SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SEAFARING
Few people realise that the trade routes of the world are the lanes
along which history is constrained to flow. It is a fascinating study,
but we have little enough room to develop the subject here. The success
of Prince Henry the Navigator’s influence, the achievement of Vasco
da Gama, completely revolutionised the trade routes of the world,
transformed the European mercantile system, made the gate of commerce
not Venice but Lisbon, transferred the centre of progress from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic; and the discovery of America accentuated
this new condition still further.
What followed? First, the Dutch, having built up a shipping industry,
so to speak, on the backbone of the herring, were able to get the
trade of distributing these goods from Lisbon to the north European
countries. This, in turn, caused competition on the part of the
English, who were not intending to be left out of the new fortune.
Secondly, the Dutch and English began themselves to voyage to the East.
And thirdly, the discovery of the rich possibilities of the East and
West not merely made the Mediterranean commercially of little future
account, but gave to the nations of the European Atlantic coasts
an impetus to progress and a reason for strife which had never yet
occurred. The history of the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries is
confined to the struggle for the dominion of the seas—that is, maritime
commercial supremacy, caused by the flow of trade taking a new route.
The wars with the Dutch, the French and the Spanish were at heart the
struggle for possession of overseas commerce, and the recent war with
Germany was animated by the same cause.
It is impossible to emphasise this trade route influence too much,
for without a clear appreciation of its place in history the sequence
of events becomes meaningless, and the rise and development of the
Mercantile Marine seem arbitrary. Prince Henry the Navigator started
a wonderful sea contest, and it has never stopped during the ensuing
centuries. As soon as one keen competitor drops out, another comes in
to keep up the running. That has been the impelling influence in the
history of the English Mercantile Marine. When Spain falls out, the
Dutch take her place. When they cease to be competitors, the French
become the pacemakers, to be followed by the Germans; and now that the
latter have disappeared almost entirely from the sea, the United States
ships of commerce will maintain this ancient contest. And so it will
go on, unless air routes cause another revolution in the transport of
merchandise, and give another sudden twist to the flow of history.
The seventeenth century, then, saw a wonderful incentive to the
English Merchant Navy just because the East was calling. And, as a
result of this, there followed in due succession the creation of the
East India Company, the wonderful and famous East Indiamen built
chiefly at Blackwall; then, after the long monopoly came to an end,
the famous Blackwall sailing ships of the Wigrams and Greens, the
historic clippers, and finally the Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Company. From the year 1582 for the next three hundred
years from Blackwall, on the River Thames, sailing ships year after
year made their way to the Orient, and it is to my mind one of the
most remarkable continuities in the history of human things. It is
certainly one of the most, if not the most, critical of periods in
the development of the commercial marine. What Portsmouth has been to
the British Navy, the village of Blackwall has been to the British
Mercantile Marine. From the Blackwall yard were launched hundreds
of East Indiamen; from here came improved and novel designs for the
sailing ships that were to win and retain against all competitors
commercial supremacy at sea for the British nation. But for these craft
the trend of English history, of the world’s history, would be entirely
different.
There would have been neither the cause nor the means of a powerful
navy; nor of Colonial expansion; nor would the position which Britain
possesses financially have been possible. I am omitting intentionally
for the present the development of the American trade, for that came
later. It was the Eastern overseas trade in the merchant ships of the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which was responsible
for an enormous part of the national wealth, many of our costliest
buildings and institutions, the founding of illustrious families, and
indirectly the awakening of Japan. All this dates back to Prince Henry
and Vasco da Gama—to the finding of a sea route to the East.
It was in April 1582 that the first ship left for the East—when the
_Edward Bonaventure_ sailed from Blackwall, joined the flagship
_Leicester_ at Southampton, and, four weeks out from the London
river, accompanied the two other ships. They made a futile attempt
to reach India west about, and because the Spanish Fleet were in the
neighbourhood of the Magellan Straits, had to return to England. In
1595 Holland sent four ships round the Cape of Good Hope, and two years
later the expedition came back, after making a treaty with the King of
Bantam and thus opening up the Indian archipelago. In 1599 a number
of merchants in London petitioned Elizabeth for permission to have a
monopoly to trade with the East Indies, and on the last day of the
following year this privilege was granted for fifteen years, and thus
the first East India Company began.
