Unlike the primary yards which were placed under the direct jurisdiction of the Victualling Board, the Commissioners entrusted each secondary home or overseas port to a single contractor who had to be in a position to fulfil all and any demands for victuals made by the Royal Navy.

There were ten secondary home ports: Greenock, Whitehaven, Liverpool, Milford and Bristol on the west coast; Leith, Newcastle, Hull, Lynn and Yarmouth on the east coast. To these should be added five Irish ports – Londonderry (from September 1759), Belfast-Carrickfergus, Dublin, Waterford, Cork – and a dozen other overseas stations: in North America there was Louisburg (from July 1759), Quebec (from March 1761), Halifax in Nova Scotia, New York, and Charleston in South Carolina; in the West Indies, Barbados and the Leeward Islands, Jamaica and Havana (from October 1762); and finally Lisbon, Oporto, Madeira and Goree.

The methods of victualling at these bases will be examined first, and this will be followed by an examination of the suppliers and their competitors, and a geographical breakdown of the markets supplying them. These indices will reveal not only the nature but also the importance of commercial networks in ensuring that the system worked optimally. Lastly, the chapter will focus on a specific trader who played a major role in Royal Navy victualling: the London merchant John Biggin.