Hyam Plutzik wrote “The Seventh Avenue Express” in 1934–35. He was then working as a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle while taking a break from his graduate studies at Yale. After a six-year hiatus in Brooklyn and the Connecticut countryside, he finally returned to New Haven in 1940. Plutzik submitted the poem to the competition for the 1941 Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize, but it was rejected in favor of his alternative selection, “Death at The Purple Rim.” (Plutzik had won the Cook Prize in 1933 for “The Three,” making him the only poet to have twice won the prestigious award.)

Its publication here thus marks the first appearance of “The Seventh Avenue Express” in print. Anthony Hecht declined to include it in his 1987 edition of the Collected Poems in deference to Plutzik’s decision not to publish it as part of his first collection, Aspects of Proteus (1949).

It is perhaps not surprising to grasp Plutzik’s reluctance: his other two long poems had attracted greater approval from the poetry establishment. In 1933, Stephen Vincent Benét had been one of the Cook Prize judges, and Arthur Davidson Ficke was particularly impressed with “Purple Rim” in 1941. It is more likely, though, that Plutzik’s reluctance to see “The Seventh Avenue Express” in print is because of its subject matter. Plutzik was at heart a pastoral poet who preferred not to write much about cities with their grittiness and clamor: the setting for “The Three” was a mythological landscape of Olympian gods and goddesses, while “Death at The Purple Rim” was set in the bucolic Connecticut landscape that he called home for nearly half of his life.

Nor is it surprising to see Plutzik choosing to begin his poem with mathematical imagery. At Trinity, Plutzik excelled in that subject and seriously considered mathematics as a profession. The opening lines to “The Seventh Avenue Express” initially describe the subway in somewhat neutral terms, only hinting subtly at what is to come:

But this cool, mathematical imagery quickly becomes stark and dystopic,

The main item here [4] is the first of the five Quarter Books surviving from the reign of Elizabeth, and is reproduced in full because of the unique insight which it provides into the detailed working of the Admiralty and its various agencies at that time. The regular income of £12,000 a year provided by the warrant of 1559 is recorded in its successive tranches under ‘Ordinary: Receipts’. Most of this revenue is absorbed by the wages and other charges itemised in the quarterly sections for the several royal dockyards, as ‘Ordinary: Deptford’ or ‘Ordinary: Portsmouth’. Further charges against the same income are listed under ‘Ordinary: Conduct’ (recruitment of shipwrights, caulkers and other craftsmen), ‘Ordinary: Prests’ (money advanced to Edward Baeshe for the victualling of shipkeepers and workmen in the harbours), and ‘Ordinary: Charges’, which relate to the collection of the money from the Exchequer. Extraordinary income is listed separately. This was obtained under a number of ad hoc warrants from different sources, and was so called not because it was exceptional, but simply because it was not issued under the ordinary warrant. Extraordinary expenditure relates to the actual ‘setting forth’ of the ships to the seas, and apart from that incurred at Portsmouth, is mostly under one or other of the general categories. ‘Extraordinary: Conduct’ relates to the recruitment of seamen, gunners and soldiers to serve in the ships; ‘Extraordinary: Prests’ to money advanced to Baeshe for victualling the ships for active service, and ‘Extraordinary: Charges’ to a variety of miscellaneous costs, most of them relating to communications. The ‘Extraordinary: Sea Charges’ cover the diets and wages of captains, masters and mariners on active service. It should be noted that at this stage Gonson is still passing substantial sums of money to Baeshe, who accounted separately in accordance with the Privy Council order of 1557. This was to change with the introduction of the victualling contract in 1565.

The overall composition is uniform, as the following table shows. The most significant variations are in the entries for Portsmouth, much fuller as the yard became the centre of operations during the Le Havre campaign, and in the sections on conduct money and sea charges, which increase for the same reason.

In this section are gathered a few papers which supplement the formal accounts, and illustrate aspects of the financial administration from different angles. The government needed more immediate information about naval costs, regularly updated, especially when an operation was impending or in progress. For this purpose the Navy Treasurer sent the Privy Council monthly estimates for sea wages, of which two examples from the time of the Le Havre campaign are here printed [16, 17]. The format is deliberately concise – much like the ‘half-sheet of paper’ which was all Churchill wanted to see from his advisers. In order to simplify the projection of wage costs, the complex structure outlined in Humphrey's table [15] was reduced to an average rate of 9s 4d per man per month of 28 days, which is 4d a day, inclusive of ‘dead shares’ and rewards. This did not represent anyone's specific pay, but was what Hawkins calls ‘the medium of all servitors’ [20], based on the numbers of ordinary seamen at 3d per day and officers of various grades at higher rates, each of whom might in reality serve only for some part of the period of account. This shorthand reckoning had long been the practice, and the figure of 9s 4d per man/month had stood since Mary's reign. Such calculation can never have been more than approximate, and like all military budgeting would have assumed maximum complements, with some margin beyond that. Nevertheless our own rudimentary calculation, using the models printed here, suggests that the medium was realistic.

