Nelson & His World

Further to David's query about "powder monkeys" it got me thinking about what age they would have been. And that led on to me considering the ages of the various classes of boys on the ships.

My initial understanding was that:

1. The first-class volunteers (V1) were the "officer material" and were apart from the others. Very roughly they might have joined the navy aged 13 - V1 for 3 years - Midshipman for 3 years - then assuming exams passed Lieutenant at 19.

2. Third-class volunteers/boys (B3) were aged under 15 years old.

3. Second-class volunteers/boys (B2) were aged under 18 years old. Then generally they would progress to become landmen, Ordinary Seamen and Able Seamen.

Further to this I decided to do a bit of analysis on the Ayshford Trafalgar Roll. The analysis includes only seamen not marines. I knew there would be some anomolies - there always is - but even then some of the results most definitely surprised me!

The first thing to mention, and this may have come up on this forum before, is that of the seamen at the Battle of Trafalgar there were 3 boys aged 9, 6 boys aged 10, and there were 65 below the age of 13. There were 463 boys below the age of 16.

There were 103 V1's. Of these 18 were over 16, 2 were 20 and 1 was 22.

There were 461 midshipmen. Of these 235 were over 19, 2 were over 50 and one was aged 59! What was going on there?!

There were 465 B3's. Of these 6 were aged 20, 3 were aged over 20 and the oldest was aged 30!

There were 319 B2's. Of these 30 were over 19, and all these were between 20 and 22.

It's always possible that there could be the odd recording error in here - but nevertheless some intriguing statistics.

MB

P.S. Time now for a lie down in a dark room!

Mark!
I hope you have recovered from your mind-boggling arithmetic for which I and other members of this site must thank you. I am however surprised that you are surprised by the presence of a handful of midshipmen over the age of 50 at Trafalgar. Two points spring to mind.
First, although the practice died out during the Napoleonic Wars, appointment as midshipmen had never been exclusively reserved for aspiring officers and when vacancies occurred at sea it was not uncommon for experienced lower deck petty officers to be promoted - albeit on a temporary basis. They could do the job even if they were not gentlemen and were often not young.
Second, the Navy had its fair share of eccentrics and these included men who were of modest background and who were institutionalised (I suppose you would call it) so that the service was their home and they had no desire to progress from the familiar role of midshipman to the new responsibilities of lieutenant. The most famous of these was Billy Culmer who joined the navy in 1755, never sought promotion, declaring that he would rather be the oldest mid in the service than the youngest lieutenant, and consistently refused to take the lieutenant’s exam until forced to do so in 1790 at the age of 57. He passed at the second attempt having turned up drunk at the first. Gardner’s ‘Above and Under Hatches’ has a detailed description.
There must also I suppose have been a small number of midshipmen who were not sharp enough the pass the lieutenant's exam and were stuck either in this rank or as Masters Mates
Brian