A small squadron of ships left the Thames in 1601 with iron, lead,
tin and presents for the Indian princes, doubled the Cape of Good
Hope on November 1, and reached Sumatra on June 5, 1602. By September
11, 1603, the flagship _Red Dragon_ anchored in the Downs, after a
most successful voyage, bringing home 1,030,000 lbs. of pepper in the
four ships. And thus the beginning of Anglo-Indian commerce started
so profitably that matters went ahead. The monopoly was extended and
prolonged, until as a fact it was not abrogated until 1833. Expedition
after expedition was sent out, until it became the normal routine;
the ships of the East India Company were a kind of bridge between
the Thames and the Orient. The Merchant Navy was thus on the way to
becoming something different from the fighting service, though it was
not until many years had passed, not until wars had ceased, privateers
and pirates had ended their activities, that the former could afford
to give up mounting guns and carrying gunners. Nineteenth century
peace thus gave a basis for separating the two types of ships and
the two kinds of personnel; and thereafter the Royal Navy and the
Mercantile Marine developed on divergent lines. But, up to that stage,
the East Indiaman differed little enough from many of her contemporary
men-of-war. Although formally the separation came earlier, it is from
after 1815 that the real separation takes place, and the amalgamation
never occurred again for a hundred years, when, temporarily, the ships
and men of the Merchant Service came to join up with the Royal Navy as
fighting units during the Great War.
We need not follow in detail the events of the great East India
Company’s rule—by far the most extraordinary monopoly which Europe
has ever had with an overseas country. It is important, however, to
note the effect of this in stimulating shipping affairs. The Dutch and
English began to improve their ships as well they might for so long an
ocean voyage. As to the former, the picture galleries in such places as
Middelburg, and Rotterdam, and Amsterdam show what truly magnificent
craft they were, with their t’gallant sails, high poops, stern
galleries and ornate decoration. They were the embodiment of wealth. In
the first decade of the seventeenth century there was built in England
the _Trades Increase_, for the English Company’s Indian trade. She was
of about 1100 tons burthen, and was the biggest merchant ship which
had ever been built in this country. But she was really too big for
the knowledge of naval architecture then existing. Clumsy, unwieldy
and top-heavy, she got out to the East, but at Bantam, whilst she was
being careened to have her sheathing examined, she fell over on to her
side and became a total loss, the date being 1613.
Nevertheless, shipbuilding did receive a great stimulus, and this
growing interest caused the formation of the Shipwrights Company, its
incorporation taking place in 1612; Phineas Pett, whose family for two
hundred years had been the greatest English naval architects, becoming
its first master. By this date of 1612 the yard at Blackwall, which was
to be during the next two and a half centuries so famous, was already
well established, and twenty years later almshouses were established at
Poplar for invalided petty officers of the East India Company’s ships.
For when we think of the Merchant Service in England during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is almost exclusively of the
East Indiamen. It begins gradually, and becomes more important as time
goes on and the grip on the East gets tighter. The great port was
London, for it was not until the opening up of the trade with America
in 1756 that Liverpool began in any way to compete as a great shipping
centre, though actually it was not until 1815 that the Lancashire port
made great strides. Nevertheless we must not get a false impression.
The Tudor awakening had created comparatively few big ships, and
even in 1615 there were only ten craft of more than 200 tons burthen
belonging to the Port of London. Still, it was the eve of brilliant
developments, the like of which the world had never before known.
