The Caribbean in the Age of Fighting Sail was considered to be one of the great treasure troves of the world and the West Indian islands were for nearly two hundred years objects of almost continuous European maritime rivalry. Great fleets and thousands of soldiers in the course of the 18th century would battle for control of the West Indian islands. When Rodney arrived in the Lesser Antilles in 1780 fighting between Britain and France for control of the Sugar Islands had been raging for two years. Major naval and military operations in the West Indies during the American War had begun with the capture of the island of St. Lucia by a British expeditionary force from New York. The island of St. Lucia in the Leeward Islands had been seized by the British at the beginning of the conflict with France in order to serve as a base from which to checkmate enemy naval forces based on the adjacent French island of Martinique. St. Lucia was to serve as the main base for the ships of Rodney's squadron during the campaign in the Lesser Antilles which would culminate in the Battle of the Saints.

On 17 March 1780, after a speedy passage from Gibraltar, Rodney ar- rived at Carlisle Bay on the island of Barbados. Several days later, discovering that the Leeward Islands squadron was at St. Lucia, Rodney sailed from Carlisle Bay and arrived on 8 March at the British anchorage in Gros Islet Bay on the west side of St. Lucia. Five days before Rodney's arrival at St. Lucia powerful French reinforcements from Europe, under the command of Lieutenant General Luc-Urban Du Bouexic, Comte de Guichen, had already arrived at Martinique. The next day a French fleet of ‘thirty two sail’ appeared off British-held St. Lucia. The French ships paraded off St. Lucia until the morning of 7 March when they returned to Martinique. Soon after his arrival at St. Lucia Rodney concluded that an opportunity to defeat the French in detail had been missed. The admiral believed that, if information on the location and strength of the British squadron in the Leeward Islands as well as the latest intelligence of the expected movements of the French forces had been awaiting him at Bar- bados, he might have been able to prevent the junction of the French ships at Martinique with those arriving from Europe.

Of paramount concern during the immediate post-war period was the necessity of bringing a greater degree of managerial efficiency to the dockyards [333]. A fundamental weakness was the position of the resident Commissioner. Working as a member of the Navy Board, it was the Commissioner's task to provide a link between the subordinate Board and the dockyard. All correspondence between the Boards in london and the respective officers of the yard passed unsealed through his office [342]. Aware of any Navy Board instructions, it was the Commissioner's task to report upon any shortcomings in the subsequent performance of the principal officers. However, should chastisement appear necessary, this would emanate entirely from the Navy Office [337, 340]. While sir thomas byam martin felt that this was sufficient for effective management [343], the Board of Admiralty disagreed and believed the authority of the Commissioner should be strengthened [341].

A further structural weakness identified by the Board of Admiralty during one of their post-war inspections was the number of post holders who had either overlapping authority or sub-divided duties. Between them, the Master Shipwright and Master Attendant were responsible for all the artisans and labourers employed in the yard. The former had authority over those directly employed on ships building and repairing, while the Master Attendant controlled similar groups employed on vessels moored in the harbour [332]. The storekeeper, clerk of the survey and clerk of the check were responsible for overseeing the delivery of stores. Additionally, the storekeeper was charged with the safekeeping and distribution of these stores; the clerk of the survey kept accounts of the quantities arriving and held in stock; and the clerk of the check examined the storekeeper's accounts [332]. The clerk of the check was also responsible for keeping the pay and muster books. It was his office that inspected the indentures of all new artificers and kept a record of workers employed and discharged [332]. The ropeyard was regarded as a completely separate entity. The clerk of the Ropeyard took responsibility for stores while the Master Rope-maker [337] was responsible for the direction of the workforce [341].

It was not only at principal officer level that there was an apparent excess of managers. The same was true at ‘inferior officer’ level. Here was a diverse group, which included some eligible for a dockyard house with others paid only slightly more than the ordinary yard artisan.

This chapter contains the transcripts of courts martial for the various types of social crime. For the present purpose the term ‘social crime’ can be defined as a transgression against either the conventions or morality of eighteenth-century British society ashore. therefore, included here are trials dealing exclusively with alcohol [51–6], property [57–64], violence [65–73], disturbances of the peace [74–5] and sex [76–80].

Social crimes constituted only about a quarter of the alleged offences tried by naval courts martial. A preliminary survey of the charges listed in 22 of the 118 volumes of transcripts for the period under consideration reveals that 22 per cent of these transgressions were of this nature. Some were combined with other offences. Mariners tried solely for social offences constituted just 15.8 per cent of the total.

By comparison, naval crimes amounted to nearly 78 per cent of all the offences in the sample. Given that social crimes adjudicated by naval courts martial were far fewer, how can a chapter pertaining to these offences that is roughly the same length as that on naval crimes be justified? The answer to this question is straightforward. It is only through the inclusion of multiple examples of trials for social offences that a clear picture emerges of the legal standards used to determine guilt or innocence in such cases. For example, from the transcripts of proceedings for drunkenness it is evident that those found guilty of this offence had to have been too intoxicated to do their duty. similarly, the minutes of enquiries involving indictments for buggery reveal that the criterion for conviction was anal penetration.

Of the social offences mentioned in the sample, alcohol-related crimes were the most common, comprising almost a third of the charges. The second most frequent type of accusation involved transgressions against property (theft, plunder, embezzlement, fraud, and so on), which constituted about 28 per cent. These were followed by offences involving violence (homicide, fighting, striking an officer, self-mutilation), which made up 21 per cent of the total. Sexual offences were next, amounting to a little more than 9 per cent of the aggregate. And disturbances of the peace (rioting, quarrelling) were the least frequent cause for indictment, coming to only about 8 per cent of the allegations in this category. These social offences are dealt with here in the same order.

