The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Overshadowed by Drake in his own lifetime and “denied the high position to which his talents and his character entitled him,” Hawkins was a man of great wealth and a seaman of unparalleled experience. He had married the daughter of Benjamin Gonson, Treasurer of Marine Causes, and succeeded him in the post, and at once set about the modernization of the fleet. Eleven new galleons had been built in the five years preceding the Armada alone and another dozen had been rebuilt to the same specifications. Elizabeth could also draw on an ever-growing fleet of armed merchantmen, a product of the profits to be made from privateering and from England’s burgeoning overseas trade in legitimate goods; the Privy Council estimated that 135 merchantmen of over 100 tons and 656 of less than that burthen could be added to the fleet from the merchant marine. For the most part, such ships had seen considerably more action than the Queen’s galleons. A dozen merchantmen had taken part in Drake’s raids on the Spanish Main in 1585, and seventeen were in the fleet that attacked Cadiz in 1587. Only half a dozen of the Queen’s galleons had been involved in either voyage.12

  Until Hawkins’s era, English warships had been built like their continental counterparts, with high forecastles and top-gallant forecastles at the prow of the ship and a series of poop-decks rising from the stern, often capped with a final roofed deck resembling a garden shed overhanging the stern at a precarious angle. No “great ship” ever had less than a poop and top-gallant poop, and three poop-decks were commonplace. Small, round wooden towers were also often carried where the fore- and sterncastles rose from the waist of the ship, in addition to the “fighting tops”—enlarged versions of crow’s nests capable of housing up to a score of snipers or archers—mounted high on all four masts. As a result of carrying these massive upperworks, the ships were ponderous and very top-heavy, prone to excessive rolling and pitching, and even to overturning and sinking, like Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, or the Swedish ship Vasa, which sank on its maiden voyage.

  However, the innovations of Henry VIII and the continuing improvements during the reign of his daughter had put English shipbuilders and gun-founders years in advance of their European counterparts and Hawkins exploited this technological advantage to the full. His ship designer, Matthew Baker, the first man to be designated a master shipwright, was the son of a shipbuilder but he had also studied mathematics and brought the disciplines of that science to his craft. Rather than working by hand and eye alone, he was the first shipbuilder to make accurate blueprints, enabling successful designs to be replicated exactly. In total, eighteen great galleons and seven smaller ones were constructed on clean, “race-built” lines (the word derives from “raze,” not “race,” and denotes the razing—lowering—of the upperworks, particularly the fore- and sterncastles). They were longer in keel—a proportion of length to breadth of three to one was thought ideal—narrower in beam and lower in the water than their predecessors. The forecastle was reduced to a single deck and the sterncastle to a poop accommodating the officers and the helmsman. The massive oak ribs of the hulls were clad in a double layer of four-inch oak planks, and the cavity between them filled with a layer of tar mixed with animal hair, like the wattle and daub used in house-building, to preserve the hull from rot. Recent improvements in rigging, such as the bowline, were also adopted; once more the Spaniards failed to follow suit. Hawkins also commissioned even sleeker and faster pinnaces for use as fighting ships in shallow waters and against weaker targets, and scouting vessels for the main fleet.

  He outlawed the short cuts and sharp practice traditionally tolerated in shipbuilding, ensured that used timber and green or summer-felled wood—prone to rotting and warping—was rejected, and built up a store of seasoned, winter-felled oak for the construction and repair of his ships. He also eliminated much, though not all, of the traditional graft and corruption by introducing a system of building on contract, and reduced the annual cost of the upkeep of the fleet from £10,000 to £6,000. His economies made enemies of those who had previously profited from graft, and some misrepresented his actions and accused him of lining his own pockets. He was said to have “laid the foundation of a large fortune by cheating the Spaniards, and increased it, it was suspected, by cheating his own countrymen.” Hawkins’s rival, Sir William Wynter, sent an unsigned and highly hypocritical letter to Burghley, accusing Hawkins of pocketing money that should have been spent on “repairing, trimming and ransacking of Her Majesty’s ships in this later time. [It] has bred a far greater charge to Her Highness . . . besides the clouterly [clumsy] patching and doing of the same, very discommodious in the use of the ships.” “This commission has been very beneficial to him, not only in furnishing Her Majesty’s yard with planks, timber, boards, etc., but also of one other yard in Deptford, which he reaps benefit as a partner, which yard has and does consume more than Her Majesty’s yard has done within two years . . . which breeds ill speeches in the country and may hinder the service to come . . . He spared himself and charged Her Majesty.” Hawkins reacted angrily to the accusations. “The navy is in good and strong estate, contrary to their hypocritical practice and vile reports.” He amply fulfilled his duties to the Crown and if he did also profit from his office it was much less than his predecessors had done, including his principal critic, Wynter.13

  Hawkins’s innovations were distrusted in some quarters, where sea-captains bred in an earlier era complained that he was abolishing the fighting castles, valued “for their majesty and terror,” but Sir Walter Ralegh was quick to dismiss their complaints. “The greatest ships are the least serviceable . . . less nimble, less mainable [easy to handle] and very seldom employed. A ship of 600 tons will carry as good ordnance as a ship of 1,200 tons; and though the greater have double her number, the less will turn her broadsides twice before the greater can wind once. The high charging of ships brings them ill qualities, makes them extreme leeward, makes them sink deep in the water, makes them labour and makes them overset. Men of better sort and better breeding would be glad to find more steadiness and less tottering cage-work.”

