Royal Navy Conversion Warrant — HMS Alligator, 5 June 1806

Description

A Royal Navy Conversion Warrant, numbered 47, dated 5 June 1806, authorising the conversion of raw spars into a set of finished upper-rigging components for HMS Alligator. The document is one of the standard Navy Board "Small Note" forms of the period, printed in London by Burr & Tonge of Tower Hill for His Majesty's Stationery Office, and completed by hand in manuscript. The printed text directs the storekeeper to "deliver to the several Persons following upon Account of the Wear & Tear Expence of His Majesty's Navy, the several Stores undermention'd for the Services against their Names express'd." Such warrants were the standard administrative instrument by which dockyards drew raw timber from their stores and converted it into the finished spars required to keep a ship in serviceable trim.
The items authorised here form an almost complete refit of Alligator's upper rigging: one mizzen top yard, one mizzen top-gallant yard, one fore top-gallant yard, one main top-gallant mast, one fore top-gallant mast, one mizzen topmast, one mizzen top-gallant mast, and one studding-sail boom — together representing the full set of upper spars on which a ship of her rate carried her lighter canvas. The right-hand column records the source of the raw timber from which these spars were cut: "Spars Norway" (the Baltic trade, the Royal Navy's principal source of softwood masts and yards during the Napoleonic Wars) and "New England" (North American white pine, prized for the largest masts but increasingly scarce after American independence). The warrant is signed at the foot in a hand that appears to read Wm Lemon.
HMS Alligator was a 28-gun Enterprise-class sixth-rate frigate launched in 1787, reduced in 1800 to a 16-gun troopship, and in June 1806 stationed in the Leeward Islands under Captain Hugh Pigot. The document dates from the same week in which Rear-Admiral John Child Purvis — whose papers form the core of the naval material in this archive — hoisted his flag in HMS Chiffonne on 1 June 1806 and sailed for the Mediterranean to take up his command of the Cadiz blockade. The Admiral kept meticulous records of his commands and a substantial body of related Navy Board paperwork; this warrant survives within the family's broader collection of naval administrative documents.