The most important work of a Naval Office is the directing of the movements of the fleet, or in other words, the determining of the cruises of the armed vessels. This power the Marine Committee jealously guarded, and was loathe to yield any part of it. The Committee was forced at times, however, to give to the Boston Board a considerable discretion. In July, 1777, it ordered the Board to send out the cruisers as fast as they could be got ready, “directing the Commanders to such Latitudes as you shall think there will be the greatest chance of success in intercepting the enemy’s Transports and Merchant Ships”; and in November, 1778, to send the vessels out, “either collectively, or singly, as you shall judge proper, using your discretion as to the time for which their Cruises shall continue, and your best judgment in directing the commanders to such places and on such stations as you shall think will be for the general benefit of the United States, and to annoy and distress the Enemy.”[140] Such general orders were always subject to the particular plans and directions of the Committee, which were by no means few. The Committee itself determined the service of all vessels that refitted at Philadelphia. As a consequence the duties of the Navy Board of the Middle Department had to do chiefly with the minor details of administration. Turning now from the work of the Navy Boards to that of the Marine Committee, one finds the significant fact to be the two-fold relation that the Committee bore to the Continental Congress. By reason of the union in Congress of both legislative and executive functions, the Committee was at one and the same time an administrative organ of Congress charged with executing the business of its Naval Department, and its legislative committee on naval affairs. Naturally, there were at points no lines of demarkation between these two functions; and it is therefore not always easy, or even possible, to determine in which capacity the Committee is acting. The Committee’s administrative duties, _par excellence_, were the enforcing and the carrying out by means of its agents of the various resolutions of Congress upon naval affairs. Already much light has been thrown upon this phase of the Committee’s work in the treatment of the Navy Boards and the naval agents.