That the Boston schooner at the center of this history happened to serve in the Royal Navy is key to what this history is about, but I did not set out to write a naval history book. I do not consider myself a naval historian. In general, I am interested in the human use of water and watercraft for contact and commerce, and in situating ordinary technologies in their particular social and cultural environments – especially technologies displaying strong continuities, as a counterpoint to the general apprehension of technological history in our innovation-obsessed culture. To both ends, I work on the technology of ordinary merchant vessels in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Atlantic. For three primary reasons, however, it is impossible to separate mercantile from naval affairs in that world. First, the technology overlaps far too much. Second, the merchant fleet and the Navy shared the same labor pool, and it was common for sailors – and thus their skills and experience – to move between merchant and naval service. Finally, the records needed to study vessel technology are far more complete for naval vessels than for merchant vessels, given the Navy's penchant for documentation and record-keeping – typical of centralized state bureaucracies. The technological overlap has limitations, given that merchant and naval vessels were built to accomplish different purposes, but it was not uncommon for the Navy to buy and use vessels originally built for merchant service, usually for auxiliary purposes such as troop transport or, in the case of this book's subject, Customs enforcement. When they did so in the eighteenth century, they typically documented the vessel. They made an accurate physical survey of her in a naval dockyard, from which they drew up a line drawing and listed her exact dimensions. They made a complete inventory of her equipment and stores, and they made a valuation of her. Many such documents survive, as do the logbooks and muster books (lists of crew members and information about them) required by the Navy to be kept by every commander. Thanks to that fact, we are in possession of a rich archival trove of information on some ordinary workaday vessels whose counterparts in the merchant service left no such records. As I discovered while working on my first book, such is the case for the small New England-built schooner Sultana.