Even these monthly estimates demonstrate the huge discrepancy between the cost of maintaining the Navy and that of actually using it. The annual ordinary budget supposedly provided what would later be called the fleet in being. The highest level of the ordinary during Elizabeth's reign was the £12,000 set in 1559; yet that exact sum could be spent in sending just six ships to sea for four months’ active service. Naval expenses for the Le Havre campaign amounted to about one-seventh of the total identifiable military cost of around £200,000. That outlay could only be met by massive borrowing, including the loans from individuals secured on privy seal warrants and £10,000 from the City of London [4 (p. 243)], from which the Navy received directly £2,008 6s 8d [4 (pp. 242 × 248; 5 (p. 531)].

Captain Edward Fenton is chiefly remembered as commander of a notoriously futile and ill-executed expedition to the South Atlantic in 1582– 83. Fenton himself seems to have been promoted above his competence, and soon lost control. He turned with particular anger and eventually violence against his Lieutenant-General, the younger William Hawkins (Sir John's nephew). It was an episode which Hakluyt thought best forgotten, since he drastically edited his only narrative of it (by Fenton's Vice-Admiral, Luke Ward) for the standard edition of Principall Navigations. When Fenton's own journal of the voyage at last found an editor, it would be given a title which enduringly associates Fenton with troublesome.

Fenton was shunned on his return. But he was an intelligent and cultivated man with friends at court, and he managed to survive his disgrace. Like many another he redeemed himself by war service, and commanded Mary Rose in 1588. Significantly he retained the regard of Sir John Hawkins. They were connected by marriage, since Fenton's wife Thomasine and Katherine, Lady Hawkins, were sisters – the daughters and co-heiresses of the previous Navy Treasurer Benjamin Gonson. So it was quite natural that when Hawkins, busy at the end of Armada year, wanted to delegate his routine work, he asked the Queen to appoint Fenton. He was duly named deputy Treasurer for the year 1 January to 31 December 1589. The account book here printed [37] shows Fenton exercising this charge during that year and the next. The extension of Fenton's deputyship into 1590 is not formally recorded, but Hawkins's absence at sea for much of that year adequately accounts for it. Nevertheless, though Hawkins attempted to resign the Treasurership on at least three occasions between 1590 and 1594, there was no suggestion that Fenton would be the appropriate successor.

This is a personal aide-memoire, not a formal account. It shows sums received from Exchequer, and the expenses which Navy Treasury's could set against that income by way of discharging its liability. Within its limited compass it reflects a considerable range of naval activity in the early years of the Spanish war. The Armada itself is recalled with a payment for bringing the most celebrated trophy of victory into the Thames.

This is the final or returned account for the period covered by the preceding Quarter Book, as presented by Gonson to the Exchequer, and is one in a regular series going back to 1548. It is, however, an exceptional example because it covers the period of the Le Havre operation, and was subject to scrutiny by a commission appointed under the great seal on 5 August 1564 to examine all recent military spending. In addition to the Navy Treasurer's account, the commissioners were required to view those of the late Treasurer of the wars in Normandy, the Surveyor of victuals at Berwick, and the Lieutenant of the Ordnance. Gonson's account incorporates the full text of the commission, and is signed by Lord Treasurer Winchester, Secretary Cecil and the four other commissioners who attended to this part of the investigation. In other respects Gonson's account follows the established format. As is several times explicitly stated, it is based on the Quarter Book, but considerably compresses and often re-assembles its material. It will be seen that the auditors’ markings to 4 are sometimes echoed here by the gathering of various items of expenditure under composite headings. The reorganisation can, however, most readily be demonstrated in the recepta. As more fully explained in the Introduction to Section II, the corresponding entries in the two accounts have been supplied with identifying symbols: #A and #B preface ordinary and extraordinary warrants for 1562; #X and #Y the like for 1563.

