There were also the four galleys and some hoys; eleven of the vessels were noted as needing more or less substantial repairs and most of the old ones were broken-backed. The ten new ships cost £6 a ton for the larger and £5, 6s 8d for the smaller ones, against £16 a ton under Mansell’s improvident management, but these prices were for the hulls and spars alone.[917] According to the Pipe Office Accounts the cost of the Happy Entrance and Constant Reformation was £8850; of the Victory and Garland £7640, which included masts and spars, carving and painting; of the Swiftsure and Bonaventure £9969, and here an additional £1169 was paid for sails, anchors, and fittings; of the St George and St Andrew £9632, and £1306 more for fittings down to boats and flags; and £8106 for the Triumph and Mary Rose. Taking them from Deptford to Chatham varied between £73 and £418, doubtless depending on the number of men employed and the time occupied. Burrell’s contracts for 1619 were at £7, 10s and £8 a ton, and the £5, 6s 8d and £6 quoted above were only due to the fact that the ten ships measured 1899 tons more than was expected which reduced the average.[918] He apparently had to bear the loss; no alteration was made in the way of calculating tonnage during the reign.
There is little to be said about any improvements in rigging or canvas during this period. Fore and aft sails are still absent; studding sails and booms are spoken of in the Nomenclator Navalis,[919] but are not alluded to in any naval document. It may be of interest to quote from the same manuscript the rules governing the proportions of masts and yards.
| Mainmast | three times four-fifths of the beam. |
| Foremast | four-fifths of mainmast. |
| Bowsprit | do. do. |
| Mizenmast | one-half of mainmast. |
| Topmasts | half the length of lower masts. |
| Main yard | five-sixths of length of keel. |
| Fore yard | four-fifths of mainyard. |
| Top yard | three-sevenths of mainyard. |
| Cross-jack yard | four-fifths of mainyard. |
| Spritsail yard | do. do. |
Shipwrights.
Baker, Pett, and Burrell were the three chief shipwrights of the reign; Ed. Stevens, John Adye, Wm. Bright, Clay, Hen. Goddard, and Maryott were less known men. Baker died on 31st August 1613 at the age of eighty-three. As a boy and man he had seen the rise of the modern Navy, and had himself largely helped by his skill to produce the type of ship that was found sufficient for that age. That during the whole of his long life he appears, so far as existing records show, to have quarrelled with, or spoken ill of, equals, inferiors, and superiors may be charitably attributed rather to the unfortunate conditions governing a shipwright’s position than to any natural bent of character. The writings or utterances of other shipwrights, that have come down to us, show them to have been in no way superior to Baker in these respects. The ships built by him represented sound and honest work. He died in harness while in charge of the repairs of the Merhonour which had been built under his superintendence twenty-four years previously, and he was long remembered as ‘the famous artist of his time.’
Pett had been favoured by Nottingham and Mansell but does not appear to have experienced the same partiality from the Commissioners. They chiefly employed Burrell, who had previously been master shipwright to the East India Company, but during the next reign Pett came again into favour, and was made a principal Officer and Commissioner for the Navy shortly after Burrell’s death in 1630. The master shipwrights received two shillings a day and lodging money, but all these men had extra allowances, partly dating from the last reign. Baker had a pension of £40 a year, besides his Exchequer fee and payments from the Navy Treasurer. Bright had one shilling and eightpence a day which had been originally given to Richard Chapman for building the Ark Royal, and had been continued in whole or part to him. Pett’s Exchequer fee had been retained in the family since it was first granted in the second year of Mary’s reign.[920] Probably the orthodox scale of wages would not alone have retained these men in the royal service and the pensions were used to make their posts more valuable.
Dockyards.
Deptford was still the principal yard, but Chatham was rapidly coming into greater importance; Portsmouth is hardly mentioned. In 1610 the dry dock at Deptford was enlarged and a paling made round the yard,[921] and in the same year there is a charge of £34, 19s for tools to make cordage at Woolwich. By 1612 cordage was being made there at £28 a ton, and in 1614 the ropehouse was extended at a cost of £368, and 305 tons of cordage made there in the year.[922] It was, however, still far from supplying the needs of the Navy since in 1617 cordage to £10,400 was bought. A Dutchman, Harman Branson, superintended the rope factory, at a salary of £50 a year. In 1619 the wooden fence at Deptford was replaced by a brick wall; the only reference to Portsmouth is for the cost, in 1623, of ‘filling up the great dock there, and ramming the mouth of the said dock with rock stones for the better preserving of the yard against the violence of the sea.’[923] This was the end of the earliest dry dock in England. A dock had been frequently urged for Chatham, but it was not until the Commissioners came into power that the matter was seriously taken up. They at once devoted their attention to the Medway, for which one reason may have been the great cost attendant on the removal, backwards and forwards, of ships between Chatham and Deptford. It has been mentioned that the hulls of the Garland and Mary Rose were used to support a dock wharf at Chatham; they were joined there by an old antagonist, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario. A sum of £61, 1s 3d was paid to
‘Thomas Wood, shipwright, and sundry other ... employed in digging out the old Spanish ship at Chatham, near the galley dock, clearing her of all the stubb ballast and other trash within board, making her swim, and removing near unto the mast dock where she was laid, and sunk for the defence and preservation of the wharf.’[924]
The old Spaniard, however, was not even yet at rest. In 1622 occurs the concise entry, ‘The hull of the ship called Don Pedroe broken up and taken away.’ The men of the seventeenth century were not emotional and saw no reason in a useless trophy. They did, in 1624, have a new wharf ‘made at Sir Francis Drake’s ship,’ but there were fees attached to the preservation of that.