Have you read NAM Rodger's THE WOODEN WORLD, which remains the classic study of shipboard life in the sailing RN as he goes into the disciplinary measures on British warships in great detail. He also returns to that subject in COMMAND OF THE OCEAN but I expect you have read that. Sadistic captains occasionally crop but more often than not, were removed from command by the Admiralty. Discipline on board HM's warships was based on the Articles of War and corporal punishment -- despite the scribblings of fiction writers -- was very strictly regulated.

Rodger also provides some cogent and compelling reasons in CoO as to why the Spanish navy was not as effective as the Royal Navy.

Your comments on manpower are right but I would point out that British fishermen were exempt from the press. There was a very high percentage of landsmen in all British warship ships' companies, but the RN was able to turn them into ordinary seamen in fairly good time because the cadre of trained personnel was sound and they got that way through being at sea more than the navies of other nations.

On the subject of homosexuality at sea, I think it is a very dangerous thing to import 21st century social views back into the early 19th century. It did exist as there is evidence (court martial transcriptions) in both the RN and USN but it was not at all widespread and the social, not to mention the legal, sanctions were such as to make it abhorrent. The historian AN Gilbert addressed the subject in two articles: "Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861," JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY 10 (1976/77), 72-98; and "The AFRICAINE Courts-Martial: A Study of Buggery and the Royal Navy," JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 1 (1974), 111-122. Gilbert had no evidence for a lot of the statments he made concerning his belief that it was widespread and, indeed, the existing evidence is that it was an extremely rare thing in English-speaking navies. NAM Rodger provided an excellent rebuttal to Gilbert's view in THE WOODEN WORLD, 80-81. As he points OUT in CoO, 451, homosexual activity was so detested by the lower deck, as well as the officers; one RN mutiny IN 1797 apparently originating when the crew mutinied to prevent the execution of three sailors convicted of homosexuality on board their vessel "as an execution for such a horrible offence would bring disgrace on the ship." The subject of homosexuality in the sailing navy period was also addressed by Christopher McKee, A GENTLEMANLY AND HONORABLE PROFESSION: THE CREATION OF THE US NAVAL OFFICER CORPS, 1794-1815, 438-440. McKee's conclusion is that "Given the evidence, the only supportable verdict is that homosexual activity by members of the U.S. Navy officer corps, 1794-1815, was almost totally nonexistent." Note that the subject of McKee's study was officers, not enlisted men, but I doubt American enlisted men were much different than their British counterparts in this respect.

dg