Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

Before we leave the Ark Royal, let us call to the reader’s attention a detail that, if he is a sailorman, he will have already noticed. The furling of the sails, correctly shown here, is very clumsy and bungling. The custom was when the sails were furled to bind them to the yard with rope yarns, and these yarns were cut to loose the sail when getting under way. Thus Sir William Wynter, writing on February 28, 1587, concludes his letter: “Written aboard the Vanguard, being in the Downs, ready to cut sail.”[82]

Centuries ago, when England had only her Viking-like craft, she had bravely claimed for herself the Sovereignty of the Seas. It was to the foreigner an insolent, arrogant boast. She had fought for the distinction many times. Spain had grown up to be the first maritime nation of the world, but just as in after years the Dutch and the French had, not without a severe tussle, to be prevented from usurping this distinction, so England had to smash the Armada—the greatest aggregation of naval power the world had ever seen on one sea—and with this defeat England was again, for a time at least, the mistress of the sea. Drake’s voyage round the world with a squadron of five ships, the largest of which did not exceed 100 tons, set the final seal on the abilities of English seamanship and navigation. The victory over the Armada settled their superiority in ships, strategy and shooting.

Before we pass from the story of the fight that never grows old—and there is no more stirring reading than the plain narrative included in Hakluyt—let us not forget that capable as were the royal ships of Elizabeth, they could never have been victorious had not the West countrymen of England come to help with their ships and their crews. The former may have been leaky, the latter may have been not as skilled as Howard’s men in the finer arts of war, but they did their duty, in spite of a thousand drawbacks, and did it well. Where had they learned their seamanship? How was it that they had even such good ships as they possessed but a hundred years after Henry VII. had come to the throne? As Mr. Blackmore points out,[83] ever since the discovery of Newfoundland the men of Cornwall and Devon had gone forth year after year to fish for cod off the Banks. Kipling, Connolly, and others, have sung the epic of the brave fishermen who to-day race out to the same banks from Gloucester, U.S.A. Most readers of fiction know that cruising about there is no latitude for a fair-weather sailor, yet three hundred years before them, when the arts of shipbuilding and navigation were not what they are now, Englishmen in ships built at Dartmouth and elsewhere were making regular voyages across the broad Atlantic to those fishing banks. Big vessels and brave capable seamen were essential for these trips. Both, at the summons of necessity, had gradually evolved from the West Country, and, at the hour of need, placed themselves at the service and in the defence of their fatherland.

Fig. 51. Elizabethan Man-of-war.

What were the kinds of ships that sailed in English waters during the reign of Elizabeth? As far as historical research will suffer us let us try and obtain a general idea as to their rig and appearance. Fig. 51, which is taken from the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian, affords an excellent example of an Elizabethan man-of-war. The flags flying are the green and white Tudor colours on the ensign staff and the St. George at the main, which was the national flag, but it was men-of-war only that were allowed to fly it at the main. According to Manwayring the Elizabethan ships, when running before a wind or with the wind on the quarter in the case of a fair fresh gale, often unparralled the mizzen lateen yard from the mast, and launched out the yard and sail over the quarter on the lee side, fitting guys at the further end to keep the yards steady. A boom also appears to have been used in this case. If a ship gripe too much, says Manwayring, then the mizzen was stowed, for otherwise “she will never keep out of the wind.” The mizzen was sometimes used when at anchor to back the ship astern in order to keep her from fouling her anchor on the turn of the tide.

Perhaps in the mind of the general reader the one type of ship of this age that he has any vague knowledge of is the galleon. He associates her with the Armada and with the Spanish nation exclusively. He has not forgotten that he learned in the days of his youth that the ships of the Armada were of enormous size, and that the English ships were victorious because they were small and nimble. It is perfectly true to say that our vessels were light and comparatively handy, but we must not omit to throw into the balance the superiority of our seamanship and gunnery, as we pointed out just now. The English had a natural taste for the sea; the Spaniards, in spite of all their trading and exploring across the ocean, had for it an equal distaste. They were admittedly bad seamen.[84] I am not expressing an opinion but asserting a fact, and this was as much the cause of their defeat as anything else. But the English ships were not particularly small. At least seven were of between 600 and 1100 tons. There were in the whole Spanish Armada only four ships larger than our Triumph, whilst of the English merchantmen the Leicester and the Merchant Royal were each of 400 tons.

Nor did the word “galleon” necessarily denote a Spanish ship. It is perfectly true that the Spanish Armada contained a number of cumbrous galleons, but it must not be inferred from this that a galleon was necessarily clumsy. In point of fact, Spain was the last of the great maritime nations to adopt the galleon. In England the galleon denoted a vessel built expressly for war, as distinguished from the adapted merchantmen. She was essentially a ship built with finer lines, and in every way smarter than the ordinary vessel. The type had been first introduced into the English service by Henry VIII. long before Spain had adopted it, although, as we mentioned earlier, there was considerable confusion as to the actual names. Thus Henry VIII.’s ships were classed as “great ships,” “galleasses,” and “galleys,” while for a long time, both in England and France, the galleon was called indifferently “galleon,” “galleasse,” “galley,” and “galliot.” By the outbreak of the Spanish war practically all the men-of-war in our country were galleons, and were thus described by foreigners. Nevertheless, as Mr. Corbett points out,[85] English seamen never took kindly to the word galleon. They continued to confuse “galleasse” and “galleon” in describing the ships of foreigners. But for all that English shipwrights understood perfectly the technical characteristics, and in official building programmes after the middle of Elizabeth’s reign the three terms “galleon,” “galleasse,” and “galley” appear correctly. The galleon, as Mr. Masefield well describes her, was roughly the prototype of the ship of the line, the galleasse the prototype of the frigate, and the pinnace of the sloop or corvette. The galleon was low in the waist with a square forecastle and a high quarter-deck just abaft the mainmast, rising to a poop above the quarter-deck. Reckoning upwards, the two decks, according to Manwayring, were called lower orlop or first orlop, and the next the second orlop. But if a ship had three decks they never called the uppermost—the third—by the name of orlop, but simply “upper deck.” The wooden bulkheads that separated the stern from the waist were pierced with holes for small quick-firing guns.

The length of the galleon was three times that of her beam, whereas the ordinary merchantman was only twice her own beam, thus preserving the old distinction that we saw in classical time existing between the long ship and the round ship. Yet the newer class of Elizabethan merchantman was getting longer, influenced by the experience gained on the long voyages across the Atlantic. It had been in Italy, the great home of maritime matters in earlier days, that the galleon had first been built. The galleon was in fact the child of necessity. The Mediterranean possessed the galley-type from very early times as we have already seen; she had, as we have also seen, the “round” merchant type. But as time went on a demand arose for a compromise between the two. Able to hold as much cargo, and more, than the old rounships, yet not utterly helpless like them in calms and narrow waters, the galleons were yet to be of such a kind as to be capable of acting with the galleys in war time. So they were made not as long but with more beam than the galleys, with a built-up structure fore and aft and—let us note this carefully—though they were sailing ships they had at first auxiliary oar-propulsion. The smaller English galleons also retained their oars for a long time.