The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (37 page)

It follows from this that people eat differently aboard ship too. Keeping food is difficult. Meat can be salted and stored in barrels, but it goes off; similarly, it is hard to keep enough ground flour dry and free from rats to bake sufficient bread. The standard ration for men at sea in 1565 is a generous 4½d per day in port or 5d at sea, which provides a gallon of beer and a pound of biscuit or bread, half a pound of cheese and four ounces of butter per day, and half a pound of meat four days a week and stockfish or four herrings the other three days.
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Dried peas and oats may be used in stewing up the meat, but very little fresh food is available. You may walk into the captain’s cabin and see the table laden with grapes, prunes, plums, apples and pears, together with pewter plates and spoons, goblets and wine flagons, but this is purely for him and any of his fellow officers dining with him; most mariners will not have fresh fruit. Indeed, if their allowance of meat goes rancid or the weevils eat into the ship’s biscuit, they will go hungry. Each man has in his chest a turned bowl, a lidded wooden flask and a wooden spoon, and he eats squatting where he can, either in the dim light below deck or up in the fresh air, amid the barrels, cannon and hundreds of other men. But what he actually consumes will be as much a matter of luck as the type of food laid in store at the start of the voyage.

This struggle for food is a key feature of life at sea. If the meat goes rancid, it may well bring the crew down with sickness and leave them unable to man the ship properly. Outbreaks of dysentery are often blamed on corrupted meat. On one of his voyages, Francis Drake tries out a suggestion of Sir Hugh Plat’s and feeds his crew on pasta, as it is easy to keep and full of nutrition. But this still does not provide the vitamins that sailors need on a long trip. Vitamin D is not a problem as the body makes it naturally in sunlight and men spend most of their time in the beating sun; but the lack of Vitamin C is a serious issue. Many more sailors die of scurvy than drown.

Life aboard ship, as you can see, is pretty desperate. Many sailors have lost teeth. Most suffer from tooth decay and gum disease. Their breath stinks, overpowering even the stench of their bodies. Apart from the officers, they do not wash or shave; the surgeon aboard a
large ship has more pressing things to do than shaving men. Their foul clothing harbours dung beetles and fleas.
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Their hair is often riddled with the larvae of insects, such as the puparia of the seaweed fly. Many seamen use wooden combs, but these provide only limited relief. The men all have to share the same toilet facilities: the ‘heads’, a place at the front of the vessel, where you urinate and defecate through a floor of slotted planks. It stinks and is rife with diseases. Only the captain and his senior officers have their own chamber pots. Any dogs, cats and rats on board will not be so careful where they defecate, and the atmosphere below decks on a long journey is a noxious mix of urine, sweat, vomit and animal excrement that will severely test your love of the sea. Just as your eyes have to adjust to the darkness when going below, so too your nose will have to get used to the smell.

You may be perturbed to see how young the mariners are who live in these conditions: 82 per cent of all the men aboard are below the age of thirty and include boys as young as ten or eleven. As you can imagine, their chances of reaching adulthood are slim.
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Discipline is essential to keep such large groups of young men under control. Expect to hear the shrill blast of the boatswain’s call regularly. Time is reckoned in strict half-hourly turns of the hourglass or sandclock; a watch is eight turns. This four-hour period regulates everything from when men may eat to when they are on duty, when they must pray and when they have to swab the deck and heads, and when the ship should change tack. Sailors work from dawn until eight o’clock in the evening. Cleaning the ship, attending to its rigging, setting or stowing the sails, mending the ropes, fishing, calculating positions, caulking the vessel to preserve its seaworthiness – there is very little scope for idleness. From eight until midnight the men are allowed to relax, unless their ship is in danger from the elements or the enemy. They may play cards or tables (a form of backgammon) and music: fiddles and pipes are popular at sea.
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In a well-run ship a strict disciplinary code is enforced. Punishments range from a 1d fine for swearing or blasphemy to ducking in the sea for minor offences such as petty theft or sleeping on duty, flogging for disobedience, and the loss of a limb or hanging for striking an officer, murder or mutiny.

