For Sailours they bee honest men,
And they do take great pains.
But Land-men and ruffling Ladds
Do cheat them of their gains.
All the same, the "Land-men" often did cheat sailors so much that sailors might well be excused for poking fun at "Land-men" who were seasick. Yet, at a time when even the best crews had no means of keeping food and water properly, a land-lubber might also be excused for being not only seasick but sick in worse ways still. The want of fresh food always brought on scurvy; and the wonder is that any one lived to tell the tale when once this plague and others got a foothold in a ship.
But the Norse blood tingling in their veins, the manly love of wonderful adventure, and, by no means least, the gamble of it, that dared them to sail for strange outlandish parts with odds of five to one against them, these, quite as much as the wish to make a fortune, were the chief reasons why Sea-Dogs sailed from every port and made so many landsmen mad to join them. And, after all, life afloat, rough as it was, might well be better than life ashore, when men of spirit wanted to be free from the troubles of taking sides with all the ups and downs of kings and courts, rebels and religions.
Whether or not the man who wrote The Complaynt of Scotland was only a passenger or off to join the Sea-Dogs is more than we shall ever know; for all he tells us is that he wrote his book in 1548, and that he was then a landsman who "heard many words among the seamen, but knew not what they meant." In any case, he is the only man who ever properly described the daily work on board a Sea-Dog ship. The Sea-Dogs themselves never bothered their heads about what they thought such a very common thing; and whatever other landsmen wrote was always wrong. A page of this quaint old book, which was not printed till two hundred and fifty years after it was written, will show us how much the work aboard a Sea-Dog ship was, in some ways, like the work aboard any other sailing ship, even down to the present day; and yet how much unlike in other ways. Some of the lingo has changed a good deal; for English seamen soon began to drop the words King Henry's shipwrights brought north from the Mediterranean. Many of these words were Italian, others even Arabic; for the Arabs, Moors, and Turks haunted the Mediterranean for many centuries, and some of their sea-words passed current into all the northern tongues. We get Captain from the Italian Capitano, and Admiral from the Arabic Amir-al-bahr, which means Commander-of-the-sea.
"I shall report their crying and their call," says our author. "Then the boatsman" (who was the officer next to the captain) "cried with an oath: 'I see a great ship.' Then the master (that is, the captain) whistled and bade the mariners lay the cable to the windlass to wind and weigh (that is, heave the anchor up). Then the mariners began to wind the cable in with many a loud cry; and, as one cried, all the others cried in that same tune, as it had been an echo in a cave. 'Veer, veer; veer, veer; gentle gallants, gentle gallants! Wind, I see him! Wind, I see him! Pourbossa, pourbossa! Haul all and one!'" When the anchor was hauled above the water they cried: "Caupon, caupon; caupon, cola; caupon holt; Sarrabossa!" When setting sail they began with the same kind of gibberish. "Hou! Hou! Pulpela, Pulpela! Hard out strife! Before the wind! God send! God send! Fair weather! Many Prizes! Many Prizes! Stow! Stow! Make fast and belay—Heisa! Heisa! One long pull! One long pull! Young blood! More mud! There, there! Yellow hair! Great and small! One and all!" The "yellow hair" refers to the fair-haired Norsemen. What the master told the steersman might have been said by any skipper of our own day: "Keep full and by! Luff! Con her! Steady! Keep close!" But what he told the "Boatswain" next takes us back three hundred years and more. "Bear stones and limepots full of lime to the top" (whence they would make it pretty hot for an enemy held fast alongside). The orders to the artillery and infantry on board are equally old and very odd when we remember modern war. "Gunners, make ready your cannons, culverins, falcons, sakers, slings, head-sticks, murdering pieces, passevolants, bazzils, dogges, arquebusses, calivers, and hail shots! Souldiers, make ready your cross-bows, hand-bows, fire-spars, hail-shot, lances, pikes, halberds, rondels, two-handed swords, and targes!" Yet, old as all this was, the artillery seems to have made a good many noises that would have been familiar to those of us who heard the noises of the Great War. "I heard the cannons and guns make many hideous cracks" (like the stabbing six-inchers). "The bazzils and falcons cried tir-duf, tir-duf, tir-duf" (like the anti-aircraft "Archies"). Then the small artillery cried tik-tak, tik-tak, tik-tak (something like the rattle of machine-guns, only very much slower).
