The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM)

ADM is the letter code under which The National Archives at Kew holds the records of the Admiralty, the Navy Board and the bodies attached to them. ADM is a family of separate record series, each with its own class number: ADM 1, ADM 36, ADM 51, ADM 52 and many more. The Board of Admiralty directed the Navy; ADM is what the Board and its ships wrote down, now catalogued as classes at Kew. The golden-age material, roughly 1690 to 1725, sits in the earliest of them.¹

How the record was made

None of it was written as history. Captains and masters kept logs because the post required it; pursers and captains compiled muster books to account for men and provisions; the Admiralty Secretary's office filed a continuous traffic of letters. The paper accumulated in Admiralty and Navy Board offices, passed to the Public Record Office, and is held now by its successor. Authorship belongs to hundreds of named officers and clerks, and to no single compiler.

The classes that carry the period

Captains' logs are ADM 51, covering 1669 to 1852. Masters' logs are ADM 52, covering 1672 to 1840, with a later masters' series, ADM 54, for 1808 onward. Ships' musters, recording the men borne on each vessel, begin with ADM 36, the first musters series, whose covering dates are not yet settled here. Logs typically record position, course, weather, notable incidents and punishments. Musters record the men aboard and are a route to an individual seaman by name.²

The general ships' log series, ADM 53, looks like the obvious place to begin. It starts in 1799. The lieutenants' logs for this period sit at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Miscellaneous early logs for 1648 to 1706 sit at ADM 7/777 to 780.

Orders and reports

The Board's own voice is in three classes. ADM 2 carries its formal out-letters, the orders sent to sea officers, from 1660. ADM 1 gathers the in-letters: reports of proceedings and correspondence from flag officers and from the commanding officers of His Majesty's ships, from about 1698. ADM 3 holds the Board's minutes from 1689.³

A report of proceedings in ADM 1 was in most cases written by a participant within hours or days, before any pamphleteer could shape the story. It is also an officer's account rendered to his superiors, and may present an action to advantage.

What it holds for the pirates

That the Cape Lopez and Ocracoke actions are documented within ADM itself is likely rather than established, and the surviving logs of HMS Swallow's Guinea cruise of 1721 to 1722 are the captains' log at ADM 51/954 and the masters' log at ADM 52/296, neither of them digitised.⁶

Around those two actions the classes supply the connective tissue: the stationing of guardships in the Caribbean, on the North American coast and off West Africa, and the careers of the officers and seamen sent against piracy, through logs and musters.

Using the classes

The arrangement is by ship and by administrative function, never by subject. Nothing in ADM is retrievable by the word "pirate". A researcher has to know which vessel to look for, and roughly where she was; the research guides and the work of earlier scholars in identifying the relevant ships are what make these classes usable here.⁴

Coverage appears uneven besides, logs and musters surviving by ship and by year with gaps; a missing volume is not evidence that nothing happened.

Access is largely on site. The National Archives states plainly that none of the principal operational records of the Royal Navy for this period are online, so the logs, musters and correspondence of this window must be read at Kew or through microform and partner reproductions. Discovery, the online catalogue, gives piece-level references but generally not images.⁵

How the Archive uses it

ADM works here as a check on the printed record. Where the General History and the trial pamphlets supply story and character, the logs and reports supply dates, positions, manning and the Navy's own version of its actions.

What this source cannot yet give the Archive is the reading itself: HMS Swallow's logs for the Guinea cruise of 1721 to 1722 are catalogued at ADM 51/954 and ADM 52/296 but neither is digitised or has been read here, the covering dates of the ADM 36 musters have not been confirmed against Discovery, and how far the Ocracoke and Cape Lopez actions are documented in ADM rather than in the Colonial Office records remains untested.