Local shipwrights and administration sustained Bombay Dockyard

Bombay's dockyard grew out of the East India Company's naval establishment, which began as the East India Marine and became the Bombay Marine when Bombay was made its Indian headquarters. Royal Navy operations in India also used the same yard, giving the base both company and imperial naval functions. Its shore organization copied the departments and offices of seventeenth-century Royal Navy yards, while the workforce drew on experienced shipwrights from Surat who built in Malabar teak. Lovji Nusserwanjee Wadia and later generations of the Wadia family became central to its construction expertise. The marine board, superintendent, commodore, accounts office, master builder, and storekeeper show how administration and skilled labour together made a distant naval-industrial centre durable.