Henry VIII, King of the English Sea
The leading pioneers in the Age of Discovery were sons of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cabot, as we have seen, was an Italian, though he sailed for the English Crown and had an English crew. Columbus, too, was an Italian, though in the service of the Spanish Crown. It was the Portuguese Vasco da Gama who in the very year of John Cabot's second voyage (1498) found the great sea route to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Two years later the Cortereals, also Portuguese, began exploring the coasts of America as far northwest as Labrador. Twenty years later again the Portuguese Magellan, sailing for the King of Spain, discovered the strait still known by his name, passed through it into the Pacific, and reached the Philippines. There he was killed. But one of his ships went on to make the first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat which redounded to the glory of both Spain and Portugal. Meanwhile, in 1513, the Spaniard Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama and waded into the Pacific, sword in hand, to claim it for his king. Then came the Spanish explorers--Ponce de Leon, De Soto, Coronado, and many more--and later on the conquerors and founders of New Spain--Cortes, Pizarro, and their successors.
| Basque fishermen and whalers apparently forestalled Jacques Cartier's discovery of the St. Lawrence in 1535; perhaps they knew the mainland of America before John Cabot in 1497. But they left no written records; and neither founded an oversea dominion nor gave rights of discovery to their own or any other race. |
During all this time neither France nor England made any lodgment
in America, though both sent out a number of expeditions, both
fished on the cod banks of Newfoundland, and each had already marked
out her own 'sphere of influence.' The Portuguese were in Brazil;
the Spaniards, in South and Central America. England, by right of
the Bristol voyages, claimed the eastern coasts of the United States
and Canada; France, in virtue of Cartier's discovery, the region of
the St. Lawrence. But, while New Spain and New Portugal flourished
in the sixteenth century, New France and New England were yet to
rise.
In the sixteenth century both France and England were occupied with
momentous things at home. France was torn with religious wars. Tudor
England had much work to do before any effective English colonies
could be planted. Oversea dominions are nothing without sufficient
sea power, naval and mercantile, to win, to hold, and foster them.
But Tudor England was gradually forming those naval and merchant
services without which there could have been neither British Empire
nor United States.
Henry VIII had faults which have been trumpeted about the world from
his own day to ours. But of all English sovereigns he stands
foremost as the monarch of the sea. Young, handsome, learned,
exceedingly accomplished, gloriously strong in body and in mind,
Henry mounted the throne in 1509 with the hearty good will of nearly
all his subjects. Before England could become the mother country of
an empire overseas, she had to shake off her medieval weaknesses,
become a strongly unified modern state, and arm herself against any
probable combination of hostile foreign states. Happily for herself
and for her future colonists, Henry was richly endowed with strength
and skill for his task. With one hand he welded England into
political unity, crushing disruptive forces by the way. With the
other he gradually built up a fleet the like of which the world had
never seen. He had the advantage of being more independent of
parliamentary supplies than any other sovereign. From his thrifty
father he had inherited what was then an almost fabulous sum--nine
million dollars in cash. From what his friends call the conversion,
and his enemies the spoliation, of Church property in England he
obtained many millions more. Moreover, the people as a whole always
rallied to his call whenever he wanted other national resources for
the national defence.
Henry's unique distinction is that he effected the momentous change
from an ancient to a modern fleet. This supreme achievement
constitutes his real title to the lasting gratitude of
English-speaking peoples. His first care when he came to the throne
in 1509 was for the safety of the 'Broade Ditch,' as he called the
English Channel. His last great act was to establish in 1546 'The
Office of the Admiralty and Marine Affairs.' During the thirty-seven
years between his accession and the creation of this Navy Board the
pregnant change was made.
'King Henry loved a man.' He had an unerring eye for choosing the
right leaders. He delighted in everything to do with ships and
shipping. He mixed freely with naval men and merchant skippers,
visited the dockyards, promoted several improved types of vessels,
and always befriended Fletcher of Rye, the shipwright who discovered
the art of tacking and thereby revolutionized navigation. Nor was
the King only a patron. He invented a new type of vessel himself and
thoroughly mastered scientific gunnery. He was the first of national
leaders to grasp the full significance of what could be done by
broadsides fired from sailing ships against the mediaeval type of
vessel that still depended more on oars than on sails.