  Hawkins had spent his life at sea, and knew exactly what he wanted from his galleons. They mounted more guns, yet were lighter, stronger, faster, more manoeuvrable and could sail much closer to the wind—“four points off” or 45 degrees to the wind—than their predecessors. Even the larger and older ships such as the 1,100-ton Triumph, unaltered since it was built in 1561, were significantly faster and much more heavily gunned than the Spanish ships they would face. “There is no prince in Europe that has a more beautiful or gallant sort of ships than the Queen’s Majesty of England at this present and those generally are of such exceeding force that two of them being well appointed and furnished as they ought, will not let to encounter with three or four of those of other countries and either budge them or put them to flight, if they may not bring them home . . . The common report that strangers make of our ships amongst themselves is daily confirmed to be true, which is that for strength, assurance, nimbleness and swiftness of sailing, there are no vessels in the world to be compared with ours.”14

  Their armament was also revolutionary. Guns had been carried on English ships since at least 1410 when the Christopher of the Tower mounted three cannon, but it was to be another 150 years after that before ship-mounted cannons ceased to be primarily anti-personnel weapons used in the prelude to boarding, and became decisive weapons in their own right. Early cannon were manufactured from strips of wrought iron, formed into a barrel by hammer-welding around a core. The welds were reinforced with lead and the barrel held together by ropes wound around the barrel or rings of wrought iron. Wooden wedges were driven into the breech to secure the removable chamber containing the powder, and the weapon was fired by applying a smouldering match-cord to a trail of powder in the touch-hole. The lighter “murthering pieces”—breech-loading weapons, using pre-loaded chambers—could achieve rates of fire of twenty to thirty shots per hour and wreak havoc among enemy personnel during boarding attacks, but the heavier cannon were far less effective.
They had to be lashed down with ropes, making no allowance for the recoil, and they sometimes broke free when fired, to the devastation of those gathered around them. Flaws and impurities in the iron and the weakness of the welds also made the barrels liable to burst under the stresses of firing, and the wedges and powder chambers were often blown out of the breech, killing any gunner careless enough to be standing nearby.

  The design of cannons and the techniques of manufacture were continuously being improved during the Tudor era. The principal English arms foundry was in Calais—English territory until 1558—but Henry VIII also set up a foundry in the Weald of Kent for Hans Poppenruyter of Mechlin, a gunmaker who had successfully produced muzzle-loading heavy cannon that were cast upright, in a single piece, ensuring that the most dense and flawless metal was concentrated around the powder chamber at the base. This introduction of muzzle-loading weapons that could withstand much higher firing pressures was a significant development, and Poppenruyter demonstrated their efficiency by demolishing a ramshackle row of houses in Houndsditch with a single shot. Bronze cannon were still preferred—the metal was less prone to casting flaws and more resistant to corrosion, and a faulty or overloaded bronze cannon would bulge before disintegrating, whereas an iron one would simply explode into fragments, killing the guncrew and anyone else within range—but English iron cannon grew increasingly reliable as techniques to remove air bubbles, sulphur and phosphorus improved, and they were a fraction of the price—only 15 per cent of the cost of the cannon produced by the seven bronze foundries in Lisbon. The price of iron guns actually fell by a quarter during the last three decades of the century at a time when rocketing inflation was more than doubling the price of almost every other commodity.

  As a result of these developments, Henry VIII soon had “cannon enough to conquer hell”; his artillery fired 100,000 shots into Boulogne during a siege in 1544, and by the later years of his reign English bronze and iron cannon were eagerly sought throughout Europe, forcing Henry to ban their export. But Calais remained the principal focus of English arms production, and its loss during Mary Tudor’s disastrous war on France cost England over a thousand cannon and its principal arms foundries. It was said at the time that the country would never recover from the loss, and at the start of Elizabeth’s reign England was heavily dependent on imports, primarily from Flanders. However, as the likelihood of hostilities with Spain increased, the rapid further development of iron-working and gun-casting in the Weald and the Forest of Dean, and the immigration of skilled metal workers fleeing persecution in the Low Countries and Germany, enabled England once again to become a substantial manufacturer and exporter of weapons.

  Naval cannons had previously tended to be of small size—the weight of heavy guns carried at deck level affected the stability of the ship—but, at Henry VIII’s insistence, ways had been found to solve this problem. The short-ranged cannons and batteries of anti-personnel weapons carried on older ships were replaced by culverins and cannons of far superior range and quality. The development of gunports in the early years of the sixteenth century, adapted from the earlier ports cut into the hull to facilitate the loading of cargo, and the subsequent introduction of gundecks also allowed the relocation of heavy weapons nearer to the waterline, where their weight was less likely to destabilize the ship.

