Anglo-Dutch commercial rivalry reemerged in the early 1660s, when the English began raiding Dutch settlements in West Africa under the guise of protecting slave traders of the newly chartered Royal African Company. In retaliation, Michiel De Ruyter, whom James, Duke of York, would later call “the greatest [admiral] that ever to that time was in the world,” sailed to Africa, where he retook all but one of the captured outposts before crossing the Atlantic to raid English Caribbean islands and returning home via the Newfoundland fishing grounds. When war officially began in January 1665, the two fleets were roughly comparable in numbers, but the English ships tended to be larger, their guns heavier, and their fleet better organized. In the Four Days’ Battle of June 1666 English losses were double those of the Dutch, but the English prevented a junction of De Ruyter with the French, who had declared war on England. Hastening to sea again, the English bested the Dutch in the St. James’s Day battle off North Foreland and went on to burn 160 merchant ships off the island of Vlieland.
The costs of the war, the Great Plague of 1665, and the London fire of September 1666 exhausted the English treasury and forced Charles II to order the fleet laid up and to open talks with the Dutch in 1667. While these were under way, De Ruyter crossed to England and in the most bold and daring action of the wars sailed up the Medway to the Chatham dockyard and relieved the English of twenty-three ships. Orders had been given to burn the Royal Charles (the old Naseby) to prevent her capture, but as Pepys relates, “the Dutch did take her with a boat of nine Men, who found not a man on board her.… They did carry her down at a time, both for tides and wind, when the best pilot in Chatham would not have undertaken it, they heeling her on one side to make her draw little water; and so carried her away safe.” Incompatible with Dutch needs, the English flagship was displayed as a trophy at Rotterdam, and her counter decoration is still on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The peace of Breda confirmed the Dutch possession of what is now Suriname and the diminutive Banda island of Pulo Run, while the English acquired title to the North American colony of Nieuw Amsterdam. Early in the war Charles had written his sister that this was “A very good town, but we have got the better of it and ’tis now called New York”—in honor of his brother, the Duke of York, later James II. The acquisition of New York removed an adversary from the middle of the English North American colonies, but the spices of the Banda Islands were vastly more valuable at the time, and the financial power of the Dutch Republic remained the envy of all Europe. “In this city of Amsterdam,” wrote Sir William Temple shortly after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, “is the famous Bank, which is the greatest Treasure either real or imaginary, that is known any where in the World. [The] security of the Bank lies not only in the effects that are in it, but in the Credit of the whole Town or State of Amsterdam, whose Stock and Revenue is equal to that of some Kingdoms.”
Early in the war the prospect of conquering the Spanish Netherlands had led France to side with the Dutch, but their relations deteriorated when the French doubled customs tariffs on Dutch imports. This was one of many mercantilist initiatives implemented by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance from 1665, and of the navy from 1669, until 1683. Others included subsidizing French industry, luring foreign manufacturers to France, establishing or bolstering overseas colonies, and building up the French merchant marine and navy, which had fared poorly since the modest improvements of Richelieu’s day. Colbert also embarked on an ambitious program of internal improvements: repairing roads, digging canals, abolishing or consolidating the kingdom’s innumerable internal river and road tolls, and managing the forests with a view to ensuring supplies of ship timber.
Although the English and Dutch people would have preferred peace, Louis XIV subsidized Charles II to gain his help against the Dutch Republic. With war imminent, the Dutch had seventy-five ships of the line against which the French could field only twenty-two; the English contributed another sixty-five. Nevertheless, De Ruyter held the upper hand over the allies throughout 1672 and 1673. Tired of war with the Dutch and their alliance with the French, the English concluded a peace with the Dutch Republic, thus leaving the French to face the combined naval power of the Dutch and its ally, Spain. Focus of the conflict switched to the Mediterranean where the French defeated the Spanish and Dutch fleets and killed De Ruyter in the process, in 1676. The Franco-Dutch War dragged on for two more years by which time the share of European trade carried by the merchants of neutral England had grown considerably.
