Samuel Pepys, the famous seventeenth-century diarist, was also the Secretary of the Royal Navy during the reign of Charles 11. A great deal of his time was taken up with the financial control of naval ship cgonstruction in the government dockyards. Example 7.5 in Section 7.3 from US experience would not have surprised him. His own rather pessimistic conclusion from his long experience still seems to hold: ‘The King cannot have things done as cheap as other men’.
