Part 3

To a certain extent the galleon was to the fleets of the Mid-Fourteenth Century much what the ironclad was to the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, or “Dreadnoughts” at the end of the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

The introduction of this type of vessel came about as follows:--

A fleet of Castillian galleons, bound for Flanders, whiled away the monotony of its trip by acts of piracy against all English ships that it met. It reached Sluys without interference. Here it loaded up with rich cargoes and prepared to return to Spain. The English meanwhile collected a fleet to intercept it, this fleet being in command of King Edward himself, who selected the “cog _Thomas_” as his flagship.

The English tactics would seem to have been carefully thought out beforehand. The Castillian ships were known to be of relatively vast size and more or less unassailable except by boarding. The result was that when at length they appeared, the English charged their ships into them, sinking most of their own ships in the impact, sprang aboard and carried the enemy by boarding. The leading figure on the English side was a German body-servant of the name of Hannekin, who distinguished himself just at the crisis of the battle by leaping on board a Castillian ship and cutting the halyards. Otherwise the result of the battle might have been different, because the Castillians, when about half only of the English ships were grappled with them, hoisted their sails, with the object of sailing away and destroying the enemy in detail. Hannekin’s perception of this intention frustrated the attempt.

The advantages of the galleons (or carracks as they were then called), must have been rendered obvious in this battle of “Les Espagnols-sur-Mer,” as immediately afterwards ships on the models of those captured began to be hired for English purposes.

Concurrent, however, with this building of a larger type of ship, a decline of naval power began; and ten years later, English shipping was in such a parlous state that orders were issued to the effect that should any of the Cinque Ports be attacked from the sea, any ships there were to be hauled up on land, as far away from the water as possible, in order to preserve them.

In the French War of 1369, almost the first act of the French fleet was to sack and burn Portsmouth without encountering any naval opposition.

In 1372 some sort of English fleet was collected, and under the Earl of Pembroke sent to relieve La Rochelle, which was then besieged by the French and Spanish. The Spanish ships of that period had improved on those of twenty years before, to the extent that (according to Froissart), some carried guns. In any case they proved completely superior to the English, whose entire fleet was captured or sunk.

This remarkable and startling difference is only to be accounted for by the difference in the naval policy of the two periods. In the early years of Edward III’s reign, when a fleet was required it was in an efficient state, and when it encountered the enemy, it was used by those who had obviously thought out the best means of making the most of the material available. In the latter stage, there was neither efficiency nor purpose. The result was annihilation.

How far the introduction of cannon on shipboard contributed to this result it is difficult to say exactly. In so far as it may have, the blame rests with the English, who were perfectly familiar with cannon at that time. If, therefore, the very crude stone-throwing cannon of those days had any particular advantages over the stone-throwing catapults previously employed, failure to fit them is merely a further proof of the inefficiency of those responsible for naval matters in the closing years of Edward III’s reign. Probably, however, the cannon contributed little to the result of La Rochelle, for, like all battles of the era, it was a matter of boarding--of “land fighting on the water.”

The reign of Richard II saw England practically without any naval power at all. The French and Spaniards raided the Channel without interference worth mention. Once or twice retaliatory private expeditions were made upon the French coast; but speaking generally the French and Spaniards had matters entirely their own way, and the latter penetrated the Thames so far as Gravesend.

In the year 1380, an English army was sent over to France, but this, as Calais was British, was a simple operation, and although two years later ships were collected for naval purposes, English sea impotence remained as conspicuous as ever. In 1385, when a French armada was collected at Sluys for the avowed purpose of invading England on a large scale, no attempt whatever seems to have been made to meet this with another fleet. Fortunately for England, delays of one kind and another led to the French scheme of invasion being abandoned.

Under Henry IV, matters remained much the same, until in the summer of 1407, off the coast of Essex, the King, who was voyaging with five ships, was attacked by French privateers, which succeeded in capturing all except the Royal vessel.

This led to the organisation of a “fleet” and a successful campaign against the privateers. The necessity of Sea Power began to be realised again, and this so far bore fruit that in the reign of Henry V no less than 1,500 ships were (it is said) collected in the Solent, for an invasion of France. But since some of these were hired from the Dutch and as every English vessel of over twenty tons was requisitioned by the King, the large number got together does not necessarily indicate the existence of any very great amount of naval power. This fleet, however, indicated a revival of sea usage.

In 1417, large ships known as “Dromons” were built at Southampton, and bought for the Crown, but these were more of the nature of “Royal Yachts” than warships. The principal British naval base at and about this period was at Calais, of which, at the time of the War of the Roses, the Earl of Warwick was the governor.

