No especial provision was made on board men-of-war for the sick or wounded sailor; if the ship went into action he was placed in the cable tier or laid upon the ballast as being the safest places. If he survived the medical science of his time, and was landed disabled, he was supposed to be passed to his own parish. Sometimes he was permitted to beg. A printed licence from Howard, as Lord Admiral, under date 1590, still exists empowering William Browne, maimed in 1588, to beg for a year in all churches.[626] By 35 c. 4 and 39 c. 21 of Elizabeth relief was afforded to hurt men; these were both repealed by 43 c. 3 which enacted that parishes were to be charged with a weekly sum of not less than twopence or more than tenpence to provide help, the pension however in no case to exceed ten pounds for a sailor or twenty pounds for an officer. Gratuities were sometimes given. In 1593 Hawkyns was ordered to pay two shillings a week, for twenty weeks, to 29 injured men, and William Storey, having lost a leg, received £1, 13s 4d, apparently in settlement of all claims.[627]
Such gifts, in view of the number we can still trace, were probably more frequent than would be expected from the character of Elizabeth. In 1587 a month’s extra pay was awarded to the crews of three pinnaces for their good service in capturing Spanish prizes. For 1588 £5, was divided among 100 men who manned the fireships sent into Calais Roads, £80, among the wounded of the fleet generally, and £7 to sick men in the Elizabeth.[628] In 1591 six months’ pay was given to the widows of the men killed in the Revenge, and in 1594 there is a gift of £61, 19s 6d to Helen Armourer, widow of John Armourer of Newcastle, ‘in consideration of his good and faithful services,’ although the name is quite strange in naval affairs.[629] Merchant seamen were also remembered in these benefactions. On one occasion forty marks were paid to five men ‘having been lately lamentably afflicted in Naples by pryson and other punyshments by thinquisition of Spayne as we are informed and by secret escape savid their lyves.’[630] On another ‘in consideration of the valiantnes done in Turkey by our welbeloved subiecte John Ffoxe of Woodbridge in our county of Suffolk, gunner by whose meanes 266 Christians were released out of miserable captivity,’ an assuredly nobly earned pension of one shilling a day was conferred upon him.[631] When it cost the Queen nothing directly she was sometimes still more liberal. To Robert Miller, a master mariner, £200, was allowed out of forfeited goods in consideration of his services and losses at sea; George Harrison received £800, in the same way and for the same reasons. Sometimes seamen’s wives, whose husbands were prisoners in Spain, petitioned the Council for help. In one instance the merchants owning the ships were ordered to assist the women; in another their landlords were directed not to press them for rent.
We can know little of the internal economy of a merchantman in those days. The vessels were relatively as crowded, and probably as unhealthy, as men-of-war; the victualling was of the same, and at times even worse quality, seeing that the owners of merchant vessels were expected to buy government provisions if the victualling department found itself overstocked. In 1596 there is a letter directing the Lord Mayor to forbid the city butchers to sell meat to ships until the government stores of salt beef were sold out. This is followed by an order from the Council to the Serjeant of the Admiralty not to allow any outward bound trader to pass down the river unless a certificate of such purchase was produced.[632]
Mortality on Shipboard.
