Sixteenth-century navigators do not always get it right, as James Hooper, captain of the Desire, will testify. On a voyage to the Azores he changes course against the advice of his shipmates and sails straight past the islands – continuing for five days before admitting that he has ‘no better knowledge than the mainmast’ where the Azores lie.60 However, most navigators learn how to deal with the complicated mathematics. They take as their starting point a simple direction across a chart, dead-reckoning the distance and setting out that way. The key lies in constantly recalibrating their position in relation to their destination by establishing the latitude. Using a quadrant, a mariner’s astrolabe or a cross-staff, they can calculate this by measuring the height of the Pole Star above the horizon in the northern hemisphere; in the southern hemisphere they use the Southern Cross. Obviously these measurements can only be made at dawn or dusk, when navigators can see both the stars and the horizon, so they use the height of the sun at midday as a supplementary measure and determine latitude according to tables worked out by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. As for speed, the basic method of a log and a series of knots on a rope has recently been invented, so you can establish distances in miles and leagues, as opposed to old-fashioned ‘keenings’ (multiples of the visible distance of the horizon from land). Deep-water soundings can be taken with a lead weight and a 100-fathom rope to measure the depth of the sea floor: if it is more than 600ft deep, you are off the Continental Shelf. Practical charts also exist: they are called ‘cards’ or ‘plats’ and are attached to sticks and stored in elm tubes.61 Most Elizabethan ships carry several compasses, in case one breaks or the needle needs remagnetising with a lodestone. If you use a traverse board to keep check of the changes of tack, and update it with each half-hourly watch (measured with an hourglass), you should be able to plot your way across the ocean.62
One thing you can take comfort from is how quickly the science of seamanship advances in England in this period. There are very few treatises on navigation in English before 1574, so those that do exist are mostly translations. In 1561 Richard Eden publishes The Arte of Navigation Translated out of Spanysh into English, thereby making available Martin Cortes’s important work for the first time. But in 1574 it is joined on the bookshelves by William Bourne’s A Regiment for the Sea: containing very necessary matters for all sorts of sea-men and travellers, the first English-composed practical treatise on navigation. Alongside the old techniques of pilotage, it includes tables on calculating tides and latitude by means of the stars, and soon becomes the essential mariners’ aid. Bourne observes that just twenty years ago ‘masters of ships hath derided and mocked them that have occupied their cards and plats and also the observation of the altitude of the Pole saying that they care not for sheepskin for they could keep a better account upon a board’. But now navigation has become a mathematical art. By the end of the reign a dozen books have further advanced the science of navigation. In Certain Errors in Navigation (1599) Edward Wright shows how to adopt Mercator’s Projection to plot an exact course across the oceans; and John Davis – the same man who sails from the Falkland Islands to Baffin Island – demonstrates in his Seaman’s Secrets (1594) the use of the back-staff for more accurately measuring the height of the Pole Star, Sun and Southern Cross. This makes use of the work of the brilliant natural philosopher Thomas Harriot, which will not be significantly bettered until the eighteenth century.63 Within forty years the English develop from being borrowers of the art of navigation to becoming pioneering experts.
LIFE AT SEA
In some respects life at sea is like life on land. Men eat, drink, sleep and perform their routine functions according to the hours of the clock – but the ways in which they go about it aboard ship, living in an overcrowded world of wood, wind and water, differ greatly. Space is at a premium, even on a large ship. You might notice the low ceilings below deck – 5′ 8″ is not unusual on the main deck, less on the orlop deck below – but as the crew are mostly between 5′ 5″ and 5′ 9″ tall, only a small minority find this a significant problem.64 However, head height is the least of your worries. The Ark Royal is a large ship but even she has little more than 2,000 square feet of space on each of her three decks, and more than half of that is used for storage and stowage of provisions, ammunition, fresh water, spare sails and so on. Then there are the fifty-five guns, which require about 500 square feet of space. This means that, when it comes to sleeping, the crew of 420 men have less than six square feet each – and this includes the upper deck, much of which is open to the elements. There simply is not enough room for everyone to lie down at once. Hammocks have not yet been introduced and people lie where they can – and curse anyone who gets up in the night and stumbles across his shipmates as he makes his way for the heads. Still, one-third of the crew will be on duty on deck wishing the night away, with the boat heaving, waves splashing over the side and the rain falling. At sea, it is fair to say, you will not get much sleep.
