The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (36 page)

TYPES OF SHIPS

By modern standards, most seagoing ships are small. Only the big royal warships are over 400 tons burden.
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The largest of these is the
Triumph
, built in 1561. Her keel is 100ft long, she is 40ft in the beam and has a burden of 955 tons. In 1599 she carries a complement of 500 men and forty-four guns, including four cannon (firing 60lbs shot), three demi-cannon (firing 30lbs shot), seventeen culverins (long-barrelled, 18lbs shot), eight demi-culverins (9lbs), six sakers (6lbs) and six falconets (approximately 1lb).
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Unfortunately, great ships like her are too slow and difficult to manoeuvre easily. Sir John Hawkins therefore pioneers the ‘race-built’ galleon, so called because the castles are lowered or ‘razed’. Traditional warships have a high forecastle at the prow and an even higher sterncastle from which archers can shoot down on their enemy. However, the effective use of cannon has resulted in battles now being fought at a distance, so castles are more of a hindrance than an advantage. Race-built galleons have just an open area at the front of the vessel and a covered deck and the captain’s cabin at the stern. Cutting down on the weight of the superstructure makes the ships lighter and thus faster, more manoeuvrable and more stable. The earliest race-built galleon is the 368-ton
Foresight
, 78ft long and 28ft wide, launched at Deptford in 1570. It is soon followed by others, including the 460-ton
Dreadnought
, the 360-ton
Swiftsure
(1573) and the 500-ton
Revenge
(1577).

It is these ships that constitute the famous ‘wooden walls of England’. The government builds more than thirty galleons over the course of the reign and a similar number of other ships to support them. The two master shipwrights Peter Pett and Mathew Baker compete to outdo each other; in 1586 Baker builds the 561-ton
Vanguard
at Woolwich (having moved to that shipyard from Deptford), and Pett, his replacement at Deptford, launches the 480-ton
Rainbow
. As preparations are made to defend England against the Armada, these ships are equipped with more weapons; each has fifty-four guns by May 1588. At the same time there are private projects such as the
Ark Raleigh
: a 700-ton galleon, with fifty-five guns, built in 1586 at Deptford for Sir Walter Raleigh at a cost of £5,000. Raleigh’s debts to the Crown force him to sell it to the queen, who renames it
Ark Royal
. Thomas Platter is allowed to inspect a similar vessel at Rochester in 1599: he counts fifty-four cannon and notes that it has five masts and thirteen sails; the ropes are covered with pitch to stop the rain rotting them, the hull is painted in bright colours and a lantern burns through the night at the very rear of the vessel.
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Have a look at the fleet that chases the Spanish Armada up the Channel in July 1588. As mentioned above, thirty-four of the ships are from the royal navy, designed for war; the rest – no fewer than 163 of them – are privately owned vessels. The royal ships are not all as large as the
Triumph
or the race-built galleons; among them are small pinnaces, such as the 60-ton
Moon
, built in 1586; but nor are the privately owned vessels all small. Some are quite impressive: for instance, the
Galleon Leicester
and the
Merchant Royal
are both 400 tons; the
Edward Bonaventure
and
Roebuck
, 300 tons. Thirty-five other merchantmen have a burden of 140 tons or more, another hundred are over 100 tons, and another 656 over 40 tons.
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This is no accident: the government encourages the building of large ships in order to be able to co-opt them for defence, paying a bounty of 5s per ton. Thomas Wilson reports in 1600 that the navy has thirty-six warships and 14 pinnaces, but this

