Elizabethan Sea-Dogs Part 8

Foiled again, Drake dashed for the mainland, seized La Hacha, burnt it, ravaged the surrounding country, and got away with a successful haul of treasure; then he seized Santa Marta and Nombre de Dios, both of which were found nearly empty. The whole of New Spain was taking the alarm-The Dragon's back again! Meanwhile a fleet of more than twice Drake's strength was coming out from Spain to attack him in the rear. Nor was this all, for Baskerville and his soldiers, who had landed at Nombre de Dios and started overland, were in full retreat along the road from Panama, having found an impregnable Spanish position on the way. It was a sad beginning for 1596, the centennial year of England's first connection with America.

'Since our return from Panama he never carried mirth nor joy in his face,' wrote one of Baskerville's officers who was constantly near Drake. A council of war was called and Drake, making the best of it, asked which they would have, Truxillo, the port of Honduras, or the 'golden towns' round about Lake Nicaragua. 'Both,' answered Baskerville, 'one after the other.' So the course was laid for San Juan on the Nicaragua coast. A head wind forced Drake to anchor under the island of Veragua, a hundred and twenty-five miles west of Nombre de Dios Bay and right in the deadliest part of that fever-stricken coast. The men began to sicken and die off. Drake complained at table that the place had changed for the worse. His earlier memories of New Spain were of a land like a 'pleasant and delicious arbour' very different from the 'vast and desert wilderness' he felt all round him now. The wind held foul. More and more men lay dead or dying. At last Drake himself, the man of iron const.i.tution and steel nerves, fell ill and had to keep his cabin. Then reports were handed in to say the stores were running low and that there would soon be too few hands to man the ships. On this he gave the order to weigh and 'take the wind as G.o.d had sent it.'

So they stood out from that pestilential Mosquito Gulf and came to anchor in the fine harbor of Puerto Bello, which the Spaniards had chosen to replace the one at Nombre de Dios, twenty miles east. Here, in the night of the 27th of January, Drake suddenly sprang out of his berth, dressed himself, and raved of battles, fleets, Armadas, Plymouth Hoe, and plots against his own command. The frenzy pa.s.sed away. He fell exhausted, and was lifted back to bed again. Then 'like a Christian, he yielded up his spirit quietly.'

His funeral rites befitted his renown. The great new Spanish fort of Puerto Bello was given to the flames, as were nearly all the Spanish prizes, and even two of his own English ships; for there were now no sailors left to man them. Thus, amid the thunder of the guns whose voice he knew so well, and surrounded by consuming pyres afloat and on the sh.o.r.e, his body was committed to the deep, while m.u.f.fled drums rolled out their last salute and trumpets wailed his requiem.

APPENDIX

NOTE ON TUDOR SHIPPING

In the sixteenth century there was no hard-and-fast distinction between naval and all other craft. The sovereign had his own fighting vessels; and in the course of the seventeenth century these gradually evolved into a Royal Navy maintained entirely by the country as a whole and devoted solely to the national defence. But in earlier days this modern system was difficult everywhere and impossible in England. The English monarch, for all his power, had no means of keeping up a great army and navy without the help of Parliament and the general consent of the people. The Crown had great estates and revenues; but nothing like enough to make war on a national scale. Consequently king and people went into partnership, sometimes in peace as well as war. When fighting stopped, and no danger seemed to threaten, the king would use his men-of-war in trade himself, or even hire them out to merchants. The merchants, for their part, furnished vessels to the king in time of war. Except as supply ships, however, these auxiliaries were never a great success. The privateers built expressly for fighting were the only ships that could approach the men-of-war.