The cannons of those days seem like mere pop-guns to those who knew the British Grand Fleet that swept the Germans off the sea. But the best guns Drake used against the Spanish Armada in 1588 were not at all bad compared with those that Nelson used at Trafalgar in 1805. There is more change in twenty years now than there was in two hundred years then. The chief improvements were in making the cannon balls fit better, in putting the powder into canvas bags, instead of ladling it in loose, and in fitting the guns with tackle, so that they could be much more easily handled, fired, and aimed.
The change in ships during the sailing age was much greater than the change in guns. More sails and better ones were used. The old forecastle, once something really like a little castle set up on deck, was made lower and lower, till it was left out altogether; though the name remains to describe the front part of every ship, and is now pronounced fo'c's'le or foxle. The same sort of top-hamper (that is, anything that makes the ship top-heavy) was cut down, bit by bit, as time went on, from the quarter-deck over the stern; till at last the big British men-of-war became more or less like the Victory, which was Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, and which is still kept in Portsmouth Harbour, where Henry VIII's first promise of a sailing fleet appeared in 1545, the year that Drake was born.
Drake was a first-rate seaman long before he grow up. His father, also a seaman, lived in a man-of-war on the Medway near where Chatham Dockyard stands today; and Drake and his eleven sturdy brothers spent every minute they could in sailing about and "learning the ropes." With "the master of a barque, which used to coast along the shore and sometimes carry merchandise into Zeeland (Holland) and France" Drake went to sea at the age of ten, and did so well that "the old man at his death bequeathed his barque to him by will and testament."
But the Channel trade was much too tame for Drake. So in 1567, when he was twenty-two, he sailed with Hawkins, who was already a famous Sea-Dog, to try his fortune round the Spanish Main, (that is, the mainland of northern South America and of the lands all round Panama). Luck went against them from start to finish. Hawkins, who founded the slave trade that lasted till the nineteenth century, was attacked this time by the negroes he tried to "snare" in Africa. "Envenomed arrows" worked havoc with the Englishmen. "There hardly escaped any that had blood drawn, but died in strange sort, with their mouths shut some ten days before they died." As everybody who sailed to foreign parts used slaves in those days Hawkins and Drake were no worse than the rest; and less bad than those whites who kept them three hundred years later, when people knew better. But Hawkins' complaint against the negroes for not coming quietly is just the same sort of nonsense as any other complaint against anything alive for being "vicious" when we want to take or kill it. "This animal," said a Frenchman who made wise fun of all such humbug, "is very wicked. When you attack it, it defends itself!"
With what he could get—some four or five hundred negroes—Hawkins did a roaring trade in those parts of the Spanish Main where King Philip's subjects were not too closely watched by Governors and troops. But new troubles began when Hawkins, trying to leave the West Indies, was blown back by a hurricane into Vera Cruz, then known as San Juan de Ulua. Hawkins still had a hundred negroes left; so, hoping for leave from Mexico City to trade them off, he held the Kind's Island, which entirely commanded the entrance to the harbour, where he saw twelve Spanish treasure ships. But it was four hundred miles to the City of Mexico and back again; and meanwhile a great Spanish fleet was expected out from Spain. Hawkins had this fleet completely at his mercy; for it could no more get past the King's Island if he chose to stop it than the fleet inside could get out. Moreover, the stormy season was beginning; so the fleet from Spain might easily be wrecked if Hawkins kept it at bay.