While the Quarter Book is a straightforward and comprehensive record of sums received and disbursed, it is the returned account which constitutes the official financial statement of the Treasurer of Marine Causes. In common with most estate and institutional accounts of the period, its purpose is not primarily to show gain or loss, but to clear the accountant of his liabilities. Unpaid credits are therefore counted in with the sums he actually received from the Exchequer and elsewhere to make up the total for which he is responsible. Against this he sets the deficit (‘superplusage’) on his previous account along with his new disbursements, and carries forward the same old unpaid credits. These sums make up his discharge; and since this is higher than his charge, the account ends again in ‘superplusage’. For the Navy this represents, in modern terms, an overdrawn current account.

Kgositsile was born on 18 February 1938 in rural Dithakong, on the outskirts of Mafikeng. The town of Mafikeng as a colonial urban centre under the British protectorate is historically important. In the early nineteenth century, the capital of the Batlhaping sub-branch of the Barolong people was in Dithakong (erstwhile Dithakwaneng). Towards the mid-nineteenth century, the sub-branch of Kgositsile's lineage of the Barolong, the Molema, settled in small, clustered villages on the banks of the Molopo River, producing a flourishing urban area that the Dutch called ‘the Stadt’, or ‘the city’. Towards the end of that century, in 1895 Mafeking was selected as a location for the British colonial administrative offices of the Bechuanaland Protectorate outside the colony of Bechuana (now Botswana). This administration leased land from the Tswana chief immediately adjacent to the village clusters.

As a British protectorate, Mafeking became the ground for territorial fighting between the Dutch and the British during the Anglo-Boer war, with both sides waging a fierce battle for that region between 1899 and 1900 in what is known as ‘the Siege of Mafeking’. As a ‘final frontier’, Mafeking was a prime location, as it was near both the border and the railway between Bulawayo and Kimberly. The latter was a booming mining town at the time since diamonds had been discovered there in the 1860s. The ‘Siege of Mafeking’ also politically conscientized a young Barolong court interpreter and journalist, Solomon Plaatje, who, funded by the Tswana chief Silas Molema, founded the newspaper Koranta ea Becoana (Newspaper for Batswana) and later, Tsala ea Becoana (Friend of Batswana).

Plaatje's work through the newspaper medium addressed the Batswana directly, asking them to maintain a love for the Setswana language, cultures, and identity. He asked them to use Setswana even when the British were teaching them English language and mannerisms; he asked them to love their language, pray in it, study it, and develop it. This sensibility was crucially instilled in him by the womenfolk of his matricentric upbringing, whom Plaatje acknowledges in his various published works.

As its title suggests, the present chapter is devoted to naval crimes. Naval crimes amounted to the lion's share of the offences tried by the courts martial in the volumes in the sample. Of the 1,596 violations of the Articles of War mentioned in these volumes, 1,241, or almost 78 per cent, fall within this category. At the same time, of the 1,149 defendants named in the sample, 533, or slightly more than 43 per cent, were tried exclusively for naval infractions.

It is all well and good to say that 43 per cent of the men tried by courts martial in the volumes in the sample were arraigned exclusively for naval infractions, but what were naval crimes? Naval crimes can be defined as those offences that were illegal only in the context of a maritime fighting force. Thus the transcripts in this chapter deal with transgressions such as desertion and absence without leave [81–94], mutiny [95–8], mutinous expressions and sedition [99–101], disobedience of orders [102–3], contempt, insolence and disrespect [104–5], neglect of duty [106–7], loss of ship and grounding [108–12], unofficerlike conduct [113–14] and brutality [115–16].

Charges of desertion or absence without leave were the most frequent naval crimes mentioned in the sample, amounting to 28 per cent of all offences in this category. Mutiny constituted almost 16 per cent of the allegations, with mutinous expressions accounting for approximately 4 per cent more. This percentage for mutiny is a bit misleading because three-quarters of the indictments for the said offence resulted from just nine incidents. contempt, insolence and disrespect made up 13.6 per cent of the total, disobedience of orders 11 per cent and neglect of duty another 9.4 per cent. Loss of ship or grounding came to approximately 10 per cent of the aggregate, with unofficerlike behaviour being 4.7 per cent of the sum and brutality constituting a little more than 3 per cent.

Trials for breaches of the articles of War such as failure to join battle, collisions between ships and cowardice are not included in this chapter because the few cases to be found between 1793 and 1815 either exceed the limitations established in the introduction or are more appropriate in another chapter.