In the first years of the American War, the armed forces of Great britain were, on the one hand, humiliated and defeated by the American rebels and, on the other, frustrated by the French and Spanish. In this period the British army had failed to suppress the American rebellion. Indeed, after the defeat at Saratoga the war in America became for the British no less than a quag- mire, which endlessly absorbed military resources. The Royal Navy, the strongest navy in the world at the time and a force with a tradition of victory, proved, in the first years of the American War, to be not only powerless to prevent blockade runners from carrying military supplies to the enemy in America, but also equally unable to prevent attacks by American cruisers on British seaborne trade. When the French entered the war in 1778 many among the British had hoped for, and even expected, the conflict to begin with a decisive battle, such as Quiberon bay, that would allow the Royal Navy, in essence, to sweep the French from the seas. However, 1778 was not 1759. The war with france began with an indecisive action off Ushant between the French and British fleets. It was followed in 1779 by an attempt by the French and Spanish to invade the British Isles. During the summer of 1779 the British would see, while the Royal Navy appeared to be stand- ing by idly, the warships of france and Spain parade in the english channel off Plymouth. To many observers, it was only the ineptitude of the French and Spanish that actually prevented an invasion of Britain.

The ideological nature of the American War as well as military defeat at the hands of the Americans and French had a corrosive effect, not only on the British body-politic but also on the officers of the Royal Navy, di- viding the officer corps into two warring camps, which would keep battling each other over the conduct and propriety of the American War for the duration of the conflict. A number of officers of the Royal Navy who opposed the government's American policy refused to serve against the Americans. For instance, Admiral hon. Augustus Keppel, an outspo- ken critic of the government's American policy, openly proclaimed that ‘he was ready to do his duty but not in the line of America’.

A great deal has been written about the actions of seagoing fleets, the individuals who commanded them and the vessels that made up those fleets. In contrast, the organisational infrastructure necessary for the purpose of building and preparing warships for the fleet has often been ignored. It was this failure to recognise an important aspect of naval history that first spurred me into several decades of researching and writing the history of naval dockyards. In britain, which had the first industrial revolution, the royal dockyards could boast a civilian workforce that was considerably larger than that of any other industrial enterprise long before the industrial take-off. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the seven home yards of the Royal navy employed a workforce of nearly 16,000 men and even some women. Even among industrial and social historians this scale of employment has often been ignored. Yet, on account of their size, the dockyards add much to our understanding of developing social processes. For it was within those yards that a system of recruitment, training and supervision of a large-scale workforce was pioneered. At the same time the artisans and labourers of the yards developed their own particular response to the means by which they were managed, attempting to ensure their own interests were protected and acknowledged.

My entry into the field of dockyard research was eased by the seminal work of Michael Oppenheim on Tudor and early Stuart naval administration, of John Ehrman on the navy of the late seventeenth century, and of Daniel Baugh on naval administration during the early eighteenth century. By fully integrating the function and working of the dockyards into their overall research, these three naval historians established the importance of the yards while indicating necessary directions for future research. Publications by the Navy Records Society added depth to my knowledge by issuing two volumes of collected documents edited by Baugh and Merriman. While the former revisited and underpinned his earlier publication, expanding his time frame, Merriman examined naval administration, including the dockyards, during the age of Queen Anne (1702–14). Later but also of importance were the works of Roger Morriss and Jonathan Coad. Both focussed specifically on the royal dockyards, morriss undertaking an in-depth study of the wartime period 1793–1815 while Coad, in two illustrated books, concentrated on the architecture of the yards.

Kgositsile's ‘Towards a Walk in the Sun’ (1971) is a future memory. The poem interweaves and enfolds indigenous knowledges from Southern Africa with new political and aesthetic imperatives of exile in the Black world to produce otherwise possibilities. The ‘otherwise’ ‘bespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped’ (Crawley 2016: 24). Kgositsile harnesses the otherwise from the Tswana literary corpus in his care, which enshrines the cosmologies, languages, mythologies, forms of being and relating, and terms of humanity, which he in turn refashions and transforms to reconfigure the political present in Black America. This chapter focuses on the cosmology of the sun and the native sons to reveal the infinitely generative nature of the Black Arts Movement archive in twenty-first-century African American social movements. In their quest to construct continuities between the past and the future, to walk in the footprints of their predecessors, twenty-first-century Black movements mine the Black arts archive in fashioning a radical imagination that responds to the unfinished project of white supremacy and Black liberation.

It is within this context that the Houston-based arts collective Otabenga Jones & Associates (OJ&A) retrieved ‘Towards a Walk in the Sun’, adapting it to operate within the realm of visual and material culture, as well as the sonic archive. The poem's radical convergence of two world systems – South African and African American literary classics, aesthetics, and oralities — spurred on that art collective's responses, which are generative and offer new reflections on discourses of Afrofuturism. Further, in framing OJ&A's work as part of dreamkeeping, a practice of intergenerational and ancestral dialogue that converges pastpresentfuture, here I theorize dreamkeeping as a musical practice of ‘digging in the crates’. Within this practice, rap's self-referential method and citational practices function as a naming device indexical of Black alternative histories of thought, sounding the antiphonic utterance across space and time.