In the seaside town of Hartlepool , in north-east England, there is a legend from two centuries ago about a monkey that was hanged by the town's fishermen as they believed him to be a French spy. At the beginning of the 19th century, during the Napoleonic Wars , the English coastal towns watched their waters before the possible French invasion. A storm blew a French-flagged warship off course, causing it to come ashore at Hartlepool. The locals, expectant, contemplated that unequal fight until the ship lost its mast and broke in two. The remains of the shipwreck reached the shore:boxes of supplies, the mast... and a soaked monkey with the French uniform on a board .
In those days, faced with the harassment of Napoleon, the English lived in a state of permanent psychosis:they were distrustful, everywhere they saw spies... even a simple monkey was a danger to the inhabitants of Hartlepool. The poor monkey, who was nothing more than the ship's mascot, was accused of being a spy, and on the same shore he was tried and sentenced to hang. The mast of the ship was stuck in the sand and the monkey was hanged.
What could have remained in an episode of animal abuse and, above all, of human stupidity could hide something worse... the hanging of a child . The legend has come down to our days as the hanging of a monkey (monkey in English) but in the crew of the warships there was another type of monkey… the powder monkey :They were children or adolescents who were in charge of taking the gunpowder (powder) from the cellar to the artillerymen. Perhaps at some point, during these two centuries, someone interested in Hartlepool not being the protagonist of that atrocity, decided to change the powder monkey for a monkey.
It is better to look stupid (hang a monkey for a spy) than inhuman (hang a child).
Power monkey
Sources:This is Hartlepool, Hartlepool Monkey,