Page:The Public Records and The Constitution.djvu/34

 an Admiralty Committee of the Council of State, the records of which were in the same office.

James Duke of York, afterwards King James II (being, as his adviser Samuel Pepys said, 'very hot for regulations in the Navy'), seems to have been the first to succeed in separating the Admiralty Department from the Council. It is in his time and under his instructions that the magnificent series of Journals and Log-Books which are now among the Admiralty records begins. It is a pleasing task to call to mind that one, of whom historians can remember little that is good, and possibly much that is bad, did at least render one great and good service to his country, and may be regarded as the father of our system of naval administration.

Since his time the office of Lord High Admiral has usually been in the hands of Commissioners, whose authority, like that of the Lord High Admiral himself, is of course derived from the Crown. Their Department has had a business which has developed from of their generation to generation, and has brought into existence a series of records of which there has never been the like in the history of the world. You can form no idea of them from a single dispatch sent by a single admiral, and relating to a single battle, such as you may see in the Public Record Office 'Museum' in a glass case. There are shelves upon shelves, presses upon presses, rooms after rooms of documents, which tell the history of Naval Administration in all its branches. They tell of the methods by which the naval authorities on shore patiently worked to ensure the efficiency of the great righting and exploring forces afloat, and obtained the money to gain their ends, as well as of the exploits performed and the victories won.

Even when a Department of Government sprang, so to speak, from an entirely new source, it was almost