So out I bolted like a hunted rat

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 130. On the old British Naval selection process for officers.

But none of this could compete with the old power of influence. While a few “tarpaulin” captains did rise on sheer ability from the lower classes and the lower decks thanks to Pepys’s rules, and while the Admiralty always would look favorably on promotion for an officer who had distinguished himself heroically in battle, family and political patronage remained deeply ingrained in the system.33 There were all kinds of ways around the rules, and by the early 1800s the ways around them were so much the norm that few naval officers gave them a second thought. Admirals on station were allowed to commission their own candidates as lieutenants or commanders to fill vacancies, and could always stall if subsequently overruled by the Admiralty. A prominent politician or peer might exert his influence directly with the Admiralty on behalf of a relative or protégé. One young man whose father was a minor government official with many useful connections was taken aside at age fourteen by one of his father’s noble friends, who told him, “When there is a general naval promotion, I am always allowed to provide for one friend, to get him made either a lieutenant, a commander, or a post captain. Therefore, when your time is up, let me know and you shall be my lieutenant. In short, you are as sure of the commission as if you had it in your pocket.”

But most of all there was a constant trade of mutual backscratching among old navy families. To get around the rule of three years’ service for promotion to lieutenant (subsequently increased to six), it was routine for captains to enter a friend’s son or nephew on their ship’s books without his having served at all. A crown piece handed to the Navy Office porter on the way in to the lieutenant’s examination ensured that the age requirement would be ignored as well, which in the early 1800s resulted in many eighteen-, seventeen-, and even sixteen-year-old lieutenants (there was even one thirteen-year-old).
Three captains were required to conduct the examination for lieutenants, and some took the job seriously enough to prepare lists of questions they intended to ask covering an array of technical knowledge about seamanship, fitting and rigging a ship, and naval warfare. But for favored candidates the fix was always in. “Well, well, a very creditable examination,” one new lieutenant was told by his examiner, a friend of the boy’s two naval uncles. He had not been asked any questions at all, and when one of the other examiners, who had just walked in the door at this point, tried to ask one, the first captain cut him off, humorously threatened to have him arrested for showing up late, and turning to the successful candidate said, “That is not the way to pass, to linger there when you are told you will do!” “So out I bolted like a hunted rat,” the boy recalled.