The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden
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wrapping ropes around the head, or bowstrings around the genitals.
As well as rewarding those with sea-skills, such enterprise encouraged private investment in ships. By the end of the century, the English merchant fleet outnumbered the Queen’s own by twenty to one. The ships landed up to £200,000 a year in illicit prize money, establishing new fortunes, no longer tied up in land, as liquid as the sea that yielded them, a fund of robber capital that grew and grew, doubling by the decade, funding more ships and more ventures, and swelling through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the prosperity on which Britain’s global power was based.
On the Burghley Map, ships fill the blank sea-spaces with gleeful profusion. To the west of Pendennis an English three-master fires, rather gratuitously, on a caravel (its southern shape suggesting devious papist intentions). Another three-master waits to the south of Pendennis. In the Carrick Roads, marked by a couple of paddock-size St George’s ensigns, a powerful squadron lies at anchor. But there are other ships, too, which fly no official flags. Mylor has a couple, St Mawes a couple more (Penryn has none); three more lie off St Methick’s Point. But the greatest number, arranged in neat formation, lie off Killigrew land, a cluster of eight off Arwenack Manor.
Burghley’s own handwriting has been identified on his map of Falmouth Haven and it is easy to imagine him during the dangerous years of the late sixteenth century, surveying his atlas and pausing to scrutinise Folio 9. He would have ignored the Killigrews’ display of standard-waving from Pendennis Castle, seeing it for the sham it was, likewise the bellicose men-of-war. But he would have noticed, too, that anonymous group off Arwenack, their pack-like poise and confidence, and been reminded of the renegade threat of privateering.
Their rig is identical. Three masts, two bare yards on the fore and main, and a spar aft on the mizzen. A bumpkin juts from a high transom stern. The images are too small to see what guns they carry – typically a clutch of sakers, minions and falconets. They are not big, perhaps fifty or sixty tons burden, easily affordable for a private syndicate – but in the history of ship design they represented the most efficient vessels that had ever sailed.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sailing ships had evolved more quickly than in the previous 5,000 years. Such was their success that they remained essentially unchanged for the next 200 or 300 years, until the coming of steam and ironclads began to make them obsolete. With only a little hyperbole, the maritime historian Alan McGowan equates the development of this type of rig with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel.
The standard sailing ship in most of Europe had, until well into the Middle Ages, tended to use a large, single sail, a very powerful driving force if the wind was steady, and moderate, and blowing from behind, or at least aft of the beam. Such a rig was pretty useless to windward and gave little scope for varying sail area in light airs or as the breeze freshened. So auxiliary sails were added – a maintop above the maincourse and ahead of them a foretop and forecourse. In time a spritsail appeared in the bows and lateen sails were set aft – which enabled the ship to manoeuvre through the wind with an ease never known before. A fourth mast and bonnets were sometimes added. Over time, sails grew upwards – top-gallants, royals and skysails – while the headsails pushed forward, out along the bowsprit. Staysails filled the gaps ahead of and between the masts while, eventually, studding-sails stretched far out over the sides.
From the Bayeux Tapestry.
As to the hulls of northern European ships, they had tended to be clinker-built. The strength lay in the overlapping boards; an inner frame was added later, towards launching. When demands on ships grew, and voyages became longer and the risks from hostile ships increased (or rather, in the case of English privateers, the rewards from being hostile oneself), an alternative construction became popular, spreading from Spain and Portugal. Carvel building placed the boards of the hull flush against one another and relied for firmness and shape on an inner frame of ribs and crosspieces. (It is possible that, in Cornwall and Brittany, carvel construction had always been practised; the Veneti were reported to have used such ships against the Romans.)
Carvel building also helped solve one of the greatest problems of sixteenth-century fighting ships: how to mount heavy guns on board in a way that would be efficient in battle and not compromise seaworthiness. Having one large gun to fire from the bows suited the Venetians with their great galleys but in the waters of northern Europe, despite many attempts, galleys never really worked. Although bow-mounted guns and stern-chasers were fixed well into the seventeenth century, it was the broadside arrangement that decided the outcome of countless battles. The carvel structure allowed ports to be cut in the ship’s sides without undermining their strength; in England, developments in iron-founding swept aside the constraints of expensive bronze barrels. Arming a ship, to the alarm of men like Burghley, became possible not only for the Crown but for privateers such as those of the Killigrews.
For want of a better model, early tactics at sea had followed the orthodoxies of land battle. The Spanish in particular took on board a military mentality based on strict rank, fortresses and close combat. They built ships with ever more elaborate upperworks. Soldiers would assemble for attack high in the floating arcades while sailors, with the status of water-carriers, performed their strange business with canvas and cordage. European kings were slow to see the strategic value of smaller, free-ranging fleets, preferring the ships they built to reflect their own magnificence. The Swedish king built the 230-foot Elefant. James IV of Scotland went one foot bigger with the Great Michael, which encouraged Henry VIII to join in and build the Henry Grace à Dieu. When he sailed to meet Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the gilded sails glowed like the morning sky. Francis I himself took royal hubris further with the Grand François: a crew of 2,000, an onboard windmill, tennis court and chapel. Before even reaching the open sea, the Grand François was wrecked.
The success of English ships from the 1570s onwards stemmed in large part from leaving behind land-based hierarchies and abiding by the laws of the sea. Ventures were plotted in small harbours, in shoreside manors like Arwenack, not in court. Ships were self-contained, small-scale units of enterprise and power, and in Elizabethan England their design developed accordingly, producing compact and agile craft. Far from shore, and in the capricious hands of wind and waves, the spirit on board was more egalitarian than anywhere on land. ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner,’ declared Drake on his circumnavigation, having just executed the troublesome courtier Doughty.
Even now, though, it is hard to glean very much about sixteenth-century ship design. The preserved boards of the Mary Rose are among the few actual relics. Otherwise there are only chance images – tapestries in Portugal, paintings in the Alhambra, the seal of Louis de Bourbon, Henry VI’s psalter, chest designs, or manuscripts like that of Anthony Anthony or Burghley’s folio of Falmouth Haven. From these sources, a vague outline of development can be traced. Masts grow in number along the deck, yards sprout from them. A bow-rigged flagstaff in one period has mutated into a spritsail in the next. Sometimes a ship will be shown with an experimental spar, which then disappears like some redundant limb. Rarely has the growth of a technology so closely mirrored biological evolution.
The vessels themselves have long since vanished, wrecked or destroyed by fire, or after countless gravings and rebuildings and re-riggings, the cutting down of decks, stripped of all blocks and fittings, then taken up some muddy creek to settle slowly back to nature, their timbers broken down by the drilling shell of shipworms. Like some race of aquatic dinosaurs, Tudor ships have been reassembled from the faintest of traces. But in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge is a set of papers that gives the only detailed glimpse of the process and thinking behind their construction, and of this decisive moment in man’s relationship with the sea.
CHAPTER 5
Storm-clouds press down dark and close above the Fens. I scuttle across Magdalene’s quads just as the first patter of rain rises to a crescendo. It is the day after seeing the Burghley Map, and now in the upper room of the Pepys Library, with the same thrill of expectation, and to the sound of approaching thunder, I lay out another ancient volume, between another pair of pasteboard covers.