The founders of Massachusetts sought to create a Calvinist sanctuary for landed gentry and their servants, but New England’s rocky soil forced them to take to the sea as fishermen and traders. The disruptions caused by the English Civil War “set our people on work to provide fish, clapboards, plank, etc., and to sow hemp and flax … and to look out to the West Indies for a trade,” exporting wood and fish to the Caribbean sugar plantations. Bostonians captured a considerable share of the intercolonial and transatlantic trades. To England itself, North America supplied naval stores and shipbuilding timber. Although wood was plentiful in England, the cost of transporting it to the coast was prohibitive, and England’s access to naval stores from the Baltic was at the mercy of European politics. A late-sixteenth-century treatise “containing important inducements” for settlement in North America stressed that “It may also be a matter of great consequence for the good and securitie of England; that out of these Northerly regions we shall be able to furnish this realme of all manner of prouisions for our nauies; namely, Pitch, Rosen, Cables, Ropes, Masts and such like.” A cargo of masts reached England in the 1630s, but the trade got its real start during the First Anglo-Dutch War, when the Danes, who were allied with the Dutch, closed the Baltic to English shipping.
The importance of New England masts, the tallest of which measured thirty-five meters, has been likened to that of oil today, an apt comparison as is suggested in the relieved diary entry of naval administrator Samuel Pepys during the Second Anglo-Dutch War:
There is also the very good news come, of seven New-England ships come home safe to Falmouth with masts for the King; which is a blessing mighty unexpected, and without which (if for nothing else) we must have failed the next year. But God be praised for thus much good fortune, and send us the continuance of his favour in other things. So to bed.
New England was not the only source of naval stores, but for most of the seventeenth century, southern oak, pine, pitch, and tar from the Carolinas were invariably carried by New Englanders.
New merchant centers arose after the Restoration. Located at the junction of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, Charleston, South Carolina, was established in 1670 and attracted settlers from the northern colonies as well as Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, and, especially during the 1680s, French Huguenots fleeing the persecution unleashed by Louis XIV. Shortly thereafter, the Carolinas became a place of refuge for Caribbean pirates and buccaneers whom the great powers had run out of the Caribbean. Charleston was the most important city in British North America south of Philadelphia, which William Penn (whose father had taken Jamaica) founded in 1691 on a spit of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The Quaker proprietor of Pennsylvania welcomed the thousand Scandinavian and Dutch immigrants who had settled around the mouth of the Delaware River over the previous forty years, as well as German Mennonites and other immigrants. Within five years the population of Pennsylvania stood at five thousand.d Though its merchant fleet was somewhat smaller than those of either Boston or New York, Philadelphia rivaled—if it did not exceed—those cities thanks to its promise of religious tolerance, its agricultural productivity and manufacturing, and its more central location on the colonial seaboard.
European Navies
The lack of more hands-on involvement in the Americas by European governments was not entirely due to apathy about the fate of their colonies. They lacked the wherewithal to exercise their will across the ocean. In spite of careful attention to the minutiae of administration and vast expenditures on ships, weaponry, and ports, European navies rarely operated far from home, and almost never beyond European waters; until the eighteenth century, most battles were identified by a coastal place name, within a day’s sail of where the engagement took place. The exceptions were the Spanish, whose ships escorted the treasure fleets to and from the Americas, and the Portuguese, who maintained units in Brazilian and Asian waters. Armed merchantmen of the Dutch East India and West India Companies also sailed overseas, but these were not naval squadrons operating on state business. More than half a century of warfare among the maritime states of Atlantic Europe had forced them all to adopt more sophisticated approaches to naval affairs, but long-distance operations were few.
