Chapter VIII: Seventeenth-Century Seafaring

Few people realise that the trade routes of the world are the lanes along which history is constrained to flow. It is a fascinating study, but we have little enough room to develop the subject here. The success of Prince Henry the Navigator’s influence, the achievement of Vasco da Gama, completely revolutionised the trade routes of the world, transformed the European mercantile system, made the gate of commerce not Venice but Lisbon, transferred the centre of progress from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic; and the discovery of America accentuated this new condition still further.

What followed? First, the Dutch, having built up a shipping industry, so to speak, on the backbone of the herring, were able to get the trade of distributing these goods from Lisbon to the north European countries. This, in turn, caused competition on the part of the English, who were not intending to be left out of the new fortune. Secondly, the Dutch and English began themselves to voyage to the East. And thirdly, the discovery of the rich possibilities of the East and West not merely made the Mediterranean commercially of little future account, but gave to the nations of the European Atlantic coasts an impetus to progress and a reason for strife which had never yet occurred. The history of the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries is confined to the struggle for the dominion of the seas—that is, maritime commercial supremacy, caused by the flow of trade taking a new route. The wars with the Dutch, the French and the Spanish were at heart the struggle for possession of overseas commerce, and the recent war with Germany was animated by the same cause.

It is impossible to emphasise this trade route influence too much, for without a clear appreciation of its place in history the sequence of events becomes meaningless, and the rise and development of the Mercantile Marine seem arbitrary. Prince Henry the Navigator started a wonderful sea contest, and it has never stopped during the ensuing centuries. As soon as one keen competitor drops out, another comes in to keep up the running. That has been the impelling influence in the history of the English Mercantile Marine. When Spain falls out, the Dutch take her place. When they cease to be competitors, the French become the pacemakers, to be followed by the Germans; and now that the latter have disappeared almost entirely from the sea, the United States ships of commerce will maintain this ancient contest. And so it will go on, unless air routes cause another revolution in the transport of merchandise, and give another sudden twist to the flow of history.

The seventeenth century, then, saw a wonderful incentive to the English Merchant Navy just because the East was calling. And, as a result of this, there followed in due succession the creation of the East India Company, the wonderful and famous East Indiamen built chiefly at Blackwall; then, after the long monopoly came to an end, the famous Blackwall sailing ships of the Wigrams and Greens, the historic clippers, and finally the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. From the year 1582 for the next three hundred years from Blackwall, on the River Thames, sailing ships year after year made their way to the Orient, and it is to my mind one of the most remarkable continuities in the history of human things. It is certainly one of the most, if not the most, critical of periods in the development of the commercial marine. What Portsmouth has been to the British Navy, the village of Blackwall has been to the British Mercantile Marine. From the Blackwall yard were launched hundreds of East Indiamen; from here came improved and novel designs for the sailing ships that were to win and retain against all competitors commercial supremacy at sea for the British nation. But for these craft the trend of English history, of the world’s history, would be entirely different.

There would have been neither the cause nor the means of a powerful navy; nor of Colonial expansion; nor would the position which Britain possesses financially have been possible. I am omitting intentionally for the present the development of the American trade, for that came later. It was the Eastern overseas trade in the merchant ships of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which was responsible for an enormous part of the national wealth, many of our costliest buildings and institutions, the founding of illustrious families, and indirectly the awakening of Japan. All this dates back to Prince Henry and Vasco da Gama—to the finding of a sea route to the East.

It was in April 1582 that the first ship left for the East—when the _Edward Bonaventure_ sailed from Blackwall, joined the flagship _Leicester_ at Southampton, and, four weeks out from the London river, accompanied the two other ships. They made a futile attempt to reach India west about, and because the Spanish Fleet were in the neighbourhood of the Magellan Straits, had to return to England. In 1595 Holland sent four ships round the Cape of Good Hope, and two years later the expedition came back, after making a treaty with the King of Bantam and thus opening up the Indian archipelago. In 1599 a number of merchants in London petitioned Elizabeth for permission to have a monopoly to trade with the East Indies, and on the last day of the following year this privilege was granted for fifteen years, and thus the first East India Company began.