is not the twentieth part of the strength of England … When there was a fleet of 240 ships of war sent into Spain and four other fleets of merchants sent to the Levant, to Russia, Barbary and Bordeaux, all at one time abroad, yet you should never see the Thames between London Bridge and Blackwall (four English miles in length) without two or three hundred ships or vessels, besides the infinite number of men of war that were then and ever roving abroad to the Indies and Spanish dominions to get purchase, as they call it, whereby a number grow rich.
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The vast majority of seagoing ships are not glamorous galleons, but humble fishing vessels and traders. You do see many carvels, barques and other merchantmen of 40–100 tons in English ports, but they will be hugely outnumbered by smaller boats. On the lower reaches of the Thames there are sailing hoys, which ply the trade along the north coast of Kent and the south coast of Essex, and tide-barges going up to Billingsgate on the flood tide and returning to their Essex or Kent port on the ebb.
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If you look at the wharves of the main ports you will find substantial ketches (strongly built, two-masted coasting vessels with three triangular sails, used mainly for long-distance fishing), mongers (trading vessels not dissimilar to ketches), dredgers and crayers or half-ketches (smaller fishing boats) and lighters (flat-bottomed boats for river work as well as short sea journeys, like modern barges). Smaller than these are the cock boats (boats attached to ships, often used for fishing) and skiffs (clinker-built rowing boats, sometimes with a single small mast).
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At times these boats can play an important role: Sir Francis Drake receives news of the arrival of the Armada from a ketch off the coast of Devon.
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SEAMANSHIP

Your greatest hardship when travelling on small boats like these is likely to be inclement weather and a little nausea. Small boats tend not to go very far from land, so if the weather turns stormy you can simply head back into port. If you are contemplating a long voyage, however, things are more complicated. The very act of handling an ocean-going vessel is both demanding and dangerous. Setting and stowing the sails requires crew members to go aloft and suspend themselves along each yard – and the heights are dizzying. The
Ark Royal
has a main mast more than 100ft tall. Imagine being out in the Atlantic in a merchantman as a storm is building up and the rain comes down hard: the captain may order the sails to be furled, to protect them or to prevent the ship being blown off course. As the
vessel pitches and tosses like a cork on the waves, you might be the one to have to climb forty or fifty feet up the mast and then clamber out along the yard, pull in the sailcloth as you balance on the pitching timber, thrust to and fro with the violent motion of the ship. If you fall from that height and land on the deck, you will break a limb at least. Fall from the topsail or topgallant on to the gunwales and that will be the end of you. Fall into the sea and you will almost certainly drown. Now imagine having to stow the sails in a gale in fading light, at nightfall.

Even steering a boat can be dangerous. In heavy seas it might take six or seven men to control the tiller of a very large vessel, and they have to do this below deck, without being able to see the sea and the sky. You will not find a ship’s wheel anywhere – it has not been invented yet. Instead most Elizabethan ships are steered by the sails and the whipstaff: a long steering pole which pivots at a point below deck, controlling the rudder. This allows the helmsman to remain on deck where he can see the direction in which he is heading, but the pivot can increase the difficulty of holding the rudder steady in high seas. A sudden surge can tear it from his hands and even break the whipstaff.

Then there are the problems of navigation. The time-honoured skills of a maritime pilot are of little use when it comes to crossing an ocean. A pilot knows the ports and the headlands, the currents and the phases of the moon and their tides; but he will rarely sail out of sight of land. He does not use a chart, but a compass, a plumb-line and his experience. When it comes to long-distance travel, these tools are not good enough, especially at night. Even if your pilot can read and write, and keeps a rutter telling him all the various soundings in, say, the Bay of Biscay, you would be unwise to entrust him with your life sailing round the world. Nor will your modern knowledge help much. For instance, you may know that St John’s, Newfoundland, has a latitude of 47° 34′ North, but how do you find your way there from Exeter (50° 43′ North)? How do you measure your latitude? How do you maintain a steady course when the wind will not blow you straight to your destination and the currents will counter any attempt to calculate where you are according to speed travelled in any given direction?

