Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  “The subtilnes of the tide imbayeth ships without prevention,” said Sir John Killigrew, as he described the perils of the shore, hoping to take fees from Dutch shipowners tired of losing vessels sailing back from the East Indies. The Mayflower may have been one of the first ships to see his winking candles, or perhaps not. It cost ten shillings a day to keep the lighthouse shining, but Killigrew ran out of money soon after it was finished. Even so, his project made him a pioneer. Four years earlier, another lighthouse had appeared at Dungeness, at the entrance to the Strait of Dover, and these were the first of their kind since Roman lights cast their beams over the channel many centuries before. Their Jacobean revival was a sign that times were changing. So too was the voyage of the Mayflower, a venture forming part of a great metamorphosis of English enterprise by sea.

  It was about to alter permanently, swerving toward the west, but only after a long and doubtful embarkation. Until the 1620s, more than a century after the foundation of New Spain, English skippers still remained scarce in the waters off the mainland of North America. In 1619, only six English ships made fishing voyages to the Gulf of Maine. For cod, Newfoundland still reigned supreme. The customs records list only one ship leaving the Thames that year for Jamestown, the Bona Nova, with a hundred settlers and a jumbled cargo of shoes, boots, hoes, and assorted ironmongery.

  Only eight English ships altogether sailed to Virginia in 1619. The colony there still had little to offer by way of business, since the tobacco leaf sent home each season came to little more than fifty tons, barely enough to fill a large fishing boat. And yet by the end of the next decade, the bias of sea traffic began to change profoundly, and the passage to America at last became routine. By the middle of the 1630s, forty ships each year were leaving the port of London for Chesapeake Bay or New England. Soon each of the leading harbors in Devon had four or five master mariners who made regular crossings.3

  The voyages traveled by English merchant ships fell into a new pattern, tilted westward. New England owed its origins to this maritime change of direction. However zealous Puritans might be, they needed sea captains willing and able to take them westward, and money to pay for the journey. Once on the other side, they had to service their debts and pay for essential items from the old country: the goods carried by the Bona Nova, but also glass, paper, lead, copper, Sheffield knives and hatchets, gunpowder and firearms, and most of all livestock. Alongside the beaver, and Puritans, imported cattle were the mammals that made Massachusetts what it became. Ships were needed too, more ships and bigger ships with ample hulls for carrying heifers as well as Pilgrims. Until they were available, nobody could build in New England a city on a hill.

  It had to be possible to cross the North Atlantic in both directions more swiftly and more safely than in the past: in both directions, because to investors and indebted settlers the return journey mattered as much as the voyage out. Feasibility required experiment, and speculation. In the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, innovations such as Killigrew’s lighthouse began to transform English navigation. Without this process, much of it by trial and error, Puritan America could not have come into being in the way in which it did.

  Just as wind and tide converge around Penlee into a vortex of waters, but a swirl with a pattern beneath it, so a new turbine of connections began to drive events in the North Atlantic, spun in motion by new flows of trade and people across the ocean. Of all this, the Mayflower and Christopher Jones were physical symbols. At first sight, we seem to know little about Jones: merely the crude, random data of two weddings, nine baptisms of his children, his burial, and his lawsuits. Look a little deeper, and we find that he and his colleagues left a mass of evidence to mark their comings and goings.

  In the two weeks before the Mayflower left for America, sixteen ships came into Plymouth, craft that the Pilgrims would have seen, bound in from Norway, Spain, Brittany, and the wine ports and salt pans of the Charente, in southwestern France. Out went another nine, heading for Dunkirk, the Basque Country, Ireland, and the Netherlands. An unknown number of small coastal boats scudded to and fro between the channel ports. These were old, familiar routes, paths deeply worn thanks to a long expansion of trade during the reign of King James. As Jones made the Mayflower ready for departure, around him he saw the pattern of English seamanship visible in its entirety.

