As always, an historian owes warm thanks to the staff in the archives, and here both time and number of documents ordered leads me to single out the people working at the great Public Record Office at Kew, presently subsumed in some mysterious way within the prosaically named National Archives (UK). Particular reference must also be made to the William L. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, especially for their kindness in allowing me to cite and quote from their fine collections of Croker and Melville papers.

Various obligations are owed to various bodies for the research grants essential to any work forcing one to travel to widely distributed archives. I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the University of the Witwatersrand, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and the American Philosophical Society. I am also bound formally to state (which I gladly do) that the material which follows is in part based on work supported financially by the National Research Foundation (of South Africa), through research grant 2053710 UFGR. Any opinion, findings and conclusions in this work, though, are the author's, and the NRF can have no liability for them.

I owe a very great deal to the work of historians who have previously ventured into the muddy waters of naval administrative history, and notably John Ehrman, Daniel Baugh, N. A. M. Rodger and Roger Morriss.