It follows from this that people eat differently aboard ship too. Keeping food is difficult. Meat can be salted and stored in barrels, but it goes off; similarly, it is hard to keep enough ground flour dry and free from rats to bake sufficient bread. The standard ration for men at sea in 1565 is a generous 4½d per day in port or 5d at sea, which provides a gallon of beer and a pound of biscuit or bread, half a pound of cheese and four ounces of butter per day, and half a pound of meat four days a week and stockfish or four herrings the other three days.65 Dried peas and oats may be used in stewing up the meat, but very little fresh food is available. You may walk into the captain’s cabin and see the table laden with grapes, prunes, plums, apples and pears, together with pewter plates and spoons, goblets and wine flagons, but this is purely for him and any of his fellow officers dining with him; most mariners will not have fresh fruit. Indeed, if their allowance of meat goes rancid or the weevils eat into the ship’s biscuit, they will go hungry. Each man has in his chest a turned bowl, a lidded wooden flask and a wooden spoon, and he eats squatting where he can, either in the dim light below deck or up in the fresh air, amid the barrels, cannon and hundreds of other men. But what he actually consumes will be as much a matter of luck as the type of food laid in store at the start of the voyage.
This struggle for food is a key feature of life at sea. If the meat goes rancid, it may well bring the crew down with sickness and leave them unable to man the ship properly. Outbreaks of dysentery are often blamed on corrupted meat. On one of his voyages, Francis Drake tries out a suggestion of Sir Hugh Plat’s and feeds his crew on pasta, as it is easy to keep and full of nutrition. But this still does not provide the vitamins that sailors need on a long trip. Vitamin D is not a problem as the body makes it naturally in sunlight and men spend most of their time in the beating sun; but the lack of Vitamin C is a serious issue. Many more sailors die of scurvy than drown.
Life aboard ship, as you can see, is pretty desperate. Many sailors have lost teeth. Most suffer from tooth decay and gum disease. Their breath stinks, overpowering even the stench of their bodies. Apart from the officers, they do not wash or shave; the surgeon aboard a large ship has more pressing things to do than shaving men. Their foul clothing harbours dung beetles and fleas.66 Their hair is often riddled with the larvae of insects, such as the puparia of the seaweed fly. Many seamen use wooden combs, but these provide only limited relief. The men all have to share the same toilet facilities: the ‘heads’, a place at the front of the vessel, where you urinate and defecate through a floor of slotted planks. It stinks and is rife with diseases. Only the captain and his senior officers have their own chamber pots. Any dogs, cats and rats on board will not be so careful where they defecate, and the atmosphere below decks on a long journey is a noxious mix of urine, sweat, vomit and animal excrement that will severely test your love of the sea. Just as your eyes have to adjust to the darkness when going below, so too your nose will have to get used to the smell.
You may be perturbed to see how young the mariners
are who live in these conditions: 82 per cent of all the men aboard are below the age of thirty and include boys as young as ten or eleven. As you can imagine, their chances of reaching adulthood are slim.67 Discipline is essential to keep such large groups of young men under control. Expect to hear the shrill blast of the boatswain’s call regularly. Time is reckoned in strict half-hourly turns of the hourglass or sandclock; a watch is eight turns. This four-hour period regulates everything from when men may eat to when they are on duty, when they must pray and when they have to swab the deck and heads, and when the ship should change tack. Sailors work from dawn until eight o’clock in the evening. Cleaning the ship, attending to its rigging, setting or stowing the sails, mending the ropes, fishing, calculating positions, caulking the vessel to preserve its seaworthiness – there is very little scope for idleness. From eight until midnight the men are allowed to relax, unless their ship is in danger from the elements or the enemy. They may play cards or tables (a form of backgammon) and music: fiddles and pipes are popular at sea.68 In a well-run ship a strict disciplinary code is enforced. Punishments range from a 1d fine for swearing or blasphemy to ducking in the sea for minor offences such as petty theft or sleeping on duty, flogging for disobedience, and the loss of a limb or hanging for striking an officer, murder or mutiny.
