The chapter on Dockyards is strongly oriented toward problems of manpower. It stresses the management and behaviour of the work force, not only to exhibit the problems and how they were solved, but also to display to historians—including, I hope, some who would normally have no particular interest in the navy—the nature of these materials. For the Navy Board and dockyard records must certainly be the largest and richest surviving source of information on eighteenth-century work rules, work attitudes and labour relations. The chapter on Seamen offers a documentary history of the manning problem, which I hope will be read with enjoyment and understanding. This was the most serious problem that the Admiralty and indeed the government (since the means of solving it were not in the Admiralty’s hands) faced, and it is fair to say that on the whole they failed. During this period the methods of dealing with seamen—the employment of press gangs, the modes of encouraging volunteers and of preventing desertion, and so on—became fixed in the form that is familiar to students of the eighteenth-century British navy.
Other important themes are explored, though not at the same length. Some of these are: the development of the officer corps, this being a period in which finishing touches were added to the process that was begun in the late seventeenth century; the interesting, though largely futile, efforts to institute a fairer method of paying seamen; the expansion of the victualling service, which was perhaps the civil branch of the navy that underwent the most administrative refinement in the early eighteenth century; the question of whether British men of war in the first half of the eighteenth century were badly designed; and the role of patronage in the naval bureaucracy.
The volume treats a period in which twenty-five years of peace were followed by nine years of war. The common judgment of naval historians has been that the navy deteriorated during the long peace. David Hannay, whose Short History of the Royal Navy is still the most readable and penetrating general history in most respects, asserted that the navy in 1739 was “less fit to meet the calls of a great war” than at any time since the reign of Charles II. He acknowledged that it was strong enough in terms of the numbers it could fit out against potential enemies, but otherwise it was permeated with “moral and intellectual diseases”; its leaders were “worn-out and commonplace, or brutal and noisy.” Fortunately, he concluded, the condition of the British nation was basically sound and “capable of reform,” and thus the navy could “bear its administrative scum as a mighty river carries driftwood and rubbish on its surface.” Strong words…’