Under Sir William Scott, arguably the greatest Judge of its long history, the High Court of Admiralty was during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars one of the most influential legal bodies in the land. It dealt not only with the technicalities of seizures in prize, but with the numerous related issues of nationality, neutrality, sovereignty and jurisdiction at a time when all those matters were frequently fluid and their application uncertain.

The law that the Court sought to administer was not the common law of England, but international law, or the law of nations as it was then (perhaps more accurately) called. The procedures of the Court, situated at Doctors’ Commons, were in contested cases adversarial rather than investigative, thus following British legal tradition, but most of the evidence was documentary and witnesses were seldom called in person. Scott himself was at pains to point out the principles on which he was working; early in his incumbency he said:

In consequence, Scott's judgments often had much to say on the law of nations as then understood, and many of the principles he enunciated have survived, in customary or codified form, to this day. That is not to say that he took no account of English interpretations of the law, where differences existed; on such matters as the Rule of the War of 1756 or the 1753 Opinion of the Law Officers on the Silesian Loan, he followed English practice rather than making concessions to continental contentions based upon the principle of ‘free ships free goods’.

Fortunately, all Scott's major judgments survive, as reported by three authorities: Christopher Robinson, Thomas Edwards and John Dodson. The reporters were clearly aided by Scott's habit of writing down his judgments in full. He was, by some accounts, not a fluent extempore speaker and this has been a benefit to history. While the judgments which follow are, technically, already published work, they are available only in specialised libraries and it is believed that they fall therefore within the criteria of the Navy Records Society.

They are, moreover, supplemented here by much previously unpublished material, nearly all from the National Archive.

Duckworth arrived back at Plymouth [232] in time for his ship to become peripherally involved in the mutinies of 1797. He first set about persuad-ing the Admiralty to disgorge his pay and expenses due from his ser-vice in Jamaica [233–235], and for two weeks his correspondence shows no apprehension of trouble or knowledge of events at Portsmouth. The mutiny began at Spithead on 17 April, and a week later Sir John Orde, commanding at Plymouth, claimed that it was all over [237, 238]; cer-tainly the issues at the heart of the Portsmouth strike were on the way to resolution, through the moderation of the men's demands, the forbear-ance of Earl Spencer, and the good sense of Lord Howe and some other admirals. But the wider issue was not actually resolved yet, and there continued to be other outbreaks for several months.

At Plymouth the mutiny came late in May. On Leviathan Duck-worth was put off the ship, with most of his officers, only Lieuten-ant William Buchanan staying on board [241–243]. The men produced a well-written document of their grievances (someone on board was well-educated and produced better English prose than most of the offi-cers), but by exaggerating and inventing items which could not be true, they spoiled their case [239]. Duckworth was outraged at his treatment [244], but returned to the ship and saw that the crew was ‘turned over’. Even so collective demands still came [253, 307], but the crew knew that Duckworth was reluctant to impose punishments and were count-ing on this.

By August the ship was at sea once again, off Ushant enforcing the blockade of Brest [256–267]. Then after only two months he was sent on to south-west Ireland [270, 271]. The revolutionary rhetoric which had inspired black slaves in the West Indies, and white naval seamen (whose condition was close to slavery), also inspired the sub-jugated Irish population, where French military intervention could be decisive. Duckworth was sent to Bantry Bay so suddenly that he had no idea at first what he was to do, a sense of confusion aggravated by the difficulty of communicating with the local commander-in-chief, Admiral Robert Kingsmill [273–282]. But he soon settled to patrol-ling around the dangerous, rock-bound, mountainous coast from Cork to the Shannon estuary.

In fact, he was present on patrol along the Irish coast in the period between two French invasions.

The central theme of this chapter is the 1909 naval scare, sometimes known as the acceleration crisis. At the very moment at which Captain Herbert Heath arrived in Berlin, news began to break that the German Navy was secretly ordering its capital ships ahead of the published schedule [66, 67]. The strong suspicion this created was that the Reich leadership was undertaking a covert attempt to match or even overtake the Royal Navy in the number of its Dreadnought battleships. Heath reported extensively on this apparent ‘acceleration’, incurring in the process the wrath of Admiral Tirpitz, who blamed him for what he considered ‘false’ statements made by British ministers in Parliament on the German shipbuilding programme. In consequence, Heath was gradually ostracized by the German naval authorities, a process that he much resented [90]. However, far from cowing the attaché, Tirpitz's actions made Heath even more certain that his deductions about German shipbuilding were correct and he continued to report in this vein. In the end relations between Heath and the German government became so strained that virtually all facilities were denied to him. Heath left his post for a sea-going command in 1910, a mere two years into his (nominally three-year) appointment.

58. Herbert Heath, Germany N.A. Report 38/08

Berlin, 13 August 1908

Visit to Danzig

I have the honour to submit the following report of my visit to Danzig on Tuesday last.

