The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden
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3,000 books. Among the large number concerning maritime history was a series of loose folios which he had bound into a volume, naming it Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry. They include the country’s earliest record of paper plans for building ships. Looking at them, you can sense the process of experimentation, with the dividers’ prick-marks still visible, and the arcane grids of hull curves framed with marginal calculations. Other folios place the art of shipbuilding in a much wider context. Included by Pepys is a painted image of Noah’s Ark – ‘Noah did according unto all that God commanded him even so did he make thee an arke of pine trees …’ Another page has jottings about Jason’s voyage to Colchis, and the invention of ships in the Hellespont. The overall impression is less of an inquiry into a practical problem than a quest to rediscover some lost secret – closer to the spirit of the Renaissance than the Enlightenment.
The papers are attributed to Matthew Baker, greatest of Elizabethan shipwrights. Baker was the first to leave a record of the abstraction of hull design into numerical proportions, the first to have a ship built from his blueprints (the private warship Galleon). It was he who built the Revenge, Drake’s flagship in 1588, from whose decks Grenville later fought the most famous rearguard action in English history. Martin Frobisher’s three Baffin Island expeditions used Baker’s ships. In his Seaman’s Secrets John Davis said that as a shipwright Baker ‘hath not in any nation his equall’. To many of his contemporaries, Baker’s craft put him on a par with Vitruvius and Dürer.
Among his bound papers in the Pepys Library is what is believed to be a self-portrait. Baker is shown standing at his plan table which is spread with instruments of drawing and mensuration. He holds a pair of dividers and is marching them over the drawing of a hull. The dividers are exaggerated, some three feet high, and there is something faintly comic about the image. Though Baker’s head is bent in earnest concentration, his left leg is kicked up behind him, giving the impression that he is skipping as he works.
It is Baker who is credited with the design that revolutionised English shipping. Rejecting the cumbersome, castellated upperworks that compromised ships’ seaworthiness, he helped develop a much lower, sleeker form, recognisable in the shapes of those on the Burghley Map lying off Arwenack Manor. Initial resistance to the new hull shape came, it seems, from Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley (as well as possibly from John Hawkins, the Navy’s treasurer to whom, paradoxically, Baker’s innovation is often attributed). Baker had a battle to fight in gaining approval for his revolutionary design, a battle that produced the most unusual image in his collection.
Baker has used a fish. He has transposed the profile of an Atlantic cod below the waterline of his ship. The curve of the fish’s belly gives the distinctive ‘crescent’ shape to the keel. The long upward slope towards the tail represents the pinching of the floor that produces the sharp and narrow after-keel section. (The convention of good ship design was long framed in the expression ‘cod’s head and mackerel tail’, which persisted for yachts right up to the 1960s, when the convention was suddenly reversed, the sleek tail in the bows, and the bulk of the beam aft.)
Baker’s cod is not an exact fit, the cod’s distinctive fat lips stick through the stem while the flukes of the tail do not correspond to very much. But that makes its use more interesting. Clearly, the cod was persuasive.
From Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry.
Such animism has always been a part of seafaring. So much is unknown, so much goes on unseen beneath the surface, and such are the uncertainties and risks of being on the water that pure reason rarely survives very far from the shore. A certain imitative instinct is in the name of the high-bowed West Country boat, the balinger (balaena – Latin for ‘whale’). Likewise, the forces of the sea should be absorbed rather than resisted. It was believed that a ship that flexed with the water was a good one, and there were instances of pirates who removed some of the ship’s frames to make it even more flexible. Whatever the exact thinking behind Baker’s cod, it represented an alternative to building ships like castles, a recognition that the best way to prosper away from land was not by transposing terrestrial forms but by realising that the sea operates by its own set of rules.
In 1588, when Elizabeth’s fleet (made up in large part of privately owned craft) at last engaged with the Spanish Armada, observers said that the English ships could tack six times to the Spanish galleons’ one. The clash was one of diverging maritime cultures, the apostate newcomer against the lords of the old order, the English in their nimble, cod-bellied ships manned by freebooting mariners, against the great floating fortresses of papal Spain.
More than a generation later, Thomas Fuller wrote about the verbal sparring of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The skit gives a sense of how much ship design had entered the thinking of the age:
Many were the wit-combats between [Shakespeare] and Ben Jonson: which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Mister Jonson like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.
During the late 1560s and the 1570s, when Matthew Baker was at work, something of a watery revolution was taking place. Until then, English mariners had lagged far behind their European counterparts. They were coast-bound, ill-equipped, ignorant and unambitious. The Navy consisted of no more than a couple of dozen serviceable ships. Navigation charts were imported from Lisbon. In 1568, months after the completion of Arwenack Manor, it was said that only one Englishman was capable of sailing a ship to the West Indies without a foreign pilot. Yet within ten years Francis Drake was sailing around the globe. Another decade on, the Venetian ambassador to France wrote that the English were, ‘above all Western nations, expert and active in all naval operations, and great sea dogs’.
Like all such revolutions, this one was a result of the coincidence of means and motivation. As ships became more efficient and more affordable, so there was a rush to use them, not only for plunder in the Channel, but for more distant ventures. Riches were one incentive; the glittering promise of El Dorado, the bullion-filled holds of the Spanish Flota or the route to Cathay drove many an oceanic crossing. But there were others, equally persuasive: patriotism, curiosity and sheer restlessness.
The work of Richard Hakluyt reveals the questing spirit of the times. So shamed was he by the French view of the stay-at-home English and their ‘sluggish security’ that he began to collate records of English overseas adventures. Hakluyt’s own epiphany took place right at the beginning of this period, in the late 1560s, with a visit to his cousin’s office in the Middle Temple. Lying open on the table were an atlas and several books of cosmography. As he watched, his cousin took up a staff and guided the young Richard through the atlas, pointing ‘to all the knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bayes, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes and Territories’. With each wand-struck feature, each tapped length of coastline, each sweep of open ocean, Hakluyt grew more excited. His cousin then reached for the Bible, flicking through its pages to the oft-quoted verses 23 and 24 in Psalm 107: ‘They that go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep …’
Hakluyt did not go to sea himself but spent the rest of his life gathering accounts of those who had. The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation was published some years after the Middle Temple meeting, and opens with an account of King Arthur (taken from the pseudo-Zeni document): ‘This kingdom was too little for him, and his mind was not contented with it. He therefore valiantly subdued Scandinavia.’ There then follows a long list of all the other territories that Arthur valiantly subdued.
After the first volume, Hakluyt added another two, and a further million words of stirring quests and sea battles. By the time of his death, ten more volumes had been produced while his unpublished papers were edited and added to by Samuel Purchas in twenty further volumes. Since 1846, the Hakluyt Society has published two volumes of voyages every year. It would be impossible to assess the legacy of that encounter in the Middle Temple during the reign of Elizabeth I – the contagion that spread