During battles they were made to carry water and gunpowder, earning them the nickname "powder monkeys".Ĭlass divisions were not so rigid as in later Victorian times, and boys from humble backgrounds went aboard with the sons of gentlemen and of existing officers and seamen. Sometimes older boys of good physique were press-ganged but the majority were volunteers, attracted by the romance of the sea and (from 1794 onwards) the relatively good pay. Some boys were already sufficiently educated to become midshipmen (boy officers) after a few months of training. It was a harsh life, even by the standards of the day, and the romance was quickly eclipsed by rotten food, the terrors of combat and strict discipline. In defence of the majority of flogging captains of Navy ships, the existing spartan conditions made it difficult to create effective sanctions for misbehaviour. Boys daily scurried about the decks barefoot, climbed the rigging in all climatic conditions and were deliberately toughened up to cope with a life at sea.
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Gay twink butt tumblr free#įood, recreation time and conversation were sacrosanct to them, and reduced diets, extra drill, denial of free time and solitary confinement in the ships' cells were resented by boys, and awkward to supervise, even if effective. Working-class boys had little or no schooling at that time and hence little experience of formal (still less bare) posterior chastisement. A crude wallop from an irate mother or belting from a father was the limit of it. Stephen Humphries in his book on working-class childhood in a later period, "Hooligans or Rebels?", raises some interesting aspects. private) schools, but tended to be resisted by the less well-educated, not just the boys themselves but sometimes also their parents: He points out that bare-posterior punishment was familiar to and accepted by middle- or upper-class boys who attended so-called "public" (i.e.
the most determined resistance to particular punishments that teachers attempted to impose occurred when boys refused to remove their trousers to be beaten on their bare bottoms.
although these ritual humiliations were for many years an integral part of public school life, teachers from such a background often discovered that working-class parents and children were resolute in their resistance to this type of punishment.
would stoically endure traditional punishments of the sort that their parents might inflict but refused to submit to the more degrading disciplinary measures favoured by some middle-class schoolteachers. Nevertheless, boys of all backgrounds were liable to bare-bottom discipline as soon as they joined the Navy. It is not clear just how far back this tradition goes. A document in the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts (British Museum) tells something of seaboard life at that period: There were ships' boys in the 16th century and they certainly received corporal punishment. As for all petty pillferings and commissiones of that kinde, those were generallie punished with the whippe, the offender beinge to that purpose bounde faste to the capstan and the waggerie and idleness of ship boys paid by the boatswayne with a rodde, and commonlie this execution is done upon Mondaye morninges, and is soe frequentlie in use, that some meere seamen and saylers doe believe in good earnest that they shall never have a faire winde until the poor boyes be duly brought to the chest that is, whipped every Mondaye morninge.īy the 18th century we have reliable accounts of the punishment of midshipmen.