Crammed into a small vessel on a long voyage, with the entire crew’s survival at stake, it won’t surprise you that men grow suspicious of one another. In 1578, on his circumnavigation of the world, Francis Drake suspects that one of his officers, Thomas Doughty, is plotting against him, thereby jeopardising the entire enterprise. When an open argument ensues, Drake strikes Doughty, has him bound to the mast of the Pelican and tries him for mutiny. After bullying the other captains of the expedition into agreeing, he orders Doughty to be beheaded. The man is executed on 2 July 1578. Months at sea with little else to think about can turn your smallest doubts about a shipmate into your biggest fears of an enemy about to attack you – as if all the filth, disease, lack of food, cold, wet and lack of sleep were not hardships enough.
With regard to safety, if the owners do not rebuild a vessel, she will grow progressively less seaworthy. If the captain is negligent and does not enforce the caulking of the hull, it will leak. If the sails are not kept in order and are allowed to tear, the ship may find itself at the mercy of pirates. If the navigator does not take regular soundings, there is a danger the ship will run aground. There are very few lighthouses. St Catherine’s on the Isle of Wight is still operational, as is Hook Lighthouse in County Wexford, Ireland. An Act of Parliament in 1566 empowers Trinity House, the organisation responsible for maritime safety established by Henry VIII, to build new lighthouses, but the first one is not constructed until 1609 (at Lowestoft). No light therefore protects mariners from the treacherous rocks of the Cornish coast. In fog this is deadly. Likewise the Eddystone will continue to tear ships to pieces sixteen miles off the Devon coast for another hundred years. As for the Goodwin Sands, they are referred to as the Great Ship Swallower. Thus a ship is in constant danger – to say nothing of the threat posed by storms, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. If you get caught in a heavy gale, the advisable course of action is to furl your sails, run before the wind and pray.69
The other great threats to the safety of a ship are piracy and war. On 19 May 1585, after years of English raids on Spanish settlements in Latin America and the seizing of many Spanish cargo ships, Philip of Spain orders the detention of all English ships in his ports. A number of English corn ships happen to be in Bilbao: the merchants who own them lose everything and the sailors are thrown into prison, where many of them die. Just being an honest merchant is a dangerous business. For this reason every seagoing ship is armed. Even a small pinnace will have half a dozen guns. If you do take part in the plundering of Spanish vessels, the rule is to observe the quantities due to the authorities. Attacks against the Spanish do not count as piracy if you pay one half of all your loot to the queen and one-tenth to the admiral of England. The remaining 40 per cent may be shared by the captain and crew.70 However, if you seize the cargo of a foreign country and keep it for yourself, you are regarded as a pirate and the government will try to hunt you down. After 1585 the Spanish similarly prey on English shipping, hoping to capture and ransom passengers to and from the Continent as well as looting English merchant ships.
The Spaniards are not your only enemies at sea. The Barbary pirates – the original ‘barbarians’ – are beginning to make an impact during the queen’s reign. These crews from North Africa principally operate in the Mediterranean and off the Spanish coast; they are not yet openly sailing in British waters, so only ships that sail long distances are under threat, such as vessels of the newly established Barbary Company. But a few unfortunate Englishmen are among the tens of thousands of Europeans taken captive and forced into slavery. In about 1585 a ship belonging to Sir Thomas Leighton is captured by Barbary pirates and its English crew taken as slaves. One of them, Giles Napper, serves as a galley slave in ‘Barbary’ for two-and-a-half years until he is able to escape.71 The Barbary pirates become a serious threat in 1601 when a Dutchman called Simon Danseker leads them through the Straits of Gibraltar to prey on European vessels in the Atlantic. Very soon afterwards, an Englishman, Jack Ward, turns to piracy and leads the Muslim corsairs into the English shipping lanes, seizing boats from within sight of the English shore. No one in a coastal town is safe. You come across women who do not know whether they are widows or not – all they know is that their husbands went to sea and never came back. Such women are in a terrible plight for they cannot presume their husbands are dead until seven years have passed; only then can they remarry. In the meantime they have to fend for themselves. If their sons are also serving aboard captured ships, then their plight is doubly awful, for the pirates will eagerly take boys to sell in the slave markets of Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis.
