The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was among those who understood that the country’s future – indeed its survival – lay in naval strength. He took personal control of the political aspects of the Royal Navy, and spent the 1560s and 1570s building up capacity, commissioning surveys of shipping and mobilising. He had a great love of geography and his copy of Saxton’s Atlas also includes a map of the coast of Norway, Sweden and northern Russia. He was famous for his meticulous knowledge of the places of Europe. Yet he himself left British shores only once in his life, for a brief visit to the Low Countries.

      The rise in piracy, represented by the Cornish Killigews, angered him; fish were the rightful yield of the seas, not plunder. Those who lived by the coast should spread nets to feed the people, not sail off on prize-grabbing adventures. But since the Reformation, and the relaxation of fast days, demand for fish had shrunk: to eat meat on a Friday, to roll your jaws over bloody slabs of beef, became an affirmation of Protestant faith, and it left fishermen with a shrinking market. They stowed their nets and joined privateers. To try to induce them back, Burghley – still William Cecil at the time – introduced a government bill to make twice-weekly fish-eating compulsory. His measure was jeered in the House for its Popish implications, and dubbed ‘Cecil’s Fast’.

      The Killigrews on the other hand saw the sea as a source of personal gain. Arwenack became a hub for the illicit side of seaborne enterprise, for privateering, a practice which took off during the last decades of Tudor rule. Elizabethan ‘privateering’ was, strictly, distinct from the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century practice which spawned the term, but it offered the same dubious licence to attack foreign ships as redress for lost cargoes. In the sixteenth century, this licence was provided through a ‘letter of marque’. If a merchant or captain was robbed of his goods by a foreign power, he was given a chit which allowed him to snatch compensation in kind from any ships of that power. Often the letters themselves were exchanged for money, and often not held at all. In practice, privateering was little more than semi-sanctioned piracy.

      To Burghley, it made a mockery of the rule of law, and jeopardised relations with other nations, particularly Spain. But with hindsight, the spirit of privateering characterises the Elizabethan age – the ship as the vessel of the wildest hopes, the heady myth-making, the heroic sea voyages, the failure of the Spanish Armadas. Privateering also had one great practical benefit: it proved the nation’s greatest school for maritime skills.

      The countless and nameless figures who manned the privateers learned the advantages of the modern rig with its auxiliary sails. They learned to use the mesh of halyards and lifts and sheets. They learned how to charge the guns with volatile serpentine powder, and how to damp the recoil. And they learned something far more important, that despite the risks and discomforts, a successful foray into the Channel, or the taking of a Spanish prize, could bring greater reward than a lifetime of toil. The sea and quick wealth become part of a powerful association for coastal communities, brought together in the arts of seamanship.

      Life on board a privateer was brutal and anarchic, lacking either the hierarchical order of Spanish ships or the fierce discipline of the later Royal Navy. Privateers were mutual enterprises, operated on the same basis as fishing boats, with the crew receiving no wages but reaping a third of the takings. They would coerce the captain if they disagreed with him – ‘shite on thy commissions!’ – or simply mutiny. There were open fights. The ships were often shockingly overmanned and under-victualled. Scurvy and the flux laid whole companies low; there were instances of starvation. But when a prize was sighted, all disputes were forgotten. The men took to their stations, gaining the weather-gage, firing on the prize not to sink it but to disable it. With small arms – fowlers and murderers, muskets and calivers – the ship was boarded. If booty was not revealed by searching, it was discovered by persuasion – wrapping ropes around the head, or bowstrings around the genitals.

      As well as rewarding those with sea-skills, such enterprise encouraged private investment in ships. By the end of the century, the English merchant fleet outnumbered the Queen’s own by twenty to one. The ships landed up to £200,000 a year in illicit prize money, establishing new fortunes, no longer tied up in land, as liquid as the sea that yielded them, a fund of robber capital that grew and grew, doubling by the decade, funding more ships and more ventures, and swelling through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the prosperity on which Britain’s global power was based.

      On the Burghley Map, ships fill the blank sea-spaces with gleeful profusion. To the west of Pendennis an English three-master fires, rather gratuitously, on a caravel (its southern shape suggesting devious papist intentions). Another three-master waits to the south of Pendennis. In the Carrick Roads, marked by a couple of paddock-size St George’s ensigns, a powerful squadron lies at anchor. But there are other ships, too, which fly no official flags. Mylor has a couple, St Mawes a couple more (Penryn has none); three more lie off St Methick’s Point. But the greatest number, arranged in neat formation, lie off Killigrew land, a cluster of eight off Arwenack Manor.

      Burghley’s own handwriting has been identified on his map of Falmouth Haven and it is easy to imagine him during the dangerous years of the late sixteenth century, surveying his atlas and pausing to scrutinise Folio 9. He would have ignored the Killigrews’ display of standard-waving from Pendennis Castle, seeing it for the sham it was, likewise the bellicose men-of-war. But he would have noticed, too, that anonymous group off Arwenack, their pack-like poise and confidence, and been reminded of the renegade threat of privateering.

      Their rig is identical. Three masts, two bare yards on the fore and main, and a spar aft on the mizzen. A bumpkin juts from a high transom stern. The images are too small to see what guns they carry – typically a clutch of sakers, minions and falconets. They are not big, perhaps fifty or sixty tons burden, easily affordable for a private syndicate – but in the history of ship design they represented the most efficient vessels that had ever sailed.

      During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sailing ships had evolved more quickly than in the previous 5,000 years. Such was their success that they remained essentially unchanged for the next 200 or 300 years, until the coming of steam and ironclads began to make them obsolete. With only a little hyperbole, the maritime historian Alan McGowan equates the development of this type of rig with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel.

      The standard sailing ship in most of Europe had, until well into the Middle Ages, tended to use a large, single sail, a very powerful driving force if the wind was steady, and moderate, and blowing from behind, or at least aft of the beam. Such a rig was pretty useless to windward and gave little scope for varying sail area in light airs or as the breeze freshened. So auxiliary sails were added – a maintop above the maincourse and ahead of them a foretop and forecourse. In time a spritsail appeared in the bows and lateen sails were set aft – which enabled the ship to manoeuvre through the wind with an ease never known before. A fourth mast and bonnets were sometimes added. Over time, sails grew upwards – top-gallants, royals and skysails – while the headsails pushed forward, out along the bowsprit. Staysails filled the gaps ahead of and between the masts while, eventually, studding-sails stretched far out over the sides.

      From the Bayeux Tapestry.

      As to the hulls of northern European ships, they had tended to be clinker-built. The strength lay in the overlapping boards; an inner frame was added later, towards launching. When demands on ships grew, and voyages became longer and the risks from hostile ships increased (or rather, in the case of English privateers, the rewards from being hostile oneself), an alternative construction became popular, spreading from Spain and Portugal. Carvel building placed the boards of the hull flush against one another and relied for firmness and shape on an inner frame of ribs and crosspieces. (It is possible that, in Cornwall and Brittany, carvel construction had always been practised; the Veneti were reported to have used such ships against the Romans.)

      Carvel СКАЧАТЬ