The ensuing peace did not lead to disarmament, and the expansion of the English and French navies mirrored the growth of their merchant fleets and foreign trade. Between 1661 and Colbert’s death in 1683, the French navy grew from 18 warships and a handful of auxiliary units to 276 warships, while England’s Navy Royal had 173 warships. Such increases would not have been possible without a concomitant improvement in fleet administration, which became more bureaucratized and systematic. This is most evident in Pepys’s establishment of a standard system for rating warships on the basis of the number and size of guns carried, “the final administrative recognition that the age of the line of battle had arrived.” This establishment determined officers’ pay, overall manning requirements (a fixed number of men being required for each gun), and provisioning. Small changes were made from time to time, but the rating system was remarkably static. In 1779 the establishment was:
Rate Guns Men
First 100–120 850–875
Second 90–98 700–750
Third 64–80 500–650
Fourth 50–60 320–420
Fifth 32–44 200–300
Sixth 20–28 140–200
A warship of sixty guns and above was considered fit to lie in the battle line and referred to simply as a line-of-battle ship (later battleship) or ship of the line. First-rates had three full gun decks, but the backbone of the battle fleet was the two-decker of sixty to ninety guns. In the age of sail, the standard ship’s gun fired an iron ball. The largest caliber was nearly seven inches and weighed forty-two pounds. A first-rate ship like Lord Nelson’s HMS Victory, launched in 1765, carried thirty 32-pounders, twenty-eight 24-pounders, forty-four 12-pounders, and two carronades. Developed at the Carron iron works in Scotland in the 1770s and known as ship smashers or devil guns, carronades fired sixty-eight-pound shot at a range of no more than 375 meters, a quarter that of ordinary guns. They were designed specifically to cause as much damage as possible to the hull and crew, who were killed or severely wounded by the massive splinters created on impact. (Sepsis from resulting infections was a leading cause of death.) Gunners also devised a variety of specialty ammunition designed to destroy masts and rigging (chain shot) and sails (bar shot). Antipersonnel ordnance included grapeshot, canister (musket balls packed in a cylindrical canister), and langrage (canisters filled with metal scraps). The biggest change, however, was that ships’ guns were fired much more frequently. English ships normally carried forty rounds per gun during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, and in the eighteenth century French gunners were firing five or six rounds per hour and British crews could attain much higher rates of fire for short periods.
Tactics remained relatively unchanged after the seventeenth century, but strategy became ever more complex, involving not just fleet actions but convoy protection and extended blockades. Frigates (fifth-or sixth-rates in the English system) cruised against enemy shipping, carried dispatches and diplomatic missions, scouted, and performed other assignments, while smaller types were used for various specialized activities such as bomb-ketches designed for shore bombardment. Taking a theoretical approach to the problem of naval warfare, Colbert established schools of gunnery and navigation. The English adopted the more empirical practice of issuing Fighting Instructions that built upon the experience of actual battle and transmitted lessons learned to be used in future actions. On balance, the English approach produced better results as would become abundantly clear in the eighteenth century.
Wha
tever their religious, commercial, or political differences, the leading powers of Atlantic Europe shared at the highest levels a commitment to maritime commerce. Because of this, they all wrestled with the question of whether to embrace the doctrine of the free sea, and to what degree. By the end of the seventeenth century, the proliferation of overseas settlements and commercial enclaves in the Americas and Asia forced European powers to recognize that the sea was less a private fiefdom than a commons held by all. The cases of Jacob Van Heemskerck and Henry Avery at either end of the century illustrate the shift. In taking the Santa Catarina, Van Heemskerck operated with the sanction of the government-sponsored VOC. Less than a century later, pirates of Avery’s ilk were falling victim to a collective quest for a more stable and secure trade. In the 1500s, he might have ranked among the Elizabethan sea dogs who opened the way for English ships and trade in hostile seas. But Avery was born after his time, and his rogue behavior threatened profits that his countrymen (and others) nurtured with diplomacy and political tact rather than indiscriminate force. Violence at sea was not a thing of the past: naval warfare in the eighteenth century would encircle the globe. Yet the conflicts to come were affairs of state administered by ever more centralized bureaucracies in the furtherance of more explicitly national interests.
