406 the fact that work on the instructions for the admiralty college commenced immediately after its completion, and since both pieces of legislation were drawn up in the tsar’s personal chancellery, presumably by the same persons.It is likely that the instructions for the college were drawn up in the same manner as was the Naval Regulation. When work on the Naval Regulation was commenced in 1718, Peter specified the following procedure: copy the English, French, Swedish, and Dutch regulations and compare them concerning each matter, beginning with the English (regulations) and extracting the same article from the other regulations . . . namely . . . when the first English article begins with some matter, the articles dealing with the same matter shall be taken from all the other regulations mentioned above and written next to it; thereafter the second English article, and to it the comparable points fromthe other regulations, and continue in that manner. Thus, the English legislation was to serve as the point of departure and each point in the English text was to be matched by the comparable articles in the other foreign naval regulations. Fromthe comparison of the foreign regulations arranged in this manner, the commission was then to choose that which it found suitable for the Russian navy. The commission followed the method prescribed by the tsar, but chose to use the French regulations, rather than the English naval regulations, as its point of departure for comparing all the aspects of foreign naval legislation. Technically speaking, this task was carried out by dividing a folio sheet into five columns, with the French naval regulation copied out article after article in the first column. The other four columns contained the articles drawn from the English, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish naval regulations which corresponded to the respective French articles.^® The first folio sheet from this preliminary step in the preparation of the Russian naval regulations is reproduced in Table 7 in order to illustrate the method described above. Maintaining the organizational outline of the French naval regulations, the commission then excerpted suitable portions from this comparative table and drew up the Russian regulations in this way. Whether any foreign legislative acts, and if so which ones, were used as a basis for drawing up the instructions for the admiralteiskaia kollegiia is a question which can only be answered after a study of the preliminary working papers of the commission charged with that task. There are few direct comments in Russian historiography concerning the sources used ■** S. I. Elagin, ed.. Material}' dlia istorii russkogo flota (St. Petersburg, 1866), 127— 139; ZA (nos. 103—104), 91—92. ZA (no. 45), 57. Concerning the method itself, see Peterson, 349.
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