On 22 July 1742 there was a hell of a row after dinner at the governor's house in Spanish Town. It occurred after a council of war between the principal military commanders and the governor of Jamaica, when the affairs of state would normally have given way to a relaxed conviviality. The governor, Edward Trelawny, had received a complaint from an American merchant about the impressment of ‘his best and only good hand’ by the royal navy. The governor raised the issue after dinner, once the army commanders had left. The commander of the Jamaica station, Admiral Edward Vernon, dismissed the complaint. He had already fallen out with the army officers over manning his ships, and he was clearly irritated that so much had been made of this particular incident, and of pressing in general. He told the governor that the incident was little more than a ‘chimera’. He was especially annoyed by the antics of one member of the Jamaican council, Samuel Dicker, a merchant connected to the Devonshire woollen trade and a protégé of Trelawny, who had stirred up passions against pressing by organizing a petition against the lieutenant of the Lichfield for aggressively taking men off merchant vessels. Vernon knew Dicker personally. Earlier in the year, when Trelawny was suffering from a bout of malaria, Dicker's house had been used for a council of war. In Vernon’s opinion Dicker was a ‘peevish malicious Fellow… a Scoundrel and a Rascal’. Sir Chaloner Ogle, Vernon's second-in-command, concurred, whereupon Trelawny aggressively defended Dicker. According to Vernon, Governor Trelawny started from his chair ‘in the rage of a Madman … turn’d as pale as a ghost with Rage and Frenzy, and drew his sword, telling Sir Chaloner, Mr. Dicker was no more a Rascal than he was’. Sir Chaloner was provoked by this retort into drawing his sword, or at least made moves to do so. Vernon expeditiously intervened to prevent a duel between the two men. He pinned Trelawny to his chair, and according to some accounts, held down the hilt of Sir Chaloner's sword before it could be drawn. He then hustled him out of the room.