Welcome to the Forum, James! Sorry I missed your post earlier. It was a simple fact that it would have been impossible back in the day to train sailors in the fine art of fencing. Despite the glamour of the old Errol Flynn movies, with the exception of perhaps the captain and officers, most of the old salts would be lucky to even get a cutlass rather than a belay pin or some such. Cutlass drill was very primitive and simple, consisting of mostly clumsy strikes and the head and upper limbs and an occasional slashing blow and stab to the mid-section.
Most injuries delivered by cutlasses (especially in the later periods of Fighting Sail (1790's-1800's) were delivered to the enemy's scalp and skull with the blunt crushing edge of the cutlass. If you could 'ring the man's bell', stun him or knock him senseless, lacerate his scalp and put blood in his eyes, you could take the fight out of him. In Gilkerson's "Boarders Away", he prints an actual list of casualties from one such boarding raid and it is shocking to see the amount of head injuries inflicted.
It should be noted that the American naval powers took this very seriously and the U.S. were the one naval power that developed a naval helmet/headgear made of tarred leather with deflecting leather slats to decrease the number of injuries from said blows.
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