Admiralty

The naval authority of the Crown. It prints such sea hazards as can be verified, and its standing instructions with them: how the great sea creatures are to be avoided, and the Basin fair-weather practice, for in the Basin, which is the inner sea, a calm fine morning is held more dangerous than a storm, and on such a morning ships hold back their departures, sound their bells and keep off any quay the harbour has closed. In its own water it puts down rovers; in season it convoys; and it keeps lists of foreign officers, Admiral Ingrid Skall among them.

The naval administration of the Crown, whose political head is the First Lord and whose senior professional officer the Admiral of the Fleet. At Dover it keeps a charts office, and it issues route circulars. In its sailing directions the Basin fair-weather practice is printed as an instruction, with no word of why it is followed. It keeps, besides, an unpublished standing list of what every sea lane would need were any link in it lost. Each year, too, it reviews the arrangement over the Narrows of Ormano, the strait through which all Basin traffic must pass and whose forts are held on different terms by different powers; it is an arrangement that suits Britannia, though Britannia did not make it.

Named with it

• Lord Admiral Henry · First Lord of the Admiralty
• Admiral Sir George Blackwood · Admiral of the Fleet
• Jonas William Pike · charts office surveyor
• Captain Anne Merrow · author of Admiralty route circular
• Admiral-Captain Ysabel Mere · basin command

Ties

• administers the Navy
• claims the Crown aerial service as a branch
• House Corbin is close to the professional fleet
• office of the Crown
• directs the Navy
• shares priority at Admiralty Basin with the Crown
• its circular is contrasted with the Dover pilots' roll's copy book
• sends sealed bags through the Dover Packet Office

At the table

The First Lord is of the royal household's world, whence the Admiralty has a direct line into court, and naval disputes take on a faintly dynastic colour. Henry answers upward, to court and to ministry; captains, for their part, trust Blackwood to know what a ship and a winter sea will bear. Admiralty men hold that the aerial service remains a branch of the sea service and of Crown transport. The wind mages of the northern raiders taught a lesson, that in those waters naval power is a contest of weather and nerve as much as of timber and gun; and the Admiralty has neither wholly absorbed it nor wholly forgotten it. Families of the middling sort will sometimes school a boy for the Admiralty examination in place of the university.