oners of Accounts, our first letter to them, and so home to
supper, where Betty Turner was (whose brother Frank did set out toward
the East Indies this day, his father and mother gone down with him to
Gravesend), and there was her little brother Moses, whom I examined, and
he is a pretty good scholar for a child, and so after supper to talk and
laugh, and to bed.

28th. Up, and to the office, and there with W. Griffin talking about
getting the place to build a coach-house, or to hire one, which I now do
resolve to have, and do now declare it; for it is plainly for my benefit
for saving money. By and by the office sat, and there we concluded on
our letter to the Commissioners of Accounts and to the several officers
of ours about the work they are to do to answer their late great
demands. At noon home to dinner, and after dinner set my wife and girl
down at the Exchange, and I to White Hall; and, by and by, the Duke of
York comes, and we had a little meeting, Anglesey, W. Pen, and I there,
and none else: and, among other things, did discourse of the want of
discipline in the fleete, which the Duke' of York confessed, and yet
said that he, while he was there, did keep it in a good measure, but
that it was now lost when he was absent; but he will endeavour to have
it again. That he did tell the Prince and Duke of Albemarle they would
lose all order by making such and such men commanders, which they would,
because they were stout men: he told them that it was a reproach to the
nation, as if there were no sober men among us, that were stout, to be
had. That they did put out some men for cowards that the Duke of York
had put in, but little before, for stout men; and would now, were he to
go to sea again, entertain them in his own division, to choose: and
did put in an idle fellow, Greene, who was hardly thought fit for
a boatswain by him: they did put him from being a lieutenant to a
captain's place of a second-rate ship; as idle a drunken fellow, he
said, as any was in the fleete. That he will now desire the King to let
him be what he is, that is, Admirall; and he will put in none but those
that he hath great reason to think well of; and particularly says, that;
though he likes Colonell Legg well, yet his son that was, he knows not
how, made a captain after he had been but one voyage at sea, he should
go to sea another apprenticeship, before ever he gives him a command. We
did tell him of the many defects and disorders among t