The leading pioneers in the Age of Discovery were sons of Italy, Spain,
and Portugal.[2] Cabot, as we have seen, was an Italian, though he
sailed for the English Crown and had an English crew. Columbus, too,
was an Italian, though in the service of the Spanish Crown. It was the
Portuguese Vasco da Gama who in the very year of John Cabot's second
voyage (1498) found the great sea route to India by way of the Cape of
Good Hope. Two years later the Cortereals, also Portuguese, began
exploring the coasts of America as far northwest as Labrador. Twenty
years later again the Portuguese Magellan, sailing for the King of
Spain, discovered the strait still known by his name, passed through it
into the Pacific, and reached the Philippines. There he was killed. But
one of his ships went on to make the first circumnavigation of the
globe, a feat which redounded to the glory of both Spain and Portugal.
Meanwhile, in 1513, the Spaniard Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of
Panama and waded into the Pacific, sword in hand, to claim it for his
king. Then came the Spanish explorers—Ponce de Leon, De Soto, Coronado,
and many more—and later on the conquerors and founders of New
Spain—Cortes, Pizarro, and their successors.
[2: Basque fishermen and whalers apparently forestalled Jacques
Cartier's discovery of the St. Lawrence in 1535; perhaps they knew the
mainland of America before John Cabot in 1497. But they left no written
records; and neither founded an oversea dominion nor gave rights of
discovery to their own or any other race.]
During all this time neither France nor England made any lodgment in
America, though both sent out a number of expeditions, both fished on
the cod banks of Newfoundland, and each had already marked out her own
'sphere of influence.' The Portuguese were in Brazil; the Spaniards, in
South and Central America. England, by right of the Bristol voyages,
claimed the eastern coasts of the United States and Canada; France, in
virtue of Cartier's discovery, the region of the St. Lawrence. But,
while New Spain and New Portugal flourished in the sixteenth century,
New France and New England were yet to rise.
In the sixteenth century both France and England were occupied with
momentous things at home. France was torn with religious wars. Tudor
England had much work to do before any effective English colonies could
be planted. Oversea dominions are nothing without sufficient sea power,
naval and mercantile, to win, to hold, and foster them. But Tudor
England was gradually forming those naval and merchant services without
which there could have been neither British Empire nor United States.
Henry VIII had faults which have been trumpeted about the world from
his own day to ours. But of all English sovereigns he stands foremost
as the monarch of the sea. Young, handsome, learned, exceedingly
accomplished, gloriously strong in body and in mind, Henry mounted the
throne in 1509 with the hearty good will of nearly all his subjects.
Before England could become the mother country of an empire overseas,
she had to shake off her medieval weaknesses, become a strongly unified
modern state, and arm herself against any probable combination of
hostile foreign states. Happily for herself and for her future
colonists, Henry was richly endowed with strength and skill for his
task. With one hand he welded England into political unity, crushing
disruptive forces by the way. With the other he gradually built up a
fleet the like of which the world had never seen. He had the advantage
of being more independent of parliamentary supplies than any other
sovereign. From his thrifty father he had inherited what was then an
almost fabulous sum—nine million dollars in cash. From what his friends
call the conversion, and his enemies the spoliation, of Church property
in England he obtained many millions more. Moreover, the people as a
whole always rallied to his call whenever he wanted other national
resources for the national defence.
Henry's unique distinction is that he effected the momentous change
from an ancient to a modern fleet. This supreme achievement constitutes
his real title to the lasting gratitude of English-speaking peoples.
His first care when he came to the throne in 1509 was for the safety of
the 'Broade Ditch,' as he called the English Channel. His last great
act was to establish in 1546 'The Office of the Admiralty and Marine
Affairs.' During the thirty-seven years between his accession and the
creation of this Navy Board the pregnant change was made.
'King Henry loved a man.' He had an unerring eye for choosing the right
leaders. He delighted in everything to do with ships and shipping. He
mixed freely with naval men and merchant skippers, visited the
dockyards, promoted several improved types of vessels, and always
befriended Fletcher of Rye, the shipwright who discovered the art of
tacking and thereby revolutionized navigation. Nor was the King only a
patron. He invented a new type of vessel himself and thoroughly
mastered scientific gunnery. He was the first of national leaders to
grasp the full significance of what could be done by broadsides fired
from sailing ships against the mediaeval type of vessel that still
depended more on oars than on sails.
Henry's maritime rivals were the two greatest monarchs of continental
Europe, Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain. Henry, Francis, and
Charles were all young, all ambitious, and all exceedingly capable men.
Henry had the fewest subjects, Charles by far the most. Francis had a
compact kingdom well situated for a great European land power. Henry
had one equally well situated for a great European sea power. Charles
ruled vast dominions scattered over both the New World and the Old. The
destinies of mankind turned mostly on the rivalry between these three
protagonists and their successors.