A small squadron of ships left the Thames in 1601 with iron, lead, tin and presents for the Indian princes, doubled the Cape of Good Hope on November 1, and reached Sumatra on June 5, 1602. By September 11, 1603, the flagship _Red Dragon_ anchored in the Downs, after a most successful voyage, bringing home 1,030,000 lbs. of pepper in the four ships. And thus the beginning of Anglo-Indian commerce started so profitably that matters went ahead. The monopoly was extended and prolonged, until as a fact it was not abrogated until 1833. Expedition after expedition was sent out, until it became the normal routine; the ships of the East India Company were a kind of bridge between the Thames and the Orient. The Merchant Navy was thus on the way to becoming something different from the fighting service, though it was not until many years had passed, not until wars had ceased, privateers and pirates had ended their activities, that the former could afford to give up mounting guns and carrying gunners. Nineteenth century peace thus gave a basis for separating the two types of ships and the two kinds of personnel; and thereafter the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine developed on divergent lines. But, up to that stage, the East Indiaman differed little enough from many of her contemporary men-of-war. Although formally the separation came earlier, it is from after 1815 that the real separation takes place, and the amalgamation never occurred again for a hundred years, when, temporarily, the ships and men of the Merchant Service came to join up with the Royal Navy as fighting units during the Great War.

We need not follow in detail the events of the great East India Company’s rule—by far the most extraordinary monopoly which Europe has ever had with an overseas country. It is important, however, to note the effect of this in stimulating shipping affairs. The Dutch and English began to improve their ships as well they might for so long an ocean voyage. As to the former, the picture galleries in such places as Middelburg, and Rotterdam, and Amsterdam show what truly magnificent craft they were, with their t’gallant sails, high poops, stern galleries and ornate decoration. They were the embodiment of wealth. In the first decade of the seventeenth century there was built in England the _Trades Increase_, for the English Company’s Indian trade. She was of about 1100 tons burthen, and was the biggest merchant ship which had ever been built in this country. But she was really too big for the knowledge of naval architecture then existing. Clumsy, unwieldy and top-heavy, she got out to the East, but at Bantam, whilst she was being careened to have her sheathing examined, she fell over on to her side and became a total loss, the date being 1613.

Nevertheless, shipbuilding did receive a great stimulus, and this growing interest caused the formation of the Shipwrights Company, its incorporation taking place in 1612; Phineas Pett, whose family for two hundred years had been the greatest English naval architects, becoming its first master. By this date of 1612 the yard at Blackwall, which was to be during the next two and a half centuries so famous, was already well established, and twenty years later almshouses were established at Poplar for invalided petty officers of the East India Company’s ships.

For when we think of the Merchant Service in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is almost exclusively of the East Indiamen. It begins gradually, and becomes more important as time goes on and the grip on the East gets tighter. The great port was London, for it was not until the opening up of the trade with America in 1756 that Liverpool began in any way to compete as a great shipping centre, though actually it was not until 1815 that the Lancashire port made great strides. Nevertheless we must not get a false impression. The Tudor awakening had created comparatively few big ships, and even in 1615 there were only ten craft of more than 200 tons burthen belonging to the Port of London. Still, it was the eve of brilliant developments, the like of which the world had never before known. Though they could not have foreseen it, the Blackwall shipwrights were preparing the way for the coming of the most perfect sailing ships which the world has ever seen, or probably ever will see—the clippers of the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1661 Pepys goes by barge to the Blackwall yard to see the new wet dock, the largest in England, and the “brave new merchantman _Royal Oake_,” which was nearly ready for launching. In the following year Evelyn refers to accompanying the Duke of York to an East India vessel at Blackwall, and going aboard her where they drank punch and “canary that had been carried to and brought from the Indies, which was indeed incomparably good.”

But before the East India Company had offices in the Blackwall yard and superintended the building of its ships, they had a yard of their own at Deptford. This dates from the year 1607, where they soon found employment for five hundred carpenters, caulkers, joiners, and others. Here there existed a wonderful organisation; large stocks of timber, masts, yards, canvas, and other stores. There were such officials as the ship’s husband, the clerk of the stores, the buyers, the clerk of the yard, the master shipwright, the master pilot (who had to survey the ships both here and at Blackwall), the boatswain-general, treasurers, purser-general, the clerk of the cordage, the surgeon-general, clerk of the slaughter-house (to look after the victuals), and so on. It was a hive of great activity, and by the year 1621 they had built so many ships that the company owned 10,000 tons of shipping. They had exported from England in their vessels £319,211 worth of woollen goods, lead, iron, tin and other commodities, and had brought home from the East £875,288 worth of cargoes, which were sold in England for the immense sum of £2,044,600. The average profit made by the first twelve voyages amounted to not less than 138 per cent.

But after leasing the Deptford yard for twenty years, it was found to be so costly that it swallowed up too much of the capital, which could be employed more profitably in hiring ships. Therefore the Blackwall yard became responsible for the building of practically all the East Indiamen. The company went on from prosperity to wealth. In 1681 they owned thirty-five ships of from 100 to 775 tons, and two years later a £100 share would sell for £500. In 1667 was imported the first cargo of tea, which in the nineteenth century was to be the means of bringing into existence those wonderful tea-clippers.