Though they could not have foreseen it, the Blackwall shipwrights were
preparing the way for the coming of the most perfect sailing ships
which the world has ever seen, or probably ever will see—the clippers
of the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1661 Pepys goes by barge to the Blackwall yard to see the new wet
dock, the largest in England, and the “brave new merchantman _Royal
Oake_,” which was nearly ready for launching. In the following year
Evelyn refers to accompanying the Duke of York to an East India vessel
at Blackwall, and going aboard her where they drank punch and “canary
that had been carried to and brought from the Indies, which was indeed
incomparably good.”
But before the East India Company had offices in the Blackwall yard
and superintended the building of its ships, they had a yard of their
own at Deptford. This dates from the year 1607, where they soon found
employment for five hundred carpenters, caulkers, joiners, and others.
Here there existed a wonderful organisation; large stocks of timber,
masts, yards, canvas, and other stores. There were such officials as
the ship’s husband, the clerk of the stores, the buyers, the clerk
of the yard, the master shipwright, the master pilot (who had to
survey the ships both here and at Blackwall), the boatswain-general,
treasurers, purser-general, the clerk of the cordage, the
surgeon-general, clerk of the slaughter-house (to look after the
victuals), and so on. It was a hive of great activity, and by the year
1621 they had built so many ships that the company owned 10,000 tons
of shipping. They had exported from England in their vessels £319,211
worth of woollen goods, lead, iron, tin and other commodities, and had
brought home from the East £875,288 worth of cargoes, which were sold
in England for the immense sum of £2,044,600. The average profit made
by the first twelve voyages amounted to not less than 138 per cent.
But after leasing the Deptford yard for twenty years, it was found to
be so costly that it swallowed up too much of the capital, which could
be employed more profitably in hiring ships. Therefore the Blackwall
yard became responsible for the building of practically all the East
Indiamen. The company went on from prosperity to wealth. In 1681 they
owned thirty-five ships of from 100 to 775 tons, and two years later a
£100 share would sell for £500. In 1667 was imported the first cargo of
tea, which in the nineteenth century was to be the means of bringing
into existence those wonderful tea-clippers.
And now let us see something of the kind of existence which the
merchant sailor led during the seventeenth century. He and his mode
of life were regarded by the landsman as something strange, something
abnormal. Contrariwise, the sailor realised that his art was almost
beyond the landsman’s comprehension. That spirit, even in this
twentieth century, is anything but dead, and between the two avocations
there must always exist a big gulf. But we have to remember that in
the seventeenth century seafaring was still such a modern and rare
career (though yearly increasing in popularity) that he who made a
profession of it was an unusual being. “The sea language,” wrote the
seventeenth-century Sir William Monson in his _Naval Tracts_, “is not
soon learned, much less understood ... a boisterous sea and stormy
weather will make a man not bred on it so sick, that it bereaves him
of legs and stomach and courage ... when he hears the seamen cry
starboard, or port, or to bide alooff, or flat a sheet, or haul home a
cluling, he thinks he hears a barbarous speech, which he conceives not
the meaning of.”
Similarly John Lyly, the dramatist who died in 1606, in his
_Gallathea_, gives a dialogue between a mariner and three sons of a
miller in which this difference is indicated. The landsmen will never
go to sea again, for the bread is hard and the meat salt, and the
mariner is pitied for being “pinned in a few boards, and ... within an
inch of a thing bottomless.” The mariner, however, rather delights in
showing his superiority over them. “I can shift the moon and the sun,”
he exclaims, “... the lodestone that always holdeth his nose to the
North, the two and thirty points for the wind, the wonders I see—would
make you blind. You be but boys. I fear the sea no more than a dish of
water.” He then tries to teach them the points of the compass, but they
cannot learn them. “O dullard,” he remarks in disgust, “is thy head
lighter than the wind, and thy tongue so heavy it will not wag?”
Richard Braithwait, who wrote during the seventeenth century, published
in 1631, in his _Whimzies_, an essay on the contemporary sailor, whom
he admires for his pluck, disregard of danger and for his hardihood. He
looks upon him as a desperate, hearty good-natured fellow of dissolute
habits when ashore. “The bredth of an inch-boord is betwixt him and
drowning, yet hee swears and drinks as deeply as if hee were a fathom
from it.... Hee is most constant to his shirt, and other his seldome
wash’d linnen.... What a starveling hee is in a frosty morning, with
his Sea frocke, which seems as it were shrunke from him, and growne too
short, but it will be long enough ere hee get another.”
