“The Childish Vice of Boys”

Large numbers of young sailors served in the navy, performing low-status work and training to sail as adult seamen. Most were destined for the lower deck, to work as common seamen, but many boys shipped out to train to become officers as well. Naval personnel recognized that active sexual cultures developed among adolescents at sea. In a book for naval schoolmasters, one authority warned against “improper growing familiarities” between the schoolmaster’s charges. ¹ Naval officers had no illusions here; most had personal experience of naval youth culture from their own boyhoods at sea. Sexual activity among young sailors was generally not seen as a serious offense, and the navy’s courts rarely heard charges of that sort. Those few that came to trial give us rare views of this side of adolescent life at sea.