Henry's maritime rivals were the two greatest monarchs of
continental Europe, Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain.
Henry, Francis, and Charles were all young, all ambitious, and all
exceedingly capable men. Henry had the fewest subjects, Charles by
far the most. Francis had a compact kingdom well situated for a
great European land power. Henry had one equally well situated for a
great European sea power. Charles ruled vast dominions scattered
over both the New World and the Old. The destinies of mankind turned
mostly on the rivalry between these three protagonists and their
successors.
Charles V was heir to several crowns. He ruled Spain, the
Netherlands, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and important
principalities in northern Italy. He was elected Emperor of Germany.
He owned enormous oversea dominions in Africa; and the two Americas
soon became New Spain. He governed each part of his European
dominions by a different title and under a different constitution.
He had no fixed imperial capital, but moved about from place to
place, a legitimate sovereign everywhere and, for the most part, a
popular one as well. It was his son Philip II who, failing of
election as Emperor, lived only in Spain, concentrated the machinery
of government in Madrid, and became so unpopular elsewhere. Charles
had been brought up in Flanders; he was genial in the Flemish way;
and he understood his various states in the Netherlands, which
furnished him with one of his main sources of revenue. Another and
much larger source of revenue poured in its wealth to him later on,
in rapidly increasing volume, from North and South America.
Charles had inherited a long and bitter feud with France about the
Burgundian dominions on the French side of the Rhine and about
domains in Italy; besides which there were many points of violent
rivalry between things French and Spanish. England also had
hereditary feuds with France, which had come down from the Hundred
Years' War, and which had ended in her almost final expulsion from
France less than a century before. Scotland, nursing old feuds
against England and always afraid of absorption, naturally sided
with France. Portugal, small and open to Spanish invasion by land,
was more or less bound to please Spain.
During the many campaigns between Francis and Charles the English
Channel swarmed with men-of-war, privateers, and downright pirates.
Sometimes England took a hand officially against France. But, even
when England was not officially at war, many Englishmen were
privateers and not a few were pirates. Never was there a better
training school of fighting seamanship than in and around the Narrow
Seas. It was a continual struggle for an existence in which only the
fittest survived. Quickness was essential. Consequently vessels that
could not increase their speed were soon cleared off the sea.
Spain suffered a good deal by this continuous raiding. So did the
Netherlands. But such was the power of Charles that, although his
navies were much weaker than his armies, he yet was able to fight by
sea on two enormous fronts, first, in the Mediterranean against the
Turks and other Moslems, secondly, in the Channel and along the
coast, all the way from Antwerp to Cadiz. Nor did the left arm of
his power stop there; for his fleets, his transports, and his
merchantmen ranged the coasts of both Americas from one side of the
present United States right round to the other.
Such, in brief, was the position of maritime Europe when Henry found
himself menaced by the three Roman Catholic powers of Scotland,
France, and Spain. In 1533 he had divorced his first wife, Catherine
of Aragon, thereby defying the Pope and giving offence to Spain. He
had again defied the Pope by suppressing the monasteries and
severing the Church of England from the Roman discipline. The Pope
had struck back with a bull of excommunication designed to make
Henry the common enemy of Catholic Europe.
Henry had been steadily building ships for years. Now he redoubled
his activity. He blooded the fathers of his daughter's sea-dogs by
smashing up a pirate fleet and sinking a flotilla of Flemish
privateers. The mouth of the Scheldt, in 1539, was full of vessels
ready to take a hostile army into England. But such a fighting fleet
prepared to meet them that Henry's enemies forbore to strike.
In 1539, too, came the discovery of the art of tacking, by Fletcher
of Rye, Henry's shipwright friend, a discovery forever memorable in
the annals of seamanship. Never before had any kind of craft been
sailed a single foot against the wind. The primitive dugout on which
the prehistoric savage hoisted the first semblance of a sail, the
ships of Tarshish, the Roman transport in which St. Paul was
wrecked, and the Spanish caravels with which Columbus sailed to
worlds unknown, were, in principle of navigation, all the same. But
now Fletcher ran out his epoch-making vessel, with sails trimmed
fore and aft, and dumbfounded all the shipping in the Channel by
beating his way to windward against a good stiff breeze. This
achievement marked the dawn of the modern sailing age.
Back to: English Exploration of America