And now let us see something of the kind of existence which the merchant sailor led during the seventeenth century. He and his mode of life were regarded by the landsman as something strange, something abnormal. Contrariwise, the sailor realised that his art was almost beyond the landsman’s comprehension. That spirit, even in this twentieth century, is anything but dead, and between the two avocations there must always exist a big gulf. But we have to remember that in the seventeenth century seafaring was still such a modern and rare career (though yearly increasing in popularity) that he who made a profession of it was an unusual being. “The sea language,” wrote the seventeenth-century Sir William Monson in his _Naval Tracts_, “is not soon learned, much less understood ... a boisterous sea and stormy weather will make a man not bred on it so sick, that it bereaves him of legs and stomach and courage ... when he hears the seamen cry starboard, or port, or to bide alooff, or flat a sheet, or haul home a cluling, he thinks he hears a barbarous speech, which he conceives not the meaning of.”

Similarly John Lyly, the dramatist who died in 1606, in his _Gallathea_, gives a dialogue between a mariner and three sons of a miller in which this difference is indicated. The landsmen will never go to sea again, for the bread is hard and the meat salt, and the mariner is pitied for being “pinned in a few boards, and ... within an inch of a thing bottomless.” The mariner, however, rather delights in showing his superiority over them. “I can shift the moon and the sun,” he exclaims, “... the lodestone that always holdeth his nose to the North, the two and thirty points for the wind, the wonders I see—would make you blind. You be but boys. I fear the sea no more than a dish of water.” He then tries to teach them the points of the compass, but they cannot learn them. “O dullard,” he remarks in disgust, “is thy head lighter than the wind, and thy tongue so heavy it will not wag?”

Richard Braithwait, who wrote during the seventeenth century, published in 1631, in his _Whimzies_, an essay on the contemporary sailor, whom he admires for his pluck, disregard of danger and for his hardihood. He looks upon him as a desperate, hearty good-natured fellow of dissolute habits when ashore. “The bredth of an inch-boord is betwixt him and drowning, yet hee swears and drinks as deeply as if hee were a fathom from it.... Hee is most constant to his shirt, and other his seldome wash’d linnen.... What a starveling hee is in a frosty morning, with his Sea frocke, which seems as it were shrunke from him, and growne too short, but it will be long enough ere hee get another.”

The English writer Sir Thomas Overbury, who was arrested and confined in the Tower, and died in 1613, has left behind a study of the character of the sailor at this time. He wittily describes him as “a pitched piece of reason, caulked and tackled, and only studied to dispute with tempests.... A fair wind is the substance of his creed, and fresh water the burden of his prayers.... In a storm ’tis disputable whether the noise be more his or the elements’, and which will first leave scolding.... His language is a new confusion, and all his thoughts new nations. His body and his ship are both one burden. Nor is it known who stows most wine, or rolls most—only the ship is guided.”

The references to life at sea in the seventeenth-century merchantmen are not many, but here and there one comes across mention of some ship or experience. Pepys, whilst sailing down the Thames estuary on Sunday, April 8, 1660, writes in his diary: “We had a brave wind all the afternoon, and overtook two merchantmen that overtook us yesterday, going to the East Indies.” But there are two interesting passages in English literature which show that going to sea in the ships of this period was a terrible business. The first is found in the autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an English historian and diplomatist, who describes his experience of crossing the English Channel in a French ship in the year 1609. The second is taken from Jonathan Swift’s famous _Gulliver’s Travels_. There is no need to ask why fiction should be dragged into history; for Swift borrowed this descriptive account of an East Indiaman in a storm almost word for word from James Love’s _The Mariner’s Jewel_, and it gives us a glimpse into the seafaring of the beginning of the eighteenth century that bears the stamp of authenticity. And it is such peeps into the past that are so invaluable to us in reconstructing the life led by the rough seaman at this time, who was learning by his mistakes, risking much by his ignorance, but doing so much for the great Merchant Service that was to spread all over the world.

Herbert, together with Sir Thomas Lucy returning from France, took ship from Dieppe early in February and spent the night in the Channel during a gale of wind. “The master of our ship,” he wrote, “lost both the use of his compass and his reason. For, not knowing whither he was carried by the tempest, all the help he had was by the lightnings, which, together with thunder very frequently that night, terrified him, yet gave the advantage sometimes to discover whether we were upon our coast to which he thought, by the course of his glasses, we were near approached.” That is to say, the master was anxious about his dead reckoning, which was kept by guessing the distance run every hour. The time was kept by means of hourly and half-hourly glasses from Elizabethan times even to the eighteenth century aboard ship, according to the number of times the sand ran through.

