Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

CHAPTER V.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SAILING SHIP FROM THE EIGHTH CENTURY TO THE YEAR 1485.

I is the custom of some writers concerning mediæval ships to deplore the existing information as being too scanty to afford us any adequate idea as to vessels that sailed the seas during the first half of the middle age. For myself I think that such a statement cannot be maintained.

The evidence on which we are able to construct afresh in our minds the ships of this period, is scarcely as slender as has been supposed, though not unnaturally we must make allowances for obvious inaccuracies, for exaggerations, and for ignorance. But, even when we have done this we shall find the sources of information far from shallow. I have used as the basis for this chapter, the evidence of mediæval seals, both English and Continental: England, Scotland, France, Spain and Flanders all affording interesting details of ships by this means. I have gone carefully through old coins, and though representations of ships thereon depicted have necessarily had to suffer through the limitations imposed on the artist by the size and shape of the coin, yet this evidence used collaterally with the rest, goes a long way towards completing the picture we are endeavouring to paint.

During the eleventh century, certain merchants from Bari on the Adriatic made an expedition to Lycia and brought back the remains of St. Nicholas, Archbishop of Myra, who had lived and suffered persecution in the fourth century under Diocletian. Thence grew up a wide-spread cult of this saint. Not only did he become patron saint of Russia, but of all sailormen throughout Christendom. In ancient pictures we sometimes see a ship caught in a terrible storm with sails and gear carried away, Boreas or his colleague, raising his head above the waters, blowing with inflated cheeks at the helpless ship, while above the picture, St. Nicholas appearing in the clouds, comes to the aid of the skipper seen praying on the poop for deliverance from the horrible seas. In England this cult was not wanting either. There are between three and four hundred churches in our land dedicated in St. Nicholas’ honour, and the reader as he journeys along the coast, will frequently find that in an old seaport the parish church bears this dedication. We need not go too far into this matter, but the famous parish church of that very ancient seaport of Great Yarmouth (whose seamen used to have goodly quarrels with the men of the Cinque Ports, and who, long prior to the coming of William the Conqueror, were busy with the herring fishery), and also of Brighton, are notable instances of this devotion to the sailor’s saint. The font of the Brighton church and of Winchester Cathedral—although the design in each case is conventionalised—cannot fail to assist us. The date of the former belongs to somewhere between the years 1050 and 1075: as to the latter, Dean Furneaux informs me that the date is about 1180.

Mediæval manuscripts both English and foreign have happily preserved to us not merely actual facts, but exquisitely coloured illustrations of ships. We see the vessels in every conceivable way—in course of construction, ashore, afloat, with sails spread, with sails stowed. We see them on rivers and seas, embarking and disembarking. We see them in peace and in war, bound for the Crusades, or ramming each other, grappling, hurling darts and arrows from their elevated fore-castles and stern-castles, or casting destruction down on to one another’s decks from the fighting top above.

We have, too, some slight evidence in contemporary stained glass, which by reason of the demands of an exceptionally conventionalised art must be regarded with caution and only to confirm other evidence. We have the clear and valuable evidence of certain mosaics in St. Mark’s Venice, which help us more than a little with regard to the fourteenth century, and, few though they be as we remarked in Chapter I., there are some artists whose pictures of ships in mediæval times can be relied upon, after making certain allowances already indicated. In this class we may include especially Carpaccio, Giorgione and Memling. The more artistic the mode of expressing these ships becomes, however, so much the more prone to inaccuracy does the evidence incline, and to this category belong the tapestries, models in precious metals, paintings on china and earthenware and tiles. In most cases the distortion of truth has been in respect of length, breadth, and height.

When we remember how thoroughly the Vikings harassed the shores of France and England sailing up the Seine and the rivers and creeks of our own land, committing piracy on the sea and pillage ashore, and finally settling down and conquering the territory, it is not to be wondered that their sway in naval architecture and construction should have been universal in northern Europe. We have in the previous chapter already dealt with the primitive craft of early Britain, and it is generally supposed that the ships which were sent from this country to assist the Veneti against Cæsar had by this time become wooden and not skin-ships. With the Roman invasion of Britain would come the introduction of Roman craft, and there can be little doubt that the Deal “galley” of to-day, which is the characteristic ship of that part of England which was so frequently the landing-place for visitors from Gaul, is a relic, much modified, from the Roman times. After the withdrawal of the Roman influence from these shores, the Saxons and Angles coming in their double-ended Viking craft quickly banished almost all the customs that the Britons had learned under the Romans. And having effected this complete transformation the Saxons settled down and practically forsook the sea and shipbuilding.

But now from the year 787 until the coming of William the Conqueror our forefathers were constantly being invaded by the Northmen in the kind of ships that we discussed in the last chapter. But before the end of the ninth century Alfred succeeded to the throne after the country had been ravaged and despoiled by these raiders along the north-east coast as far west as Southampton Water. Acting on that blessed maxim which alone preserves our country to-day, that he who would be secure on land must first be supreme on sea, he set himself the task of improving on the Viking ships. This he carried out by making his longships—so the Saxon Chronicles inform us—twice as long as the Danish, and swifter, steadier and with more freeboard than any war vessels that had hitherto been seen in England. Nor did he neglect such important details as the seasoning of the timber. But to show how utterly lacking his subjects were in all knowledge of seamanship, his oarsmen—some of his ships carrying as many as sixty—were all hired pirates from the seafaring district of Friesland. Still, for all that, he succeeded in his object and defeated the cruel foe.