by Neil Hanson
In the early 1570s English traders had found a more reliable source in Fez on the Barbary Coast (in modern-day Morocco). Islamic and Christian states were implacably opposed but there was a commonality of interest—the Sheriff of Fez granted a monopoly of the trade in saltpetre in return for English iron cannon and cannonballs, pikes, helmets and small arms. It was an unlooked-for but welcome bonus for English diplomacy that these weapons were then used against Spanish shipping in the Mediterranean. For the first time, England now had a dependable supply of gunpowder of consistent quality, enabling the charge of a weapon and therefore its range and trajectory to be calculated with greater accuracy, but persuading the Queen to purchase sufficient stocks of this expensive commodity—black powder cost around £100 a ton—and prising it from her magazines at the Tower of London when required remained problems that English naval commanders had yet to solve. Only when the Armada was actually off the coast were attempts made to obtain additional supplies and by then it was too late.
Sheer weight of numbers was on the Spanish side, but the massed troops and their mountains of equipment and supplies made their ships slow and unwieldy, and they were overmanned with soldiers and undermanned with seamen. While Howard’s 800-ton flagship, the Ark, had 300 seamen and only 125 soldiers aboard, Medina-Sidonia’s 1,000-ton San Martin carried 300 soldiers and only 177 seamen. The English crewmen also tended to be more skilled and experienced, particularly in Atlantic conditions. Some Spanish sailors were not unused to rough seas; the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic, where the sailors of the west and north coasts plied their trades, can be as wild and rough as any but the southern oceans. But the experience of most Spanish, Venetian and Neapolitan sailors was largely confined to the Mediterranean, and with the exception of the Basque fishermen working the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, those who had sailed the Atlantic had rarely ventured much beyond the run with the trade winds to and from the Caribbean. Philip described “the enemy’s crews” as consisting of “novices, drawn from the common people, a tumultuous crowd, lacking military discipline,” but he grossly underestimated their experience and ability. It was true that pressing men for the Queen’s galleons—though not for privateers—remained a necessity, for “their usage has been so ill that it is no marvel they show their unwillingness to serve the Queen. For if they arrive sick from any voyage, such is the charity of the people ashore that they shall sooner die than find pity; unless they bring money with them.” As a result, some English crewmen were still an undisciplined, unskilled rabble, the scourings of the seaports, but there was a solid core of well-trained and experienced seamen that the navy could draw on in time of war, and knowledge of the sea extended even beyond the coastal ports of England, for many younger sons from inland towns were apprenticed to ships’ captains.16
Henry VIII’s sailors never voyaged further than the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea; under Elizabeth, Durham and Newcastle colliers still sailed the North Sea, and grain and cargo ships crossed the Channel, but large numbers of her seamen had also sailed the stormy waters guarding the rich fisheries off Ireland, Iceland and Greenland, where East Coast ships were challenging the German and Scots fishing fleets, and Bristol and West Country ships had begun to fish the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, previously monopolized by the Basques. Still others had voyaged in search of the North-West Passage with Frobisher or John Davis, on raids across the Bay of Biscay to mainland Spain, or gone plundering in the Spanish colonies of the New World. Merchant adventurers in London, Bristol and the South West also made their own journeys to secure the goods once brought by Venetian and Hanseatic ships, and Turkey merchants of the Levant Company pursued the Mediterranean trade, “extremely profitable to them, as they take great quantities of tin and lead thither,” as well as stockfish, corn and fine cloths. The Barbary Company carried on a brisk trade with Morocco, where English iron, cloth and timber were exchanged for sugar and saltpetre. The Eastland Company, established in 1579, traded finished cloth with the Baltic countries and Poland in return for timber and naval supplies, and the Muscovy Company traded the same commodities with Russia. Merchant explorers such as Gilbert, Hawkins, Wyndham, Willoughby and Chancellor were meanwhile pioneering trade with the New World, Africa and Asia.