  Under John Hawkins, a continuous gundeck was introduced and the traditional low waist of the ships was also raised, allowing an additional row of lighter guns at deck level. Despite the galleons’ slender construction, these longer gundecks enabled them to carry a far greater weight of great ordnance than the Spanish ships they were to face, as much as 10 per cent of the total weight of the ship. The Revenge, built in 1575, carried 43 guns, 20 on the lower deck of 4,000 to 6,000 pounds in weight and 23 on the upper deck of 2,000 to 3,000 pounds. These great guns fired projectiles of from nine to 60 pounds in weight. By contrast, the galleass San Lorenzo, one of the most heavily armed ships of the Armada, had 40 guns, but 16 of those were sakers or minions, firing only four- or six-pound shot.

  English seamen had also solved the intractable problems of manoeuvring and reloading heavy cannons in the cramped, dangerous confines of the gundeck. The two-wheeled gun-carriages used on land were replaced by four-wheeled “truck-carriages” that occupied less space and were far easier to handle, allowing them to be pulled back from the gunport for reloading, and withdrawn towards the centre of the ship when not in use, further improving stability. In addition, the preferred weapon of the English navy, the culverin, was cast much heavier than strictly necessary, allowing for casting flaws that might otherwise have caused the weapon to explode and absorbing much of the energy of the recoil that would have stressed the ship’s frame or sent the weapon careering backwards, mowing down the guncrew. In compensation for this increased weight, the barrel length of the cannons and culverins was reduced by a third compared to the guns used by land forces—from fourteen to nine feet—with no loss of muzzle velocity, since black powder combusts so rapidly that a shot reaches its maximum velocity after travelling less than ten feet. A longer barrel tends to reduce rather than increase the range and, given the inherent inaccuracy of the weapons, firing at long range was in any case a pointless exercise. “He that shoots far off at sea had as good not shoot at all.” The English naval culverins had a theoretical range of well over a mile, but the range at which they could cause significant damage to an enemy ship was much shorter, as little as 100 yards against the stout oak hulls of warships. However, at such a distance they could be devastating; one artillery expert claimed that a 24-pound shot fired at that range could penetrate four and a half feet of “sound and hard oak.”

  The standardization and more precise calibration of the bore of cannons and the diameter of the “great shot” they fired was of equal importance, allowing much greater accuracy than had previously been possible, when variations in the size of cannonballs and in the quality and quantity of black powder used to fire them, coupled with the inevitable delays between the gunner’s decision to fire and the actual ignition of the firing charge after he put the matchcord to the touch-hole, made gunnery more a lottery than an exact science. Naval guns were now manned by specialist crews whose firing rate and accuracy was three or four times that of their European counterparts, and gunnery had become an honoured and sought-after profession within the ship’s company. So proficient and widely admired were English gunners that “a register of all the gunners, both serving Her Majesty in the ships and in forts and of others serving merchants” was kept, “that none depart the realm” to take the high wages offered to fight for England’s enemies. 15

  Gunpowder also underwent a quantum leap in quality with the introduction of “corned” powder. The earlier “serpentine” powder was prone to deterioration through damp or separation into its individual constituents, and was highly unstable. A gunner using his ramrod with too much vigour might blow himself to pieces, but if he was too tentative the gun would either discharge feebly or not fire at all. In the new process, small fragments of powder were glazed so that they remained stable and relatively impervious to moisture and burned at a more predictable and constant rate. However, securing adequate supplies of gunpowder remained a serious problem. As early as 1562, Elizabeth had been warned of the danger of not maintaining a strategic reserve of powder. “It will be only that thing she shall lack if wars should chance, which should be foreseen in time, because our forces and ships be nothing without powder.” The warnings had gone unheeded and despite occasional attempts to boost domestic production, nearly all of England’s saltpetre (nitre or potassium nitrate, the chief constituent of black powder) was imported. Saltpetre was primarily extracted from processed urine or manure. So desperate was the need that laws were passed encouraging the establishment of pigeon cotes—pigeon droppings were particularly rich in nitre—and “saltpetre men” also periodically dug up the floors of earth closets, stables, pigsties, henhuts and sheep pens to obtain the precious commodity “black
earth.” “Urine from people who drink strong drink” was particularly recommended, along with fresh dung from horses “who like to eat oats.” The process of extracting saltpetre was lengthy, complex and foul. A trench was dug and filled with quicklime and straw. Quantities of manure and urine were added daily for three weeks, and the uric acid in the urine oxidized to nitrate. The resulting mixture was then dug up again and boiled in lead or copper vats to evaporate the liquid. The crystallized saltpetre produced in this way was of variable strength and quality, making the charging of weapons an inexact science.