The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The Dutch predisposition to maritime trade was a consequence of the paucity of natural resources at home. Living in the delta of some of northwest Europe’s largest rivers, the Dutch were surrounded on three sides by salt-and freshwater from which they had to protect themselves by “a heavy yearly expenditure for dykes, sluices, mill-races, windmills and polders.” Farming was possible, but in itself could not pay for these improvements. “Wherefore the inhabitants,” in the words of a 1543 petition from the Dutch provinces to Charles, “must maintain themselves by handicrafts and trades, in such wise that they fetch raw materials from foreign lands and re-export the finished products, including diverse sorts of cloth and draperies, to many places, such as the kingdoms of Spain, Portugal, Germany, Scotland and especially to Denmark, the Baltic, Norway, and other like regions, whence they return with goods and merchandise from those parts, notably wheat and other grains.” The Hanseatic merchants had guarded their control of the Baltic jealously, but by the end of the fifteenth century a majority of ships sailing through the Øresund were Dutch. Even though ice closed the Baltic to navigation for five months of the year, a thousand grain ships sailed from Gdansk to the Netherlands in 1471, and twice that number left the port a century later. By then, most Dutch ships still sailed north in ballast or with cargoes of low-value Iberian salt for the fisheries, the backbone of the Dutch domestic economy.

  The Baltic trade provided not only for foodstuffs and luxuries like Russian furs, it was also vital for the Dutch shipbuilding industry, which imported virtually all its naval stores: wood, tar, iron for fastenings, hemp for rigging, and flax for sails. Reliant as they were on maritime trade, the Dutch developed highly sophisticated commercial and shipbuilding practices. They adopted wind-powered sawmills, compensated for the use of inferior wood with superior fabrication, and built ships of distinct design for different trades. Until the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule (1568–1648), few individuals in the Netherlands could afford to build ships on their own. As a result, the Dutch developed the practice of dividing the investment in ships into as many as sixty-four shares. This meant that many more people from all walks of life were invested in maritime commerce than elsewhere. To this system of apportioning risk and spreading wealth the Dutch married the development of the fluit, the most efficient merchantman of the day. Measuring four to five hundred gross tons with a length-to-beam ratio of about five or six to one, fluits are often described as floating boxes, with a sharp turn of the bilge, sharp stem and sternposts, and sterns that tapered sharply upward. They carried more sails of smaller size—usually square sails on the fore and main and a lateen mizzen—and because fewer hands were needed to take in sail, they had smaller crews. Although fluits were generally slow, most carried no armament, and for protection they sailed in convoys guarded by purpose-built warships.

  Unlike his Burgundian father, Charles I, the Spanish-born Philip II tried to curb the privileges long enjoyed by the Dutch; to root out Calvinists, whose numbers were growing especially in the northern provinces; and to impose stiff taxes on merchants. The final breach came in 1568, the start of the Eighty Years’ War, which ended with the independence of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces—the modern Netherlands. Antwerp was an early casualty in the struggle, and after its capture by the Spanish the population fell by more than half. Amsterdam welcomed the exodus of southern commercial expertise and capital and quickly became a warehouse for an almost infinite variety of products: wine, fruit, and sugar from southern Europe; Asian pepper, spices, and silks; American silver; and, encroaching on the English and Hanse trade in northern luxuries, Russian furs, leather, wax, and caviar, the last of which moved north via river from the Caspian to the White Sea.

  Penetration and Expansion in Russia

  In June 1553, three English ships sailed for the White Sea. Despite an underlying desire to find a Northeast Passage to China, their primary interest was to find new markets for English woolens. The crews of two ships froze to death on the coast of Lapland, but Richard Chancellor reached the Northern Dvina River and from there traveled to the court of Ivan IV, “the Terrible,” at Moscow, more than a thousand kilometers to the south. Though “robbed homewards by Flemings,” he gave a favorable report of his mission, which established cordial relations between the czar and Mary I and promised to give the English a firm hold on the Russian fur trade. In the sixteenth century, Russia referred chiefly to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, centered on Moscow, about 750 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Although situated in “the Russian Mesopotamia” from which flowed the Volga, Western Dvina, Dnieper, Don, and Northern Dvina Rivers, Russia had only one saltwater outlet, on the White Sea. This remote, subarctic coast was not obviously conducive to long-distance trade, but its commercial potential was recognized by London merchants of the Muscovy Company and later still by the Dutch.