Improvements in the design, seaworthiness and durability of sailing ships helped to encourage the new trades. The single-masted ships of medieval times were replaced by two-, three- and four-masters, lateen sails were introduced and hulls became longer and narrower, making ships faster and better able to sail close to the wind, and the introduction of topmasts and topsails increased the canvas they could carry and therefore the speed they could achieve. The Crown also introduced a bounty to encourage shipbuilding, and took steps to promote the fishing industry, the training ground for most of the nation’s mariners, by imposing a statutory meatless day once a week—increased to two days a week by Elizabeth. Fast days also fulfilled religious duties but their prime purpose was secular: to conserve meat supplies, especially during Lent at the end of winter, when meat stocks were at their lowest; and, of equal or greater importance, to encourage the consumption of fish.
Unlike their counterparts in The Netherlands, France, Naples, Genoa, Venice or Portugal, few English mariners served foreign rulers. They made their voyages of exploration, trade or privateering in English ships, under English captains, and they were seasoned, honed and battle-hardened in sea fights by years of privateering. All English merchant ships, particularly those of the Levant Company, were armed against attacks by pirates and corsairs, and if the vessels used in the Baltic trade were often of modest size, the ships used in privateering or the Levant trade, such as the 400-ton Merchant Royal, were almost as large and heavily armed as the Queen’s galleons. Many merchants found the speculative profits from using their vessels in privateering voyages even more attractive than legitimate trading, and some of the most enthusiastic were those who had previously traded with Spain. “The very men whose business was with Spain seemed fated to become her worst enemies.” During the 1570s and 1580s, a substantial armed merchant fleet had been built up, together with a correspondingly large pool of men experienced in seamanship and naval warfare.
All this was of both immediate and long-term benefit to the Crown, for “the state may hereafter want such men, who commonly are the most daring and serviceable in war.” Fear of Spanish land forces was universal, but English sailors had been fighting the Spaniards at sea for twenty years and had formed no high opinion of their fighting abilities. The primary role of English crewmen was to sail the ship, not fight battles, and they were normally armed only with a “kidney dagger”—after the place in the belt where it was kept—but those who worked on privateers soon acquired expertise with musket, pike, sword and axe, and would take them up as required either in defence of their own ship or, more usually, to attack a prize. English seamen saw nothing in Spanish ships and sailors to cause them fear. They “had already taken the measure of Spain and, unlike the politicians in London, regarded her much as a prize-fighter regards a fat citizen with a full purse.”17
English captains and admirals were also superior to their Spanish opponents. English ships had their share of lords and gentlemen in command—Lord Howard owed his position as Admiral of the Fleet to his ancestry, not his naval skills—but there were powerful reasons why a lord would be preferred as overall commander even by the lowliest of his men. A man of power, influence and connections at Court was far more likely to secure improvements in pay and conditions, or obtain supplies of food or munitions in a crisis, than any commoner. But that special case aside, the vast majority of captains in the English fleet had won their commands on merit. The very discomforts and dangers of life at sea ensured that only the most dedicated—or desperate—would seek his fortune in that way. Of the commanders of the thirty-four prime fighting ships in the English Grand Fleet, only five were lords, and one of those, the debt-ridden Earl of Cumberland, was a very experienced if not conspicuously successful privateer. Several
others, including Drake, were knights but they had been honoured for their expertise at sea, not promoted because of their titles, and the remaining captains of the fleet were all commoners. It was inconceivable that Spanish galleons would have been commanded by common men.
On Spanish ships, the sea-captains were subordinate to the army officers on board; on English ships the reverse was true, and if the captain of a ship was every bit as much the absolute ruler of his kingdom as his monarch on land, there was a democracy of effort and shared risk aboard English ships that was utterly foreign to Spaniards. Drake famously insisted that “I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman . . . let us show ourselves to be of a company. I would know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope, but I know there is not any such here.” Drake did his share of hauling and drawing with his men, but to partake of such menial activity was anathema to Spanish officers and gentlemen, and morale aboard their ships was further hampered by the unending hostility, sometimes to the point of blows and bloodshed, between the crewmen and the soldiers. Englishmen were not immune to such disputes, but Drake stamped out any show of disunity. “Such controversy between the sailors and the gentlemen and such stomaching between the gentlemen and the sailors . . . does make me mad to hear it.”