The first act of the Regency of Henry VI was to sell by auction such ships as had been bought for the Crown under Henry V. The duty of keeping the Channel free from pirates was handed over to London merchants, who were paid a lump sum to do this, but did not do it at all effectively.

Edward IV made some use of a Fleet to secure his accession, or later restoration. Richard III would seem to have realised the utility of a Fleet, and during his short reign he did his best to begin a revival of “the Navy” by buying some ships, which, however, he hired out to merchants for trade purposes; and so, at the critical moment, he had apparently nothing available to meet the mild over-sea expedition of Henry of Richmond. So--right up to _comparatively_ recent times--there was never any Royal Navy in the proper meaning of the word, nor even any organised attempt to create an equivalent, except on the part of those two Kings who we are always told were the worst Kings England ever had--John and Richard III. Outside these two, there is not the remotest evidence that anyone ever dreamed of “naval power,” “sea power,” or anything of the sort, till Henry VII became King of England, and founded the British Navy on the entirely unromantic principle that it was a financial economy.

Such was the real and prosaic birth of the British Navy in relatively recent times. It was made equally prosaic in 1910 by Lord Charles Beresford, when he said, “Battleships are cheaper than war.”

There is actually no poetry about the British Navy. There never has been--it will be all the better for us if there never is. It is merely a business-like institution founded to secure these islands from foreign invasion. Dibden in his own day, Kipling in ours, have done their best to put in the poetry. It has been pretty and nice and splendid. But over and above it all I put the words of a stoker whose name I never knew, “It’s just this--do your blanky job!”

That is the real British Navy. Henry VII did not create this watchword, nor anyone else, except perhaps Nelson.

III.

THE TUDOR PERIOD AND BIRTH OF A REGULAR NAVY.

That Henry VII assimilated the lesson of the utility of naval power is abundantly clear. Henry VII it was who first established a regular navy as we now understand it. Previous to his reign, ships were requisitioned as required for war purposes, and, the war being over, reverted to the mercantile service. The liability of the Cinque Ports to provide ships when called upon constituted a species of navy, and certain ships were specially held as “Royal ships” for use as required, but under Henry ships primarily designed for fighting purposes appeared. The first of these ships was a vessel generally spoken of as the “_Great Harry_,” though her real name seems to have been _The Regent_, built in 1485. Incidentally this ship remained afloat till 1553, when she was burned by accident. She has been called “the first ship of the Royal Navy”; and though her right to the honour has been contested, she appears fully entitled to it. The real founder of the Navy as we understand a navy to-day was Henry VII.

Another important event of this reign is that during it the first dry dock was built at Portsmouth. Up till then there had been no facilities for the underwater repair of ships other than the primitive method of running them on to the mud and working on them at low tide. While ships were small this was not a matter of much moment, but directly larger vessels began to be built, it meant that efficient overhauls were extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Yet another step that had far reaching results was the granting of a bounty to all who built ships of over 120 tons. This bounty, which was “per ton” and on a sliding scale, made the building of large private ships more profitable and less risky than it had been before, and so assisted in the creation of an important auxiliary navy as complement to the Royal Navy.

The bounty system did more, however, than encourage the building of large private ships. The loose method of computing tonnage already referred to, became more elastic still when a bounty was at stake; and even looser when questions of the ship being hired per ton for State purposes was at issue. Henry VII, who was nothing if not economical, felt the pinch; the more so, as just about this time Continentals with ships for hire became alarmingly scarce. Something very like a “corner in ships” was created by English merchants.

Henry VII was thus, by circumstances beyond his own control, forced into creating a permanent navy in self defence. He died with a “navy” of eighteen ships, of which, however, only two were genuinely entitled to be called “H.M.S.” He had to hire the others!

This foundation of the “regular navy” is not at all romantic. But it is how a regular navy came to be founded--by force of circumstances. Henry VII, “founder of the Royal Navy,” undoubtedly realized clearer than any of his predecessors for many a hundred years the meaning of naval power. But--his passion for economy and the advantage taken by such of his subjects as had ships available when hired ships were scarce, had probably a deal more to do with the institution of a regular navy than any preconceived ideas. In two words--“Circumstances compelled.” And that is how things stood when Henry VIII came to the throne.

The nominal permanent naval power established by Henry VII consisted of fifty-seven ships, and the crew of each was twenty-one men and a boy, so that the _Great Harry_, which must have required a considerably larger crew, would seem to have been an experimental vessel. The actual force, however, was but two fighting ships proper.

