Tudor and Stuart Seafarers: The Emergence of a Maritime Nation, 1485-1707

By James Davey

Tudor and Stuart Seafarers tells the compelling story of how a small island positioned on the edge of Europe transformed itself into the world's leading maritime power. In 1485, England was an inward-looking country, its priorities largely domestic and European. Over the subsequent two centuries, however, this country was transformed, as the people of the British Isles turned to the sea in search of adventure, wealth and rule. Explorers voyaged into unknown regions of the world, while merchants, following in their wake, established lucrative trade routes with the furthest reaches of the globe. At home, people across Britain increasingly engaged with the sea, whether through their own lived experiences or through songs, prose and countless other forms of material culture.

This exquisitely illustrated book delves into a tale of exploration, encounter, adventure, power, wealth and conflict. Topics include the exploration of the Americas, the growth of worldwide trade, piracy and privateering and
the defeat of the Spanish Armada, brought to life through a variety of personalities from the well-known – Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Drake and Samuel Pepys – to the ordinary sailors, dockyard workers and their wives and families whose lives were so dramatically shaped by the sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781472956774

Book preview

CONTENTS

Patron's Foreword

Director’s Foreword

Introduction – James Davey

CHAPTER 1

‘New Worlds’: 1485–1505

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

CHAPTER 2

Adventurers: England Turns to the Sea, 1550–80

James Davey

CHAPTER 3

The Spanish Armada and England’s Conflict with Spain, 1585–1604

David Scott

CHAPTER 4

Building a Navy

J. D. Davies

CHAPTER 5

Using the Seas and Skies: Navigation in Early-Modern England

Megan Barford and Louise Devoy

CHAPTER 6

Encounter and Exploitation: The English Colonization of North America, 1585–1615

Laura Humphreys

CHAPTER 7

Of Profit and Loss: The Trading World of Seventeenth-Century England

Robert J. Blyth

CHAPTER 8

The British Civil Wars, 1638–53

Elaine Murphy

CHAPTER 9

Life at Sea

Richard J. Blakemore

CHAPTER 10

The Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Wars

Rebecca Rideal

CHAPTER 11

A Sea of Scoundrels: Pirates of the Stuart Era

Aaron Jaffer

CHAPTER 12

Art and the Maritime World, 1550–1714

Christine Riding

Notes

Bibliography

Patron’s Foreword

The Tudor period is a source of endless fascination, full of epic moments of drama, such as the Spanish Armada of 1588 as well as the luminescent writing of William Shakespeare. Indeed, it was in the late sixteenth century that England, previously riven with dynastic concerns and religious turmoil, began to look outwards to the sea and the ‘New World’ as sources of opportunity and adventure. As an American, though one who has lived in the UK, I am aware of the tumultuous and far-reaching consequences of these early encounters on the subsequent history of the European and American continents.

My family is honoured to support the ‘Tudor and Stuart Seafarers’ gallery at the National Maritime Museum, reflecting the importance of Greenwich in the early modern period. Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I were born at the Greenwich Palace – a favoured royal residence and a place of pleasure, passion and politics. Henry VIII enjoyed jousting and the thrills of the tournament on the Museum’s grounds.

Little remains of Tudor Greenwich following its comprehensive redevelopment by subsequent Stuart monarchs, who created the Queen’s House and began work on the Baroque splendour of the Greenwich Hospital complex. However, a new room in the Museum allows visitors to explore the site’s many layers of history. Together, this room and the adjacent Gallery bring to life the rich story of Greenwich and its multifaceted connections to this extraordinary historical period, which did so much to shape Britain’s relationship with the sea.

Mark Pigott KBE KStJ OBE

Director’s Foreword

In 1924, Geoffrey Callender, Professor of History at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, published a textbook entitled The Naval Side of British History. The book outlines Britain’s rise as a maritime power from the late fifteenth century to victory in the First World War. However, his emphasis is firmly in the age of sail and heavily weighted towards the Tudor and Stuart age. When Callender became the first director the National Maritime Museum in 1934, this narrative of British seafaring endeavour provided the essential intellectual underpinning for the displays.

Our interpretation of the past must, of course, move with the times. Naturally, Callender’s outlook now seems hopelessly old-fashioned to modern readers but the Tudor and Stuart period remains an era of popular interest. This book advances the latest scholarship on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in an accessible form. It accompanies a new permanent gallery at the Museum – ‘Tudor and Stuart Seafarers’ – that explores this crucial and foundational period in Britain’s maritime history. Whereas Callender focused on great men like Drake, Ralegh and Blake, the gallery examines key themes from a variety of perspectives to give a fuller and more rounded view. By looking anew at events like the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the English settlement of North America, some familiar misconceptions might be overturned and difficult moments in the nation’s past be brought into sharper focus.