Yet, strangely enough, King Henry's first modern men-of-war grew out of a merchant-ship model, and a foreign one at that. Throughout ancient and medieval times the 'long ship' was the man-of-war while the 'round ship' was the merchantman. But the long ship was always some sort of galley, which, as we have seen repeatedly, depended on its oars and used sails only occasionally, and then not in action, while the round ship was built to carry cargo and to go under sail. The Italian naval architects, then the most scientific in the world, were trying to evolve two types of vessel: one that could act as light cavalry on the wings of a galley fleet, the other that could carry big cargoes safely through the pirate-haunted seas. In both types sail power and fighting power were essential. Finally a compromise resulted and the gallea.s.se appeared. The gallea.s.se was a hybrid between the galley and the sailing vessel, between the 'long ship' that was several times as long as it was broad and the 'round ship' that was only two or three times as long as its beam. Then, as the oceanic routes gained on those of the inland seas, and as oceanic sea power gained in the same proportion, the galleon appeared. The galleon had no oars at all, as the hybrid gallea.s.ses had, and it gained more in sail power than it lost by dropping oars. It was, in fact, the direct progenitor of the old three-decker which some people still alive can well remember.

At the time the Cabots and Columbus were discovering America the Venetians had evolved the merchant-gallea.s.se for their trade with London: they called it, indeed, the galleazza di Londra. Then, by the time Henry VIII was building his new modern navy, the real galleon had been evolved (out of the Italian new war- and older merchant-gallea.s.ses) by England, France, and Scotland; but by England best of all. In original ideas of naval architecture England was generally behind, as she continued to be till well within living memory. Nelson's captains competed eagerly for the command of French prizes, which were better built and from superior designs. The American frigates of 1812 were incomparably better than the corresponding cla.s.ses in the British service were; and so on in many other instances. But, in spite of being rather slow, conservative, and rule-of-thumb, the English were already beginning to develop a national sea-sense far beyond that of any other people. They could not, indeed, do otherwise and live. Henry's policy, England's position, the dawn of oceanic strategy, and the discovery of America, all combined to make her navy by far the most important single factor in England's problems with the world at large. As with the British Empire now, so with England then: the choice lay between her being either first or nowhere.

Henry's reasoning and his people's instinct having led to the same resolve, everyone with any sea-sense, especially shipwrights like Fletcher of Rye, began working towards the best types then obtainable. There were mistakes in plenty. The theory of naval architecture in England was never both sound and strong enough to get its own way against all opposition. But with the issue of life and death always dependent on sea power, and with so many men of every cla.s.s following the sea, there was at all events the biggest rough-and-tumble school of practical seamanship that any leading country ever had. The two essential steps were quickly taken: first, from oared galleys with very little sail power to the hybrid gallea.s.se with much more sail and much less in the way of oars; secondly, from this to the purely sailing galleon.

With the galleon we enter the age of sailing tactics which decided the fate of the oversea world. This momentous age began with Drake and the English galleon. It ended with Nelson and the first-rate, three-decker, ship-of-the-line. But it was one throughout; for its beginning differed from its end no more than a father differs from his son.

One famous Tudor vessel deserves some special notice, not because of her excellence but because of her defects. The Henry Grace a Dieu, or Great Harry as she was generally called, launched in 1514, was Henry's own flagship on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. She had a gala suit of sails and pennants, all made of damasked cloth of gold. Her quarters, sides, and tops were emblazoned with heraldic targets. Court artists painted her to show His Majesty on board wearing cloth of gold, edged with the royal ermine; as well as bright crimson jacket, sleeves, and breeches, with a long white feather in his cap. Doubtless, too, His Majesty of France paid her all the proper compliments; while every man who was then what reporters are to-day talked her up to the top of his bent. No single vessel ever had greater publicity till the famous first Dreadnought of our own day appeared in the British navy nearly four hundred years later.