  Seal die of the English Muscovy Company, 1555. The world’s first joint-stock company was established with the aim of opening trade to northern Russia, which at the time had no other outlet to the sea. The English exported textiles in exchange principally for fur. Courtesy of the British Museum.

  Chartered with a monopoly of the Russian trade and all lands “northwards, north-eastwards or north-westwards” not previously known to or visited by English traders, the Muscovy (or Russia) Company was the world’s first joint-stock company in which people could freely buy and sell shares and receive dividends on their investments while leaving the direction of the company’s day-to-day affairs in the hands of management. As in a partnership, shareholders were liable for all company debts, but this was limited to the size of an individual’s investment, a fundamental principle for all publicly traded companies. This structure became the model for the Levant Company (1581), East India Company (1600), and the Dutch East India Company (1602). Muscovy Company merchants led the way north for forty years before Dutch traders eased the English off their perch in the early 1600s thanks to their access to a more diverse selection of goods. Although Russian merchants did not enter the sea trade in any numbers, Ivan established a port at Archangel, Russia’s only saltwater port from 1584 until the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703.

  Hemmed in on the west by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland, and to the south by Cossacks and the khanate of Crimea, Muscovy turned to the east. Ivan the Terrible, who assumed the title “Ruler of all Russia,” defeated the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates to gain access to the lower Volga and Caspian. Ivan also oversaw Russia’s advance across the Ural Mountains into Siberia, an effort that would push the empire’s eastern border to the Pacific by the 1630s. This expansion was initiated by a renegade Cossack named Yermak who, “being famed for attacking ships on the Caspian sea and on the Volga together with many free warriors, even plundering the royal treasure,” invaded the Sibir khanate via river and portage from the Volga to the Irtysh and ultimately the Ob River between 1579 and 1584. Yermak’s men used flat-bottomed riverboats called doshchaniks, powered by a single square sail and up to twenty oars. These had a capacity of 35 to 150 tons and a maximum length of about thirty-eight meters. The double-ended strug measured between six and eighteen meters long.

  Progress across Siberia continued at a brisk pace as merchants searched for furs, and tsars issued charters for rights to territories from which, as a deed of 1558 puts it, “no kind of dues have come … to my [Ivan’s] royal treasury, and this land has not been given to anyone and has not been entered in anyone’s name in registers, deeds of sale or legal documents.” This was nothing more than a Russian rendering of the doctrine later known as terra nullius, literally “no one’s land,” the conceit being that land not in productive use—that is, untaxed—did not belong to its inhabitants, and that nation-states were free to take title and impose their laws on its people. Walter Raleigh invoked the same imagery in giving the name Virginia (which also honored Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen) to the undefined territory of North America to which he sent an expedition in 1584. He was more explicit still in his promotion of th
e settlement of Guiana, which he described as “a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance.” This constituted a more sophisticated rationale for colonization than the simple claim of discovery and symbolic taking of possession of land, but it only became a matter of diplomatic importance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Russians, Spanish, English, and Americans staked competing claims in the Nootka Sound area of North America.

  European Naval Administration and State Formation

  Western Europeans were able to consolidate and build on the pioneering accomplishments of Columbus, Gama, and others of their generation thanks to advances in naval organization, shipbuilding, and gunnery. But the transformation was slow and uneven. Until well into the 1500s, and later still in some countries, the primary purpose of maritime conflict was not to advance a nationalist agenda. Most violence at sea was essentially commercial, carried out by private individuals to further their own interests, and even the Venetian convoy system was organized with a view to protecting merchants against pirates as much as for protection against hostile actions by other states. Few people expected to conduct a voyage of any length without having to defend themselves against an aggressor. As one historian has put it, “For those who used the sea lines of communication in order to explore economic opportunities, efficient use of violence was one of several entrepreneurial skills which were necessary for profit.”

