What was training like for American Sailors in the 1810-1820 Navy?

So it turns out I couldn't really find much of an answer for this, but I found a few books by American sailors who were P.O.W.s in England, and I presume you'd appreciate them.

Given this sub has a specific rule against just dropping primary sources, I'll try to make this a bit of a method post on how I find stuff.

First source, The Prisoners' Memoirs, or Dartmoor Prison; Containing a Complete and Impartial History of The Entire Captivity of the Americans in England, From the Commencement of the Last War Between the United States and Great Britain, until all Prisoners were Released by the Treaty of Ghent. by Charles Andrews, I knew about already from a project of my own. It's the latest of the three, published in 1852, and has nothing specifically about training. I found it by searching keywords on archive.org and restricting by date (so for instance you might do a search like this), the same thing can be done on the Hathitrust digital library (same search as above, though I've done this one as a fulltext rather than metadata search). This is pretty useful in finding primary sources. There are some significant limitations; if you compare the results with a more focused source collection, you'll see this misses memoir style books written decades later, and material that was discovered and published more recently, but for the kind of thing you're doing where there's no need to be comprehensive and it's not academic, this should get you a few useful results to get along with.

Next I found a scholarly article from the 80s by the fairly unsophisticated technique of googling the author of the first book. It's not the greatest paper, and fairly old, but I used the footnotes to find the other two primary sources. It might be worth your time digging a bit more on this step to find better and more recent sources, whether to answer your question or just to find more via footnotes.

The other two books are A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, the earliest, published in 1816, and A Green Hand's First Cruise from 1841. This is the most 'artistic' of them all, with detailed dialogue and descriptions. I was pretty suspicious of it given that the maritime novel was definitely a thing at the time, Midshipman Easy (which this book shares a joke with) is from 1836, but the paper I mentioned cites it as if it was fact, and the only other information I could easily find (a review from when it was written) treats it as though it was based on fact, so it's probably safe enough to treat as a fictionalised memoir. This makes it pretty unusual, as there are very few books written by common sailors.

As I said, The Prisoners' Memoir starts with the author already imprisoned, and has nothing about training (he never mentions anything about his own service prior to capture), though there's plenty of other interesting stuff about US sailors and their culture in there. The authors of the other two books both sailed on privateers, and both had very little training. Privateers formed a pretty big part of the US war effort though: two thirds of British ships destroyed or captured during the war were taken by privateers, so these men would have been more typical than members of the actual navy. The author of the Journal of a Young Man was a doctor, and when a ship that needed a doctor offered him a place:

without much reflection or consultation of friends, I stepped on board her in that capacity [assistant surgeon], with no other ideas than that of a pleasant cruise and making a fortune

The author of A Green Hand had barely any more training. He had always had an interest in sailing, and so had picked up a few things from sailors already. Once on board though, all training was on the job, and the new sailors were expected to pick it up as they went along, with the occasional kick or punch to reenforce learning, and if they couldn't (like the unfortunate sailor they nicknamed 'nimble Billy') then tough. The closest thing to training he had was when, a few days out of port, the third lieutenant ordered all the green hands (most still very seasick) to reef the foretopsail with one 'good foremast hand' on either end of the yard to 'assist the no-nothings'. One sailor almost falls to his death (this is one of the parts I'm a bit suspicious of, it reads very like a set-piece in a novel), this is all the 'training' they get though.

Sorry, all these books are more about the POW experience, but hopefully they're useful anyway.

edit: ok, I take back what I said about Green Hand, the muster roll of the Prince de Neufchatel is online, and includes Josiah Cobb, marine; and Mairen (?) Moore, fifer from Sudbury (in Middlesex County, which is where the Fifer in the book is from), so it is real. There is one odd thing about the roll, that it has a Nicholas Millen as commander, while the captain described in Green Hand ('a Jew by persuasion, a Frenchman by birth') is clearly John Ordronaux who owned the vessel and had commanded the previous, successful cruises 'Millen' not sounding very French or Jewish. However, as the captain very rarely came on deck, it's possible Cobb was unaware he was someone different.