a The Dogger Bank is a large (17,600 square kilometers), shallow area of the North Sea renowned for its fishing. It lies about sixty miles from the English coast, but the name comes from that of a Dutch fishing vessel.
b Honored by the Longwu emperor, Zheng was known as “the gentleman of the imperial surname,” or kokseng ya in Fujianese.
c The rupee was a silver coin weighing about ten grams. Servants earned the equivalent of three to four rupees per month.
d Swedish colonists settled New Sweden (Wilmington, Delaware) between 1637 and 1655.
Chapter 17
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Northern Europe Ascendant
The eighteenth century is the last in which sail-powered ships predominated worldwide. Sailing warships continued to be built well into the nineteenth century, and merchant ships into the twentieth, but it was in the eighteenth century that the full potential of the sailing ship was unleashed and the world first made whole. The 1700s also saw an unprecedented rise in the number of people who put to sea—merchant crews, naval sailors, voluntary and involuntary migrants, and explorers—as a result of European initiative. Large-scale migration by both free people and slaves began in the sixteenth century, and more people migrated in the nineteenth; but the 1700s are significant because this is when the commercial acumen that had been perfected in the carriage of cargo was adapted to that of people, who proved ill-suited to such treatment.
Though not necessarily the most arduous, the longest voyages were those of exploration, whether driven by merchants seeking new markets and sources of raw materials or governments intent on annexing new lands. Mariners of all stripes had an abiding interest in improvements to navigation, from greater accuracy on charts to easier and more reliable methods for determining course and position. These entailed a more nuanced understanding of the physical sciences and more precise instruments for measuring angular distance, compass direction, and time, and explorers were in the forefront of testing and refining these. The age was also characterized by a new interest in zoology, botany, and ethnography. The results of late-eighteenth-century explorations were widely disseminated and resulted in unprecedented efforts at cross-cultural comparisons articulated in an ever-expanding body of written and visual representation that transformed people’s awareness of the physical world and each other.
Life and Death Afloat
At the start of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the Royal Navy’s Commodore George Anson sailed from England with six ships. He was charged with harassing Spanish shipping on the Pacific coast of the Americas and capturing the Manila galleon, an apparently straightforward mission that took four torturous years. The story of the planning and execution of this voyage is one of almost unrelieved misery and reveals many of the logistical challenges faced by naval administrators in the half century after European fleets began oceanic operations. These sufferings were not unique to naval crews, however, and although civilians and slaves ordinarily spent less time at sea, the ships that carried them were subject to less official oversight and many endured conditions worse than those faced by Anson’s crews.
Soon after his assignment, Anson discovered that he was short three hundred sailors. He collected 170, thirty-two of them from the naval hospital at Chatham. He was also assigned five hundred invalid “soldiers, who from their age, wounds, or other infirmities, are incapable of service in marching regiments,” and more than half of whom deserted before embarkation. The crews began to suffer from scurvy and other ailments after a withering autumn rounding of Cape Horn in 1741. The lieutenant of Anson’s flagship, the Centurion, reported that he could “muster no more than two Quarter-masters, and six Foremast men capable of working; so that without assistance of the officers, servants and the boys, it might have proved impossible for us to have reached [Juan Fernández] Island, after we had got sight of it.” They were there joined by three other ships, one of which had “already thrown overboard two thirds of their complement.” The English burned Paita, Peru, before sailing north to cruise off Acapulco. After repairs on the coast, the Centurion and Gloucester (which was later scuttled) sailed for Macau. While cruising off the Philippines seven months later, Anson captured the Manila galleon Nuestra Señora de la Covadonga with a cargo worth about £250,000. Despite the loss of three ships (two others had turned back from South America) and more than thirteen hundred crew—just four of them to enemy action—Anson’s capture of the Manila galleon outshone any other achievement of the war. Under the prize system of the day, members of the ship’s company were entitled to a share, proportionate to one’s rank, of the value of captured enemy ships. As head of the expedition and captain of the Centurion, Anson made about £91,000, while a surviving seaman’s share was worth £300—the equivalent of about twenty years’ pay. Spectacular though the results were for these men, the four-year voyage did nothing to alter the outcome of the war, and the appalling cost in men and matériel underlined the enormous difficulties of conducting long-range naval operations.