  Most rulers lacked the wherewithal to build or maintain standing navies. When monarchs ordered fleets to sea, they were generally made up of vessels and crews acquired on a temporary basis by ship musters, requisitioning, or chartering to supplement small warship squadrons built and maintained for the purpose. A hallmark of naval affairs in the sixteenth century was the development of state navies under central control and a gradual shift from private, commercial warfare to public, political warfare that presupposes conflict between two or more states with the material support of their respective citizens. States came to monopolize the use of violence at sea in what was to some degree a mutually reinforcing system: as states generated the revenues to build and manage standing fleets and the apparatus for efficient revenue collection, they increased their capacity to protect their citizens’ trade and to channel commerce in ways beneficial to themselves.

  At its most basic, naval administration is concerned with military operations and logistics—acquiring, repairing, and provisioning ships and crews—and sound finances and physical infrastructure are essential to the development of a permanent navy. (In this period and for several more centuries, prize courts for the adjudication of ships and cargos lawfully captured and the distribution of prize money raised from their sale were also integral to naval administration.) The most sophisticated European fleets of the time were those of the Venetians, the organization of which was substantially the same as in previous centuries, and the Ottomans, whose navy reached its peak during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. In the 1550s, there were more than 120 double slipways at the Imperial Arsenal in Pera on the Golden Horn, another thirty at Gallipoli, and a shipyard at Sinop on the Black Sea. Subsidiary fleets were stationed in the Aegean at Kavala, Lesbos, and Rhodes and at Alexandria and Suez in Egypt, while a smaller squadron at Mocha guarded the entrance to the Red Sea. There were also river squadrons on the Danube and Sava in the Balkans. Independent of this structure was the corsairing fleet at Algiers, which was not under obligation to fight for the Ottomans but which produced a number of the Ottomans’ best known officers, starting with Hayreddin “Barbarossa,” a native of Lesbos who with his older brother ruled Tunis and Algiers.

  Shipyard workers were grouped into various occupational corps: carpenters, oar makers, caulkers, ironsmiths, pulley makers, and so on. Galleys, which comprised the bulk of the fleet until the seventeenth century, were for the most part manned by crews levied in the provinces and who were, in the view of a Venetian diplomat at Istanbul, “very well treated and paid.” Although captives tended to form a high proportion of the crews in corsair fleets, including the Algerines and the Christian Knights of Malta, galley slaves and convicts comprised a smaller percentage of Ottoman than of Christian crews. In 1562, a Venetian official estimated that only thirty Ottoman galleys had any slaves in their crews. Nine years later, the year of the battle of Lepanto, convicts comprised 47 percent and slaves 10 percent of the crews of thirty Neapolitan galleys, and in 1584 convicts comprised 60 percent and slaves nearly 20 percent. One reason for the reliance on unfree crews was the adoption of a new style of rowing called a scaloccio. Instead of having one man per oar with three to five oars per bench in the alla sensile manner, a scaloccio put three to five rowers on each oar. A primary benefit of this arrangement was that skill counted for less than brute strength, and it was possible to have only one or two experienced rowers per oar, the others being employed solely for their muscle. A further benefit of relying on convicts was that their maintenance cost half that of free sailors.

  The only two western European states with standing navies were Portugal and England, and only Portuguese ships were deployed beyond European waters. Little is known of the administrative structure of the fleet, but the Portuguese were able to operate throughout the eastern hemisphere thanks to their access to bases of operation from Brazil to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Macau, some three hundred in all at one time or another, including Melaka, Hormuz, Mozambique Island, and especially Goa, and, in Brazil, Bahia. The latter two developed renowned shipyards whose vessels were fully the equal of those built in Portugal. Of course ships were fundamental to success, and Portuguese vessels tended to be bigger and more heavily armed than their contemporaries. As important, Portuguese shipwrights tailored the design of their ships to the work for which they were intended.

