The expanded use of ships’ guns was as important to the naval revolution of the sixteenth century as improved administration. Rudimentary cannon were developed in the thirteenth century but were not practically employed at sea until the 1470s, when the Venetians began mounting large centerline guns in their galleys, which had long been overshadowed, literally, by the high freeboard of carracks and cogs. Mounting a single large gun in the bow, galleys became the offensive naval weapon par excellence. The largest class, the galleass, was a Venetian invention based on the three-masted great galley, whose large hull made an excellent gun platform and which the Venetians fitted with the heaviest guns they could. An accounting of four Neapolitan galleasses that sailed with the Spanish Armada is probably typical: each carried five cannon (which fired stone or metal shot weighing about twentyfive kilograms) and forty-five smaller guns designed to fire shot ranging in weight from twelve kilograms down to antipersonnel grapeshot. In all, this was enough guns to arm five ordinary galleys. Upward of fifty meters long, these galleasses were powered by oars and sails. With twenty-one to thirty oars per side and three to seven rowers per oar, galleasses were too expensive to supersede the ordinary galley as the standard warship. Somewhat smaller were the galiot (sixteen to twenty oars per side) and the bergantin (as few as eight oars per side), both of which were favored by Mediterranean corsairs.
At first, sailing warships had no way to counter armed galleys. Mounting heavy guns high on the main deck made ships unstable and ineffective against low-slung galleys, and so long as ships were clinker-built, as was normal in northern Europe until the sixteenth century, it was impossible to cut watertight gun-ports in the hull. When sailing ships did start carrying heavy guns, they were mounted aft, as close to the waterline as possible, and aimed through gun-ports pierced in the flush planking of the transom stern. This was not an ideal platform for offensive operations, as tactics of the day demonstrate. Ships attacked first with their bow chasers, came up into the wind to fire their lighter broadside guns, turned into the wind to bring the heavy stern guns to bear, and then fell off to fire the opposite broadside. The importance of stern-mounted guns is reflected in the fact that well into the seventeenth century paintings of warships generally featured the stern with its heavy guns (and lavish ornamentation) rather than a broadside profile. By the 1570s, English shipwrights began launching sailing galleys and galleons, the latter characterized by carvel (flush) planking with high sterns and cutaway forecastles—“crudely … the forepart of a galley with the afterpart of a ship”—which allowed heavy guns to be mounted forward. Only later did the heavy guns spread fore-and-aft to create the broadside battery standard between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
In terms of armament, the English had a pronounced advantage over other countries thanks to the availability of iron. While technically inferior, harder to cast, and heavier than bronze guns, cast-iron guns had the virtue of costing only a fifth as much, which led to their widespread adoption in the Navy Royal (as it was called until 1707) and created a brisk export market. Among the most willing buyers were the Danes during the Scandinavian Seven Years’ War (1563–70), the first to involve repeated battles between armed sailing war fleets. The Swedes appear to have relied more on state-owned, purpose-built warships but the greatest inequity between the fleets came from the Swedes’ access to high-quality, long-range bronze guns, while the Danes initially relied on wrought-iron guns before they began purchasing more advanced English cast-iron guns. No detailed accounts of the fleet engagements fought between 1563 and 1566 survive, but superior gunnery and greater maneuverability seem to have enabled the often outnumbered Swedes to keep the Danish-Lübecker fleet from forcing a boarding action until the battle of Bornholm. Here, on July 7, 1565, the evenly matched fleets of about twenty-seven ships each fought a pitched battle at close range from which the Danish-Lübecker fleet withdrew after the loss of the flagship. The utility of shipboard gunnery was still uncertain, however. Ships’ guns usually fired one shot per hour on average, and most guns of the day fired only twentyfive to thirty rounds in a season. Although ships’ guns could prevent the enemy from closing, they had not proven their worth as antiship weapons.
