The
actions of the
Royal Navy's
press gangs may have been technically
legal and proper for them to do to
British subjects. The press gangs, however, didn't really pay too much attention to the
citizenships of the drunks they gathered off the
streets -- or off other
ships, on the occasion that the RN press gangs boarded another ship purportedly looking for
deserters.
Their habit of picking up sailors off American merchant ships and impressing them into British service with false desertion claims ("well, hell, they're just rebellious colonials anyway") after the American Revolution was one of several causes of the War of 1812.