The emergence of the professional naval officer was related both to
the necessities of naval warfare and to the structure of society on
land. Originally warships were manned by two separate sets of
commanders - gentleman soldiers skilled in fighting, and
'tarpaulins' of humbler social origin skilled in navigation and the
manual skills of sailing. Elias traces the onboard conflicts
between them, from Drake's famous insistence that the gentlemen
'haul and draw' with the sailors, to the gradual merging of the two
hierarchies by the end of the eighteenth century. The innovation of
the midshipmen - boys of gentle birth who both learned the manual
skills of the sailor and received the education of a gentleman -
gave crucial advantage to the British Royal Navy over the French
and Spanish, in which the greater rigidity of social barriers
ashore prevented a similar solution afloat. Planned but never
completed by Elias, this book has been reconstructed from his
mainly unpublished typescripts.
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