ABSTRACT
The eighteenth-century Admiralty had almost no control over the recruitment of its officers. It had no means of telling who were the young gentlemen who aspired to commissioned rank, nor how many of them there were. A majority of the commissioned officiers were the sons of gentlemen, and a significant minority of noblemen, but no institutional barriers were erected against any young man of ability and a minimum of education. This chapter looks at another set of finks, which attached these two developments to a third: the rise of professional education in the Navy. It also looks at the central purpose of naval education, the formation of the minds of young officers to fit them for their profession. The chapter intends to concentrate instead on the numerous and curious ways in which naval education shaped the recruitment and control of the officer corps.