Naval Warfare from Lepanto to the Armada
The English, Danes, and Swedes had demonstrated the value of rationalized approaches to naval administration and the destructive potential of modern armaments, but until the 1570s the epicenter of naval power remained firmly in the Mediterranean. In the course of barely a quarter century, however, the focus shifted dramatically to northwest Europe. The outlines of this transformation can be traced through three naval campaigns (all involving Spain): the battle of Lepanto (1571), the battle of São Miguel in the Azores (1582), and the Spanish Armada (1588).
In 1570, the Ottomans besieged the port of Nicosia on Venetian-occupied Cyprus. Desperate for allies, Venice secured help from Pius V, who set aside the Papal States’ traditional rivalry with the Most Serene Republic, and from Spain’s Philip II, who was indifferent to Venetian troubles but eager to reverse the Ottomans’ capture of Tunis, Tripoli, and Djerba (1551–60). Prospects for joint action were dim, but Venice, Spain, and the Papal States hammered out a Treaty of Alliance in May 1571. Don Juan of Austria, Philip II’s half brother, was designated commander-in-chief over Sebastiano Venier, Venice’s general-at-sea, and Marcantonio Colonna, the pope’s commander-in-chief. On October 7, the fleets met off the Curzolari Islands, forty miles west of Lepanto (Naupaktos, Greece), at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. To ensure that the Christian fleet would fight as one, ships of all flags were mixed through the different squadrons, with Don Juan, Venier, and Colonna sailing side-by-side in the center squadron of a combined fleet of 207 galleys and 6 galleasses. Commanded by Müezzinzâde Ali Pasha, with Uluç Ali Pasha and S¸uluç Mehmed Pasha, the Ottomans had 213 galleys and 33 galiots.
Despite the Ottomans’ numerical superiority in ships, their galleys tended to be more lightly built, and with nothing comparable to the heavy firepower of the six Venetian galleasses, they were probably outgunned by a ratio of two to one. The allies also had better protection in the form of pavisades, screens of shields that protected the crews against Turkish arrows and small arms, and they carried a greater number of harquebuses, which though cumbersome were more effective at close range than arrows. The power of the galleasses told early, and they disrupted the Turkish line as it passed and veered toward the shore. By early afternoon Ali Pasha was dead, the Turkish standard captured, and the Turkish fleet in disarray. The Ottomans lost 210 ships, including 117 galleys and 13 galiots captured, and about thirty thousand casualties, three times that of the allies. The celebrated victory demonstrated to Christian Europe that the Turks were not invincible, but in the short run the Ottomans proved more resilient than the coalition. As one official told the Venetians, “You have shaved our beard, but it will soon grow again; but we have severed your arm, and you will never find another.” Uluç Ali oversaw the construction of a new fleet the next year, but the Venetians built hardly any new galleys, and while Venetian merchants were allowed to resume their trade to Alexandria, the Ottomans completed their capture of Cyprus in 1573.
Lepanto proved the last major Ottoman-Habsburg confrontation at sea. The Christian alliance did not long survive the battle, and the Ottomans concluded truces with Venice in 1573 and the Habsburgs four years later. This freed the two imperial powers to concentrate on other crises: for the Ottomans, Safavid Persia; for the Spanish Habsburgs, the Dutch Revolt and the Portuguese succession. Spain’s lack of a standing Atlantic fleet was put to the test in 1580, when Portugal’s King Sebastian died without an heir and Philip II claimed his throne. The Azores refused to accept Philip as king and sided with the pretender, Dom Antonio, who was also supported by European rulers who felt threatened by the expansionist Habsburg Empire and eyed the Azores as a strategic prize from which they could harry Spain’s transatlantic treasure fleets. In 1582, the French decided to support Dom Antonio’s a
spirations with an expedition of about sixty ships led by Philippe Strozzi. A Spanish fleet under the Marquis of Santa Cruz brought the French to battle off the island of São Miguel. Descriptions of the battle suggest that it opened with ships firing their broadside guns before closing for a boarding action. Though outnumbered two to one, Santa Cruz smashed Strozzi’s force and with it the Azorean threat to Spanish rule in Portugal.