But the much advertised Great Harry was not a mighty prototype of a world-wide-copied cla.s.s of battleships like the modern Dreadnought. With her lavish decorations, her towering superstructures fore and aft, and her general aping of a floating castle, she was the wonder of all the landsmen in her own age, as she has been the delight of picturesque historians ever since. But she marked no advance in naval architecture, rather the reverse. She was the last great English ship of medieval times. Twenty-five years after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry was commanding another English fleet, the first of modern times, and therefore one in which the out-of-date Great Harry had no proper place at all. She was absurdly top-hampered and over-gunned. And, for all her thousand tons, she must have bucketed about in the chops of the Channel with the same sort of hobby-horse, see-sawing pitch that bothered Captain Concas in 1893 when sailing an exact reproduction of Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, across the North Atlantic to the great World's Fair at Chicago.

In her own day the galleon was the 'great ship,' 'capital ship,' 'ship-of-the-line-of-battle,' or 'battleship' on which the main fight turned. But just as our modern fleets require three princ.i.p.al kinds of vessels-battleships, cruisers, and 'mosquito' craft-so did the fleets of Henry and Elizabeth. The galleon did the same work as the old three-decker of Nelson's time or the battleship of to-day. The 'pinnace' (quite different from more modern pinnaces) was the frigate or the cruiser. And, in Henry VIII's fleet of 1545, the 'row-barge' was the princ.i.p.al 'mosquito' craft, like the modern torpedo-boat, destroyer, or even submarine. Of course the correspondence is far from being complete in any cla.s.s.

The English galleon gradually developed more sail and gun power as well as handiness in action. Broadside fire began. When used against the Armada, it had grown very powerful indeed. At that time the best guns, some of which are still in existence, were nearly as good as those at Trafalgar or aboard the smart American frigates that did so well in '1812.' When galleon broadsides were fired from more than a single deck, the lower ones took enemy craft between wind and water very nicely. In the English navy the portholes had been cut so as to let the guns be pointed with considerable freedom, up or down, right or left. The huge top-hampering 'castles' and other soldier-engineering works on deck were modified or got rid of, while more canvas was used and to much better purpose.

The pinnace showed the same sort of improvement during the same period-from Drake's birth under Henry VIII in 1545 to the zenith of his career as a sea-dog in 1588. This progenitor of the frigate and the cruiser was itself descended from the long-boat of the Nors.e.m.e.n and still used oars as occasion served. But the sea-dogs made it primarily a sailing vessel of anything up to a hundred tons and generally averaging over fifty. A smart pinnace, with its long, low, clean-run hull, if well handled under its Elizabethan fighting canvas of foresail and main topsail, could play round a Spanish gallea.s.se or absurdly castled galleon like a lancer on a well-trained charger round a musketeer astraddle on a cart horse.[4] Henry's pinnaces still had lateen sails copied from Italian models. Elizabeth's had square sails prophetic of the frigate's. Henry's had one or a very few small guns. Elizabeth's had as many as sixteen, some of medium size, in a hundred-tonner.

[4: Fuller in his Worthies (1662) writes: 'Many were the wit-combats betwixt him [Shakespeare] and Ben Jonson, which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war: Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, like the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.']

The 'mosquito' fleet of Henry's time was represented by 'row-barges' of his own invention. Now that the pinnace was growing in size and sail power, while shedding half its oars, some new small rowing craft was wanted, during that period of groping transition, to act as a tender or to do 'mosquito' work in action. The mere fact that Henry VIII placed no dependence on oars except for this smallest type shows how far he had got on the road towards the broadside-sailing-ship fleet. On the 16th of July, 1541, the Spanish Naval Attache (as we should call him now) reported to Charles V that Henry had begun 'to have new oared vessels built after his own design.' Four years later these same 'row-barges'-long, light, and very handy-hung round the sterns of the retreating Italian galleys in the French fleet to very good purpose, plying them with bow-chasers and the two broadside guns, till Strozzi, the Italian galley-admiral, turned back on them in fury, only to see them slip away in perfect order and with complete immunity.

By the time of the Armada the mosquito fleet had outgrown these little rowing craft and had become more oceanic. But names, types, and the evolution of one type from another, with the application of the same name to changed and changing types, all tend to confusion unless the subject is followed in such detail as is impossible here.