The English writer Sir Thomas Overbury, who was arrested and confined
in the Tower, and died in 1613, has left behind a study of the
character of the sailor at this time. He wittily describes him as
“a pitched piece of reason, caulked and tackled, and only studied
to dispute with tempests.... A fair wind is the substance of his
creed, and fresh water the burden of his prayers.... In a storm ’tis
disputable whether the noise be more his or the elements’, and which
will first leave scolding.... His language is a new confusion, and all
his thoughts new nations. His body and his ship are both one burden.
Nor is it known who stows most wine, or rolls most—only the ship is
guided.”
The references to life at sea in the seventeenth-century merchantmen
are not many, but here and there one comes across mention of some
ship or experience. Pepys, whilst sailing down the Thames estuary
on Sunday, April 8, 1660, writes in his diary: “We had a brave wind
all the afternoon, and overtook two merchantmen that overtook us
yesterday, going to the East Indies.” But there are two interesting
passages in English literature which show that going to sea in the
ships of this period was a terrible business. The first is found in the
autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an English historian
and diplomatist, who describes his experience of crossing the English
Channel in a French ship in the year 1609. The second is taken from
Jonathan Swift’s famous _Gulliver’s Travels_. There is no need to ask
why fiction should be dragged into history; for Swift borrowed this
descriptive account of an East Indiaman in a storm almost word for word
from James Love’s _The Mariner’s Jewel_, and it gives us a glimpse
into the seafaring of the beginning of the eighteenth century that
bears the stamp of authenticity. And it is such peeps into the past
that are so invaluable to us in reconstructing the life led by the
rough seaman at this time, who was learning by his mistakes, risking
much by his ignorance, but doing so much for the great Merchant Service
that was to spread all over the world.
Herbert, together with Sir Thomas Lucy returning from France, took
ship from Dieppe early in February and spent the night in the Channel
during a gale of wind. “The master of our ship,” he wrote, “lost both
the use of his compass and his reason. For, not knowing whither he was
carried by the tempest, all the help he had was by the lightnings,
which, together with thunder very frequently that night, terrified
him, yet gave the advantage sometimes to discover whether we were
upon our coast to which he thought, by the course of his glasses, we
were near approached.” That is to say, the master was anxious about
his dead reckoning, which was kept by guessing the distance run every
hour. The time was kept by means of hourly and half-hourly glasses from
Elizabethan times even to the eighteenth century aboard ship, according
to the number of times the sand ran through.
Towards daylight the ship sighted Dover and the master made for it.
Here the local seafarers were in great numbers by the shore on the
look-out for wreckage, for the gale had blown down their own barns and
trees. But the French skipper was either a very bad seaman, or his ship
was extremely unhandy, for the craft went smack up against Dover pier
and split, whereupon the Frenchman cheerfully announced: “Mes amis,
nous sommes perdus.” Herbert, though in the toils of sea-sickness,
then emerged from his cabin, climbed part of the way up the mast
and waved his sword for help. A local six-oared boat then came off,
into which Herbert was the first to enter. Lucy was half dead with
sea-sickness, but was lifted from the cabin to the boat, and thus they
were saved. Other boats rowed off the rest of the men and the horses.
The ship, concluded Herbert, “was wholly split and cast away, insomuch
that in pity to the master, Sir Thomas Lucy and myself gave thirty
pounds towards his loss, which yet was not so great as we thought,
since the tide now ebbing, he recovered the broken parts of his ship.”