For the first two decades of the seventeenth century, there was little for navies to do. Spain concluded a peace with England’s James I in 1604 and hammered out a truce with the Dutch five years later. This period of relative peace was interrupted by the Thirty Years’ War, which began as a contest between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Protestant king of Bohemia in 1618, and three years later by the renewal of hostilities between Spain and the Dutch Republic. The resumption of war signaled the start of a European naval competition that would continue almost unchecked in peace and war into the twentieth century. Although the Thirty Years’ War and the Dutch rebellion were distinct conflicts, Philip IV’s chief minister, Count-Duke Olivares, sought to link them, chiefly to wrest Spain’s Baltic trade back from the Dutch. Maintaining access to the region’s naval stores and grain was crucial to the Spanish war effort generally, while usurping the trade was intended to deny its profits to the Dutch.
In Olivares’s calculation, a united front of Habsburg Spain and Austria, and Poland-Lithuania (an enemy of Sweden, which backed the Dutch), would envelop France, which though Catholic had allied with the Dutch Republic. Olivares was encouraged by the success of Spain’s armada of Flanders, which in 1621 included a dozen frigates stationed at Dunkirk and could call upon privateers who preyed on French, Dutch, and English shipping. Developed by shipwrights in the Spanish Netherlands, these frigates were relatively small and fast three-masted warships ideally suited to commerce raiding, convoy protection, and scouting. The Spanish navy achieved an impressive record in the first half of the decade and in 1625 Philip IV wrote the governor of the Spanish Netherlands “from now on the landwar will be reduced to the purely defensive.… In Mardyck [by Dunkirk], we will build up a fleet of fifty warships.” This proved impossible, but royal frigates and privateers sank scores of Dutch fishing vessels and their escorts as far afield as the Shetlands and Iceland. On the administrative side, in 1623 the Spanish created the Admiralty of the North to control trade between Spain and Flanders; forced neutral ships into Dunkirk to be inspected for contraband; and imposed a host of sweeping protectionist measures, including charging duties of 40 percent on French trade with Spain. (Spaniards trading in France paid 2.5 percent.) In the end, however, Olivares had to abandon his Baltic ambitions to focus on hostilities with France and the fallout from Piet Heyn’s capture of the silver fleet in Cuba.
Olivares’s French counterpart and rival, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, was likewise concerned about Dutch and English dominance of the French carrying trades, as well as Muslim and Christian corsairs in the Mediterranean, Spain’s great and growing naval ambition, and the naval threat posed by the Huguenot rebels of La Rochelle, one of the country’s most flourishing ports. These problems came to the fore with the renewal of hostilities between Spain and the Netherlands—which threatened French commerce even as it offered French merchants the opportunity to capitalize on the Spanish embargo on Dutch shipping—and the threat of a naval war with the Huguenots and England. In 1621, the Huguenots established their own admiralty and over the next four years attacked a number of French ports. Hoping to diminish English support for the Huguenots, Louis XIII arranged the marriage of his daughter Henriette Marie to Charles I. Yet the English feared the prospect of a French naval revival, and despite the personal alliance of Stuarts and Bourbons they occupied the Ile de Ré off La Rochelle in 1627. The French repelled them and though they returned the following year, their appearance was inconsequential and La Rochelle fell after a fourteen-month siege that effectively ended the French Wars of Religion.
Huguenot resistance was facilitated by the fact that although reforms had been under way since the sixteenth century, France had no national navy. Rather, the grand admiral of France had au
thority in Picardy and Normandy on the English Channel and Poitou and Saintonge on the Bay of Biscay; but Brittany, Provence, and Guyenne each had its own navy and distinct approaches to maritime law. This made it impossible for the French crown to raise revenues adequate for the creation of a state fleet or even to move fleets between provinces. A year before the siege of La Rochelle, Richelieu abolished the office of the grand admiral of France and called for the construction of a navy virtually from scratch: forty warships, thirty galleys, and ten galleons, “true citadels of the sea.” He also attempted to improve French seaports for the benefit of the navy, but his efforts were thwarted by nature, indifference, and outright opposition. Nonetheless, the navy was ready when France formally allied with the Dutch against Spain in 1635, and at the battle of Guetaría in the Bay of Biscay the next year divested the Spanish of seventeen galleys and ships, and four thousand sailors.
Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas, by Sir Peter Lely, circa 1645–50. Pett holds a pair of dividers, symbols of his expertise as a ship designer and builder. At left is a stern view of his heavily decorated Sovereign of the Seas (1637). Like the Hellenistic super-galleys of antiquity, the Sovereign of the Seas was intended partly “to make appearance for display.” Such pretension is a nearly universal tendency. An early Chinese work recommended ships so large that they were unmanageable in bad weather—“But the fleet cannot fail to be furnished with such ships, in order that its overawing might may be perfected.” Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.
Richelieu was certainly justified in complaining of “the ignominy of seeing our king, the foremost of Christian rulers, weaker than the pettiest princes of Christendom in terms of naval power.” Yet many English were equally contemptuous of the Navy Royal. “Such a rotten, miserable fleet, set out to sea, no man ever saw,” wrote one contemporary. “Our enemies seeing it may scoff at our nation.” Eager to restore the navy’s prestige, which had fallen since the days of Elizabeth and Drake, Charles I determined to reassert England’s ancient if fanciful title to the waters around the British Isles by building a navy equal to the claim and securing publication, at long last, of John Selden’s Of the Dominion; or, Ownership of the Sea. Having dissolved Parliament in 1629, Charles raised money for the fleet not through direct taxation payable to the Exchequer, the prerogative of Parliament, but by issuing writs for “ship money” payable to the navy in kind or cash. This scheme generated more than £800,000 over six years and, money in hand, Charles informed the shipbuilder Phineas Pett of “his princely resolution for the building of a great new ship.” Critics warned that “the art or wit of man cannot build a ship fit for service with three tier of ordnance,” but they dissuaded neither Charles nor Pett’s son, Peter, who built the ship. Built at a cost of £65,586—the equivalent of about ten 40-gun ships—as her name advertised, the Sovereign of the Seas was as much an instrument of propaganda as of war. In a pamphlet otherwise devoted to interpreting the “Decorements whiche beautify and adorne her … the carving worke, the figures, and mottoes upon them,” playwright and essayist Thomas Heywood managed a brief account of the ship’s armament:
She hath three flush Deckes, and a ForeCastle, an halfe Decke, a quarter Decke, and a round-house. Her lower Tyre [tier] hath thirty ports, which are to be furnished with Demy-Cannon [firing thirty-pound shot] and whole Cannon through out, (being able to beare them). Her middle Tyre hath also thirty ports for Demi-Culverin [ten-pounders], and whole Culverin: Her third Tyre hath Twentie sixe Ports for other Ordnance, her foreCastle hath twelve ports, and her halfe Decke hath foureteene ports.… She carrieth moreover ten peeces of chase Ordnance in her, right forward; and ten right aff.
Heywood further notes that Charles’s responsibility for national honor and security “should bee a great spur and incouragement to all his faithful and loving Subjects to bee liberall and willing Contributaries towards the Ship-money.” In fact, the attention Charles lavished on his naval program was much resented by his faithful and loving subjects, and in the Sovereign of the Seas can be seen some of the excess and arrogance that contributed to his eventual overthrow.
Such ostentation might have been tolerated had the fleet proved equal to policing English coastal waters, but during a more than monthlong standoff between a Spanish fleet under Antonio de Oquendo and the Dutch admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp in 1639 it proved completely ineffective. The year before, Olivares noted that Spain had won eighty-two victories at sea in seventeen years. But the tide was turning. The destruction of the squadron at Guetaria took place the same year and the following spring Dutch ships had captured seven hundred soldiers being convoyed to Flanders. In September, Oquendo was sent north with more troops, but harried by Tromp, he anchored in the Downs north of Dover. This was obviously England’s territorial waters, but the English fleet was powerless to enforce a peace and after a long standoff, on October 21 the Dutch took or sank thirty-two Spanish warships and transports. Dunkirk privateers had ferried five thousand of the soldiers to Flanders and Oquendo himself managed to reach Dunkirk and return to Spain, but the battle of the Downs was a blow both to Spain and to Charles’s claim to sovereignty of the seas.