  The most important Portuguese ship types for the Carreira da India (the India run) were the merchant nau or carrack, the galleon, and the fleet caravel (caravela de armada). The last was an enlarged version of the caravela redonda used in the Portuguese exploration of Africa and Columbus’s transatlantic voyages. Of between 150 and 180 tons with two covered decks, fleet caravels were too small to carry cargo on long voyages, but they were well suited for service as escorts for the Indies voyage or for coast guard functions. Generally four-masted, they were square-rigged on the foremast and lateen-rigged on the other three and set a square spritsail forward. Beamier than its predecessors, to make it a steadier gun platform, the fleet caravel is regarded as “the first oceangoing sailing ship developed exclusively for war at sea by any European navy.” (Although some Venetian shipwrights were committing design concepts to paper by the fifteenth century, the first printed shipbuilding manual did not appear until 1587—published in Mexico City of all places—by which time the caravel was well past its heyday.) More than twice as big as fleet caravels, galleons developed around the middle of the century. The word “galleon” was applied to a variety of broadly similar vessels found from Venice to the Netherlands, but the Portuguese galleon was designed chiefly for naval duties. They were generally longer but narrower than naus and had lower forecastles, and they carried four masts with square sails on the fore and main and lateens on the mizzen and bonaventure mizzen, all of which made them faster and more maneuverable than naus.

  In northern Europe, the first country to attempt the creation of a state navy was England. Although Henry VII is notable for ordering the construction of a dry dock at Portsmouth, his successor, Henry VIII, was the first king in nearly a century to promote English naval ambition. Early on he ordered construction of the Mary Rose—launched in 1510, accidentally sunk in battle against the French in 1545, and raised from the seabed in 1982—and the monumental Henri Grace à Dieu of 1514. With its echoes of competition between the Hellenistic kings of antiquity, this early-sixteenth-century trend toward gigantism—shared by Denmark, France, and under James IV, Scotland—quickly gave way to smaller, mo
re compact galleons with better sailing qualities, stouter construction, and greater operational versatility. Yet the stability of the English naval establishment had its roots not in the ships per se, but in setting up facilities for naval stores and ship maintenance and the infrastructure to oversee them. The clerk of the king’s ships was an ancient office supported by the clerk controller and the keeper of the storehouses, most of which were on the Thames. Henry enlarged the naval bureaucracy in the 1540s with the appointment of a lieutenant of the admiralty, treasurer, surveyor and rigger of ships, and master of the naval ordnance, and an administrative and advisory body collectively known as the Navy Board. In 1557, the navy was given a fixed budget and the following year, when Elizabeth came to the throne, “the Queen’s Majesty’s Navy” was found to have twenty-three serviceable ships maintained in the Medway, which enters the Thames estuary below Chatham.

  Denmark followed England in attempting the creation of a state navy, thanks to Hans of Denmark’s determination to maintain Sweden as part of the Kalmar Union and to counter the commercial and military pretensions of the Hanse cities. Around the turn of the century Hans began to develop a navy of heavily armed ships paid for from the Sound tolls levied on ships passing through the Øresund. These were not duties so much as protection money, justified on the grounds that the Danes provided security in the Skagerrak, Kattegat, and Baltic, over which they claimed dominion. This was particularly resented by the Hanse merchants, who were likewise troubled by the favor shown the Dutch. The Baltic fault lines were confirmed in 1522 when the future Gustav I Vasa jump-started the formation of a Swedish navy by purchasing about a dozen armed merchant ships from the Hanse cities of Lübeck and Stralsund. Five years later, Gustav took the bold step of dissolving the monasteries (a year before his Danish counterpart did so, and nearly a decade before England’s Henry VIII) and used the proceeds to build Sweden’s first permanent fleet, the flagship being the Stora Kravelen of 1,700 tons.