While it's still Midshipman Monday in my timezone, I want to share an interesting piece of trivia I found last night in Geoffrey Penn's 1957 book Snotty: The Story of the Midshipman. Mastheading, sending a boy into nautical time-out by having him sit up in the masthead, was officially abolished in 1836.
The “official” punishments, that is those authorized by the captain or the first lieutenant, but usually not by the Admiralty, were sometimes no less severe. “Mastheading” was the most frequent and at times this became both cruel and dangerous. The boy was sent to the masthead, usually for a set period or until told to come down again. Soaked to the skin with rain and in an icy wind at the masthead the youngster often suffered terribly from exposure and must have been in grave danger, with his fingers stiff and numb, of losing his hold and falling to the deck [...] It was perhaps because of incidents such as that described above that mastheading was officially abolished in 1836, though that is not to say that it actually ceased altogether.
— Geoffrey Penn, Snotty: The Story of the Midshipman
Mastheading is huge in the novels of Frederick Marryat, and the illustration I used was originally published with his novellas The Pirate and the Three Cutters in 1835. 1836, the year mastheading was supposedly abolished, is the year Mr. Midshipman Easy was published, with Jack Easy reading the Articles of War at the masthead. According to his statements in Newton Forster, Marryat was mastheaded frequently after he joined the Royal Navy in 1806. He usually makes light of the dangers (as with Jack Easy), but his hero Peter Simple is incapacitated by exposure at the masthead.
Marryat’s novels of the 1830s and 1840s are already products of nostalgia, largely set in the early 19th century if not the late 18th century. I had thought that mastheading was practiced throughout the 19th century in the Royal Navy, but it didn’t even survive into Queen Victoria’s reign (officially). It was a relic of more brutal times even as Marryat hit his stride as a popular writer.
There is still the possibility that some of Franklin’s officers were mastheaded as midshipmen. Henry TD Le Vesconte joined the service in 1829 at age 15, although he regarded his first captain fondly so he may have been a well-behaved lad who escaped the masthead.