When you consider all the dangers from pirates and shipwreck, all the hardship and diseases and the terrible conditions aboard, you may decide that travelling by ship is not for you. But it makes the achievements of the Englishmen who do sail round the world in this reign all the more remarkable. Consider what Drake has to put up with on his great circumnavigation. He sets sail in November 1577 with five ships and about two hundred men. His own ship, the 150-ton Pelican, is the largest, with eighteen guns. The other four are John Wynter’s 80-ton Elizabeth, with eleven guns; the 50-ton Marigold; the 30-ton Swan; and the 15-ton Benedict. The last three have just twelve guns between them. After attacking and looting six Spanish and Portuguese vessels, the Benedict is exchanged for a captured 40-ton ship, which is renamed the Christopher. A sixth ship is added when a Portuguese merchant vessel is seized and renamed the Mary. Drake appoints Thomas Doughty of the Swan captain of this new vessel, but, as we have seen, it is soon after this that he accuses Doughty of plotting against him. Things now go from bad to worse. After stripping the Swan of her crew and burning her, after executing Doughty and stripping all the other captains of their ranks and appointing them as his own subordinates, Drake continues through the Straits of Magellan. When a violent storm blows up, the Marigold sinks with its twenty crew and the other ships are dispersed in the freezing Southern Pacific. Having lost sixty men to cold, hunger and disease, Drake is forced to abandon the Mary. At this point John Wynter in the Elizabeth absconds back to England with his survivors. With the Pelican the only one of his original five ships left – now renamed the Golden Hind – Drake sails up the coast of Chile. Only thirty of the seventy men left aboard are able to fight, but while most people would be glad still to be alive, Drake goes on the rampage, attacking Spanish vessels and looting every ship he takes. One prize is accidentally lost when a drunken sailor drops a lamp in the hold and sets light to the vessel, but Drake continues, capturing ships laden with valuable cargoes. By this time he is showing signs of mental instability. Worried lest his Portuguese pilot betray him, he tricks the man into going ashore and abandons him
. After sacking the ship’s chaplain he conducts his own religious services. When the Golden Hind runs aground on some rocks in the middle of the Pacific, his chaplain declares that the disaster is God’s judgement for Drake’s execution of Doughty. Drake forces the chaplain to wear an insulting label and threatens to hang him if he should remove it for the duration of the voyage. A black woman captured in America is put ashore in Indonesia (after Drake and his men have got her pregnant); but her presence during the Pacific crossing hardly relieves the tension, only adding to the jealousies and suspicions of the crew. The Golden Hind finally arrives back in Plymouth on 26 September 1580, three years after setting out, becoming only the second ship to sail round the world, and the first to be captained all the way by the same man.72
If the above does not put you off maritime exploration, consider the case of Peter Carder. This chap sails in the Elizabeth under the command of John Wynter. He is thus caught in the storm after sailing through the Straits of Magellan and heads back to England with Wynter. When Carder and several other men are set ashore in a small boat on the coast of Brazil to look for fresh water, they are attacked by Portuguese sailors who fatally wound five Englishmen and take the others prisoner. After spending some time in gaol, Carder is put in the custody of a Portuguese merchant, who makes him work on his plantation alongside black slaves for several years until Carder escapes to Pernambuco and embarks on a Portuguese ship heading back to Europe. Captured by Englishmen on the return journey and almost wrecked off Ireland, he finally arrives home in November 1586 – nine years after setting out.73
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Page 27
