Catalogue description High Court of Admiralty: Instance Court: Appraisements Files

This series consists of files of documents (or broken files of loose papers) concerning the appraisement of ships and their cargoes carried out by order of the High Court of Admiralty. All files after 1672 have indexes of ships prefixed.

The documents consist of commissions or decrees from the Instance Court to appraise the value of the ship and its goods; the detailed inventory (not including prices); the appraisement, or overall valuation, with prices, based on the inventory; the commission or decree from the Court to sell the ship by public sale to the best bidder; and the articles of sale signed by the purchaser. The inventories are very detailed and when they include cargoes they sometimes include illustrations of merchants' marks.

High Court of Admiralty, Instance Court, 1660-1875