An honest man points out "fraudulent practices"
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Sir Denis Gauden obviously had quite a lot to say in this very closely-written very long letter.
Who was Sir Denis Gauden you ask? An honest man, it seems, and victualler to the Navy in the late 17th century. A friend of Samuel Pepys, and well-known to Pepys through his work. In fact, Pepys spent the last days of his life in Gauden's Clapham house, where he died. But Gauden had fallen on hard times by then and had sold his house to one of Pepys's clerks.
In 1673, during the third Anglo-Dutch War, and only six years after the Dutch had sailed up the Medway and destroyed much of the English navy, he wrote to the Lord High Treasurer, pointing out irregularities in victualling the Navy citing "fraudulent practices have brought matters in the victualling to that passe as they are now".