I’m adding a new category to this blog today. I have on other blogs written about Age of Consent, Age of Maturity, child labor, and children as participants in war — as well as related topics.

Today I came across a mention of Acting Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. His father, a hero of the War of 1812, took him along on ship with him. At 14, well trained as a sailor on his father’s ship, he was transferred to another vessel. Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, he was captured in a battle with a Spanish warship and spent six months as a prisoner of war in a prison ship in Havana Harbor.

As those who read this blog will learn, I am a pedant about historical and cultural accuracy and dislike genre work that tries to paste a modern perspective on previous historical eras and cultures that imitate the levels of those cultures.