  A CAPACIOUS RENDEZVOUS

  Somewhere moored close to the Mayflower was the Patience, skippered by Richard Barton. At the end of August, she sighted Penlee from the channel, on her way back from Alicante. Before him, as he came into Plymouth, Barton saw everything that the departing Pilgrims must also have seen: the same rocks and hills, and the same schools of dolphins, basking sharks, and canvas sails, arranged within the drowned river valleys that make the sound resemble a flooded auditorium, leading deep inland.

  Like the Mayflower, the Patience was a London ship, at two hundred tons a little larger than Jones’s craft. Like the Mayflower, she would be heavily armed against the Arab pirates to protect her cargo. It would have contained the items that Spain sent to England in the summer before wine making began: aniseed, almonds, figs, prunes, licorice, marmalade, and Spanish soap, the soft white Castile variety. Hundreds of pieces of Spanish pots and olive jars have been unearthed beneath the streets of Plymouth, with among them a broken set of blue-glazed teacups and saucers, porcelain made in China during the same era.4

  In the nineteenth century, engineers built the great breakwater that now defends the sound. But in Jones’s day the winds sped straight in from the sea without an obstacle, making it far too rough to ride at anchor in the middle. So, after the Patience rounded Penlee, most likely she swung to the west to enter the wide, sheltered haven of Cawsand Bay. This is a place so calm that even when a strong swell is running out at sea, the pennants of yachts berthed within it barely flutter. Long before, a Spanish raiding party had burned Cawsand village, but they left untouched the brick sheds by the beach, still standing today, where Tudor fishermen stored pilchards taken from the channel.

  Cawsand made the best anchorage when the wind came from the southwest. If it changed to blow from the southeast, the Patience would have gone elsewhere. She would steer diagonally across the sound, making for a seamark, a stand of willow trees on a hillside. Known then and now as the Withy Hedge, the seamark still guides submarines along the deep channel that zigzags into the naval base at Devonport. At the Withy Hedge the Patience would turn to the north, toward the dark blue rim of Dartmoor, the granite plateau that hangs behind the sound like a curtain above a stage.

  Beyond the Withy Hedge, the Patience would come to an island fortified with fourteen cannon. Once safely past it, four miles into the sound from the open sea, she would sail straight for a line of low gray cliffs, with above them the grass expanse of the Hoe, where Drake played his game of bowls before sailing out against the Spanish Armada. Close beneath it, at the last moment, Barton would have swung his bow sharply to starboard, under a row of more guns, pointing out over the waves from an artillery fort. Built at the corner of the Hoe, the fort had the low profile, sloping earthworks, and wide ditches recommended by the most advanced military architects.5

  Behind the fort and the Hoe lay another haven for the Patience. Deep within the sound, a long placid pool curved away to the northeast, forming an anchorage, nearly one mile long. It was called the Cattewater. Either here or in Cawsand Bay, depending on the wind, Barton would have sighted the three masts of the Mayflower, and at her stern her square aft castle, towering thirty feet into the air. Neither ship would have entered the third available haven, Sutton Harbour, a basin flanked by piers and guarded by a defensive chain. Both vessels were too large, with about twelve feet of keel below the waterline. If either Barton or Jones had docked inside the basin at high tide, seven hours later he would have been trapped in the mud.

  Carefully making his way around the Mayflower, Barton would have seen an aging ship. She was nearing the end of the usual working life of fift
een years. Most likely the Mayflower measured roughly one hundred feet long, from the beak of her prow to the hindmost tip of her superstructure. At her widest point she was roughly twenty-five feet across. Nobody can be more precise, since this was an age long before dimensions took a standard form. William Bradford says that the Mayflower had a volume of 180 tons, but he was not an expert.

  What we can say, on the basis of surviving records, is that she could certainly fit at least 180 casks of wine into her hold, great barrels each filled with hundreds of gallons of claret.6 Behind the gun ports in her sides and stern, if she wished to match a foreign ship of her class, the Mayflower also needed ten pieces of ordnance: seven cannon for use at long range, and three smaller guns charged with musket balls for close-quarter fighting. Later, at New Plymouth, Jones unloaded four of his pieces to fortify the colony. He would not have done so unless he had still more on board.

