Tudor Shipping
In the sixteenth century there was no hard-and-fast distinction
between naval and all other craft. The sovereign had his own
fighting vessels; and in the course of the seventeenth century these
gradually evolved into a Royal Navy maintained entirely by the
country as a whole and devoted solely to the national defence. But
in earlier days this modern system was difficult everywhere and
impossible in England. The English monarch, for all his power, had
no means of keeping up a great army and navy without the help of
Parliament and the general consent of the people. The Crown had
great estates and revenues; but nothing like enough to make war on a
national scale. Consequently king and people went into partnership,
sometimes in peace as well as war. When fighting stopped, and no
danger seemed to threaten, the king would use his men-of-war in
trade himself, or even hire them out to merchants. The merchants,
for their part, furnished vessels to the king in time of war. Except
as supply ships, however, these auxiliaries were never a great
success. The privateers built expressly for fighting were the only
ships that could approach the men-of-war.
Yet, strangely enough, King Henry's first modern men-of-war grew out
of a merchant-ship model, and a foreign one at that. Throughout
ancient and medieval times the 'long ship' was the man-of-war while
the 'round ship' was the merchantman. But the long ship was always
some sort of galley, which, as we have seen repeatedly, depended on
its oars and used sails only occasionally, and then not in action,
while the round ship was built to carry cargo and to go under sail.
The Italian naval architects, then the most scientific in the world,
were trying to evolve two types of vessel: one that could act as
light cavalry on the wings of a galley fleet, the other that could
carry big cargoes safely through the pirate-haunted seas. In both
types sail power and fighting power were essential. Finally a
compromise resulted and the galleasse appeared. The galleasse was a
hybrid between the galley and the sailing vessel, between the 'long
ship' that was several times as long as it was broad and the 'round
ship' that was only two or three times as long as its beam. Then, as
the oceanic routes gained on those of the inland seas, and as
oceanic sea power gained in the same proportion, the galleon
appeared. The galleon had no oars at all, as the hybrid galleasses
had, and it gained more in sail power than it lost by dropping oars.
It was, in fact, the direct progenitor of the old three-decker which
some people still alive can well remember.
At the time the Cabots and Columbus were discovering America the
Venetians had evolved the merchant-galleasse for their trade with
London: they called it, indeed, the "galleazza di Londra". Then, by
the time Henry VIII was building his new modern navy, the real
galleon had been evolved (out of the Italian new war- and older
merchant-galleasses) by England, France, and Scotland; but by
England best of all. In original ideas of naval architecture England
was generally behind, as she continued to be till well within living
memory. Nelson's captains competed eagerly for the command of French
prizes, which were better built and from superior designs. The
American frigates of 1812 were incomparably better than the
corresponding classes in the British service were; and so on in many
other instances. But, in spite of being rather slow, conservative,
and rule-of-thumb, the English were already beginning to develop a
national sea-sense far beyond that of any other people. They could
not, indeed, do otherwise and live. Henry's policy, England's
position, the dawn of oceanic strategy, and the discovery of
America, all combined to make her navy by far the most important
single factor in England's problems with the world at large. As with
the British Empire now, so with England then: the choice lay between
her being either first or nowhere.
Henry's reasoning and his people's instinct having led to the same
resolve, everyone with any sea-sense, especially shipwrights like
Fletcher of Rye, began working towards the best types then
obtainable. There were mistakes in plenty. The theory of naval
architecture in England was never both sound and strong enough to
get its own way against all opposition. But with the issue of life
and death always dependent on sea power, and with so many men of
every class following the sea, there was at all events the biggest
rough-and-tumble school of practical seamanship that any leading
country ever had. The two essential steps were quickly taken: first,
from oared galleys with very little sail power to the hybrid
galleasse with much more sail and much less in the way of oars;
secondly, from this to the purely sailing galleon.
With the galleon we enter the age of sailing tactics which decided
the fate of the oversea world. This momentous age began with Drake
and the English galleon. It ended with Nelson and the first-rate,
three-decker, ship-of-the-line. But it was one throughout; for its
beginning differed from its end no more than a father differs from
his son.
One famous Tudor vessel deserves some special notice, not because of
her excellence but because of her defects. The "Henry Grace a Dieu,"
or "Great Harry" as she was generally called, launched in 1514, was
Henry's own flagship on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in
1520. She had a gala suit of sails and pennants, all made of
damasked cloth of gold. Her quarters, sides, and tops were
emblazoned with heraldic targets. Court artists painted her to show
His Majesty on board wearing cloth of gold, edged with the royal
ermine; as well as bright crimson jacket, sleeves, and breeches,
with a long white feather in his cap. Doubtless, too, His Majesty of
France paid her all the proper compliments; while every man who was
then what reporters are today talked her up to the top of his bent.
No single vessel ever had greater publicity till the famous first
"Dreadnought" of our own day appeared in the British navy nearly
four hundred years later.