As important, it signaled the definitive arrival of the Dutch Republic in the top rank of European naval powers, one whose management was a cross between that of the French and the English. The Dutch navy, the organization of which remained essentially unchanged from 1597 to 1785, included five admiralties in the maritime provinces of Friesland, Holland, and Zeeland. The fleets were paid for by taxes on merchants collected by the admiralties, and supplemented in wartime by extraordinary revenues voted by the States-General. Each admiralty was responsible for levying its own crews, maintaining and building its own ships and warehouses, and organizing convoys, and they could issue privateers’ commissions and adjudicate prizes and other matters of maritime law. This organization worked well against the Spanish and English fleets of the seventeenth century, but was outmoded in the subsequent age of highly centralized state violence calling for ever larger and more heavily gunned ships.
The Dutch at War, 1652–80
Three years after the humiliation of the Downs, Charles’s increasingly contentious relations with Parliament and Puritan leaders erupted into civil war. Defeated by Oliver Cromwell, Charles was tried for treason and executed. The substitution of the Commonwealth (1649–60) for the monarchy did little to alter the direction of English foreign policy, however, and in 1651 Parliament passed the Navigation Act. Under this protectionist legislation, the first of several such measures that came into force over the next two centuries, goods could be imported into England and its overseas territories “only in such [ships] as do truly and without fraud belong only to the people of this Commonwealth, or the plantations thereof … and whereof the master and mariners are also for the most part … people of this Commonwealth.” The only exception was for ships carrying the trade of their own country. So, for instance, a French ship could carry French wine to England or New England, but it could not carry New England wood to England. The law’s intent was to bolster English shipping and to undercut the Dutch. The government further insisted that all ships, foreign and domestic, dip their flags to English warships as a mark of respect for England and its navy. In a reprise of Charles’s showboating, Cromwell authorized the construction of three “great ships,” including the eighty-gun Naseby. Nicknamed the “Great Oliver,” Naseby’s original adornments included: “In the Prow…Oliver on horseback trampling 6 nations under foote, a Scott, Irishman, Dutch, French, Spaniard & English as was easily made out by their several habits: A Fame held a laurell over his insulting head, & the word God with us.”
On May 8, 1652, Tromp’s fleet was protecting Dutch convoys when it sought shelter in the Downs—the site of his triumph over Oquendo thirteen years before. Ordered to leave, Tromp sailed for France, but was followed by the English, whom he engaged in what became known as the battle of Dover (or the Downs), the casus belli for the Engli
sh declaration of war, the most decisive engagement of which came at the battle of the Gabbard Shoal (also known as North Foreland and Nieupoort) on June 2–3. Each fleet had more than a hundred ships, although the English vessels were generally larger and much of the Dutch fleet comprised hired or converted merchantmen.
The two-day battle is significant as one of the first fought between two fleets drawn up in line of battle, the classic formation that endured into the twentieth century. By this time, the ships of the major navies mounted their heaviest guns amidships rather than forward or aft. Once it was determined that ships could be maneuvered to bring a heavy concentration of broadside fire on a specific part of the enemy fleet, the line of battle became the tactic of choice for fleet engagements. The preferred maneuver was “crossing the T,” so that one’s broadsides raked the enemy ships from stem to stern while the enemy could respond with only a handful of guns mounted in the bows. The Dutch lost nineteen ships at the Gabbard, and the English blockaded the Dutch coast. Two months later, Tromp was killed at the battle of Scheveningen (or Texel, within sight of The Hague) but both fleets suffered heavily in what proved to be the last major engagement of the war.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 65