We have no means of estimating the mortality from disease on board merchant ships, but we know that in men-of-war it was very great. ‘In the late Queen’s time many thousands did miscarry by the corruption as well of drink as of meat,’ says a seventeenth century writer;[633] and Sir Richard Hawkyns thought that, in twenty years, 10,000 men died from scorbutic affections. The length of the voyages now undertaken rendered larger crews necessary; the accommodation was narrow and ill-ventilated, the requirements of sanitation unknown, and the food was usually scanty and bad, so that the sailor was placed under conditions that made him fall an easy victim to disease. In Drake’s voyage of 1585-6 out of 2300 men nearly 600 died from disease. In the expedition of 1589, out of 12,000 men employed, nearly one-half perished, mainly from sickness and want of food, and every enterprise, small or great, suffered more or less largely in the same way. Usually the hope of plunder sustained the men through all such trials, and there is only one serious case of the mutiny of a crew because of ‘the weakness and feebleness they were fallen into through the spare and bad diet.’ But in this instance sympathy with their captain may have had much to do with their action.[634]
The pages of Hakluyt relate much of the suffering endured by our seamen abroad from disease and privation, but there is one historic illustration at home of the miseries borne by the men and the callousness or scanty resources of the authorities. On 10th August 1588 Howard wrote to Burghley:
‘Sicknes and mortallitie begin wonderfullie to growe amongste us ... the Elizabeth, which hath don as well as eaver anie ship did in anie service, hath had a great infectione in her from the beginning soe as of the 500 men which she carried out, by the time she had bin in Plymouth three weeks or a month there were ded of them 200 and above, soe as I was driven to set all the rest of her men ashore, to take out the ballast and to make fires in her of wet broom 3 or 4 daies together, and so hoped therebie to have cleansed her of her infectione, and thereuppon got newe men, verie tall and hable as eaver I saw and put them into her; nowe the infectione is broken out in greater extremitie than eaver it did before, and they die and sicken faster than ever they did, soe as I am driven of force to send her to Chatham ... Sir Roger Townsend of all the men he brought out with him hath but one left alive ... it is like enough that the like infectione will growe throughout the most part of the fleet, for they have bin soe long at sea and have so little shift of apparell ... and no money wherewith to buy it.’
On the 22nd August he writes to the Queen that the infection is bad, that men sicken one day and die the next but, in courtly phrase, that ‘I doubt not that with good care and God’s goodnes which doth ever bles your Maiestie it wyll quenche againe.’ But on the same day he tells the Council more plainly, ‘the most part of the fleet is grievouslie infected and die dailie ... and the ships themselves be so infectious and so corrupted as it is thought to be a verie plague ... manie of the ships have hardly men enough to waie their anchors.’[635] And as illustrating the infection and its probable cause comes a complaint from him to Walsingham that, although the beer in the fleet has been condemned as unfit for use, it is still served out to the men, and ‘nothing doth displease the seamen more than sour beer.’
This sickness is usually said to have been the plague or typhus. But Howard and his captains, who had lived to middle age in a country where the plague was endemic and who must have known its symptoms well, obviously thought ‘the infectione’ something different. In the passage quoted above he compares it to the plague and in another letter he writes, ‘The mariners who have a conceit (and I think it true and so do all the captains here) that sour drink hath been a great cause of this infection amongst us.’[636] The plague was familiar to them all but this was something they could not easily name. The same arguments apply, although perhaps not so closely, against typhus which in its general form and symptoms was familiar under various names to sixteenth century observers. But 1588 was not a particularly unhealthy year on land and there is no record of any sudden outbreak of epidemic disease either before or after that occurring on the fleet. Moreover though typhus occasionally kills within a few hours it has never been known to kill numbers in the rapid fashion suggested by Howard. It is probable that the complaint was an acute enteritis, caused by the beer, acting on frames enfeebled by bad and insufficient food, and still further weakened by the scorbutic taint to which all classes, but especially seamen, were subject in the middle ages.
On the whole the position of the sailor was now steadily deteriorating. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries his pay had been relatively very high, and as he was only called upon to serve round the coasts, or, at furthest, to Bordeaux or the Baltic, his health was not affected by conditions to which he was only exposed for a short time. But towards the end of the sixteenth century the wages, in consequence of the general rise in prices, were relatively less than they had been, and less than those of the artisan classes on shore. In an epoch when the increase in the number of distant voyages set his services in commercial demand he was required to serve in the royal fleets for longer periods than had been before known. He was exposed to a merciless system of impressment, cheap for the State because he had to indirectly bear the cost. And the length of the cruises, their extension into tropical climates, and the character of the provisions, unsuited to the new conditions, made themselves felt in outbreaks of disease to which his ancestors, assembled chiefly for Channel work, had been strangers. Morally the general tone among the men cannot have been high if we may judge them from a phrase used by the officials sent down to examine into the plunder of the Madre de Dios in 1592, ‘we hold it loste labor and offence to God to minister oathes unto the generallitie of them.’[637]