Sergison, Charles, Naval Administrator, 1654-1732

When he resigned office Sergison, as was common practice at the time, took with him a number of official and semi-official volumes relating to Navy Office business. Many were later dispersed by his descendants and this collection constitutes the residue of Sergison's papers. It consists of Navy Board Minutes, 1673 to 1718 (seventy-six volumes), and copies of Admiralty orders to the Navy Board, 1603 to 1717 (thirteen volumes), mostly after 1674. There are also a large number of miscellaneous documents, including lists of ships in Sea Pay, 1660 to 1685 and 1684 to 1718, lists of officers, 1688 to 1716, Instructions for Ordnance, 1660 to 1688, Instructions for the Navy, 1686 to 1688, an abstract of Navy Board Warrants, 1660 to 1717, an abstract of numbers of dockyard workmen, 1686 to 1718, the Ordinary Estimate, 1692, papers relating to a victualling enquiry, 1710 to 1713, and an account of the Select Committee to Examine and State the Debt of the Navy, 1714. Finally there are copies of Hollond's 'Discourse on the Navy' and 'Survey of the South Coast' by Edmund Dummer, Surveyor of the Navy between 1692 and 1699.

Administrative / biographical background
Sergison began his career as a dockyard clerk in 1671 and in 1675 was appointed an extra clerk to the Comptroller of Victualling Accounts in the Navy Office. In 1677 he was made Chief Clerk to the Clerk of the Acts in which office he remained until 1686. For two years he was secretary of the new commission for conducting current business and continued with the title of Secretary when the Navy Board was re-constituted in 1688. In the following year he was made Assistant Clerk of the Acts and in 1690 became Clerk of the Acts, a post which he held until 1719. Documents from the collection form the basis of Commander R.D. Merriman's 'The Sergison papers' (Navy Records Society, 1950) and of 'Queen Anne's Navy' (Navy Records Society, 1961).

Record Details

Item reference: SER; GB 0064
Catalogue Section: Personal collections
Level: COLLECTION
Measurements: Overall: 646 cm
Date made: 1603-1718
Credit: © Crown copyright. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
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