As ordeals like the Anson voyage show, European navies would never have been able to operate effectively beyond home waters if they did not attend to their crews. Larger ships on longer voyages put ever more sailors at risk of previously rare or unknown ailments whose virulence was exacerbated by an inadequate knowledge of communicable disease, a poor understanding of hygiene and nutrition, and primitive means of food preservation. French and British crews suffered the most from these deployments thanks to their governments’ commitment to controlling trade from North America to Southeast Asia. Yet following the War of the Austrian Succession, progress was remarkably swift. Barely a decade after the Centurion’s circumnavigation, the Seven Years’ War (1757–63) was the first in which European fleets deployed around the world, in the Americas, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean, and while tropical disease continued to ravage fleets, malnutrition became less of a problem. Closer to home, it was by ensuring a constant supply of fresh food to ships on station that Admiral Edward Hawke was able to maintain a close blockade of the port of Brest. “It is an observation, I think, worthy of record,” wrote naval surgeon James Lind, “that fourteen thousand persons, pent up in ships, should continue for six or seven months, to enjoy a better state of health upon the watery element, than it can well be imagined so great a number of people would enjoy, on the most healthful spot of ground in the world.” Attention to his crew’s diet paid handsome dividends and enabled Hawke to stifle French merchant trade and to contain the demoralized Brest squadron and prevent its resupply by sea. When the French broke out with twenty-one ships in November 1759, they lost seven of them and twentyfive hundred men fighting or fleeing from the British in the rocky confines of Quiberon Bay.
Not all illnesses were peculiar to tropical climates, and ships were natural incubators of contagious ailments the causes of and cures for which were unknown. Called generically ship fever, these included typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, dysentery, and other afflictions. The names of these usually fatal diseases are familiar, but their symptoms are not. Dysentery is characterized by diarrhea mixed with mucus and blood. Typhoid is caused by Salmonella bacteria and results in high fever, headache, intestinal disorders including diarrhea, and physical and mental collapse. Never in short supply in eighteenth-century Europe or aboard ship, lice spread typhus, a near relative to typhoid that generates high fever, delirium, and rashes. Carried by mosquitoes and therefore more prevalent in the tropics, yellow fever comes on suddenly and often fatally, though not before its dying victims are rendered prostrate from fever, headache, hemorrhaging, jaundice, and other symptoms. Also borne by mosquitoes, malaria induces fever, chills, nausea, and anemia; left untreated it is fatal.
Malnutrition was another leading cause of death at sea. Scurvy was commonplace among crews forced to subsist for long stretches on salted meat or fish and grains, chiefly in the form of hardtack, or ship’s biscuit. In the late 1700s, sailors in the Royal Navy were issued weekly four pounds of salt beef, two pounds of pork, two pints of peas, three pints of oatmeal, eight ounces of often rancid butter, and twelve ounces of cheese. Some sailors realized that fresh vegetables and especially lemons were invaluable in preventing scurvy as early as the sixteenth century, and in 1615 the East India Company’s Captain William Keeling noted when “I began to allow each messe a pottle [half gallon] of water to drinke by night ordering allso the due expence of our lemon water to prevent scurvvie.” James Lind is frequently credited with having proved the efficacy of lemons in preventing scurvy following Anson’s voyage, but his own writings suggest an uncertainty about both its cause and its cure. The Royal Navy did not mandate that ships carry antiscorbutics until 1796, and similar provisions in the merchant marine were not adopted for another fifty years.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 66
