Naval hydrography, charismatic bureaucracy, and the British military state, 1825-1855 / Megan Barford

"This thesis is an investigation into writing and record keeping practices of those in and around the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty in the earlier-nineteenth century. It looks at the Hydrographic Office in the context of early-Victorian adminsitrative growth and the print culture of the Royal Navy. In doing so it draws on media-theoretic approaches to paperwork and archives which insist on treating them as topics for invesitigation, and suggests that these can be used to examine fundemental issues of the establishment and effacement of self, and group, and profession, and public as created through a sophisticated bureaucratic system. Hydrographic surveyors were a group of naval officers who role stressed record keeping in a peculiarly acute way, but this was underwritten by an intensive concern in this period about both record keeping and life writing. In particular this thesis focus on the bureaucratic practices at the Admiralty in London and on survey ships as the operated in regions of particular colonial, commercial or strategic importance to the British. It goes on to examine how the work of hydrography was defined and promoted in a popular magazine, explores a particular survery carried out on the St Lawrence River, and describes the way in which the circulation of instruments was managed within a system that relied on personal relationships between those involved. In finally discussing an episode when the system of correspondence organised by the office was placed under the greatest strain, the thesis explores ideas of institutional memory and absolution. As such, the work is a contribution to literature on paperwork, professionalism, and the early-Victorian state."--Provided by the author.