Charles V was heir to several crowns. He ruled Spain, the Netherlands,
the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and important principalities in
northern Italy. He was elected Emperor of Germany. He owned enormous
oversea dominions in Africa; and the two Americas soon became New
Spain. He governed each part of his European dominions by a different
title and under a different constitution. He had no fixed imperial
capital, but moved about from place to place, a legitimate sovereign
everywhere and, for the most part, a popular one as well. It was his
son Philip II who, failing of election as Emperor, lived only in Spain,
concentrated the machinery of government in Madrid, and became so
unpopular elsewhere. Charles had been brought up in Flanders; he was
genial in the Flemish way; and he understood his various states in the
Netherlands, which furnished him with one of his main sources of
revenue. Another and much larger source of revenue poured in its wealth
to him later on, in rapidly increasing volume, from North and South
America.
Charles had inherited a long and bitter feud with France about the
Burgundian dominions on the French side of the Rhine and about domains
in Italy; besides which there were many points of violent rivalry
between things French and Spanish. England also had hereditary feuds
with France, which had come down from the Hundred Years' War, and which
had ended in her almost final expulsion from France less than a century
before. Scotland, nursing old feuds against England and always afraid
of absorption, naturally sided with France. Portugal, small and open to
Spanish invasion by land, was more or less bound to please Spain.
During the many campaigns between Francis and Charles the English
Channel swarmed with men-of-war, privateers, and downright pirates.
Sometimes England took a hand officially against France. But, even when
England was not officially at war, many Englishmen were privateers and
not a few were pirates. Never was there a better training school of
fighting seamanship than in and around the Narrow Seas. It was a
continual struggle for an existence in which only the fittest survived.
Quickness was essential. Consequently vessels that could not increase
their speed were soon cleared off the sea.
Spain suffered a good deal by this continuous raiding. So did the
Netherlands. But such was the power of Charles that, although his
navies were much weaker than his armies, he yet was able to fight by
sea on two enormous fronts, first, in the Mediterranean against the
Turks and other Moslems, secondly, in the Channel and along the coast,
all the way from Antwerp to Cadiz. Nor did the left arm of his power
stop there; for his fleets, his transports, and his merchantmen ranged
the coasts of both Americas from one side of the present United States
right round to the other.
Such, in brief, was the position of maritime Europe when Henry found
himself menaced by the three Roman Catholic powers of Scotland, France,
and Spain. In 1533 he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon,
thereby defying the Pope and giving offence to Spain. He had again
defied the Pope by suppressing the monasteries and severing the Church
of England from the Roman discipline. The Pope had struck back with a
bull of excommunication designed to make Henry the common enemy of
Catholic Europe.
Henry had been steadily building ships for years. Now he redoubled his
activity. He blooded the fathers of his daughter's sea-dogs by smashing
up a pirate fleet and sinking a flotilla of Flemish privateers. The
mouth of the Scheldt, in 1539, was full of vessels ready to take a
hostile army into England. But such a fighting fleet prepared to meet
them that Henry's enemies forbore to strike.
In 1539, too, came the discovery of the art of tacking, by Fletcher of
Rye, Henry's shipwright friend, a discovery forever memorable in the
annals of seamanship. Never before had any kind of craft been sailed a
single foot against the wind. The primitive dugout on which the
prehistoric savage hoisted the first semblance of a sail, the ships of
Tarshish, the Roman transport in which St. Paul was wrecked, and the
Spanish caravels with which Columbus sailed to worlds unknown, were, in
principle of navigation, all the same. But now Fletcher ran out his
epoch-making vessel, with sails trimmed fore and aft, and dumbfounded
all the shipping in the Channel by beating his way to windward against
a good stiff breeze. This achievement marked the dawn of the modern
sailing age.
And so it happened that in 1545 Henry, with a new-born modern fleet,
was able to turn defiantly on Francis. The English people rallied
magnificently to his call. What was at that time an enormous army
covered the lines of advance on London. But the fleet, though employing
fewer men, was relatively a much more important force than the army;
and with the fleet went Henry's own headquarters. His lifelong interest
in his navy now bore the first-fruits of really scientific sea power on
an oceanic scale. There was no great naval battle to fix general
attention on one dramatic moment. Henry's strategy and tactics,
however, were new and full of promise. He repeated his strategy of the
previous war by sending out a strong squadron to attack the base at
which the enemy's ships were then assembling; and he definitely
committed the English navy, alone among all the navies in the world, to
sailing-ship tactics, instead of continuing those founded on the rowing
galley of immemorial fame. The change from a sort of floating army to a
really naval fleet, from galleys moved by oars and depending on
boarders who were soldiers, to ships moved by sails and depending on
their broadside guns—this change was quite as important as the change
in the nineteenth century from sails and smooth-bores to steam and
rifled ordnance. It was, indeed, from at least one commanding point of
view, much more important; for it meant that England was easily first
in developing the only kind of navy which would count in any struggle
for oversea dominion after the discovery of America had made sea power
no longer a question of coasts and landlocked waters but of all the
outer oceans of the world.