Strozzi’s force included a contingent of English ships, volunteers with no official sanction from Elizabeth I, one of whose diplomatic preoccupations was dealing with Philip II, her former brother-in-law and suitor. While inclined to support her fellow Protestants in the Netherlands—which took two-thirds of English wool exports—Elizabeth was at pains to check the more belligerent of her Protestant subjects who sought to despoil the despised Catholic monarch. England’s navy was not yet an effective instrument of state policy and as in Spain royal ships comprised only a fraction of what might be needed in wartime. At the same time, the line between personal prerogative and affairs of state was poorly defined, and Elizabeth had no compunction about lending her ships for private commercial ventures by which she could both profit and covertly challenge her enemies.
Elizabeth’s greatest provocation came in 1585 when she secretly approved a mission by Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. The voyage had several aims: to reconnoiter the Pacific coast of Spanish America and, if it could be found, return via a Northwest Passage; to establish relations with people not yet subject to European princes; and to plunder Spanish shipping. In December 1577, Drake sailed with five ships and 180 men. They captured half a dozen Spanish ships and a Portuguese pilot near the Cape Verde Islands before pressing on to South America. Drake executed a mutineer at Puerto San Julian, the same place Magellan had executed a mutineer on his circumnavigation in 1520, and he renamed his ship the Golden Hind. Down to three vessels, Drake transited the Strait of Magellan and the English flag first flew in the Pacific on September 6, 1578. A severe storm sank one ship, while another, under John Winter, returned to England. Driven south, Drake established that the Strait of Magellan did not separate South America from a southern continent, Terra Australis, as previously believed, but that its southern shore was made up of islands to the south of which lay open ocean, now known as the Drake Passage.
Working their way north, the English looted Valparaíso, Arica, and Callao, and on March 1, 1579, captured Nuestra Señora de la Concepción off Colombia with a cargo that reportedly included eighty pounds of gold and twenty-six tons of silver. Drake followed the west coast of North America perhaps as far as the Strait of Juan de Fuca before abandoning his search for the Northwest Passage. After anchoring in a “convenient and fit harbor” generally believed to be Drake’s Bay, about twentyfive miles north of San Francisco Bay, he named the coast Nova Albion and claimed it for England. After a twelve-week passage to the Philippines, the English refit the Golden Hind and then purchased spices in the Spice Islands. Their last stop in Asia was on Java, from where they embarked on a nonstop passage of nearly ten thousand miles—remarkable for its lack of incident—before anchoring off Sierra Leone. The first English circumnavigation of the globe ended on September 26, 1580. After lying low while the consequences of his voyage were considered at London, Drake was knighted by Elizabeth aboard the Golden Hind. She also “ordered the ship itself to be brought ashore and placed in her arsenal near Greenwich as a curiosity,” one of the earliest museum ships on record.
The diplomatic contortions over Drake’s expedition reveal something of the complexities of sixteenth-century diplomacy. England and Spain were not at war, but the Spanish considered the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific coast of South America Spanish territory to which foreigners could not sail without permission. Elizabeth could have issued a letter of marque, though not without risking war with Philip. At the same time, Drake was not a common criminal or pirate seizing property indiscriminately, and he had Elizabeth’s tacit support. News of Drake’s exploits inflamed Spanish opinion and elicited a variety of reactions in England. Even before Drake’s return, Portuguese protests forced John Winter to surrender his share of the spoils—goods, in the words of the lord admiral (and one of Drake’s chief investors), “piratically taken on the seas by Francis Drake and his accomplices.” Elizabeth’s eventual embrace of Drake was due largely to the phenomenal success of the voyage. The accounting is murky, but £264,000 (equal to about half the English crown’s annual revenues) was officially deposited in the Tower of London; Drake’s crew divided £14,000; and Drake himself was allowed to keep £10,000. Yet some Iberian merchants claimed the value of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción’s cargo alone to be £330,000, and a published estimate of 1581 put the total value of Drake’s booty at £600,000, twice the amount officially accounted for.
