• The Website Explained
• Studies Index
• Introducing Merchant Seafaring
• Shipmasters
• Dead Men do tell Tales
• Not Regular Seafarers
• Naval Connections
  • Introduction
  • Trade Not Rule
  • Equally Superb
  • The Fleet Exists to Achieve Victory
  • Through Troubled Waters
  • The Benefits of Empire
  • Belated Recognition
  • Selected Sources
• Port Life

Equally Superb

Before Charles II bestowed the title of British Royal Navy, "navy" referred to all English shipping and seamen. Ships didn't exist for the sole purpose of war. When threatened by war trading ships were converted to fighting vessels. Early merchant vessels were sometimes armed against privateers and pirates. By the nineteenth-century, however, the arguments of free traders, deriving from Adam Smith, suggested that the merchant marine, and trade in general, would prosper from the autonomy of a merchant marine organized by market principles. So while a strong navy was maintained in defence of trade the two "services" were separated.

Within a decade following the ending of the Navigation Laws in Britain's overseas trade (1850), the state's supervision of the personnel of the merchant marine was autonomous from its supervision of the Royal Navy. In the 1830s and 40s Registrars of Seamen were from a naval background, and they maintained an official link with the Admiralty. But, after 1850, the first official to hold the combined title of "Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen" [RGSS] was from a civilian background. While it is true that the routines and practices of his office originated with the state treating the merchant marine as a source for pressed men for the naval forces in time of war, the RGSS and leading officials at the Mercantile Marine Department of the Board of Trade worked with a passionate commitment to liberal political economy.

At grass roots, some men still migrated between naval and mercantile services, usually as a one-time move. Others, permanently employed in the merchant marine, enrolled in the Royal Naval Reserve [RNR] and gave time to periods of naval training. A pension would be provided them when none was forthcoming from a commercial shipowner. The foreign-going Crew Agreement had a place for recording a man's RNR number. Officers employed by the mail and passenger liner companies were expected to join the RNR. These companies decked them out in quasi-military uniforms.