  As he brought his own vessel to her berth nearby, Barton would see small boats plying back and forth from the Mayflower to the quayside, because Plymouth had a postmaster. Although details within Bradford’s narrative suggest that the Mayflower spent no more than two or three days in the sound, there would still be time to write a last batch of letters up to London. The capital was only forty-eight hours away on horseback if the mail went posthaste. And since the postmaster also did business as a ship’s chandler, he could supply Jones with any missing items needed for the journey. He had done just that only a few months earlier when he kitted out another English ship bound across the Atlantic that year, on an illegal voyage to Guyana in Spanish South America.

  Did any of the Pilgrims go ashore? It seems that some did, but probably not many. Many weeks earlier they had already spent all their money on provisions, quarreling with one another about the cost, and about the outward customs duties they had to pay on their freight. But even from the deck they could see that the town above Sutton Harbour was new. Within a few decades, Plymouth had ceased to be just another small pilchard fishing village. Instead the town had become the sixth-busiest port in the kingdom.

  Starting in about 1570, in the best havens around the coast of Devon, here and at Barnstaple and Dartmouth, suddenly the townspeople began to build new quays, wharves, harbor walls, and lanes of waterfront houses. One such, aptly called New Street, survived the Luftwaffe at Plymouth in 1941 and remains intact today. Up to a point, this new prosperity arose from the war with Spain, when Drake and his mentors the Hawkins family led the town as it became a base for warships and privateers. However, even after the king made peace with the Spanish, Plymouth continued to thrive in the Jacobean era, for reasons to be found in the voyages of ships such as the Patience.

  We can talk about this ship, and the expanding trade of Plymouth, because of something called a port book. In 1564, to ensure that duties were paid, the Crown ordered the revenue men in each port to prepare annual reports listing every taxable cargo. The system produced immense volumes of paper, to be sent to the Exchequer in London, where they were filed and later forgotten. No historian looked at the port books until 1911, when an official inquiry revealed the lamentable conditions in which they were kept. A few scholars began to examine them, and swiftly made discoveries. This was how, at the time of World War I, historians traced in part the career of Jones and the Mayflower before her journey to America.

  Since then, the port books have faded back into obscurity and become a neglected resource rarely touched by researchers. Often they are ragged, filthy, stained, or made illegible by heat, by damp, or by rodents. Many of the books have vanished entirely, including most of those from London. Breaks in the sequence make it hard to identify trends, and doubts exist about their accuracy, because of corruption among the customs men. All the same, and despite their flaws, the tattered books contain superb material when used with care and checked against other sources.*

  The port books list the names of ships, their sizes, their masters, their destinations, the places from which they came, and the consignments shipped by each merchant. These details can be matched with other records—wills, depositions, official papers, and Puritan narratives—in such a way as to transform the familiar old story. And as it happens, a Plymouth port book has survived from 1620, ignored by historians because it fails to mention the Mayflower. There is nothing odd about this: the omission occurred because Jones never intended to pause in Plymouth at all.

  His final port of exit was supposed to be Southampton, a hundred miles east along the channel coast. There the Mayflower met a smaller supply ship, the Speedwell, which had ferried the Pilgrims from Leiden across the North Sea. If everything had gone according to plan, the Mayflower and the Speedwell would have have left Southampton and headed straight out toward the Atlantic. Once across the other side, the Speedwell would have stayed on to fish and trade up and down the American coast. As it happened, soon after their departure from Southampton on August 5 the Speedwell sprang leaks. Both ships had to stop at Dartmouth, where the Speedwell underwent repairs, before they sailed out again.7

  Three hundred miles beyond Land’s End, the skipper of the Speedwell complained that once again she was filling with water. Back both ships went once more, and the Speedwell was discharged and sent home to London. This was how Jones came to be in Plymouth. The customs men did not list his ship in their annual report, because their Southampton colleagues had checked her already and collected the duties which she owed.

