ABSTRACT
The next section of this collection (Part 4) explores some of the major naval buggery scandals that captured public attention in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These were hardly the only cases involving naval personnel that made the papers, however. The following newspaper reports allow us to trace the case of Lt. Thomas Wye. Wye had received his lieutenant’s commission in the 1740s, but he faced dismissal from the navy after he was caught with a journeyman blacksmith in the mid-1750s. As the reports show, Wye initially fled arrest, but he eventually faced trial and was convicted of a misdemeanor crime. The court gave him a sentence that mirrored Captain Rigby’s six decades earlier, though in miniature (Part 4, Document 1.2). Wye also faced dismissal from the navy.
