| dc.description.abstract | This study has three principal aims: to research the circumstances of mid-eighteenthcentury
ships' boys, to look at the role the sea service played for contemporary youths
with no family connections to the maritime world, and to deliver an institutional history
of the Marine Society in its early years. Though present in significant numbers on board
eighteenth-century vessels, ships' boys have rarely been considered by historians. The
lack of research can partly be explained by the lack of source material, which is why the
records of the London Marine Society, a charity that had made it its task to recruit boys
for the sea service, are so valuable. The Marine Society was one of the most prominent
charities in the wave of voluntary associations that emerged in the mid-eighteenth
century, and this thesis aims to add to the historiography of the charity movement by
investigating the Society's origins, how and by whom it was run and financed, and how
successful its work was.
To fulfil the first two aims, the backgrounds, motives and fates of the Marine
Society's Seven-Years-War recruits were explored, drawing on the Society's registers of
recruits and minutes, and the Royal Navy's muster books. The Society's institutional
history was traced with the help of its minutes of committee meetings and its subscription
lists, through contemporary newspapers and journals, and pamphlets written by the key
figures.
Going to sea as a boy during the Seven Years War was extremely dangerous, as the
high casualty rate among the Marine-Society boys shows, yet if the youth managed to
survive, being a sailor promised him a faster route to the (economic) independence of an
adult than most land-based apprenticeships available to the children of the lower strata.
The sea service could take on a dual character for such children: it could be a
(near-)coercive institution where authorities or relatives sent a destitute or troublesome
boy, but at the same time to the impoverished or non-conformist youth himself the sea
could appear as the escape from his misery or from a society to which he was unable to
conform. The Marine Society itself was not merely a recruitment project, but something
that was deeply rooted in the concern about London's troubles with youth
unemployment, misbehaviour and crime. The Society's impact on naval manpower
during the Seven Years War has hitherto been overestimated; however, its contribution
to the preservation of sailors through the effective typhus prevention measures it
undertook has never received due recognition. | en_US |
