On 8 November 1810, Thomas Hearn wrote to the Victualling Board requesting that he be granted certificates for bisket delivered to the victualling stores at Portsmouth under two contracts he had made with the Agent Victualler in August and September of that year. The Board reviewed his deliveries when the letter was read two days later and instructed the Agent Victualler to make him out the certificates he had granted, but to cut the prices paid on the last 190 bags to the same as they were paying others who had subsequently entered into contracts. They then directed the Agent to demand of Mr Hearn an explanation of why one hundred bags of bread delivered in September had been found on inspection to be ‘old, smelly and maggoty,’ and to inform him that unless he gave a satisfactory explanation he would be regarded in future as ‘a person wholly unfit to hold any further Contract with this department.’ Hearn, a baker by trade, based in Newport, on the Isle of Wight, was a well-established contractor. He was one of the most prominent of twenty or so local bakers who had regularly supplied to Portsmouth victualling yard on a succession of contracts, up to five per year, since the outbreak of war in 1793. He had been penalised once before, in 1809, when £14 was abated from his payments for 140 hundredweight rejected, out of 300 he had contracted to supply. Presumably he could give no satisfactory excuse for supplying poor-quality goods, for he held no further contracts and disappears from the record. The blacklisting of Thomas Hearn is significant, because it illustrates several key aspects of how the Victualling Board purchased its supplies, and also the changing way in which it dealt with its suppliers. A succession of contracts for deliveries of set quantities of goods was the most common means of buying in provisions, although as this chapter explores, there were many variations in such contracts. As we have already seen, later in the war, after its reorganisation in 1809, the Victualling Board became increasingly assertive with its contractors, less willing to allow poor-quality supplies to pass and increasingly willing to threaten, penalise and blacklist contractors who did not meet the required standards.