There was still a marked inequality of rates of pay and the remuneration of an admiral depended more on his social rank than his skill. As Lord High Admiral of England, and one of the most prominent peers of the realm, Charles Howard was paid £3 6s 8d per day. Lord Henry Seymour, Admiral of the Narrow Seas and second son of the Earl of Hertford, received £2 a day, comfortably more than the lowly born Drake’s 30 shillings. Wynter and Frobisher had to be content with £1, captains received half a crown (12½p) and the “common man” 10 shillings a month—4d a day, at a time when 1½d to 2d per day was judged the minimum necessary to keep Spanish prisoners of war from starving to death. The “allowance for a diet for the Lord Thomas Howard and Lord Sheffield” was a generous one, however, amounting to £433 during the period of their service. Captains and officers also profited from “dead-shares”: the wages paid to dead or non-existent mariners on the ship’s books, but little if any of this money filtered down to their living crewmen.
In 1585, John Hawkins had performed the near miraculous feat of persuading the Queen and Burghley to raise seamen’s pay by a third, so that “the common man, that had but 6s 8d by the month, shall have 10s.” After strident protests from Elizabeth, Hawkins pointed out, with an eye to the Queen’s customary priorities, that it could actually be a means of saving money as well as improving the service, since a few well-trained and experienced men were worth more to a ship’s captain than twice as many members of an ill-disciplined rabble. “By this means, Her Majesty’s ships will be furnished with able men, such as can make shift for themselves, [and] keep themselves clean without vermin and noisomeness which breeds sickness and mortality . . . The ships would be able to continue longer in the service . . . There is no captain or master but would undertake with more courage any enterprise with 250 able men than with 300 of tag and rag, and assure himself of better success. The wages being so small, cause the best men to run away, to bribe and make means to be cleared from the service, and insufficient, unable and unskilful persons supply the place.” His argument was undoubtedly true; there was a general complaint that “the muster masters do carry the best men in their pockets” and the Weymouth press-masters were accepting bribes of £1 a head to let seafarers avoid the press gang, with unqualified “men of all occupations, some of whom did not know a rope and were never at sea,” being taken in their place. It was unsurprising that the press-masters were susceptible to bribes since, like her soldiers and seamen, they often went unpaid by Elizabeth. 18
Hawkins continued to petition her to improve seamen’s wages—“If it shall please Her Majesty to yield unto this increase, Her Highness’s service would be far safer and much bettered, and yet the charge nothing increased”—and the pay was eventually raised, but the rise did not even compensate for the effects of inflation. Wages were still so meagre that the only means of filling the ships with men frequently remained the forced recruitment of the press gang, though even on the Queen’s ships many crewmen, often the majority, were volunteers drawn by the promise of a share in rich prizes from pillage and plunder. “We find it in daily experience that all discourse of magnanimity, of national virtue, of religion, of liberty and whatsoever else has been wont to move and encourage virtuous men, has no force at all with the common soldier [or sailor] in comparison of spoil or riches,” and English seamen were notorious throughout Europe as “the most infamous for outrageous, common and daily piracies.”