The fleets of Henry VIII and of Elizabeth did far more to improve both the theory and practice of naval gunnery than all the fleets in the world did from the death of Drake to the adoption of rifled ordnance within the memory of living men. Henry's textbook of artillery, republished in 1588, the year of the Armada, contains very practical diagrams for finding the range at sea by means of the gunner's half circle-yet we now think range-finding a very modern thing indeed. There are also full directions for making common and even something like shrapnel sh.e.l.ls, 'star sh.e.l.ls' to light up the enemy at night, armor-piercing arrows shot out of muskets, 'wild-fire' grenades, and many other ultra-modern devices.

Henry established Woolwich Dockyard, second to none both then and now, as well as Trinity House, which presently began to undertake the duties it still discharges by supervising all aids to navigation round the British Isles. The use of quadrants, telescopes, and maps on Mercator's projection all began in the reign of Elizabeth, as did many other inventions, adaptations, handy wrinkles, and vital changes in strategy and tactics. Taken together, these improvements may well make us of the twentieth century wonder whether we are so very much superior to the comrades of Henry, Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, and Drake.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A complete bibliography concerned with the first century of Anglo-American affairs (1496-1596) would more than fill the present volume. But really informatory books about the sea-dogs proper are very few indeed, while good books of any kind are none too common.

Taking this first century as a whole, the general reader cannot do better than look up the third volume of Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America (1884) and the first volume of Avery's History of the United States and its People (1904). Both give elaborate references to doc.u.ments and books, but neither professes to be at all expert in naval or nautical matters, and a good deal has been written since.

THE CABOTS. Cabot literature is full of conjecture and controversy. G.P. Winship's Cabot Bibliography (1900) is a good guide to all but recent works. Nicholls' Remarkable Life of Sebastian Cabot (1869) shows more zeal than discretion. Harrisse's John Cabot and his son Sebastian (1896) arranges the doc.u.ments in scholarly order but draws conclusions betraying a wonderful ignorance of the coast. On the whole, Dr. S.E. Dawson's very careful monographs in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (1894, 1896, 1897) are the happiest blend of scholarship and local knowledge. Neither the Cabots nor their crews appear to have written a word about their adventures and discoveries. Consequently the shifting threads of hearsay evidence soon became inextricably tangled. Biggar's Precursors of Cartier is an able and accurate work.

ELIZABETH. Turning to the patriot queen who had to steer England through so many storms and tortuous channels, we could find no better short guide to her political career than Beesley's volume about her in 'Twelve English Statesmen.' But the best all-round biography is Queen Elizabeth by Mandell Creighton, who also wrote an excellent epitome, called The Age of Elizabeth, for the 'Epochs of Modern History.' Shakespeare's England, published in 1916 by the Oxford University Press, is quite encyclopaedic in its range.

LIFE AFLOAT. The general evolution of wooden sailing craft may be traced out in Part I of Sir George Holmes's convenient little treatise on Ancient and Modern Ships. There is no nautical dictionary devoted to Elizabethan times. But a good deal can be picked up from the two handy modern glossaries of Dana and Admiral Smyth, the first being an American author, the second a British one. Smyth's Sailor's Word Book has no alternative t.i.tle. But Dana's Seaman's Friend is known in England under the name of The Seaman's Manual. Technicalities change so much more slowly afloat than ash.o.r.e that even the ultra-modern editions of Paasch's magnificent polyglot dictionary, From Keel to Truck, still contain many nautical terms which will help the reader out of some of his difficulties.