Crammed into a small vessel on a long voyage, with the entire crew’s survival at stake, it won’t surprise you that men grow suspicious of one another. In 1578, on his circumnavigation of the world,
Francis Drake suspects that one of his officers, Thomas Doughty, is plotting against him, thereby jeopardising the entire enterprise. When an open argument ensues, Drake strikes Doughty, has him bound to the mast of the
Pelican
and tries him for mutiny. After bullying the other captains of the expedition into agreeing, he orders Doughty to be beheaded. The man is executed on 2 July 1578. Months at sea with little else to think about can turn your smallest doubts about a shipmate into your biggest fears of an enemy about to attack you – as if all the filth, disease, lack of food, cold, wet and lack of sleep were not hardships enough.

With regard to safety, if the owners do not rebuild a vessel, she will grow progressively less seaworthy. If the captain is negligent and does not enforce the caulking of the hull, it will leak. If the sails are not kept in order and are allowed to tear, the ship may find itself at the mercy of pirates. If the navigator does not take regular soundings, there is a danger the ship will run aground. There are very few lighthouses. St Catherine’s on the Isle of Wight is still operational, as is Hook Lighthouse in County Wexford, Ireland. An Act of Parliament in 1566 empowers Trinity House, the organisation responsible for maritime safety established by Henry VIII, to build new lighthouses, but the first one is not constructed until 1609 (at Lowestoft). No light therefore protects mariners from the treacherous rocks of the Cornish coast. In fog this is deadly. Likewise the Eddystone will continue to tear ships to pieces sixteen miles off the Devon coast for another hundred years. As for the Goodwin Sands, they are referred to as the Great Ship Swallower. Thus a ship is in constant danger – to say nothing of the threat posed by storms, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. If you get caught in a heavy gale, the advisable course of action is to furl your sails, run before the wind and pray.
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The other great threats to the safety of a ship are piracy and war. On 19 May 1585, after years of English raids on Spanish settlements in Latin America and the seizing of many Spanish cargo ships, Philip of Spain orders the detention of all English ships in his ports. A number of English corn ships happen to be in Bilbao: the merchants who own them lose everything and the sailors are thrown into prison, where many of them die. Just being an honest merchant is a dangerous business. For this reason every seagoing ship is armed. Even a small pinnace will have half a dozen guns. If you do take part in the plundering of Spanish vessels, the rule is to observe the quantities due to
the authorities. Attacks against the Spanish do not count as piracy if you pay one half of all your loot to the queen and one-tenth to the admiral of England. The remaining 40 per cent may be shared by the captain and crew.
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However, if you seize the cargo of a foreign country and keep it for yourself, you are regarded as a pirate and the government will try to hunt you down. After 1585 the Spanish similarly prey on English shipping, hoping to capture and ransom passengers to and from the Continent as well as looting English merchant ships.

The Spaniards are not your only enemies at sea. The Barbary pirates – the original ‘barbarians’ – are beginning to make an impact during the queen’s reign. These crews from North Africa principally operate in the Mediterranean and off the Spanish coast; they are not yet openly sailing in British waters, so only ships that sail long distances are under threat, such as vessels of the newly established Barbary Company. But a few unfortunate Englishmen are among the tens of thousands of Europeans taken captive and forced into slavery. In about 1585 a ship belonging to Sir Thomas Leighton is captured by Barbary pirates and its English crew taken as slaves. One of them, Giles Napper, serves as a galley slave in ‘Barbary’ for two-and-a-half years until he is able to escape.
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The Barbary pirates become a serious threat in 1601 when a Dutchman called Simon Danseker leads them through the Straits of Gibraltar to prey on European vessels in the Atlantic. Very soon afterwards, an Englishman, Jack Ward, turns to piracy and leads the Muslim corsairs into the English shipping lanes, seizing boats from within sight of the English shore. No one in a coastal town is safe. You come across women who do not know whether they are widows or not – all they know is that their husbands went to sea and never came back. Such women are in a terrible plight for they cannot presume their husbands are dead until seven years have passed; only then can they remarry. In the meantime they have to fend for themselves. If their sons are also serving aboard captured ships, then their plight is doubly awful, for the pirates will eagerly take boys to sell in the slave markets of Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis.