  But even without the name of the Mayflower, the port book displays the forces at work in the world from which she came. The mercantile marine of England fell into three tiers or classes, depending on the size of the ship or the goods she carried. In each division England faced high risks and keen rivals. In the next four years the country underwent an economic crisis, a slump that continued to take its toll on the Pilgrims long after they reached America. As it turned out, in the end these hardships and the vagaries of war and commerce gave birth to lasting colonies. Arduous, long, and uncertain of success, the process can be followed in the careers of the men and the ships in the sound.

  A page from the first English textbook of trigonometry, published in 1614 with a dedication to Sir John Wolstenholme, who helped the Pilgrims obtain consent to settle in America. This section explains how to calculate the distance and compass bearing between the Lizard in southwestern England and the Davis Strait in the Canadian Arctic. (Lincoln Cathedral Library)

  THE LION OF LONDON

  Two famous mariners passed Penlee that year. History remembers Jones, but in his day the other man had far more prestige and sailed more dangerous waters. Three weeks after the Mayflower left for America, into Plymouth came the Lion of London, skippered by John Weddell. He later became the first English sea captain to take his ship to the Chinese port of Canton. In 1639, Weddell vanished at sea, most likely lost in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, but in 1620 he stood on the quarterdeck of his first great command, within the topmost tier of English shipping.

  A craft of four hundred tons, the Lion sailed under the flag of the East India Company. She and Weddell were bound back from Saldanha Bay in South Africa, after a year or two of trading and fighting the Portuguese in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Jones would have known him, by sight and by reputation at least, since in London they lived on opposite sides of the river Thames, Weddell at Ratcliff, and Jones just across the water at Rotherhithe. Most likely the Mayflower crossed paths with the Lion on her voyage out. Before turning west to America along the fortieth parallel, Jones would have headed down toward the Azores, on a route converging with the track that Weddell must have followed home.

  John Weddell belonged to England’s seafaring elite, men with the skills to complete the nine-month voyage to the Malay Archipelago. On their way back, after sighting the Lizard, East India ships such as his called at Plymouth for food and water. They unloaded a little cargo, silks, spices, and perhaps some Chinese crockery, before making for the capital with the bulk of what they had. Demand for luxuries such as these led to
rich profits, but it also caused side effects that, in due course, spilled over to accelerate English enterprise in the Atlantic as well.8

  Eager to see more capacity at sea, the Crown gave a bounty to men who built new ships, five shillings per ton for each oceangoing vessel of one hundred tons or more. Records of the bounty payments show a surge of construction driven by the voyages of Weddell and his colleagues in the East India service. In 1616, English dockyards launched no fewer than seventeen oceangoing hulls, with among them two vessels of more than one thousand tons each, armed merchantmen bound for the Orient. In 1617 the boom continued, with such intensity that the king scrapped the subsidy. He saw no need to bankroll speculators with scarce public funds.

  By that time, the shipwrights had already engineered a lasting increase in the size of English merchant vessels. In the final decade of the bounty, the average ship built with it nearly doubled in size, from a little over two hundred tons to four hundred. When Jones first skippered the Mayflower, in about 1608, she ranked as one of the largest English merchantmen at sea. By the time of her voyage to America she was slipping down the scale, smaller than all but one of the last tranche of ships that received the royal subsidy, and when John Winthrop led his fleet to Massachusetts, he traveled in a flagship twice the Mayflower’s size.9 A matter of deliberate policy on the part of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the use of bigger ships was essential, as we shall see. It was only possible because of the preceding decades of experience.

  As ships grew larger, expertise deepened too, with East India merchants like Wolstenholme as the chief sponsors of research. Lighthouses were only one instrument of change. Among the others were new coastal charts and tide tables, and buoys and beacons in hazardous spots, and the regular dredging of the Thames, making safer the return to England’s sea approaches. In 1608, the Dutch began selling telescopes like Bainbridge’s. Nine years later a London surgeon wrote the first handbook of nautical medicine. By the early 1620s, besides new manuals of advanced mathematics English seamen had the first books that tabulated the variation in the earth’s magnetic field from one place to another: an essential tool for correcting errors in reading a compass.