By the late eighteenth century the Royal Navy's reach was global. However, it was impracticable for the navy to maintain a victualling yard in every part of the world where ships operated, and too expensive to justify doing so at ports in the British Isles where ships touched more or less occasionally. The solution was to turn victualling over to a contractor, who undertook to provide the full range of sea provisions at a given place. Such contracts therefore represented a crucial way of augmenting the navy's own facilities and extending its operational range. As a very rough index of their importance in victualling the fleets, the value of provisions supplied directly to ships by contractors in 1804 totalled £548,071, around 18 per cent of the total spent on provisions in that year.

The uses of sea provisions contracts

Engaging a contractor to provide all provisions was a longstanding means of supplying the navy. The first contractor for victualling the fleet was appointed in 1565, and until victualling was brought under the control of the Navy Commission in 1649 it was all done on contract. This resumed after the Restoration and continued until the establishment of the Victualling Board in 1683. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, contracting had been in part supplanted by direct supply from the Victualling Board's own expanding facilities. However, the Board's own capacity to assemble, process and deliver provisions always lagged behind operational requirements, and in any case there were many places that were out of feasible reach of the victualling bases, especially as the geographical scope of sustained naval operations widened.

In effect there were four ways of procuring provisions away from the main victualling yards. First, the Victualling Board could simply establish another base, sending out an Agent Victualler and shipping provisions to him as it judged necessary. This was done for the Leeward Islands in 1794, George Desborough being appointed Agent Victualler and ordered to take passage out to Antigua in a victualler about to leave for the island. Second, a peripatetic Agent Victualler could be attached to a particular squadron, either buying in provisions or liaising with yards to provide them or, in some instances, both.