Sixteenth-century navigators do not always get it right, as James Hooper, captain of the
Desire
, will testify. On a voyage to the Azores
he changes course against the advice of his shipmates and sails straight past the islands – continuing for five days before admitting that he has ‘no better knowledge than the mainmast’ where the Azores lie.
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However, most navigators learn how to deal with the complicated mathematics. They take as their starting point a simple direction across a chart, dead-reckoning the distance and setting out that way. The key lies in constantly recalibrating their position in relation to their destination by establishing the latitude. Using a quadrant, a mariner’s astrolabe or a cross-staff, they can calculate this by measuring the height of the Pole Star above the horizon in the northern hemisphere; in the southern hemisphere they use the Southern Cross. Obviously these measurements can only be made at dawn or dusk, when navigators can see both the stars and the horizon, so they use the height of the sun at midday as a supplementary measure and determine latitude according to tables worked out by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. As for speed, the basic method of a log and a series of knots on a rope has recently been invented, so you can establish distances in miles and leagues, as opposed to old-fashioned ‘keenings’ (multiples of the visible distance of the horizon from land). Deep-water soundings can be taken with a lead weight and a 100-fathom rope to measure the depth of the sea floor: if it is more than 600ft deep, you are off the Continental Shelf. Practical charts also exist: they are called ‘cards’ or ‘plats’ and are attached to sticks and stored in elm tubes.
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Most Elizabethan ships carry several compasses, in case one breaks or the needle needs remagnetising with a lodestone. If you use a traverse board to keep check of the changes of tack, and update it with each half-hourly watch (measured with an hourglass), you should be able to plot your way across the ocean.
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One thing you can take comfort from is how quickly the science of seamanship advances in England in this period. There are very few treatises on navigation in English before 1574, so those that do exist are mostly translations. In 1561 Richard Eden publishes
The Arte of Navigation Translated out of Spanysh into English
, thereby making available Martin Cortes’s important work for the first time. But in 1574 it is joined on the bookshelves by William Bourne’s
A Regiment for the Sea: containing very necessary matters for all sorts of sea-men and travellers
, the first English-composed practical treatise on navigation. Alongside the old techniques of pilotage, it includes tables on calculating tides and latitude by means of the stars, and soon becomes the essential
mariners’ aid. Bourne observes that just twenty years ago ‘masters of ships hath derided and mocked them that have occupied their cards and plats and also the observation of the altitude of the Pole saying that they care not for sheepskin for they could keep a better account upon a board’. But now navigation has become a mathematical art. By the end of the reign a dozen books have further advanced the science of navigation. In
Certain Errors in Navigation
(1599) Edward Wright shows how to adopt Mercator’s Projection to plot an exact course across the oceans; and John Davis – the same man who sails from the Falkland Islands to Baffin Island – demonstrates in his
Seaman’s Secrets
(1594) the use of the back-staff for more accurately measuring the height of the Pole Star, Sun and Southern Cross. This makes use of the work of the brilliant natural philosopher Thomas Harriot, which will not be significantly bettered until the eighteenth century.
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Within forty years the English develop from being borrowers of the art of navigation to becoming pioneering experts.

LIFE AT SEA

In some respects life at sea is like life on land. Men eat, drink, sleep and perform their routine functions according to the hours of the clock – but the ways in which they go about it aboard ship, living in an overcrowded world of wood, wind and water, differ greatly. Space is at a premium, even on a large ship. You might notice the low ceilings below deck – 5′ 8″ is not unusual on the main deck, less on the orlop deck below – but as the crew are mostly between 5′ 5″ and 5′ 9″ tall, only a small minority find this a significant problem.
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However, head height is the least of your worries. The
Ark Royal
is a large ship but even she has little more than 2,000 square feet of space on each of her three decks, and more than half of that is used for storage and stowage of provisions, ammunition, fresh water, spare sails and so on. Then there are the fifty-five guns, which require about 500 square feet of space. This means that, when it comes to sleeping, the crew of 420 men have less than six square feet each – and this includes the upper deck, much of which is open to the elements. There simply is not enough room for everyone to lie down at once. Hammocks have not yet been introduced and people lie where they can – and curse anyone who gets up in the night and stumbles across his shipmates
as he makes his way for the heads. Still, one-third of the crew will be on duty on deck wishing the night away, with the boat heaving, waves splashing over the side and the rain falling. At sea, it is fair to say, you will not get much sleep.