Sea Dogs

Life Aboard an English Galleon

James Seay Dean

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781803991818
  9780752450971
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750957380
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

'James Seay Dean is the noted authority on these voyages … he provides a sympathetic treatment of life aboard ship in some of the most challenging circumstances these redoubtable sailors faced "beyond the line".' – Professor Barry Gough, maritime historian

'A fascinating and informative account of the development of Tudor and Stuart sailing ships. Its examination of their architecture, sailing, and tactics, especially as it is set within the international political context, makes a most interesting story.' – Bryan Barrett, Commander RN, ret.

From jacktar to captain, what was life like aboard an Elizabethan ship? How did the men survive tropical heat, storms, bad water, rotten food, disease, poor navigation, shifting cargoes and enemy fire? Would a sailor return alive?

Sea Dogs follows in the footsteps of the average sailor, drawing from the accounts of sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century ocean voyages to convey the realities of everyday life aboard the galleons sailing between England and the West Indies and beyond. Celebrating the extraordinary drive and courage of those early sailors who left the familiarity of their English estuaries for the dangers of the Cabo Verde and the Caribbean, the Rivers Amazonas and Orinoco, and the Strait of Magellan, and their remarkable achievements, Sea Dogs is essential reading for anyone with an interest in English maritime heritage.

1

‘Ships Are But Boards’

‘Ships are but boards, sailors but men.’

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1596–97

One day toward the end of January 1556 the English merchant Robert Tomson, passenger in a fleet of eight Spanish ships, was anticipating a landfall within hours at Nueva España’s San Juan de Ulúa. The ship was 15 leagues (45 nautical miles) from port. He had left England some years before, moved to Spain, and had set out for the New World to pursue his fortune through trade. Tomson expected to step ashore before dinner on Mexican soil and to make his way to lodgings in nearby Vera Cruz. But from out of nowhere – it was a full three months beyond the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico – came a deadly storm, a Norther typical in those waters. The storm battered the fleet for ten days. One 500-ton hulk was cast away. As for Tomson’s ship, he writes that in its ‘boisterous winds, fogs and rain our ship being old and weak was so tossed, that she opened at the stern a fathom under water, and the best remedy we had was to stop it with beds and pilobiers,1 and for fear of sinking we threw and lightened into the sea all the goods we had or could come by’.2 The captain cut away the mainmast and threw all but one cannon overboard. Tomson was fortunate to live to tell the tale of steep waves and archaic design.

Ships in the sixteenth century were indeed boards, vulnerable especially in the tropics, where wind, wave and sun challenged traditional European designs and construction. In the 1520s English shipwrights were building hulks, cogs and carracks largely designed for coastal sailing but not suitable for transoceanic voyaging. The next seventy-five years were to see radical changes in design and practice in English shipyards. This chapter examines how the English first followed Portuguese and then Spanish examples, then over the decades caught up with and surpasssed these great maritime nations in both design and construction. It considers first the carracks, caravelas, galleons and their refinement as race-built galleons. Second, it turns to the techniques of construction. The old tradition of building with green wood proved troublesome, especially in the tropics. As ships were built from a series of ratios, shipwrights wasted much wood. New powerful cannon required stronger and more stable ships. The race-built galleon was such a ship. Its design could support the more powerful armament, and such vessels were fast and manoeuvrable. From 1570 on, most of the Navy was built or rebuilt the new way. By the 1590s English race-built galleons were copied by the rest of Europe. Related to design was the measurement of a ship’s tonnage. Third, the chapter considers lessons learned from oceanic voyaging, during which the English saw new designs or on occasion fashioned a vessel from local raw materials. New vessels include the Dutch vlieboot, the Moorish gallizebra, the Brazilian jangada, Panamanian and Argentinian rafts and Chilean bladder boats. In the Americas, local shipwrights built Cuban frigates for use in Europe, and English shipwrights built a Panamanian pinnace, and a Bermudian bark.

