(Dover to Orfordness.) This is taken from the first Atlas ever published, viz., in 1585.
“How you may at one Station Measure uppon an Heigth with a Geometricall Square a Longitude uppon Plaine.”
This is from Lucar’s sixteenth-century treatise on gunnery, and illustrates the use of the “geometricall square” for finding the distance between the galley and the ship, viz. 300 yards. This instrument was made of metal or cypress, the quadrant being divided into 90 degrees. It was used for measuring “altitudes, latitudes and profundities,” and so very valuable for all gunnery work.
The hourly or half-hourly glasses used on board were turned by the sentry, who struck the ship’s bell at every half-hour just as on shipboard to-day. The only means of keeping correct time in those days was by observing the heavenly bodies, and this gave time at ship. But frequently the navigators were many miles out in their longitude, since the latter is found by comparing the exact time at ship with the time by a chronometer showing the time at the prime meridian.
Nicholas Tartaglia, in his “Three Bookes of Colloquies concerning the Arte of Shooting,” published in the year of the Armada, gives an interesting illustration to indicate how one could know by the help of a gunner’s circle the number of miles or feet any ship lying in the roadstead was distant; and also how to measure height with a geometrical square. And Bourne, in his “Treasure for Traueilers” (1578), had a method for ascertaining the “waight of any shyp swimmyng on the water.” The reader will remember that when we were discussing Columbus we pointed out the lack of that useful instrument, the log and line, for indicating the distance which a vessel sailed. It was William Bourne who first published an idea for overcoming this difficulty in a somewhat ingenious manner. In his “Inventions and Devices” (1578), he gives a method whereby “to know the way or going of a ship, for to knowe how fast or softly that any ship goeth.” The idea is too complicated to be given here in detail, but practically it amounted to towing astern a tiny boat containing a paddle-wheel which revolved, and so by a species of clockwork registered the speed. Excepting that the patent log of to-day is helicular, there is much resemblance between the old and the new in at least the bare idea. But a little later—in the year 1637—Richard Norwood published, in his “Seaman’s Practice,” a whole chapter on the subject “Of dividing the Log-line and reckoning the Ship’s way.” The log-line was to be used in conjunction with the glass, and this method was little altered until the nineteenth-century invention of the patent log had to be brought about owing to the great speed of steamships.
Sixteenth-Century Ship Before the Wind.
By a Contemporary Artist. Notice the square lids over the portholes.
Before we conclude this chapter we must not omit to say something of the improvement in naval strategy, tactics, and discipline during the Elizabethan period. You will remember that important campaign of 1587, when Drake took an expedition out to Cadiz, sunk and burnt an enormous quantity of the enemy’s tonnage, repulsed the attacks of the Mediterranean galleys—completely beating this type of craft at her own special game and in her own waters—captured large quantities of supplies intended for the Armada, and demonstrated himself to be no man of medieval conceptions, but a modern strategist by waiting at Cape St. Vincent, where he held the real key to the situation—able to prevent the fleets from Cartagena and Cadiz from reaching Lisbon. You will remember, too, that after terrorising the Spaniards and their galleys he set a course for the Azores, captured the mammoth San Felipe, homeward bound from the East Indies with a cargo that, reckoned in the money value of to-day, was worth over £1,000,000; and what was more, discovered from the ship’s papers the long-kept secrets of the East Indian trade. Finally, during that same historic voyage, when friction broke out between the modern strategist Drake and his medieval-minded vice-admiral William Borough, the latter was promptly court-martialled, tried on board the flagship by Drake, Fenner, and the other captains, and deposed from his command.