the French with vigour, especially with campaigns at sea and overseas. There had been occasion to celebrate spectacular victories as a result of naval and com- bined operations in support of the American colonists. In the previous