But the much advertised "Great Harry" was not a mighty prototype of
a world-wide-copied class of battleships like the modern
"Dreadnought". With her lavish decorations, her towering
superstructures fore and aft, and her general aping of a floating
castle, she was the wonder of all the landsmen in her own age, as
she has been the delight of picturesque historians ever since. But
she marked no advance in naval architecture, rather the reverse. She
was the last great English ship of medieval times. Twenty-five years
after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry was commanding another
English fleet, the first of modern times, and therefore one in which
the out-of-date "Great Harry" had no proper place at all. She was
absurdly top-hampered and over-gunned. And, for all her thousand
tons, she must have bucketed about in the chops of the Channel with
the same sort of hobby-horse, see-sawing pitch that bothered Captain
Concas in 1893 when sailing an exact reproduction of Columbus's
flagship, the "Santa Maria", across the North Atlantic to the great
World's Fair at Chicago.
In her own day the galleon was the 'great ship,' 'capital ship,'
'ship-of-the-line-of-battle,' or 'battleship' on which the main
fight turned. But just as our modern fleets require three principal
kinds of vessels--battleships, cruisers, and 'mosquito' craft--so
did the fleets of Henry and Elizabeth. The galleon did the same work
as the old three-decker of Nelson's time or the battleship of today.
The 'pinnace' (quite different from more modern pinnaces) was the
frigate or the cruiser. And, in Henry VIII's fleet of 1545, the
'row-barge' was the principal 'mosquito' craft, like the modern
torpedo-boat, destroyer, or even submarine. Of course the
correspondence is far from being complete in any class.
The English galleon gradually developed more sail and gun power as
well as handiness in action. Broadside fire began. When used against
the Armada, it had grown very powerful indeed. At that time the best
guns, some of which are still in existence, were nearly as good as
those at Trafalgar or aboard the smart American frigates that did so
well in '1812.' When galleon broadsides were fired from more than a
single deck, the lower ones took enemy craft between wind and water
very nicely. In the English navy the portholes had been cut so as to
let the guns be pointed with considerable freedom, up or down, right
or left. The huge top-hampering 'castles' and other
soldier-engineering works on deck were modified or got rid of, while
more canvas was used and to much better purpose.
The pinnace showed the same sort of improvement during the same
period--from Drake's birth under Henry VIII in 1545 to the zenith of
his career as a sea-dog in 1588. This progenitor of the frigate and
the cruiser was itself descended from the long-boat of the Norsemen
and still used oars as occasion served. But the sea-dogs made it
primarily a sailing vessel of anything up to a hundred tons and
generally averaging over fifty. A smart pinnace, with its long, low,
clean-run hull, if well handled under its Elizabethan fighting
canvas of foresail and main topsail, could play round a Spanish
galleasse or absurdly castled galleon like a lancer on a
well-trained charger round a musketeer astraddle on a cart horse.[4]
Henry's pinnaces still had lateen sails copied from Italian models.
Elizabeth's had square sails prophetic of the frigate's. Henry's had
one or a very few small guns. Elizabeth's had as many as sixteen,
some of medium size, in a hundred-tonner.
[4: Fuller in his "Worthies" (1662) writes: 'Many were the
wit-combats betwixt him [Shakespeare] and Ben Jonson, which two I
beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war:
Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning,
solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, like the English
man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with
all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the
quickness of his wit and invention.']
The 'mosquito' fleet of Henry's time was represented by 'row-barges'
of his own invention. Now that the pinnace was growing in size and
sail power, while shedding half its oars, some new small rowing
craft was wanted, during that period of groping transition, to act
as a tender or to do 'mosquito' work in action. The mere fact that
Henry VIII placed no dependence on oars except for this smallest
type shows how far he had got on the road towards the
broadside-sailing-ship fleet. On the 16th of July, 1541, the Spanish
Naval Attache (as we should call him now) reported to Charles V that
Henry had begun 'to have new oared vessels built after his own
design.' Four years later these same 'row-barges'--long, light, and
very handy--hung round the sterns of the retreating Italian galleys
in the French fleet to very good purpose, plying them with
bow-chasers and the two broadside guns, till Strozzi, the Italian
galley-admiral, turned back on them in fury, only to see them slip
away in perfect order and with complete immunity.
By the time of the Armada the mosquito fleet had outgrown these
little rowing craft and had become more oceanic. But names, types,
and the evolution of one type from another, with the application of
the same name to changed and changing types, all tend to confusion
unless the subject is followed in such detail as is impossible here.
The fleets of Henry VIII and of Elizabeth did far more to improve
both the theory and practice of naval gunnery than all the fleets in
the world did from the death of Drake to the adoption of rifled
ordnance within the memory of living men. Henry's textbook of
artillery, republished in 1588, the year of the Armada, contains
very practical diagrams for finding the range at sea by means of the
gunner's half circle--yet we now think range-finding a very modern
thing indeed. There are also full directions for making common and
even something like shrapnel shells, 'star shells' to light up the
enemy at night, armor-piercing arrows shot out of muskets,
'wild-fire' grenades, and many other ultra-modern devices.
Henry established Woolwich Dockyard, second to none both then and
now, as well as Trinity House, which presently began to undertake
the duties it still discharges by supervising all aids to navigation
round the British Isles. The use of quadrants, telescopes, and maps
on Mercator's projection all began in the reign of Elizabeth, as did
many other inventions, adaptations, handy wrinkles, and vital
changes in strategy and tactics. Taken together, these improvements
may well make us of the twentieth century wonder whether we are so
very much superior to the comrades of Henry, Elizabeth, Shakespeare,
Bacon, Raleigh, and Drake.
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