Under Henry VIII, however, the policy of monster ships was vigorously upheld, and one large ship built in the early years of his reign--the _Sovereign_--was reputed to be “the largest ship in Europe.” In 1512 the King reviewed at Portsmouth “twenty-five ships of great burthen,” which had been collected in view of hostilities with France. These ships having been joined by others, and amounting to a fleet of forty-four sail, encountered a French fleet of thirty-nine somewhere off the coast of Brittany.

This particular battle is mainly noteworthy owing to the fact that the two flagships grappled, and while in this position one of them caught fire. The flames being communicated to the other, both blew up. This catastrophe so appalled the two sides that they abandoned the battle by mutual consent; from which it is to be presumed that the nautical mind of the day had, till then, little realised that risks were run by carrying explosives.

The English, however, were less impressed by the catastrophe than the enemy, since next day they rallied and captured or sank most of the still panic-stricken French ships.

Henry replaced the lost flagship by a still larger ship, the _Grace de Dieu_, a two-decker with the lofty poop and forecastle of the period. She was about 1,000 tons. Tonnage, however, was so loosely calculated in those days that measurements are excessively approximate.

When first cannon were introduced, they were (as previously remarked) merely a substitute for the old-fashioned catapults, and discharged stones for some time till more suitable projectiles were evolved. Like the catapults they were placed on the poop or forecastle, as portholes had not then been introduced. These were invented by a Frenchman, one Descharges, of Brest. By means of portholes it was possible to mount guns on the main deck and so increase their numbers.

Although the earliest portholes were merely small circular holes which did not allow of any training, and though the idea of them was probably directly derived from the loopholes in castle walls, the influence of the porthole on naval architecture was soon very great indeed. By means of this device a new relation between size and power was established, hence the “big displacements” which began to appear at this time. The hole for a gun muzzle to protrude through, quickly became an aperture allowing of training the gun on any ordinary bearing in English built ships. The English (for a very long time it was English only) realisation of the possibilities of the porthole in Henry VIII’s reign contributed very materially to the defeat of the Spanish Armada some decades later. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the porthole was to that era what the torpedo has been in the present one. Introduced about 1875 as a trivial alternative to the gun, in less than forty years the torpedo came to challenge the gun in range to an extent that as early as 1905 or thereabouts began profoundly to affect all previous ideas of naval tactics, and that by 1915 has changed them altogether!

Another great change of these Henry VIII days was in the form of the ships.[6] At this era they began to be built with “tumble-home” sides, instead of sides slanting outwards upwards, and inwards downwards as heretofore. With the coming of the porthole came the decline of the cross-bow as a naval arm. In the pre-porthole days every record speaks of “showers of arrows,” and the gun appears to have been a species of accessory. In the early years of the Sixteenth Century it became the main armament, and so remained unchallenged till the present century and the coming of the long-range torpedo.

Henry VIII’s reign is also remarkable for the first institution of those “cutting out” expeditions which were afterwards to become such a particular feature of British methods of warfare. This first attempt happened in the year 1513, when Sir Edward Howard, finding the French fleet lying in Brest Harbour refusing to come out, “collected boats and barges” and attacked them with those craft. The attempt was not successful, but it profoundly affected subsequent naval history.

Therefrom the French were impressed with the idea that if a fleet lay in a harbour awaiting attack it acquired an advantage thereby. The idea became rooted in the French mind that to make the enemy attack under the most disadvantageous circumstances was the most wise of policies. That “the defensive is compelled to await attack, compelled to allow the enemy choice of the moment” was overlooked!

From this time onward England was gradually trained by France into the role of the attacker, and the French more and more sank into the defensive attitude. Many an English life was sacrificed between the “discovery of the attack” in the days of Henry VIII, and its triumphant apotheosis when centuries later Nelson won the Battle of the Nile; but the instincts born in Henry’s reign, on the one hand to fight with any advantage that the defensive might offer, on the other hand to attack regardless of these advantages, are probably the real key to the secret of later victories.

The Royal ships at this period were manned by voluntary enlistment, supplemented by the press-gang as vacancies might dictate. The pay of the mariner was five shillings a month; but petty officers, gunners and the like received additional pickings out of what was known as “dead pay.” By this system the names of dead men, or occasionally purely fancy names, were on the ship’s books, and the money drawn for these was distributed in a fixed ratio. The most interesting feature of Henry VII and Henry VIII’s navies is the presence in them of a number of Spaniards, who presumably acted as instructors. These received normal pay of seven shillings a month plus “dead pay.”

