HMS Victory’s historian has exploded one of the longest-standing myths of the age of Trafalgar.

Peter Goodwin said the plight of the ‘powder monkeys’ was not quite the tale of hardship that has become the enduring scenario.

Traditionally, powder monkeys have been seen as young boys, aged around ten, who dashed about the ship in battle, carrying gunpowder to the cannon in a chaotic manner.

But everything else the Royal Navy of the era did was so well organised that the facts just did not add up for Peter.

When he studied the records, they showed that these ‘monkeys’ – Naval slang for something small – were not the young, mistreated boys that everyone perceives them to be, and that the operation was much more sophisticated than commonly believed.

Peter said such a haphazard system simply would not have worked, as in the heat of battle there would have been damaged ladders between the decks, making it a very slow and dangerous process.

His research has revealed that boys aged 12-19 – ‘boy’ was a formal rank – helped pass the powder in a human chain to the guns, using sailors who were not directly involved in the fighting.

And ships’ standing orders of the day actually prevented young boys working in or near magazines.

There would have been approximately 90 men and boys involved in a system which persisted in some form or another until World War II, with the nimbler boys passing cartridges from hatches to the gun crews.

Records show that there were also procedures in place to ensure that cartridges were going to the appropriate guns – Mr Goodwin said a 32-pounder cartridge ending up in a 12-pounder cannon would have been disastrous.

A ‘powder man’ nominated to each opposing pair of guns monitored the cartridges, held in fireproof boxes, making sure that there were only two bags of powder at any one time, and that no sparks got near the gunpowder.

The youngest sailors would also have had a ‘fireman’ role, damping down loose gunpowder to prevent explosions.