There are two overarching themes in this book. The first concerns order and how it was created in ships of the Royal Navy at the end of the long eighteenth century. The second theme explores how people shape their lives by engaging in a range of behaviour, at times outside the lines drawn by authority. This will be a different view of the Royal Navy than those offered by other historians who most often start with and return to the leader, the captain or admiral, the great or lesser man, as the driver of all shipboard activity, the determiner of mission or battle outcome. The shipboard world is cleaved into three parts in this study. The first concerns the range of ways in which order was established on a ship. Order refers to the state in which people adhere to the structure and rules created by authority which enables authority to accomplish the goals it sets. Order was established in a variety of ways and from different points within the organizational structure of the Royal Navy. It is established in a top-down process. Ordering systems often view acts which contradict established customs, regulations or laws as reflective of personal idiosyncrasy, an inborn or social class proclivity to err or stray from the good. The second element investigated is the ways in which people serving within the navy undermined that order. The resulting ‘disorder’ was most often viewed and responded to by the navy through the legal lens of the Articles of War, with the aforementioned frame of mind. But to the perpetrators this behaviour could be perceived as any number of things, including resistance, retaliation, disobedience, accessing a right, exercising choice, or simple filching for self-gain, among others. The term ‘disorder’ is employed throughout the book to indicate this range of possibilities. It is offered to push against the tendency to see the ‘disordering’ behaviour as crime, which leads to an explanation of failure within the perpetrator rather than seeing it as behaviour engaged in to shape aspects of the environment, to improve or change one's circumstances. This latter approach to ‘disorder’ portrays an additional source for determining activity aboard a ship beyond the officers, that is, the seamen and marine privates. It also allows for the perspective that officers themselves pressed against order to shape their own and their crews’ experience.