When you consider all the dangers from pirates and shipwreck, all the hardship and diseases and the terrible conditions aboard, you may decide that travelling by ship is not for you. But it makes the achievements of the Englishmen who do sail round the world in this reign all the more remarkable. Consider what Drake has to put up with on his great circumnavigation. He sets sail in November 1577 with five
ships and about two hundred men. His own ship, the 150-ton
Pelican
, is the largest, with eighteen guns. The other four are John Wynter’s 80-ton
Elizabeth
, with eleven guns; the 50-ton
Marigold
; the 30-ton
Swan
; and the 15-ton
Benedict
. The last three have just twelve guns between them. After attacking and looting six Spanish and Portuguese vessels, the
Benedict
is exchanged for a captured 40-ton ship, which is renamed the
Christopher
. A sixth ship is added when a Portuguese merchant vessel is seized and renamed the
Mary
. Drake appoints Thomas Doughty of the
Swan
captain of this new vessel, but, as we have seen, it is soon after this that he accuses Doughty of plotting against him. Things now go from bad to worse. After stripping the
Swan
of her crew and burning her, after executing Doughty and stripping all the other captains of their ranks and appointing them as his own subordinates, Drake continues through the Straits of Magellan. When a violent storm blows up, the
Marigold
sinks with its twenty crew and the other ships are dispersed in the freezing Southern Pacific. Having lost sixty men to cold, hunger and disease, Drake is forced to abandon the
Mary
. At this point John Wynter in the
Elizabeth
absconds back to England with his survivors. With the
Pelican
the only one of his original five ships left – now renamed the
Golden Hind
– Drake sails up the coast of Chile. Only thirty of the seventy men left aboard are able to fight, but while most people would be glad still to be alive, Drake goes on the rampage, attacking Spanish vessels and looting every ship he takes. One prize is accidentally lost when a drunken sailor drops a lamp in the hold and sets light to the vessel, but Drake continues, capturing ships laden with valuable cargoes. By this time he is showing signs of mental instability. Worried lest his Portuguese pilot betray him, he tricks the man into going ashore and abandons him. After sacking the ship’s chaplain he conducts his own religious services. When the
Golden Hind
runs aground on some rocks in the middle of the Pacific, his chaplain declares that the disaster is God’s judgement for Drake’s execution of Doughty. Drake forces the chaplain to wear an insulting label and threatens to hang him if he should remove it for the duration of the voyage. A black woman captured in America is put ashore in Indonesia (after Drake and his men have got her pregnant); but her presence during the Pacific crossing hardly relieves the tension, only adding to the jealousies and suspicions of the crew. The
Golden Hind
finally arrives back in Plymouth on 26 September 1580, three years after setting out, becoming only the second
ship to sail round the world, and the first to be captained all the way by the same man.
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If the above does not put you off maritime exploration, consider the case of Peter Carder. This chap sails in the
Elizabeth
under the command of John Wynter. He is thus caught in the storm after sailing through the Straits of Magellan and heads back to England with Wynter. When Carder and several other men are set ashore in a small boat on the coast of Brazil to look for fresh water, they are attacked by Portuguese sailors who fatally wound five Englishmen and take the others prisoner. After spending some time in gaol, Carder is put in the custody of a Portuguese merchant, who makes him work on his plantation alongside black slaves for several years until Carder escapes to Pernambuco and embarks on a Portuguese ship heading back to Europe. Captured by Englishmen on the return journey and almost wrecked off Ireland, he finally arrives home in November 1586 – nine years after setting out.
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Carder subsequently spins out his story. He claims that when sheltering on an island devoid of fresh water for two months, he was forced to drink his own urine; and that he lived with a tribe of moon-worshipping polygamous cannibals for a number of years. These polygamous cannibals really do exist – but Carder himself does not meet them; he simply borrows these elements of his story from others. Nevertheless, he is honest in one respect: his story is testimony to the many sufferings that you may encounter at sea, even if you do return home. More than half of those who set out with Drake do not. When the
Golden Hind
finally puts into Plymouth in 1580, there are just fifty-six men on board, and fewer than forty men return with Winter in the
Elizabeth
. Statistically speaking, sailing round the world in the sixteenth century is considerably more dangerous than going into space in the twentieth.