I hope that readers of this book find it compelling and thought-provoking. Moreover, I expect it will inspire them to visit (and revisit) the Museum to see the many of the objects illustrated here.

The Museum sincerely wishes to thank Mr Mark Pigott and family for their generous support of the ‘Tudor and Stuart Seafarers’ gallery at the National Maritime Museum and the adjoining Mark Pigott Room which provides visitors with an overview of our site’s direct historic links back to Greenwich Palace and the Tudor and Stuart eras.

Dr Kevin Fewster AM

Director, Royal Museums Greenwich

Introduction

James Davey

Chart of the Atlantic Ocean (detail). Nicholas Comberford, 1650. G213:2/.2.

In September 1620 an old, creaking merchant ship named the Mayflower left England, setting out from Plymouth into the Atlantic Ocean. On board were 102 religious separatists, later to become known as the Pilgrims (or Pilgrim Fathers), determined to establish a colony in the ‘New World’. There, in the remote, unfamiliar land of North America, the intrepid immigrants hoped they would be free to practise their religion without fear of persecution from James I’s government. With their homeland thousands of miles behind them, they established a settlement on the edge of what they believed to be a boundless wilderness. And yet it was here they discovered that England’s influence was inescapable. On 16 March 1621, an Indigenous American man named Samoset strode up to the Pilgrims’ rudimentary settlement and, to their astonishment, addressed them in their own language. ‘Greetings, Englishmen,’ he declared, and proceeded to ask if they had any beer. None of the Pilgrims had ever met an Indigenous American before – let alone one who was capable of conversing in their own tongue – and we can only begin to imagine the look of surprise on their faces. There was a further shock in store: the following week Samoset returned, this time with his friend Tisquantum, who spoke English even better.¹

It seems extraordinary that a group of settlers could sail across the Atlantic to an alien continent and find Indigenous people able to communicate with them in English. However, by the time of the Mayflower’s voyage, the people of the British Isles were already devoting considerable attention to the world beyond their own shores. Explorers had sailed to the furthest reaches of the world in a relentless search for wealth and power. In their wake came merchants and settlers determined to exploit these untapped, resource-rich lands. It was these voyages that initiated the spread of the English language around the world. It is likely that Samoset acquired his halting phrases – as well as his taste for beer – from fishermen operating off the coast of Newfoundland. Tisquantum, by contrast, had experienced the darker side of English maritime expansion. In 1614 he had been captured by an English seafarer and taken to London, returning five years later to find his tribe wiped out by diseases transmitted by European explorers. Both had learned enough English to converse with the Pilgrims. That they had done so was testament not only to their gift for language but also to the upswell in English maritime activity at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Tisquantum

Tisquantum – or Squanto as he was known to the English – was one of the most extraordinary figures of his time. Born to the Patuxet tribe that lived on the western coast of Cape Cod Bay, he was one of 27 Indigenous Americans captured and enslaved by the English adventurer Thomas Hunt in 1614. He was transported to Europe to be sold in Spain, but somehow – the sources are unclear – managed to escape this fate and make his way to England, where he spent the next five years. In 1619 he returned to America as part of an expedition to settle in Newfoundland, and found that his people had been annihilated by an epidemic infection carried by European visitors. He went to live with the Pokanoket tribe and was therefore on hand to greet the Mayflower Pilgrims in early 1621.

Perhaps even more surprising than Tisquantum’s transatlantic travels was his remarkable generosity. Despite having good reason to distrust and even hate the English, his advice and assistance in the early years of Plymouth Colony was essential to its success. He acted as a translator between English and Indigenous peoples, preventing conflict from breaking out and establishing over ten years of peaceful relations. Tisquantum taught the English how to sow and fertilize native crops, and also helped them economically, introducing them to the lucrative fur trade. Without his many interventions it is barely conceivable that Plymouth Colony would have survived: but for him, the history of English imperialism – and indeed America – would have been very different.