Dean Swift, in _Gulliver’s Travels_, refers to the ship _Adventure_
riding in the Downs at the end of June 1702. She was commanded by
Captain John Nicholas, a Cornishman, and bound for Surat. At the Cape
of Good Hope they landed for fresh water, but other reasons detained
them until the end of March. A good passage was then made till north
of Madagascar, when bad weather was encountered. The spritsail (the
square-sail set on a small mast at the end of the bowsprit) was
therefore taken in, the mizzen was handed, and the guns secured. Rather
than heave-to, the captain decided to run before the wind—“spooning” is
the technical expression—the foresail was reefed, the fore-sheet hauled
aft, the helm put hard aweather, and “the ship wore bravely.” But the
foresail became split, and the yard was hauled down. “It was a very
fierce storm; the sea broke strange and dangerous. We hauled off upon
the lanyard of the whip-staff, and helped the man at helm.” For there
was no steering wheel in use yet, and this was not introduced until
about fifty years later. The tiller from the rudder was controlled by
a vertical bar or lever, called a “whip-staff,” and the lanyards would
naturally enough be used, as it is employed to this day for assisting
the helm of sailing yachts.
After scudding before the storm, the weather at last eased up. Then
the ship set her foresail and mainsail and hove-to, and finally set
the mizzen, main-topsail and fore-topsail, and with the wind S.W. ran
a course E.N.E. Then they “got the starboard tacks aboard” and headed
S.S.E. “We cast off our weather braces and lifts. We set in the lee
braces and hauled forward by the weather bowlines and hauled them tight
and belayed them, and hauled over the mizzen tack to windward and kept
her full-and-by as near as she could lie.” That is to say, the ship was
now trimmed to sail on a wind, the bowlines, which were connected by
bridles to the leech of the sail, being used to keep the weather edge
well hauled out tight, to make the canvas set properly. The mizzen, of
course, was still a triangular, fore and aft sail. Finally on June 3,
1703, a boy on the topmast sighted land.
It is a little difficult in this highly specialised twentieth century
to appreciate the slight difference which existed between a merchant
ship and a man-of-war. Between the men of the Merchant Service and
those of the Navy there was thus little to choose. From the Elizabethan
days most merchant ships of any size had to be armed for their own
defence. Moreover the merchantman was as much privateer or pirate as
he was freighter. He had to be a fighting man, whatever else he might
be. Thus there was always at hand a reserve of crews which could be
“imprest” into the Navy. During the first quarter of the seventeenth
century the merchants were paying their crews thirty shillings a month,
whilst the men in the Royal ships were receiving less than half this
amount. The result was that for a time the merchant ships attracted the
best seamen.
It was from the Merchant Service that some of the most distinguished
officers of the Royal Navy graduated. Admiral Benbow, for instance, had
been an apprentice in the Merchant Service, and was eventually given
command of a naval ship such as was usually given to a lieutenant. He
was promoted later to captain and to flag rank. This caused jealousy
and bad feeling, and the reader will remember that this Admiral, when
attacking the enemy in 1702 in the West Indies, was basely deserted
by some of his captains, but he carried on a running fight almost
single-handed for five days.
Other names could be mentioned, too. Neither masters nor mates were
exempt from being impressed; and these rough, daring merchantmen, who
fought as hard as they drank, who despised the enemy as heartily as
they despised cowardice, were the very life-blood of the nation that
was growing up to prosperous adolescence. England was just realising
what was the meaning of the word sea. As Francis Bacon wrote in his
essay: “To be master of the sea is an abridgment of a monarchy....
Surely, at this day, with us of Europe, the vantage of strength at
sea (which is one of the principal dowries of this kingdom of Great
Britain) is great; both because most of the kingdoms of Europe are not
merely inland, but girt with the sea most part of their compass; and
because the wealth of both Indies seems in great part but an accessory
to the command of the seas.”
It takes time for a nation to appreciate all that maritime progress
connotes. We in this twentieth century have seen that it required the
Great European War to enable the United States to realise this, and the
present American mercantile shipping activity and development are the
practical results of this appreciation. The Merchant Navy to a country
is the basis on which her fighting Navy is built. It is the avenue
along which her commerce must flow out and home.