Nor was the bad pay all, or even the worst. Their wretched 20s. or less a month were paid to the men on a system both wasteful to the state and cruel to its servants. At home the payment was made by a commissioner who went round with a staff of clerks, and held an inspection on each ship. Then he held another, named a recall, in the dockyards, to take in the men overlooked, or absent during the first. The process was long, and it led to an absurd outlay on travelling expenses and clerks’ wages. Such as it was this system applied only to the ships at home. It was long before the crews abroad, including the officers, were paid till their return to England. If the men had remained always with the same ship the evil, though severe enough, would not have been so great. But they were shifted about from vessel to vessel, and had often to present “pay tickets” for four or five different ships. In the later seventeenth century, before it became usual to maintain large squadrons abroad for years, the wrong was not so acutely felt. But in the eighteenth it became a monstrous oppression. The discontent it caused, after leading to many minor mutinies, culminated in the great outbreak of 1797. If the sailors had not been unorganised and unrepresented in Parliament, and if it had been impossible to obtain them by force, a remedy must have been found earlier. A bad system has always indirect bad consequences, and one result of this was a sheer waste of public money. Funds voted for a given ship could not be paid till the proper claimants appeared. Meanwhile the money lay in the hands of the treasurer of the navy, who received the interest. If he left office he was still responsible for the unclosed accounts, and the money remained with him. It is even said that far into the eighteenth century the accounts of ships commissioned in the reign of Queen Anne had not been wound up. For the sailors themselves the system worked out in downright robbery. When they could get their pay tickets they were driven to sell them to speculators at enormous discounts. In order to protect them against this their tickets were kept in the hands of the captains—with the result that they might never reach the proper owner. It was a common accusation against bad commanders that they robbed their men in combination with the purser.