The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden
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As Hakluyt began his great page-odyssey, prodding less book-bound souls than himself into roaming the world, advances in scientific literature helped them on their way. In 1570 the first English translation of Euclid was published. ‘No other work in the English tongue,’ wrote the historian of Tudor science D.W. Waters, ‘has been so influential in stimulating the growth in England of the arts of mathematics, navigation, and hydrography.’ Perhaps even more important at the time than Euclid’s text was the introduction to it written by John Dee, Elizabeth I’s favourite philosopher and astrologer.
Dee’s introduction applies Euclidian method to seamanship. He provides the first English definition of navigation, stressing the range of sciences it relies on – ‘hydrographie, astronomie, astrologie and horometrie’ – as well as the basics of arithmetic and geometry. At the time the word ‘navigation’ referred to all aspects of seamanship and Dee could not restrain himself from presenting maritime skills not just as a practical discipline but as some sort of transcendent communion. Be attentive, he urged ships’ masters, be attuned to all things, for in their changes lie both threats and opportunities. If signs were noted ‘of Moon, Sterres, Water, Ayre, Fire, Wood, Stones, Birdes, and Beastes, and of many thynges els, a certain Sympatheticall forewarning may be had’. Such attentiveness, he added, could lead to ‘pleasure and profit’.
His essay emboldened a generation of seafarers, particularly those in the West Country, for whom patriotism, adventure and greed were beginning to coalesce in maritime enterprise. Going to sea, reaping its rewards (by any means), was both the right and the destiny of the English people. ‘What privilege,’ wrote Dee, ‘God had endued this Iland with, by reason of situation, most commodious for Navigation, to Places most Famous and Riche.’ Dee was much taken with rebuilding an English mythology, and like Hakluyt was drawn to the Arthurian cycles (he called his own son Arthur). He, too, celebrated the far and ancient wanderings of the English, quoting Geoffrey of Monmouth as well his own collection of esoteric texts. Such was the importance of his task for the nation that it was sometimes necessary for Dee to embellish them with his own inventions. It was Dee who first coined the term ‘British Impire’ in his 1577 book General and Rare Memorial Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, and a few years later, Burghley and Queen Elizabeth were presented with Dee’s two voluminous rolls explaining the English queen’s extensive rights to the world’s territories.
The 1570s also saw great advances in cosmology, adding to expanding perceptions and the range of geometrical techniques. In 1576, John Dee’s pupil Thomas Digges published Pantometria, the ground-breaking work of his father, Leonard. At the same time, Thomas Digges was the first advocate in England of Copernicus’s strange idea that the Earth revolved round the Sun. Thomas Digges even extended the Copernican vision: the stars you see at night, he suggested, are just a fraction of them all, running off from our sight in numbers unimaginable, into eternity. Awareness of a tiny Earth in a celestial infinity found an equivalent in the sense of a rapidly expanding terrestrial world. Closer to home, Digges applied his science to harbour engineering and an overhaul of the art of navigation using mathematical methods. Unlike Hakluyt and Dee, Digges validated his theories – for himself, and in the eyes of mariners – by testing them during a fifteen-week stint at sea.
CHAPTER 6
In Cornwall, the Killigrews were perfectly placed to take advantage of the new age – Protestant, proficient at sea and in control of one of the best anchorages in the country. Emphasis had shifted away from the east coast, away from the Narrow Seas towards the Western Approaches, the Atlantic and the adventure of the New World. Plymouth was already the springboard both for Crown-sponsored missions and for fleets defending the Channel; Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh and Grenville had all sailed from Plymouth on their heroic voyages.
In many ways Falmouth had even greater natural advantages than its rival up the coast. Comparing the two havens, Richard Carew found much to favour the Cornish one. Falmouth ‘lieth farther out in the trade way, and so offereth a sooner opportunity to wind-driven shipping than Plymouth’. Where Plymouth had ‘fairer towns’, Falmouth had the great asset of secrecy – ‘a hundred sail may anchor within his circuit, and no one of them see the other’s top, which Plymouth cannot equal’. Whichever is the better, he concluded, they each have ‘precedence over all other havens in England’.
Heir to the harbour’s entrance, during these heady years of maritime progress, was the second John Killigrew. Succeeding from his father in 1567, he inherited not only the just-rebuilt Arwenack but a lucrative scroll of freeholds from the Lizard to Penryn, fee simple farms as far afield as Penwith – and the captaincy of Pendennis Castle. He became the local Commissioner of Musters. He was twice returned as MP for Penryn, and along with his two brothers at court – William and little limping Henry – was a member of the crucial Parliament which rid Queen Elizabeth of her Catholic plotters and led to the execution of the Duke of Norfolk. Once imprisoned with his father under Queen Mary, twenty years later – in 1576 – John Killigrew was knighted.
The Killigrew family.
A year later, the Crown turned to deal with a perennial problem. To help purge the Channel of its growing number of bandits, a Commission for Piracy was established. In London, its receiver of fines was Sir John’s own brother, Henry Killigrew. Among the offenders was another brother, the notorious pirate Peter, forced to part with £25 to make amends for his felonies. In Cornwall, Sir John Killigrew himself – no stranger to the business of piracy – was appointed the Commission’s head.
On paper, Sir John Killigrew was now one of the most powerful men in the West Country, but his name is not among the far-sighted figures of the Elizabethan age. Sir John was a consummate, dyed-in-the-wool rogue. To his father’s bullying, he added profligacy and a taste for southern wines. He established a family trait that would push him further and further from the track of the law – extravagance. Among those he owed money to was the convict Anthony Bourne, holed up in his own Pendennis Castle. When Bourne escaped, Cornwall’s vice-admiral accused Killigrew of complicity. Sir John challenged him to fight; the two men clashed swords at Truro but without resolution. Arbitration found in the vice-admiral’s favour, but Killigrew still refused to pay the £100 fine.
The limitations of Tudor sources, and the reluctance of lawless privateers to commit their adventures to paper, have left little but glimpses of the second John Killigrew and his affairs. (One contemporary described him ‘as proud as Ammon, as covetous as Ahab and as cruel as Nero’.) But from the proceedings of the Privy Council come details of a particular incident.
It was the winter of 1582. A Spanish ship, the Marie, some 140 tons burden, had been struggling down the Channel. Days of gales had left her rigging badly damaged. Rather than tack south into the weather, towards her home port of San Sebastian, the Marie did what any stricken ship would have done: sought shelter in Falmouth. She bore away to the north, loosening sheets for St Anthony’s Head, past Pendennis Castle and Black Rock, and into the flat waters of the Penryn river. There her master commissioned repairs.
On shore, the people of Penryn watched the Marie. They watched the pinnaces come and go and in the evening they watched her crew at the inn of Ambrose Cox. The days passed. The gales fell away and the swells flattened; the waters of the Carrick Roads became glassy. Now the Marie could not leave for want of wind and so she sat there still, her masts restepped, her new sails bent, while her anchor chain dropped vertically into the flat winter water.
At Arwenack, Sir John Killigrew, too, had been watching the Marie. Together with his wife and a number of his men, he put together a plan. Having set it in motion, Sir John – Cornwall’s Crown Commissioner for Piracy – saddled his horse and rode far away from any taint of involvement. At nine in the evening, a couple of Killigrew’s men appeared at Cox’s inn and told the Spaniards: there is illness on the Marie, you must board at once. Bess Moore agreed to tell anyone who might ask that two more of Killigrew’s servants, Kendall and Hawkins, were with her that evening and tarried until midnight while one had his shirt dried.
In fact they and the others hurried out to Arwenack, launched