I called on Rear Adml Schimmelman [sic] in command of the Imperial Dockyard at 10 A.M. The Admiral was very cordial in his welcome but the interview was short and the Flag Captain then took me over the dockyard. The average number of workmen employed is [2000?], the work consisting of repairs and completion of vessels up to 3rd class cruisers, there are also older vessels of a larger class in reserve.

The Ersatz Pfeil was alongside but lying very light in the water; she is due for completion by the end of this year.

My guide informed me that he was not allowed to speak about German submarines.

After lunch I went down the river in a ‘penny steamer’ accompanied by a local Englishman, but an inspection of the yards from this position did not reveal anything of importance except that Schichau appear to have completed a new large ship.

Amongst the recently catalogued manuscripts from the Admiralty Library collection are a series of ten personal journals kept by Vice Admiral George Augustus Bedford (1809–78) for the years between 1830 and 1860. Setting aside one break in the 1830s, these provide a continuous and remarkable record of nearly 30 years of Naval surveying. Bedford was a successful specialist officer who commanded surveying vessels for 20 years, was eventually appointed Assistant Hydrographer in 1863 and became Marine Advisor to the Board of Trade shortly afterwards. His career took place about as far from the quarter-deck of a flag-ship as was possible in the mid-nineteenth-century Navy; the last two decades of his sea-going service were spent in the cutter Sylvia surveying the west and northwest coasts of Ireland.

Bedford was serving in a Navy that was small in historic terms (it mustered just under 26,000 men when he took his first command), but it was a Navy which, under John Barrow, as Secretary to the Admiralty, and Frances Beaufort as Hydrographer, put real resources into exploration, surveying and associated scientific research. Beaufort's period as Hydrographer (1829–55) has been described as the ‘high noon’ of the Hydrographic Office, and it was one of remarkable achievement. Although office resources for chart production were initially small, Beaufort managed to increase these and to secure more vessels for the surveying service – including in 1841 the use of six paddle steam vessels, which helped revolutionise practice. These resources allowed comprehensive surveys to be made overseas and in home waters. These surveys produced real benefits; the number of new charts produced annually increased from 19 in 1830 to 130 in 1855, and details of revisions to existing printed charts were published from 1832 in ‘The Nautical magazine’, and from 1834 as ‘Notices to Mariners’. In 1823 charts had first been made available commercially to the rest of world, and in the year when Beaufort left office 140,000 copies from a series of 2,000 charts were sold or distributed to the fleet. Bedford never had a starring role, never took part in the high-profile exploration of the Arctic, but his methodical surveying is typical of the work which contributed to this expansion.

It is clear that as a young man Bedford was aware of the personal risk of specialising which tended to divert officers from conventional Naval practice.

The main sets of Declared Accounts are in E 351 (Exchequer, Declared Accounts in Rolls); they are handsomely written and on parchment. This list shows how accounts printed in this volume stand in the series and in relation to the one appearing in ENA. A fuller listing there extends the range to the end of Elizabeth's reign, and includes other sets of accounts.

This chapter commences with an illustration of the tensions that were beginning to bedevil Anglo-German relations. The farewell audience of the out-going naval attaché, Captain Reginald Allenby, was used by the Kaiser as a platform for expounding his manifold complaints about British policy [1]. It was into this chill that Commander (later Captain) Philip Dumas arrived as the new representative of the Royal Navy. The chapter follows his experiences, drawing especially upon his growing perception of an intense German Anglophobia [4, 14, 15, 31]. It also heralds an issue that will be of some prominence later, namely the invasion question [22]. However, Dumas's main concern upon his arrival was to investigate Germany's ability to build major warships. To this end he conducted an extensive tour of the German coasts, visiting and reporting upon various ship yards and harbours in the process [8, 9, 12, 18]. He also went to see several armaments manufacturers, including Krupp's of Essen [17]. The result of all these inspections was an important despatch outlining in great detail Germany's ability to construct large numbers of naval vessels of all types with considerable rapidity [19]. Following this, in early 1907, came a long memorandum in which Dumas examined the question of the best strategy to adopt in the event of an Anglo-German war. The attaché proposed as the most effective course a rigorous assault on German commerce through a distant blockade that would prevent both German and neutral vessels reaching the Reich [24]. Such a course, it may be noted, would be adopted in the First World War.

1. Reginald Allenby, Germany N.A. Report 2/06

Berlin, 16 January 1906

Anglo-German Relations

I had the honour of being this day received in farewell audience by His Majesty the Emperor. I beg to submit the following account of the conversation which ensued.

His Majesty's manner was extremely cordial, although he was just recovering from a severe attack of influenza. He gave me the impression of being much in earnest when referring to the question of the relations between England and Germany, and appeared to keenly feel and resent the imputations in the press and elsewhere under which he suffered. His manner was very forcible when denying the right of England to interfere between Germany and France, and he inferred that his motives were of the most pacific nature.