BRITISH NAVAL HISTORY has a history of its own. According to the social and political agendas of the day, it has been told as the story of a sequence of important battles which led to British naval supremacy, a sequence of hagiographies intended to offer the subjects as role models to the coming generation of naval officers, studies of battle tactics made at a time when a new outbreak of war seemed inevitable, studies of developing technologies and studies of the social history of the navy and life at sea. A few historians have recognised the importance of naval administration but they have tended to concentrate on the building and repairing of ships, the economic aspects of running a navy and the political personalities involved at high levels.

One aspect of British naval history which has received little attention is that of logistics and the art of keeping ships and their crews supplied with equipment and, perhaps more importantly, the victuals which fuelled their efforts. These victuals were supplied by the Board of Admiralty’s subsidiary, the Victualling Board, which commenced its work in 1683 and continued, with only one brief pause, until 1832, when, with the other subsidiary boards, it was disbanded and its functions taken over by the newly created Victualling Department of the Admiralty. During this long period, the Victualling Board and its staff at the Victualling Office and yards had ample opportunity during numerous wars to improve its administrative systems, but it was during the twenty-three years of the great French wars that the Board was put to its greatest test: that of feeding over 147,000 men in over 800 ships deployed on stations around the world, and being given formal responsibility for feeding many people besides British naval personnel and occasionally soldiers on transports: soldiers in overseas garrisons, British settlements overseas, convicts en route to New South Wales, the men of other navies, and at various periods, distressed civilians in places such as the Shetland Islands. Taken all together, although accurate figures cannot be obtained, the number of men fed by the Victualling Board was probably well in excess of 250,000 at the high point between 1810 and 1815.