Aboard ship was no place for faint hearts. One jaundiced mariner wrote of “continual destruction in the foretop, the pox above board, the plague between decks, Hell in the forecastle and the Devil at the helm.” Discipline was enforced by the personality of the captain or the brawn of his underlings as much as by regulation, and privateers were notoriously undisciplined, but a code of punishment serving the interests of the crews as well as their captains was enforced with more or less rigour. Falling asleep on watch, leaving the ship vulnerable to attack and capture, was a serious offence. The punishment increased with each of the first three infractions, the guilty watchman being lashed to the capstan or the mast with progressively heavier weights attached to his limbs, causing “much pain to his body at the will of the captain.” If he fell asleep a fourth time, he was effectively sentenced to death, suspended from the bowsprit “in a basket with a can of beer and a loaf of bread and a sharp knife.” He was left to “hang there until he starve or cut himself into the sea.” Thieves were hauled behind the ship on a rope into the next port of call and thrown ashore; seamen drawing a weapon during a dispute or brawl had their right hands nailed to the mainmast or cut off, and murderers were bound to the bodies of their victims and thrown overboard to drown. “If the offence be very foul,” keelhauling was also practised, in which men were dragged under water from one side of the ship to the other by a rope passed right under the keel. “Whilst he is thus under water, a great gun is fired right over his head, which is done as well to astonish him as to give warning to all others of the fleet.” It was a punishment of such brutality that many died from it, but discipline was maintained by such rough justice long after the Elizabethan era. 19
In parallel with the improvements to English ships, crews and armaments, the traditional tactics of naval warfare, in which ships were merely an augmentation of the land forces or the means of transport by which troops were delivered to a hand-to-hand fight with the enemy aboard their own or the enemy’s ships, were also revolutionized. When France tried to invade in 1545, Henry VIII’s fleet was drawn up close to the shore batteries of Spithead so that together they could defend the land, but the privateering raids of Drake had showed that ships could be decisive in their own right. The troops that his ships carried were used primarily for sorties on shore, not for ship-to-ship fighting, and such warfare required a completely different strategy and tactics, aggressive instead of passive, defending the country by waging war on the high seas or in the enemy’s ports and strongholds, and destroying his ships in his own territorial waters. In this new form of warfare, economic blows against the enemy were as vital as military ones; every treasure ship that was intercepted by English privateers was one less hoard of silver that Philip could use to pay his troops or crew his ships. Sea power therefore offered the prospect of achieving foreign policy ends without recourse to the damaging, financially draining continental wars that had emptied England’s treasury for centuries. The Fighting Instructions issued by William Wynter, Surveyor of the Navy, in 1558 showed that cannon were then still intended to be used in conjunction with boarding and hand-to-hand fighting, rather than as a substitute for it, but by the 1570s, under Wynter’s successor and bitter rival, John Hawkins, the emphasis had shifted. English galleons would now aim to outsa
il and outmanoeuvre their enemies and defeat them with the power and accuracy of their gunnery alone.
English crewmen were inured to hardships such as “a hard cabin, cold and salty meat, broken sleeps, mouldy bread, dead beer, wet clothes, want of fire,” but their commanders had cause for concern about the physical state of their men and the availability of the provisions and munitions upon which they depended. Baking or salting were then the only available methods of preserving food and the lack of knowledge of basic nutrition, medicine and hygiene was reflected in the widespread ill-health of seamen. They were often malnourished even before they joined their ships and the shipboard diet was a virtual guarantee of sickness. When the rush floor-coverings of houses routinely harboured “spittle, vomit, the urine of dogs and men, the dregs of beer, the remains of fish and other nameless filth,” the decks and ballast of ships at sea would scarcely be cleaner. All this left the crews especially vulnerable to the plagues that infected every fleet: dysentery, typhus and scurvy.
The early symptoms of scurvy—progressive weakness, tiredness and depression—take five to six weeks to develop, but the diet of most Englishmen, especially in the winter months, was so lacking in fruit and vegetables that seamen were often suffering from a deficiency of vitamin C before they even put to sea. The Mediterranean seaman’s diet, based on dried or salt tunny, cod, sardines or squid, pulses, olive oil and ship’s biscuit, was only marginally better. Seamen who had been kept on board for weeks or months to prevent desertions before the fleet sailed were also at increased risk. “Feeding them on salt-meat with only the diet of the ship two or three months sometimes before their going out to sea, must needs prostitute them to much sickness and infection and I believe has been the main occasion of those so extraordinary losses of men . . . in our sea expeditions.” With the men already debilitated, scurvy could rapidly progress to its terrible later stages. Men’s limbs became swollen and black, scars that had healed years before opened up again and old fractures of the bones broke once more. Teeth fell out in handfuls and blood trickled constantly from nostrils and eye-sockets. If fresh fruit was eaten, the recovery from the disease was near-miraculous, but without it death was inevitable. Despite halts in the New World and Asia to take on fresh supplies, Drake lost a quarter of his men to scurvy during his circumnavigation and there were recorded instances of every single member of a ship’s crew perishing from the disease, leaving a ghost ship drifting over the seas. 20
