Fig. 52. The Spanish Armada coming up Channel.
The immediate ancestor of the English galleon was the Italian merchantman that traded between Venice and London. This had three masts with a square sail on the foremast, but lateen on the main and mizzen. She carried also oars as auxiliaries. Afterwards, by degrees the oars were dispensed with, so that by the end of the sixteenth century the galleon was a purely sailing vessel with sometimes two and sometimes three decks, while the galleasse had oars as well. Her special claim was that she was both faster and more weatherly than the older type of warship. English shipwrights understood a galleasse to be similar to a galleon but with more length in proportion to her beam, though strictly speaking the galleasse should designate a large ship with high freeboard, using oars as well as sails. The ships, however, that fitted this description were known to them by the name of “bastard galleasses.” The galleasse was sometimes flush-decked and minus both poop and forecastle and never so highly charged (i.e., with such high decks at stern and bow) as the galleon. A good illustration will be found in the foreground of Fig. 52, which contains two of these with their oars out. This picture represents the Spanish Armada coming up channel when first sighted off the Lizard. The illustration has been taken from one of the plates in “The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords,” engraved by John Pine, London, in 1739. If the reader will pardon a short digression it may not be out of place to say a few words in explanation of these engravings.
After he had defeated the Armada in 1588, Lord Howard of Effingham, later raised to an earldom, determined to commemorate the victory by depicting the scenes he had so recently passed through. Accordingly Hendrik Corneliszoon Vroom, who had at this time obtained a European reputation as a marine artist, was invited from Haarlem to paint the pictures. From these Francis Speiring, an eminent craftsman, wove the designs into tapestry. Howard, or, as he now was, the Earl of Nottingham, sold them in his old age to James I., who hung them in the precincts of the House of Lords. When, during the Commonwealth, the House of Lords was abolished, the tapestries were fitted into brown wooden frames and hung on the walls of the chamber which had been used for the Upper House. Here they remained until the House was burned down in 1834, when the ten tapestries perished. Fortunately, however, even in the inartistic eighteenth century, an artist, John Pine, and a friend of Hogarth, had the inspiration to reproduce them by engraving, But for this we should lack what is a most valuable record. It is so easy to fall into inaccuracies a century after an event, but since Pine copied from the tapestries, and the tapestries were executed under Howard’s own supervision, there cannot be much room left for anything incorrect in respect of the ships. Howard had fought against the Spanish ships night and day in that memorable month of July, and had every opportunity of noting the rigging and lines of his enemy’s vessels, so that when he had left the sea and, not unnaturally, devoted his attention to his own memorial, he would be the ideal person to see that accuracy was insisted upon. These engravings are still to be picked up occasionally in some of the London print-sellers, but the illustration here given is from the collection in the Print Room of the British Museum.[86]
The reader who is familiar with Elizabethan literature must have found considerable confusion existing in his mind as to what a “pinnesse” really was. Let us say at once, then, that the name was indiscriminately given to two distinct classes of craft. One class was a kind of galleasse, only smaller; that is to say, she relied on both oars and sails. She was a sea-going ship and decked. Under this heading came also row-barges, and at various times also galleots, galleys, frigates, and shallops. The point to notice is that this class comprised really big craft. The other “pinnesses” were ships’ boats. The modern use of the word pinnace expresses pretty clearly its relation to the mother ship. The greatest critics are unable to define exactly what a “bark” was, but from an early Venetian print I gather that she was smaller than the prevailing Mediterranean galley. At the same time the word seems to have included also vessels ranging from fifty, to a hundred and fifty tons. Thus they were sometimes small ships, and sometimes large pinnaces. Whilst Elizabethan seamen included all sailing vessels fit to take their place in the line of battle under the generic term of ship, the shipwrights divided them according to their design into “ships,” “galleons,” “galleasses”; “barks” being a convenient term for vessels of smaller ability.
Fig. 53. The “Black Pinnesse,” which brought Home the Body of Sir Philip Sidney.
The “brigandine” or “brigantine” was a Mediterranean type of small galley, rowed by its own fighting crew and without slaves. Sometimes she was classed as a “pinnesse” and sometimes as a bark, but never as a galley. Whether or not she possessed sails she was primarily a rowed boat. The illustration in Fig. 53 represents a big sea-going pinnesse as distinct from the ship’s boat. This was the vessel that carried home the body of Sir Philip Sydney, and is taken from “Sequitur celebritas et pompa funeris...” (of Sir Philip Sydney) by Thomas Lant, printed in 1587. The Elizabethan deep-sea pinnaces were from eighty to fifteen tons. The present illustration shows the vessel with her waist-cloths rigged up to prevent boarding, and with nettings[87] drawn over the waist to intercept the missiles dropped from the fighting-tops of the enemy. Mr. Masefield says that this cloth was of canvas two bolts (three feet six inches) deep. It was gaily painted with designs of red, yellow, and the Tudor green and white. It was of no protection against the enemy’s guns, yet it helped the sail trimmers on board from being aimed at. But against the enemy’s arrows sent from the tops it was efficacious, for though they penetrated the texture they were caught. We have already called attention to the additional protection of the shields or pavesses that ran around the outside of the deck.
Fig. 54. A Galleon of the Time of Elizabeth.
The illustration in Fig. 54 shows a galleon with decorated sails, a practice that died out about the close of Elizabeth’s reign.[88] This decoration was effected by stitching on to the canvas cut-out pieces of cloth with twine. Most of the sails were woven in Portsmouth on hand looms, and the stuff was of good quality. But during the reign of James II. when the Huguenots took refuge in England, among the many new trades which the settlers brought over was that of the manufacture of sail-cloth. A French refugee, Bonhomme, who had settled down at Ipswich, taught the secret of its manufacture. Previously, England had imported her sail-cloth from France. The new factory was assisted in every possible way, but was finally destroyed by French agents, who bribed the artisans to return once more to France. Another factory was set up in London during the reign of William III., but as late as the time of George I. sail-cloth was imported from abroad.