This dissertation investigates the gradual emergence of the 'young hero' as a new figure in maritime literature beginning in the aftermath of the 1745 Rebellion and culminating as the centrepiece in a campaign of concerted war-propaganda in the years immediately preceding and succeeding the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). The campaign was intended to redefine Britain as no longer a martial 'Old School' warrior-nation but instead a heroic 'Temple of Honour' occupied by naval 'Worthies'. Thereby, 'national characteristic spirit' would be imbued with maritime ardour, the swashbuckling, adventurous, courageous integrity long associated with 'our naval heroes' and 'modem patriotism' made energetic, vibrant and vigorous as the nation confronted existential dangers from without and within. By its further, express assimilation to the young naval hero - the boy from the lower deck and young gentleman from the quarter-deck - who 'with an ardour natural to youth ... panted after a life of adventure' , the campaign's objective was that emergent 'Britishness' would be simultaneously rejuvenated and depolicitized by the deeper truths which enlightenment society had begun attaching to youth, all while romanticising the Navy by its association with the dark blue ocean based on the conventional perception that youth was the in extremis veritas of the human condition and that naval youth, faced with the twin jeopardy of the sea and war, represented the quintessential British hero. This campaign was pioneered by The Naval Chronicle, a monthly periodical which ran from January 1799 to December 1818 and was the brainchild of Admiral John Willett Payne, 'Private Secretary and keeper of the Privy Seal to the PRINCE' of Wales prior to the French Wars and the Reverend James Stanier Clarke, appointed chaplain to the Prince of Wales in 1798. As the naval wars subsided and Joyce Gold, The Naval Chronicle's publisher, took increasing control of editorial policy, the figure of the young hero took on an overtly political hue, spawning the ' unfortunate youth' attached as a central figure of polemical discourse in the movement for naval reform gaining momentum in the later years of the French Wars. These two stages brought heroic youth, in the symbolic power that it thereby evoked, from the outreaches of the maritime world to its heart, the high profile accorded to these successive images as centrepiece of this propaganda campaign marking a turning-point in the history of young persons at sea.

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This thesis aims to explain how British naval power was sustained in the Indian Ocean during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. To improve efficiency and economy, the Admiralty had to reorganise the management of shore support services, as well as to rationalise the bases available to the navy to meet the enemy it faced. The basic proposal of this thesis is that British naval power was projected overseas by the Admiralty's effective reconciliation of two competing demands, the naval demand for strategic deployment and the domestic demand for reform. The thesis argues that British naval power in the Indian Ocean was increased by the acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope and Trincomalee and the naval bases built at these locations. The removal of the navy from complete dependence on the East India Company for support services was part of a long term policy of increasing Admiralty control of facilities in the east. In 1793 Bombay was the main naval base but Madras quickly became another hub supporting naval activities in the east. Other locations were considered. Calcutta was used and investigations were made into developing Penang as a navy base before Trincomalee became part of Britain’s long-term naval infrastructure. At the Cape a separate naval command was given responsibility for part of the Indian Ocean. Following the capture of Mauritius in 1810 this island was used temporarily as a forward support base. Admiralty control of the naval support services delivered to the squadrons at the Cape and in the East Indies was dramatically improved by the appointment overseas of resident commissioners from 1809. This resulted from the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission of Naval Revision, first suggested by the Commissioners on Fees in 1788. Resident commissioners ensured Admiralty instructions and policies were implemented and executed, resulting in improved efficiency and reduced costs.