But Dartmouth men and Dartmouth ships were never idle, nor were they always engaged upon mere filibustering expeditions. In the hearts of Devon seamen the flame of patriotism has ever burned, and so on more than one occasion they came in the nick of time to the aid of England, and embarked upon enterprises of national, not merely personal, significance and importance. It was so half a century before the expeditions to Brittany, which brought about the descent of Du Chastel and his force. Then, in 1385, after the death of Edward III and his warlike son Edward the Black Prince, the French were planning one of the periodical invasions of England, which on a grand scale were always doomed to failure, and the English admirals and generals seemed to have become indifferent, or were, perhaps, worn out by the long years of fruitless fighting in Guienne, Poitou, and Brittany. It was then that the Dartmouth men gathered their ships together, and regardless of treaties or the lack of national support, swept up the Channel, forced their way into the mouth of the Seine, where the French fleet was being brought together, and preparations for the invasion were going on, attacked the enemy, sank several of the ships, and carried off with them back to Dartmouth four others, including, Walsingham tells us, a knight’s barge, filled with spoil rich enough to satisfy the greediest freebooter. This undertaking of Dartmouth folk was of national importance; although such events were usually much more of the nature of merchants’ speculations or piracy, which seldom failed to bring about retribution from the equally bold and enterprising Bretons. Indeed, there would appear good reason for supposing that the right to levy “private warfare” was at least tacitly admitted by both English and French rulers of the period, for in an ancient volume bearing upon the subject one finds a distinct statement that at least one English Sovereign, Edward III to wit, aided and abetted his subjects in this matter, the excuse given being the laxity of the then Duke of Brittany in restraining his subjects from similar depredations. Three ports are mentioned, Dartmouth being one, to which the King afforded “help and notable puissance upon pety Bretayne for to warre.”
It may be remarked in passing that men who had been bred of corsair stock, who had learned the value of courage and the lust of battle on the open sea, and the fascination of pillage and rapine as early as they learned anything, needed little official encouragement to undertake and continue the predatory warfare beloved and followed so sturdily by their forbears. Whatever one’s opinion as to the lawfulness or otherwise of such marauding habits, which often, it may be admitted, told severely on the innocent, it is well to remember the historical fact that these sea-rovers of the West of England formed the nucleus of the British Navy, and the thews and sinews of the power which enabled England in after years to flout the great Armada of Philip of Spain, and to stand alone when Europe bowed before the crash of dynasties, and trembled beneath the tread of Napoleon’s legions.
Out of the murk of piracy and lawless freebooting upon the coasts of France and Spain was destined to emerge centuries later the material from which were drawn the navy of Nelson, and the victors of Trafalgar, and of many another hard fought fight, men indomitable when engaged at long odds; enterprising and courageous when traversing in solitude unknown seas and unknown lands; chivalrous (yes, chivalrous in measure) when a gallant foe yielded; full of belief in the overruling Providence which had set Britain in the midst of the waters that she might throughout all the jugglery of Empires and nations remain free.
In the State papers and ships’ log-books which we have seen may be found material for all the romances that can ever be written of daring doings in the narrow seas, of the pirates, and afterwards of the privateers and smugglers who sailed out of Devon and Cornish ports and coves, and made the Channel during several centuries, war or no war with France and Spain, almost impossible of safe passage to merchantmen of the latter nations, except when strongly convoyed.
Of many of the stirring scenes which the port of Dartmouth must have witnessed, there are unfortunately few historical records. But we know that it was visited by several of the early Kings. Here, too, in Saxon times came Sweyn, son of Godwyn, into whose hands Earl Beorn fell a prisoner, and by him was afterwards put to death about 1049. It was to Dartmouth that the “Red King” William Rufus came in hot haste from his hunting of the deer on Dartmoor in 1099, after receiving the news of the siege of Mans, Dartmouth being the nearest port from which he could embark.
Just upon a century later, in 1190, came Richard Cœur de Lion with his army of knights and Crusaders obsessed by the necessity for slaying infidels, and of themselves dying in a far-off land. King John came to Dartmouth more than once, notably in 1214, after his defeat at Roche aux Moines in Anjou. It is this monarch, Leland states, who gave a charter to the town, confirmed in the succeeding reign by Henry III, although another writer, Merewether, states that in 1319 the town set up a claim as having been free in the reign of Henry I early in the twelfth century.
A less pleasant visitor of Royal blood was Prince Maurice, nephew of Charles I, who besieged and took the town in 1643, the Royalists losing possession three years later, when General Fairfax and his Parliamentarians stormed and captured the place after considerable loss of life and destruction of property. Charles I was here in 1643, and (so tradition asserts) held his court in a room of one of the houses in the Butterwalk, and Charles II visited the place after his Restoration, some say with fair Mistress Gwynne in his suite.
But after all it is not to Royal folk that Dartmouth owed its fame in years gone by, but to the sturdy seafarers of whom the famous navigating sons of Devon, Adrian Gilbert, who (to quote a letter of Queen Elizabeth herself) “doth travail and seeke, and by divers meanes indeavoureth and laboureth that the passage unto China and the Isles of the Moluccas by the northwestward may be known”; Martin Frobisher, and John Davis of Sandridge; Francis Drake, and John Hawkins are but a few. It was to John Davis that the task of discovering the sea route concerning which Sir Humphrey Gilbert (the brother of Adrian) wrote a Discourse “to prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East Indies” was entrusted. In all he made three voyages, in 1585, 1586, and 1587, in vessels which are well described in Chaucer’s words, “little bote(s) no bigger than a manne’s thought”; and afterwards we are told that he sailed into southern seas, and eventually was killed by the Malaccan pirates with whom he had had more than one “brush,” leaving behind him a permanent memorial in the name of Davis’s Straits between Greenland and Baffin Land.
To Queen Elizabeth herself some credit must be given for the encouragement and stimulus her patronage afforded these hazardous enterprises; and if it was because of the reflected glory which would accrue to her, or even direct monetary profit, well, what matter?
In Hakluyt one finds how “certain honourable personages and worthy gentlemen of the Court and Country, with divers worshipful merchants of London and the West Countrie, moved with desire to advance God’s glory, and to seek the good of their native country, consulting together of the likelihood of the discovery of the North-West Passage, which heretofore has been attempted, but unhappily given over by accidents unlooked for ... resolved, after good deliberation, to put down their adventures, to provide for necessary shipping, and a fit man to be chief conductor of this so hard an enterprise.” Then we are told how one Master William Sanderson, merchant, of London, became the greatest of the adventurers in respect of the money he provided, and how he commended to those who had the adventure in hand one Master John Davis, “a man very well grounded in the principales and art of navigation,” as captain and chief pilot of the expedition. One can imagine the meetings of the adventurers in London, and the zest with which the gentlemen of the Court, the Queen’s representatives, secret or open, and the worthy merchants, conned “sea-cards,” the charts of Master Martin Frobisher’s voyages of a few years before, and the learned and closely reasoned discourse of Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself regarding the existence of the Passage. It may be that among these was the chart of friar Andro Urdaneta, which Sir Humphrey Gilbert states was “made by his own (Urdaneta’s) experience and travel ... wherein was plainly set down and described this North-West Passage,” agreeing in all points with Ortelius’ map.