Portuguese Caravelas

A generation before the English sailed off soundings into the Atlantic, the Portuguese and Spanish were Europe’s uncontested maritime nations. The venerable Portuguese nau (a generic name for a large ship) was beamy, short-keeled, with a deep-draught and a large hold for cargo. Naus could carry much cargo, but they were not weatherly vessels. The early Portuguese navigators favoured the smaller but more seaworthy caravela redonda, relatively narrow in beam, with its hermaphrodite rig of square and fore and aft sails on as many as four masts. Here was a design that sailed well and was seaworthy, though smaller. In 1498 a caravela took the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama around Africa to India’s pepper and cinnamon. It was a caravela that Pedro Álvares Cabral commanded when he discovered Brazil in 1500. The Portuguese were to write the first manuals on ship construction. About 1565 Fernando de Oliveira published his Livro da fábrica das naus. The Spanish were quick to follow. In 1575 Juan Escalante de Mendoza brought out Itinerario de navigación de los mares y tierras occidentales, a work that considers, among other matters, the proportions of ocean-going vessels, then the usual way to build a ship.

Tudor Carracks and Galleases

England, on the periphery of power, lagged behind the Continent in maritime construction. Shortly after Henry VIII became king in 1509, one of his first acts was to build his navy, a late medieval navy, where size, not efficiency, mattered. The old ways are figured in Henry VIII’s great ship, the carrack Henry Grace à Dieu (colloquially, the Great Harry), and her contemporary, the carrack Mary Rose.3 To challenge the Scottish great ship, Michael, built in 1511, Henry VIII the next year ordered the Great Harry built at the Woolwich yard. Henry’s Harry was the greatest of them all: four-masted, 1,000–1,500 tons, 165ft in length, with a four-deck forecastle and a two-deck sterncastle, ordnance of forty-three cannon of which twenty or twenty-one were the new bronze (colloquially called brass), and some 200 smaller ordnance. Her crew numbered between 700 and 1,000 men. Besides her size and the latest bronze cannon, she was the first English warship to have gunports cut into her hull. When launched, she was the grandest vessel afloat in European waters. But like the carrack Mary Rose, the Harry also proved top-heavy, and her rolling made for wildly inaccurate gunfire. In 1536 she was sent back to the shipyard for refitting. Shipwrights there anticipated Hawkyns’ race-built design by over thirty years by reducing the Harry’s top hamper, cutting down her tonnage to 1,000 tons, and improving her sail plan. In this refit, to make her easier to sail and to balance her centre of effort, her two masts forward carried the main, topsail and topgallants and the two aft carried five lateen sails. She became more responsive, faster, and was a more stable platform for firing her cannon. It is this refitted Harry that is shown in the Anthony Roll, 1546.4

Like the Portuguese naus, though, even rebuilt carracks were slow and sailed poorly. Their capacious design, however, had long worked for the Hanse merchants trading in Scandinavia. Their high freeboard had proved a bulwark against attackers and against the steep cold waves of the North Sea. Their deep holds could carry many tuns of profitable cargo. One example was the 700-ton, 70-gun Jesus of Lubeck, 1544. She was one of five carrack traders built originally as merchantmen, 400 to 700 tons. Henry VIII bought her in 1544–45 in Hamburg from the Hanseatic League, and armed her as a warship to augment his navy. The refitted Jesus as shown in the Anthony Roll5 was in 1546 an impressive ship of great bulk, tonnage and substantial firepower. Of her four masts the fore and mainmasts carried a course and topsail, and on the mizzen and bonadventure mizzen a single lateen sail each. In battle she carried 300 men. Like most vessels of the time the Jesus had been built of green wood, as had Cabot’s caravel, the Matthew, in the 1490s. Her unseasoned timber soon rotted. Her high forecastle and poop and full-cut sails made her poor in going to weather but good for defence from boarders.

Her high freeboard and broad beam allowed her to carry some heavy ordnance (seventy cannon in all) at a reasonable distance above the waterline, with smaller guns on the upper decks. Her stern’s flat transom was high, with a centre-hung rudder mounted outboard on the transom, usual for the time. The stern was armed with eight cannon of somewhat smaller bore than her main cannon. Two were positioned close to the waterline, on either side of the rudder. Despite these modifications, she was built to be a Baltic trader, not a warship, and the hull suffered from the pounding recoil of heavy artillery. Spanish galleons, with more closely spaced ribs, could take the stresses better. The Jesus’ cannon out-muscled her timbers.

