The Admiralty records document British exploration and expansion overseas as well as the naval side of the growth and defence of the British Empire. The role of the Royal Navy in the development and defence of British North America is also documented.
The Admiralty fonds is composed of records generated by the Board of Admiralty, the Navy Board, the Transport Office and the Harbour Department, the Board for Sick and Wounded Seamen, the Royal Marine Office and Marine Pay Office, the Greenwich Hospital etc., and the antecedents and successors of these and other authorities concerned with the administration of naval affairs. The Admiralty records are organized into several hundred numbered classes of records and the foundation of the system is the Admiralty as reorganized after 1832.
The National Archives has copied those classes or selections of classes which pertain to the administration of naval affairs in the colonies in North America and the Dominion, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the British North American colonial period. Acquired as transcripts, photocopies or microfilm, this material is available on microfilm. Reel numbers are identified at lower levels of description or in the finding aid.
Types of documentation include, for example: despatches and correspondence letterbooks, reports and memoranda; orders and instructions, subject files, lists such as pension lists and lists of officers and men, returns of officers' services, ships, and personnel; contingent accounts, registers and indexes, journals and ships' logbooks, medical journals, pay books, ships' muster books and proclamations.
Great Britain. Admiralty : From the late seventeenth century until the reforms in naval administration of 1832, the system of directing and managing British naval affairs involved more than a dozen different departments and offices. The system was headed by the Admiralty Board with its secretary, followed by the Navy Board with its four principal officers, and a series of lesser boards and offices which had grown out of the two main boards. These subordinate departments included the Treasurer's Office, the Navy Pay Office, the Victualling Board, the Board of Transport Service, the Board for Sick and Wounded Seamen, the Prize Office, the Rendezvous Office, the Board of Longitude, the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth and Greenwich Hospital.
General direction was provided by the Lord High Admiral and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty with their secretary. The Board of Admiralty implemented the government's policies, including the movement of ships. To facilitate naval business, the Admiralty Board was in frequent communication with the Navy Board as well as with other subordinate departments on a variety of matters including convoys, manpower, transport and supplies. The Board also corresponded with other government offices including the Secretary of State, the Treasury, the Commissioners of the Customs, the General Post Office, the Secretary at War, and the Ordnance Office. The Colonial Office provided the Admiralty with valuable information while the Admiralty in its turn provided the means of enforcing regulations and of transporting officials and communications.
The Navy Board, while older than the Admiralty Board and theoretically superior in prestige to the numerous subordinate departments, could not, as a rule, deal directly with any other office. Its communications usually had to be directed through the Admiralty Board. The Navy Board did, however, have responsibility for much business relating to the navy.
The most significant reform in naval administration came in 1832 when the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, abolished the Navy Board and the Victualling Board and created five departments headed by: the Surveyor of the Navy, the Accountant General, the Storekeeper General, the Controller of Victualling and Transport Services, and the Physician General. The whole system was coordinated by the Admiralty Board whose membership varied from six to twelve including the First Lord of the Admiralty, one or more civil lords and a parliamentary secretary. All these members served for limited terms and continuity was provided by a permanent secretary. Despite refinements there were no further major reforms in the administration of the navy until 1963 when the Admiralty Board disappeared. The Queen became Lord High Admiral with effective direction of the Royal Navy handed to the Minister of Defence.
The Royal Navy was the cornerstone of the British colonial system. However, to protect British interests in North America it was not normally considered necessary for the Royal Navy to maintain a large force in American waters. The security of the colonies and the fisheries rested on the preservation of the command of the sea, the key to which was control of the western approaches. So long as the Royal Navy controlled the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, and the Straits of Gibraltar, British interests were in little danger from the French, the principal rivals of the British in North America.
The North American station, which included divisions for Newfoundland, Halifax, Bermuda, Barbadoes and Jamaica, generally had few ships to protect the Newfoundland fisheries, the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and the West Indian islands. Small forces only were assigned to the North American station.
The stationing of ships in the waters of the northwestern Atlantic meant that officers and seamen of the Royal Navy had frequent contact with North America. For most of the eighteenth century and all of the nineteenth century, Halifax was the headquarters for a division of the North America and West Indies station and St. John's performed the same function for another, virtually autonomous part of the station. In these centres, the Royal Navy had a wide variety of contacts with the colony and the local population with the result that information was sent back to London about all aspects of life there.
Similar work by the Royal Navy, in peace and war, was undertaken in other areas: on the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes under the Commander-in-Chief, North America and West Indies station; and off the coast of present-day British Columbia, under the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific station, where Esquimalt became the important naval base. Even before the advent of a separate station for the Pacific, the Royal Navy touched the western coast of North America through the endeavours of such officers as Captain James Cook and Captain George Vancouver, whose exploration in the Pacific brought them to the waters of British Columbia in the late eighteenth century. With the expansion of British and American trading companies in the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy protected British commercial interests and territorial claims in British Columbia.
Under men such as Sir John Barrow, Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, 1804-1845, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty engaged in Arctic exploration to discover the northwest passage. The first Arctic expedition sent by the Admiralty was commanded by Christopher Middleton and William Moor who searched unsuccessfully for the northwest passage in 1741-1742. This started a long line of Admiralty initiated expeditions which climaxed in the middle of the nineteenth century with the last and tragic voyage of Sir John Franklin in 1845 followed by the numerous expeditions sent to solve the mystery of his expedition's disappearance. A map of the Canadian Arctic testifies to the part played by the Admiralty and the Royal Navy in Arctic exploration.
