Ale-conners sometimes had to be impressed into service, and the post was often rotated amongst a number of individuals.
She also press ganged civilians into her crew at gunpoint, which led to several families being murdered under Cain's orders.
Impressment, the practice of pressing men into military service
In the book Sam and his uncle were forced into the navy by the press gang.
He does have ready money which he uses to buy Susan and Elizabeth-Jane at the beginning of the book, so he has clearly not been pressed into service and has money from some source.
The "common purse" was a fighting fund raised by the tenants to fund legal action in the Chancery court; the "clokebagge well fraught with money" was a large bribe to the tenants' leader to drop the case, after first having had him press ganged into the army and sent to fight "beyond seas" which probably meant in Ireland, which he survived.
In Tobias Smollett's 1748 novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, a "bumboat woman" conducts business with sailors imprisoned on board a pressing tender moored near the Tower Wharf on the Thames River, London, England.
In By Force of Arms, Captain Isaac Biddlecomb's smuggling ship, the Judea, is destroyed by British soldiers, which results eventually in his and his friend Ezra Rumstick's impressment aboard an English man-o-war, HMS Icarus, commanded by the irresponsible and arrogant Lieutenant James Pendexter.