Samoset, Tisquantum and the Pilgrims were all participants in one of the more astonishing developments of the early-modern era: the emergence of England as a major maritime power. In the 1480s, England was an inward-looking, peripheral country, but over the subsequent two centuries the people of the British Isles learned how to use the sea to their advantage, with an expanding mercantile marine, a permanent naval force, and imperial ambitions that were truly global. Indeed, this period saw the English nation come to define itself by its relationship with the maritime world. If many thousands experienced it first-hand, the lives of countless others were shaped by the sea in less direct ways. The explosion of maritime activity saw thousands of people employed in new trades and dockyards, while dinner tables across the land were adorned with exotic commodities brought from the far corners of the world. The exploits of famous sea captains were disseminated in woodcuts and ballads, while paintings, medals and other forms of material culture were produced to celebrate new national heroes. The oceans became a source of inspiration for poets and playwrights, representing a ‘sea change’ in the way the ocean was understood in the British Isles.²

This book tells the story of how England transformed itself into a powerful maritime nation. This development has frequently been reduced to triumphalist and nationalistic histories, in which England would inevitably ‘rule the waves’. The defeat of the Spanish Armada looms large in any such discussion, an event that almost single-handedly confirmed England’s manifest maritime destiny, and which created a myth of naval superiority that would last for centuries.³ England’s rise, though, was by no means assured, for it was slow to appreciate the opportunities offered by the sea. Indeed, it was not until the 1550s that England began to make a concerted effort to exploit the world beyond Europe, and even after this, investment in oceanic endeavour remained limited and unsteady. Authors such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Richard Hakluyt wrote passionate treatises arguing for a larger navy or greater imperial investment, but for much of this period English maritime endeavours were ad hoc, relying on the ambition of private individuals rather than the support of the state. Even when England began to make greater strides into the Atlantic world, failure and disappointment were as common – if not more common – than success. As often as not – and as the Pilgrims could testify – England’s expanding position relied as much on good fortune as on any deliberate strategy. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, the English grew more confident and more ambitious. There can be no doubt that by the early 1700s English maritime power was in the ascendancy, poised to dominate the world’s oceans.

The ‘Royal Prince’ and other Vessels at the Four Days’ Battle, 1–4 June 1666. Abraham Storck, c.1670.

NMM, acquired with the assistance of the Art Fund. BHC0286.

In recent years a remarkable profusion of new research has opened up fresh perspectives on this story. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have supplemented the traditional focus on strategy, operations and technology with ground-breaking research that has transformed our understanding of the period. We now know far more about the relationship between the sea and the construction of individual and national identities, as well as its impact on art, music and popular culture. Historians have explored the social and cultural realities of life on board ship, the burgeoning communities that supported and depended upon seafaring, and the complex relationships that existed between ship and shore. Ships have been shown to be important places of cross-cultural interaction, while other scholars have shed light on the remarkable diversity of people found on board early-modern vessels. The history of ‘discovery’ has been replaced with one of ‘encounter’, focusing on moments of cultural exchange and the numerous incidents of violence and exploitation that came to define European imperialism. Crucially, this research has shown that, in England’s case at least, maritime history and national history are intertwined, and that the one cannot be studied without the other.⁴

The chapters that follow build on this wealth of research, bringing together contributions from twelve leading scholars. Individual chapters trace the numerous ways that the English shaped the maritime world of the early-modern era, through exploration, encounter, trade, warfare and piracy. Others focus on key events that were of central importance at the time, and which move the chronology of the book forward. Each chapter has as its spine a selection of objects from the extensive collections of the National Maritime Museum, which offer a rare insight into this history. The Museum holds world-class collections of charts, navigational instruments and ship models that allow us to consider the practicalities of seafaring, the weaponry of warfare and the structure of the sailing ship. Crucially, it houses other artefacts – such as paintings, prints, maps and medals – that demonstrate how the maritime world was represented back in England. In a few places, other international collections have been utilized – for example, those of the Mary Rose Trust – but all of the chapters will use the Museum’s collections to demonstrate the impact of maritime endeavours on English society, culture and self-image.

Terrestrial table globe. Gerardus Mercator, 1541.

NMM, Caird Collection. GLB0096.

This is, then, fundamentally a book about England. That is not to say that ‘Britain’ and the people of Ireland, Wales and Scotland are ignored. On the contrary, the early-modern period saw the gradual formation of a federated and composite ‘British’ state, with the growing adoption of English as a common language across the four nations and the eventual recognition of a single ruler over the British Isles.⁵ However, for most of this period, the notion of ‘Britain’ meant very little. Throughout the sixteenth century, England, Scotland and Ireland were separate nations ruled by different monarchs; Wales had long been subsumed into the English state. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 made James VI of Scotland the new King

Print showing the British Isles in 1590, also showing the track of the Spanish Armada. Robert Adams; Augustine Ryther, 1590. PBD8529(2).

Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 8 August 1588. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 1796.

NMM, Greenwich Hospital Collection. BHC0264.

James I of England, and he subsequently tried his utmost to inculcate a sense of a ‘Greater Britain’ in a deliberate attempt to shift regional loyalties to his new compound monarchy.⁶ It was not until 1707, however, when the Act of Union formally amalgamated Scotland with the English state to form the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’, that ‘British’ became an accurate descriptor. It follows that this book uses the term ‘England’ rather than ‘Britain’, and the countless Irish, Scottish and Welsh protagonists who have a stake in this story will be referred to as such.

Although predominantly about England, this is also a book about England’s place in the world. It is not possible, for instance, to understand the voyages of John Cabot without knowing about Columbus’s previous expeditions, nor can we grapple with the idea of piracy without some consideration of international law. For much of this period, English eyes remained fixed on European affairs. Indeed, the early-modern era was one of regular and repeated conflict with other Europeans, in no small part because of England’s rapid maritime expansion. It was Spanish fears about English encroachments at sea that led Philip II of Spain to assemble his vast Armada, while the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century were the direct result of England’s seemingly unstoppable commercial and imperial expansion. The rise of an ‘English Empire’ beyond the British Isles took on global proportions, and explorers and adventurers intervened in and influenced nations and peoples even further afield. Here the English encountered peoples in Africa, America and Asia, establishing diplomatic and trading connections that could have only existed because of maritime communications. As more formalized imperial roots began to be laid down from the 1600s onwards, the impact England had on the world became ever greater.

There is no escaping the fact that in many cases this impact came in the form of violence and exploitation. The early-modern era saw the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade, arguably the greatest stain on English history, which saw millions of Africans forcibly taken from their communities and enslaved to work in European colonies across the Americas. Even where England set up more established trading relationships, these commercial networks frequently relied on indigenous labour and unequal trading agreements. Elsewhere, English settlers disrupted sophisticated societies and communities that had existed for centuries. In North America, English colonization has been accurately – but not uncontroversially – termed an ‘invasion’, in which settlers displaced peoples who had been living there for millennia. Some groups were forced to re-settle inland as the English intruded further, but others found they had nowhere to turn. The Beothuk people of Newfoundland were forced to huddle in the interior of the island, cut off from their traditional resources and economy by the encroaching English, and by the end of the seventeenth century they were virtually extinct.⁷ European settlers also brought with them ‘Old World’ diseases such as influenza and smallpox, to which Indigenous peoples were extremely susceptible. The consequences were truly devastating: in 1500 there were perhaps 560,000 people living along the east coast of North America; the ravages of disease and conflict halved this population to an estimated 250,000 by 1700, and this decimation continued in the subsequent decades.⁸

This is not an attempt to lambast an entire period of English history. On the contrary, the book grapples with what happened in the past and attempts to understand why people acted as they did. This process necessitates facing uncomfortable truths. Some apologist historians have attempted to explain away the more brutal side of English history, either by pointing out that other European powers had initiated these practices, or suggesting that the deaths of Indigenous Americans were an unhappy but unintended accident. However, these positions do not hold up to even modest scrutiny. Certainly the English were not the first to enslave African people – the Portuguese had long been involved in this trade – but the English quickly eclipsed their Iberian rivals: by the end of the seventeenth century England was the largest transporter of enslaved people in the world. Similarly, while it is true to say that many settlers acted without understanding the impact of their actions, others knew exactly what they were doing: English settlers in Virginia and Maryland conducted deliberate campaigns to raid and destroy local villages, killing thousands of innocent people who stood in the way of English expansion. It is easy to see why some modern scholars have begun to use the word ‘genocide’ to describe what happened to the indigenous people of North America.⁹

Print showing male inhabitants of the Gold Coast, West Africa. Johannus Theodor de Bry, 1604. PAG7537.

Portrait depicting a Tudor seafarer. English School, c.1596.

NMM, Caird Collection. BHC3152.

William Shakespeare

The plays of Shakespeare, one of the most famous writers of his or any age, abound with maritime subjects and imagery. Though he was born in landlocked Stratford-upon-Avon, his work reveals a man who was fascinated by the ocean – so much so that some biographers have wondered if he spent time at sea in his younger years. Even if this is unlikely – the range of explanations for his ‘lost years’ of 1585–92 is mind-boggling – he was certainly part of a London society that was increasingly aware of the possibilities of maritime endeavour. His plays reveal numerous themes – imperial