Tensions between England and Spain were further strained by Elizabeth’s execution of her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and by her increasingly open support of the Dutch Revolt. In 1585, Philip began formulating plans for an invasion of England using troops gathered under the duke of Parma in the Spanish Netherlands supported by a powerful fleet from Spain. To accomplish this, Philip authorized a force of twenty-eight thousand crew and soldiers and 130 ships, 27 of which belonged to the crown: 19 galleons of the Castilian and Portuguese squadrons, 4 Neapolitan galleasses, and 4 Portuguese galleys. The balance was a mix of armed merchantmen and unarmed storeships requisitioned or leased from their owners. Ranged against this formidable assemblage, the English had nearly 200 ships, 34 belonging to the crown, 105 armed merchantmen, and victuallers and coasters, with a combined complement of just under sixteen thousand men.
When the Armada finally sailed in June 1588, it was under the reluctant duke of Medina Sidonia, who had assumed command following the death of Santa Cruz, hero of São Miguel. The loss of Santa Cruz was regrettable, but it only compounded the deficiencies of the fleet’s inadequate administration, corrupt provisioning, and poor strategic planning by the autocratic Philip, who had no naval experience. The ships sailed from La Coruña on July 22 and a week later were off Plymouth. The Spanish knew that their only hope of beating the English was in boarding actions, which they could not force.
But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious harm. So we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.
No miracle was forthcoming, but the English guns were not as effective as either they hoped or the Spanish feared. The fleets skirmished up the English Channel for eight days until the Spanish anchored off Calais in anticipation of rendezvousing with Parma’s transports, which were not ready. Forced out of their anchorage by English fireships, the Spanish lost four ships at the battle of Gravelines, bringing their total losses over eleven days to only eight vessels.d Forced northward by wind and tide, by August 9 the Spanish commanders had little choice but to make for home by sailing around Scotland and Ireland. Little did anyone imagine that only sixty-seven of their storm-tossed ships would return to Spanish ports, nearly fifty having been lost at sea or wrecked on the rocky coasts that ring the British Isles.
The story of the Armada has almost as many interpretations as interpreters. Some Englishmen were disappointed that they had not accomplished more, but the loss of the Armada demonstrated that Catholic Spain was not invincible and thus had much the same effect on Dutch and English Protestants that the victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto had had on Christian Europe as a whole. Yet as happened after Lepanto, the victors were unable to capitalize on their success. The next year Drake led the so-called counter-armada to destroy the remnants of the Spanish fleet, establish Don Antonio on the Portuguese throne, and seize the Azores. The ill-conceived expedition failed and the English fleet returned with only about two thousand of the ten thousand men e
mbarked fit for duty. Far from destroying the Spanish Armada, the “irretrievable miscarriage, that condemned the war to an inefficient conclusion” sixteen years later, was one of the factors that led to the creation of Spain’s permanent Atlantic fleet, the Armada del Mar Océano.
Ships big enough to make the long passages across the Atlantic, around Africa to the Indian Ocean, and across the Pacific were essential to European expansion. For much of the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal faced virtually no competition in the Americas or Asia from other Europeans, apart from a handful of freebooters and pirates who nibbled at the flanks of their Atlantic empires. In the more distant waters of the Monsoon Seas, Portugal managed a commercial network at the absolute limit of what its resources would allow; yet it was not until the end of the century that its exclusive control of seaborne trade between Asia and Europe was effectively challenged, not by Asians resentful of Portuguese arrogance but by Dutch merchants envious of their success and eager to strike a blow against their Spanish overlord.
The losses sustained by the Armada and Philip’s determination to focus his efforts on backing the Catholic faction in the French wars of religion gave the Dutch rebels a much needed respite, as did his decision to lift an embargo on Dutch shipping so that Spain could continue to receive the goods it needed from northern Europe. Blockading the Flemish coast around Antwerp, the Dutch channeled still more commerce to Amsterdam, where many Antwerp merchants had taken refuge. The combination of their commercial expertise and international connections with Amsterdam’s concentration of shipping and industry ignited the port’s meteoric rise, and in so doing helped assure the Dutch Republic’s eventual independence from Spain in 1648. By that time, the Dutch were the world’s foremost traders, and the torch of ocean trade had passed for the first time to northern Europe, where it would blaze without rival for nearly two hundred years.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 61