The year that saw the birth of modern sea power is a date to be
remembered in this history; for 1545 was also the year in which the
mines of Potosi first aroused the Old World to the riches of the New;
it was the year, too, in which Sir Francis Drake was born. Moreover,
there was another significant birth in this same year. The parole
aboard the Portsmouth fleet was _God save the King_! The answering
countersign was _Long to reign over us_! These words formed the nucleus
of the national anthem now sung round all the Seven Seas. The anthems
of other countries were born on land. _God save the King_! sprang from
the navy and the sea.
The Reformation quickened seafaring life in many ways. After Henry's
excommunication every Roman Catholic crew had full Papal sanction for
attacking every English crew that would not submit to Rome, no matter
how Catholic its faith might be. Thus, in addition to danger from
pirates, privateers, and men-of-war, an English merchantman had to risk
attack by any one who was either passionately Roman or determined to
use religion as a cloak. Raids and reprisals grew apace. The English
were by no means always lambs in piteous contrast to the Papal wolves.
Rather, it might be said, they took a motto from this true Russian
proverb: 'Make yourself a sheep and you'll find no lack of wolves.'
But, rightly or wrongly, the general English view was that the Papal
attitude was one of attack while their own was one of defence. Papal
Europe of course thought quite the reverse.
Henry died in 1547, and the Lord Protector Somerset at once tried to
make England as Protestant as possible during the minority of Edward
VI, who was not yet ten years old. This brought every English seaman
under suspicion in every Spanish port, where the Holy Office of the
Inquisition was a great deal more vigilant and businesslike than the
Custom House or Harbor Master. Inquisitors had seized Englishmen in
Henry's time. But Charles had stayed their hand. Now that the ruler of
England was an open heretic, who appeared to reject the accepted forms
of Catholic belief as well as the Papal forms of Roman discipline, the
hour had come to strike. War would have followed in ordinary times. But
the Reformation had produced a cross-division among the subjects of all
the Great Powers. If Charles went to war with a Protestant Lord
Protector of England then some of his own subjects in the Netherlands
would probably revolt. France had her Huguenots; England her
ultra-Papists; Scotland some of both kinds. Every country had an
unknown number of enemies at home and friends abroad. All feared war.
Somerset neglected the navy. But the seafaring men among the
Protestants, as among those Catholics who were anti-Roman, took to
privateering more than ever. Nor was exploration forgotten. A group of
merchant-adventurers sent Sir Hugh Willoughby to find the Northeast
Passage to Cathay. Willoughby's three ships were towed down the Thames
by oarsmen dressed in sky-blue jackets. As they passed the palace at
Greenwich they dipped their colors in salute. But the poor young king
was too weak to come to the window. Willoughby met his death in
Lapland. But Chancellor, his second-in-command, got through to the
White Sea, pushed on overland to Moscow, and returned safe in 1554,
when Queen Mary was on the throne. Next year, strange to say, the
charter of the new Muscovy Company was granted by Philip of Armada
fame, now joint sovereign of England with his newly married wife, soon
to be known as 'Bloody Mary.' One of the directors of the company was
Lord Howard of Effingham, father of Drake's Lord Admiral, while the
governor was our old friend Sebastian Cabot, now in his eightieth year.
Philip was Crown Prince of the Spanish Empire, and his father, Charles
V, was very anxious that he should please the stubborn English; for if
he could only become both King of England and Emperor of Germany he
would rule the world by sea as well as land. Philip did his ineffective
best: drank English beer in public as if he liked it and made his
stately Spanish courtiers drink it too and smile. He spent Spanish
gold, brought over from America, and he got the convenient kind of
Englishmen to take it as spy-money for many years to come. But with it
he likewise sowed some dragon's teeth. The English sea-dogs never
forgot the iron chests of Spanish New-World gold, and presently began
to wonder whether there was no sure way in far America by which to get
it for themselves.
In the same year, 1555, the Marian attack on English heretics began and
the sea became safer than the land for those who held strong anti-Papal
views. The Royal Navy was neglected even more than it had been lately
by the Lord Protector. But fighting traders, privateers, and pirates
multiplied. The seaports were hotbeds of hatred against Mary, Philip,
Papal Rome, and Spanish Inquisition. In 1556 Sebastian Cabot reappears,
genial and prosperous as ever, and dances out of history at the sailing
of the _Serchthrift_, bound northeast for Muscovy. In 1557 Philip came
back to England for the last time and manoeuvred her into a war which
cost her Calais, the last English foothold on the soil of France.
During this war an English squadron joined Philip's vessels in a
victory over the French off Gravelines, where Drake was to fight the
Armada thirty years later.
This first of the two battles fought at Gravelines brings us down to
1558, the year in which Mary died, Elizabeth succeeded her, and a very
different English age began.