Besides carracks, Harry had galleasses. Any captain wants a ship that can manoeuvre in any direction, independent of the wind. The galleass seemed the answer. The galleass, variously called galleys, galleasses or barks, was powered by as many as sixty oars, and had three masts that supported a full sail plan. She was sleek, with a length-to-beam ratio of 3:1 (2:1 was then normal). The vessel was armed with light cannon. She promised to be more versatile than the huge carrack. If there were wind, sail; if calm, row. Underwater, the galleass had the sleek lines of the galley, with a full keel and relatively deep draught, and a pronounced tumblehome that added stability. Such was Henry’s Great Galley, launched in 1515 just a year after the Great Harry slid down the ways in 1514. This huge clinker-built vessel of 800 tons had four masts, 120 oars and 97 cannon. But Henry’s massive Great Galley (really a galleass) unfortunately proved leak. Furthermore, 800 tons were simply too much to row. In 1544, she was sent back to the yards to be rebuilt as a great ship of 500 tons, without the oars.

In 1545, the war with France proved the uselessness of the large oared galleasses. Both the galleass and the carrack were dying breeds. Even as they came down the ways at the Chatham yard, smaller and faster vessels had for a half century proved their worth in Europe. Yet though Henry’s feet were firmly planted on a medieval deck, in some ways he was farseeing. He had always insisted on a fine turn of speed from his horses, women and ships. Thus when his galleasses proved too heavy and too slow he ordered them all back to the shipyards. There they lost their oars and some tonnage. By 1549 they had all been rebuilt as ships.6

Galleons

When the northern carrack met the southern caravela, the result was a three-masted ship with both square sails and a mizzen lateen sail, and a stern-mounted rudder. Size had met speed. The hermaphrodite plan sailed better than the plan of the bulky northern European ships and on the open sea could go to weather or reach well in following seas. This new vessel was the galleon, so successful a design that from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the galleon was the principal merchant and naval vessel of the English and European fleets. Like all ships of the time, the design was generic so that a single ship could serve as a cargo vessel or warship. Galleons had a pronounced tumblehome that brought the upper gun deck closer to the vessel’s centre line, improving stability and making for accurate gunnery. Longer and narrower than carracks, they sailed better than the earlier design. So successful was the galleon as a design, that one, the Lion, was rebuilt three times over her extraordinarily long lifespan of 141 years, from 1557 to 1698.7

The galleon’s hull was similar to that of the caravela redonda, but she was more stoutly built to withstand heavy seas and to carry heavy ordnance. She was fully rigged like her predecessor. Galleons of this period had three or more masts, of which the fore and main masts were rigged with squares, and lateen-rigged on the after masts. She had a beak, a high forecastle and sterncastle and one or two gun decks. In both merchant and naval use she was armed. It was this sort of vessel that Sir John Hawkyns in the 1570s typically modified as the race-built galleon.

Hawkyns’ Race-Built Galleons

Storms and battle encountered in Hawkyns’ third trading voyage in 1567–68 to the Caribbean convinced him that a new ship design was needed. D.W. Waters argues cogently that from the disaster at the small port of San Juan de Ulúa in 1568, Hawkyns understood that the Elizabethan navy’s ‘narrow seas’ now had to mean ‘oceanic’, and that ‘battle by boarding’ had to give way to ‘battle by bombardment’. In that one battle Hawkyns recognised the need for a different design and for new tactics.8

By the 1560s the old carrack Jesus of Lubeck had been well past her useful life and was headed for the breakers when she became Elizabeth’s major stake in Hawkyns’ second voyage, 1564–65, and then the third, 1567–68. For that third voyage the queen valued her condemned vessel not worth the repair costs of £4,000, and Hawkyns had to spend a considerable sum to make the 24-year-old ship seaworthy. Overhauled, the Jesus sailed as Hawkyns’ admiral (flagship). Though archaic in design, she still had a cavernous capacity for cargo and the potential for substantial profit. She was leak and unseaworthy, but Hawkyns had to keep her, as she was the queen’s impressive royal vessel, part of her stake in the enterprise. Elizabeth’s other contribution was the Minion, 300–600 tons, much younger, purchased in 1558. But within six years of her launching she was likewise condemned as unseaworthy and deemed not worth repairing. Like the Jesus, she too was overvalued by the queen. On the West Indian run, Spanish ships rarely undertook more than four voyages out and back before being retired.9 In the sixteenth cen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notices to Mariners
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Ships Are But Boards’
• 2 ‘Remainder Biscuit’
• 3 Western Winds – A Tropical Rutter
• 4 Stars for Wandering Barks
• 5 The Way of a Fighting Ship
• 6 ‘Plague of the Sea and Spoyle of Mariners’
• 7 Traffiques and Booty
• 8 Epilogue
• Appendix A: Chronology
• Appendix B: Tropical Climate and Weather
• Appendix C: Glossary
• Bibliography
• About the Author