Ships' Boys and Youth Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Navy Recruits of the London Marine Society

Abstract

Jim Hawkins, mousse et héro du roman de Robert L. Stevenson « L'île au trésor », est un personnage dont plusieurs d'entre nous aurons lu l'histoire dans notre jeunesse.Il est étonnant, cependant, qu'on ait fait si peu de recherches sur les vrais mousses du dix-huitième siècle.Fondé sur les archives de la London Marine Society, cet article tente de mettre au jour les origines et les motifs des garçons qui s'enrôlaient dans la Marine britannique au cours de la Guerre de sept ans contre la France.L'analyse suggère que le service en mer avait un double caractère pour les enfants des classes ouvrière et défavorisée : il leur fournissait une « demeure flottante », ce que n'arrivait pas à faire la communauté, et, en même temps, il semble qu'il offrait un moyen de s'enfuir pour les jeunes qui ne voulaient pas se conformer aux normes de la société.En recrutant ces derniers, mais aussi à cause de son environnement de travail, le marin acquérait plusieurs caractéristiques d'un modèle culturel pour la jeunesse.When thinking of ships' boys in the eighteenth century, the first that usually comes into one's mind is Jim Hawkins, the narrator in Robert L. Stevenson's Treasure Island.Yet, compared to such colourful stories of boys at sea in literature, historiography has little to offer on these juvenile sailors.Partly the lack of studies can be explained by the available source material: eighteenth-century records telling us about the boys aboard ships who were trained to become ordinary sailors are scarce.A rich exception is the records of the Marine Society, a society that made it its task to recruit and/or equip impoverished boys for the Royal Navy and later also for the merchant navy, and whose records are stored at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London.Following some initial remarks about youths serving in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, this article will attempt to bring back to life the first generation of Marine Society boys, who joined the navy during the Seven Years' War, to ask who they were and why they went to sea.To aid the understanding of the boys' motives this article will in the second part try to interpret eighteenth-century deep-sea sailors from a youth cultural angle, drawing not solely upon the evidence from the Marine Society's records, but also from sailors' memoirs and historical studies of maritime culture. 1 1 This article is based on the fourth chapter of the author's doctoral thesis on the Marine Society and its boy recruits, "Ships' Boys and Charity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The London Marine Society, 1756-1772,"

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