I’ve been working on the Ratlines since yesterday. It is pretty tedious process and requires a lot of patience I’m telling you! And I’m only still like about 1/2 done!

But while working on it, it made me think about all these guys who were pressed into service, basically kidnapped into involuntary servitude is what happened. And then they were made to learn how to climb the Mast and go out on the Yards. Nowadays they use safety equipment for all that. But back in those days they climbed up the Ratlines and go out on the Yards in bare feet!

A pretty good example of this is in that movie Damn the Defiant! Captain Crawford, Alec Guinness ends up having to press a bunch of men into service around the taverns,… I believe they were either in Liverpool or Portsmouth I can’t remember. well one of the guys they pressed with a guy who claimed that he was a gentleman. So they made him learn how to climb up the Mast and yard like the rest of the Seaman. LOL!!! 🙂

HMS Defiant on Wikipedia

TCM Article

From the TCM Article…

“…The insurrection presented in Damn the Defiant! (originally released in England as H.M.S. Defiant) is depicted less as a just fight against systemic corruption than as a reaction to an evil, aberrant officer in stark opposition to a benevolent commander with his crew’s best interests at heart. The brutal treatment inflicted on the crew by sadistic Lt. Scott-Padget goes unnoticed by Capt. Crawford until the captain’s own midshipman son is viciously punished by the second in command. The resolution comes not from Crawford’s intervention or the official administration of justice on behalf of the men below deck but through the actions of a “bad” mutineer, and at the end, the singular threat to their well-being removed, the men patriotically unite in the service of defeating the French Navy. “It no more challenges constituted authority than those public school stories about a good house-master and brutal prefects,” Durgnat notes.”