The messing of the crews was by no means indifferent. It was as follows per man:--

Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday: ¾ lb. beef and ½ lb. bacon.

Monday, Wednesday, Saturday: Four herrings and two pounds of cheese.

Friday: To every mess of four men, half a cod, ten herrings, one pound of butter and one pound of cheese.

There was also a daily allowance of one pound of bread or biscuit. The liquid allowance was either beer, or a species of grog consisting of one part of sack to two of water. Taking into account the value of money in those days and the scale of living on shore at the time, the conditions of naval life were by no means bad, though complaints of the low pay were plentiful enough. Probably, few received the full measure of what on paper they were entitled to.

Henry VIII died early in 1547. In the subsequent reigns of Edward VI and Mary, the Navy declined, and little use was made of it except for some raiding expeditions.

When Elizabeth came to the throne the regular fleet had dwindled to very small proportions, and, war being in progress, general permission was given for privateering as the only means of injuring the enemy. It presently degenerated into piracy and finally had to be put down by the Royal ships.

No sooner, however, was the war over than the Queen ordered a special survey to be made of the Navy. New ships were laid down and arsenals established for the supply of guns and gunpowder, which up to that time had been imported from Germany. Full advantage was taken of the privateering spirit, the erstwhile pirates being encouraged to undertake distant voyages. In many of these enterprises the Queen herself had a personal financial interest. She thus freed the country from various turbulent spirits who were inconvenient at home, and at one and the same time increased her own resources by doing so.

There is every reason to believe that this action of Elizabeth’s was part of a well-designed and carefully thought out policy. The type of ship suitable for distant voyages and enterprises was naturally bound to become superior to that which was merely evolved from home service. The type of seamen thus bred was also necessarily bound to be better than the home-made article. Elizabeth can hardly have failed to realise these points also.

To the _personnel_ of the regular Navy considerable attention was also given. Pay was raised to 6/8 per month for the seamen, and 5/- a month with 4/- a month for clothing for soldiers afloat. Messing was also increased to a daily ration of one pound of biscuit, a gallon of beer, with two pounds of beef per man four days out of the seven, and a proportionate amount of fish on the other three days. Subsequently, and just previous to the Armada, the pay of seamen rose to 10/- a month, with a view to inducing the better men not to desert.

The regular navy was thus by no means badly provided for as things went in those days; while service with “gentlemen adventurers” offered attractions to a very considerable potential reserve, and so England contained a large population which, from one cause and another, was available for sea service. To these circumstances was it due that the Spanish Armada, when it came, never had the remotest possibility of success. It was doomed to destruction the day that Elizabeth first gave favour to the “gentlemen adventurers.”

Of these adventurers the greatest of all was Francis Drake, who in 1577 made his first long voyage with five ships to the Pacific Ocean. Drake, alone, in the _Pelican_, succeeded in reaching the Pacific and carrying out his scheme of operations, which--not to put too fine a point on it--consisted of acts of piracy pure and simple against the Spaniards. He returned to England after an absence of nearly three years, during which he circumnavigated the globe.

There is little doubt that Drake in this voyage, and others like him in similar expeditions, learned a great deal about the disadvantages of small size in ships. Drake, however, learned another thing also. Up to this day the crew of a ship had consisted of the captain and a certain military element; also the master, who was responsible for a certain number of “mariners.” The former were concerned entirely with fighting the ship--the latter entirely with manœuvring it.

This system of specialisation, awkward as it appears thus baldly stated, may have worked well enough in ordinary practice. It did not differ materially from the differentiation between deck hands and the engineering departments, which to a greater or less extent is very marked in every navy of the present day.

Drake, however, started out with none too many men, and it was not long before he lost some of those he had and found himself short-handed. His solution of the difficulty is in his famous phrase, “I would have the gentlemen haul with the mariners.” How far this was a matter of expediency, how far the revelation of a new policy, is a matter of opinion. It must certainly have been outside the purview of Elizabeth. But out of it gradually came that every English sailor knew how to fight his ship and how to sail her too, and this amounted to doubling the efficiency of the crew of any ship at one stroke.

Of Drake himself, the following contemporary pen-picture, from a letter written by one of his Spanish victims, Don Franciso de Zarate,[7] explains almost everything:--

“He received me favourably, and took me to his room, where he made me seated and said to me: ‘I am a friend to those who speak the truth, that is what will have the most weight with me. What silver or gold does this ship bring?’

“... We spoke together a great while, until the dinner-hour. He told me to sit beside him and treated me from his dishes, bidding me have no fear, for my life and goods were safe; for which I kissed his hands.