I've recently been reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books and in The Fortune of War, it is mentioned that all the American ships were crewed by "volunteers" - which I understood in the context to mean people who signed up willingly - which was different to the Royal Navy's approach. It seems from what I've read (and I understand O'Brian did his research) that new hands on a Royal Navy ship were either criminals or pressed into the service.
So what I'm wondering is the actual process involved in pressing crews. Could the navy recruit/press pretty much just anyone they liked (who was male and working class)? How did they go about the process?
There were volunteers in the royal navy as well - especially skilled craftsmen such as carpenters, barrelmakers and ropemakers could make a decent sum working on a royal navy vessel, and the workload and food was usually better aboard a warship than it was aboard a merchantman. However, much of the crew was indeed pressed into service (ie conscripted).
The law allowed the royal navy to press any sailor between the age of 18 and 45 into service in the royal navy. Press gangs were usually sent aboard merchant vessels and into the harbours and forcibly took sailors (and rarely, non-sailors) to serve aboard royal navy ships.
Having a severe manpower shortage, the royal navy routinely stopped US merchant vessels and searched them for British subjects during the Napoleonic war - and the royal navy often took a very liberal aproach to who was a British subject - if you were born as such, you were such, which meant that most grown US citizens qualified. Thus the royal navy pressed plenty of US citizens into service - which was one of the reasons for the War of 1812.