Towards daylight the ship sighted Dover and the master made for it. Here the local seafarers were in great numbers by the shore on the look-out for wreckage, for the gale had blown down their own barns and trees. But the French skipper was either a very bad seaman, or his ship was extremely unhandy, for the craft went smack up against Dover pier and split, whereupon the Frenchman cheerfully announced: “Mes amis, nous sommes perdus.” Herbert, though in the toils of sea-sickness, then emerged from his cabin, climbed part of the way up the mast and waved his sword for help. A local six-oared boat then came off, into which Herbert was the first to enter. Lucy was half dead with sea-sickness, but was lifted from the cabin to the boat, and thus they were saved. Other boats rowed off the rest of the men and the horses. The ship, concluded Herbert, “was wholly split and cast away, insomuch that in pity to the master, Sir Thomas Lucy and myself gave thirty pounds towards his loss, which yet was not so great as we thought, since the tide now ebbing, he recovered the broken parts of his ship.”

Dean Swift, in _Gulliver’s Travels_, refers to the ship _Adventure_ riding in the Downs at the end of June 1702. She was commanded by Captain John Nicholas, a Cornishman, and bound for Surat. At the Cape of Good Hope they landed for fresh water, but other reasons detained them until the end of March. A good passage was then made till north of Madagascar, when bad weather was encountered. The spritsail (the square-sail set on a small mast at the end of the bowsprit) was therefore taken in, the mizzen was handed, and the guns secured. Rather than heave-to, the captain decided to run before the wind—“spooning” is the technical expression—the foresail was reefed, the fore-sheet hauled aft, the helm put hard aweather, and “the ship wore bravely.” But the foresail became split, and the yard was hauled down. “It was a very fierce storm; the sea broke strange and dangerous. We hauled off upon the lanyard of the whip-staff, and helped the man at helm.” For there was no steering wheel in use yet, and this was not introduced until about fifty years later. The tiller from the rudder was controlled by a vertical bar or lever, called a “whip-staff,” and the lanyards would naturally enough be used, as it is employed to this day for assisting the helm of sailing yachts.

After scudding before the storm, the weather at last eased up. Then the ship set her foresail and mainsail and hove-to, and finally set the mizzen, main-topsail and fore-topsail, and with the wind S.W. ran a course E.N.E. Then they “got the starboard tacks aboard” and headed S.S.E. “We cast off our weather braces and lifts. We set in the lee braces and hauled forward by the weather bowlines and hauled them tight and belayed them, and hauled over the mizzen tack to windward and kept her full-and-by as near as she could lie.” That is to say, the ship was now trimmed to sail on a wind, the bowlines, which were connected by bridles to the leech of the sail, being used to keep the weather edge well hauled out tight, to make the canvas set properly. The mizzen, of course, was still a triangular, fore and aft sail. Finally on June 3, 1703, a boy on the topmast sighted land.

It is a little difficult in this highly specialised twentieth century to appreciate the slight difference which existed between a merchant ship and a man-of-war. Between the men of the Merchant Service and those of the Navy there was thus little to choose. From the Elizabethan days most merchant ships of any size had to be armed for their own defence. Moreover the merchantman was as much privateer or pirate as he was freighter. He had to be a fighting man, whatever else he might be. Thus there was always at hand a reserve of crews which could be “imprest” into the Navy. During the first quarter of the seventeenth century the merchants were paying their crews thirty shillings a month, whilst the men in the Royal ships were receiving less than half this amount. The result was that for a time the merchant ships attracted the best seamen.

It was from the Merchant Service that some of the most distinguished officers of the Royal Navy graduated. Admiral Benbow, for instance, had been an apprentice in the Merchant Service, and was eventually given command of a naval ship such as was usually given to a lieutenant. He was promoted later to captain and to flag rank. This caused jealousy and bad feeling, and the reader will remember that this Admiral, when attacking the enemy in 1702 in the West Indies, was basely deserted by some of his captains, but he carried on a running fight almost single-handed for five days.

Other names could be mentioned, too. Neither masters nor mates were exempt from being impressed; and these rough, daring merchantmen, who fought as hard as they drank, who despised the enemy as heartily as they despised cowardice, were the very life-blood of the nation that was growing up to prosperous adolescence. England was just realising what was the meaning of the word sea. As Francis Bacon wrote in his essay: “To be master of the sea is an abridgment of a monarchy.... Surely, at this day, with us of Europe, the vantage of strength at sea (which is one of the principal dowries of this kingdom of Great Britain) is great; both because most of the kingdoms of Europe are not merely inland, but girt with the sea most part of their compass; and because the wealth of both Indies seems in great part but an accessory to the command of the seas.”

It takes time for a nation to appreciate all that maritime progress connotes. We in this twentieth century have seen that it required the Great European War to enable the United States to realise this, and the present American mercantile shipping activity and development are the practical results of this appreciation. The Merchant Navy to a country is the basis on which her fighting Navy is built. It is the avenue along which her commerce must flow out and home.