The life of the sea-dogs, gentlemen-adventurers, and merchant-adventurers should be studied in Hakluyt's collection of Princ.i.p.al Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques, and Discoveries; though many of his original authors were landsmen while a few were civilians as well. This Elizabethan Odyssey, the great prose epic of the English race, was first published in a single solemn folio the year after the Armada-1589. In the nineteenth century the Hakluyt Society reprinted and edited these Navigations and many similar works, though not without employing some editors who had no knowledge of the Navy or the sea. In 1893 E.J. Payne brought out a much handier edition of the Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America which gives the very parts of Hakluyt we want for our present purpose, and gives them with a running accompaniment of pithy introductions and apposite footnotes. Nearly all historians are both landsmen and civilians whose sins of omission and commission are generally at their worst in naval and nautical affairs. But James Anthony Froude, whatever his other faults may be, did know something of life afloat, and his English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, despite its ultra-Protestant tone, is well worth reading.

HAWKINS. The Hawkins Voyages, published by the Hakluyt Society, give the best collection of original accounts. They deal with three generations of this famous family and are prefaced by a good introduction. A Sea-Dog of Devon, by R.A.J. Walling (1907) is the best recent biography of Sir John Hawkins.

DRAKE. Politics, policy, trade, and colonization were all dependent on sea power; and just as the English Navy was by far the most important factor in solving the momentous New-World problems of that awakening age, so Drake was by far the most important factor in the English Navy. The Worlde Encompa.s.sed by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Francis Drake his Voyage, 1595, are two of the volumes edited by the Hakluyt Society. But these contemporary accounts of his famous fights and voyages do not bring out the supreme significance of his influence as an admiral, more especially in connection with the Spanish Armada. It must always be a matter of keen, though unavailing, regret that Admiral Mahan, the great American expositor of sea power, began with the seventeenth, not the sixteenth, century. But what Mahan left undone was afterwards done to admiration by Julian Corbett, Lecturer in History to the (British) Naval War College, whose Drake and the Tudor Navy (1912) is absolutely indispensable to any one who wishes to understand how England won her footing in America despite all that Spain could do to stop her. Corbett's Drake (1890) in the 'English Men of Action' series is an excellent epitome. But the larger book is very much the better. Many illuminative doc.u.ments on The Defeat of the Spanish Armada were edited in 1894 by Corbett's predecessor, Sir John Laughton. The only other work that need be consulted is the first volume of The Royal Navy: a History, edited by Sir William Laird Clowes (1897). This is not so good an authority as Corbett; but it contains many details which help to round the story out, besides a wealth of ill.u.s.tration.

RALEIGH. Gilbert, Cavendish, Raleigh, and the other gentlemen-adventurers, were soldiers, not sailors; and if they had gone afloat two centuries later they would have fought at the head of marines, not of blue-jackets; so their lives belong to a different kind of biography from that concerned with Hawkins, Frobisher. and Drake. Edwards's Life of Sir Walter Raleigh (1868) contains all the most interesting letters and is a competent work of its own kind. Oldys' edition of Raleigh's Works still holds the field though its eight volumes were published so long ago as 1829. Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana is the favorite for reprinting. The Hakluyt Society has produced an elaborate edition (1847) while a very cheap and handy one has been published in Ca.s.sell's National Library. W.G. Gosling's Life of Sir Humphry Gilbert (1911) is the best recent work of its kind.

The likeliest of all the Hakluyt Society's volumes, so far as its t.i.tle is concerned, is one which has hardly any direct bearing on the subject of our book. Yet the reader who is disappointed by the text of Divers Voyages to America because it is not devoted to Elizabethan sea-dogs will be richly rewarded by the notes on pages 116-141. These quaint bits of information and advice were intended for quite another purpose, But their transcriber's faith in their wider applicability is fully justified. Here is the exact original heading under which they first appeared: Notes in Writing besides More Privie by Mouth that were given by a Gentleman, Anno 1580, to M. Arthure Pette and to M. Charles Jackman, sent by the Marchants of the Muscovie Companie for the discouerie of the northeast strayte, not all together vnfit for some other enterprises of discouerie hereafter to bee taken in hande.

See also in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Ed. the articles on Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Drake, Raleigh, etc.