OCEANIC COMMERCE

127 trade. The opportunity was great and the profits sometimes reached 400 per cent.1; for the discontent of the Portuguese under Spanish rule yielded an easy victory to Dutch organisation and persistence. In 1598 England and the United Provinces made a treaty of mutual support, which helped on Anglo-Dutch incursions into both the Indies; and in the sequel mercantile efforts reached a higher plane of organisation, as appeared in the English East India Company (1600) and the concentration of the Dutch on the joint-stock Universal East India Company (1602).

By this effective union of capital and maritime enterprise both Companies were able to build far larger and better armed ships, suitable for the long and dangerous voyage to the East. From the time of the Phoenicians the greatest maritime progress has been achieved by the peoples who persistently attempted the longest and most gainful voyages. As Mun wrote (chap. iv), "remote trades are most gainful to the Commonwealth". The East now became the most coveted goal; and the development of naval construction, first of merchantmen and then of protecting warships, has in the main corresponded to the vital needs of oriental trade. First, the Portuguese with their great carracks; then their conquerors, the Dutch, for a time led the way in great weatherly ships; while, later, the English forged ahead, gradually discarding the fore and aft castles, building ships of wider beam and deeper draught, the climax being reached in 1610 in the East Indiaman, Trade's Increase, of 1100 tons. The chief disadvantage in the eastern voyages was the high death rate, eight sailors dying out of ten.1

Thus, in the years 1590-1610 the Dutch and English passed from the pelagic to the oceanic phase—a change akin to that which replaced privateering by commerce, the mother of empire. As might be expected from their limited land base, small population and oligarchic town government, Dutch efforts were narrowly commercial; and Motley exaggerates when he hails in the Dutch "the first free nation to put a girdle of empire around the earth".5 Only in Great Britain were found the political and social conditions favouring the further development from what may be called the factory to the family stage; and, the beginnings of her Empire having been firmly laid in successful seamanship and national unity (consummated in 1603 by the union of the English and Scottish Crowns), the growth of the fabric was henceforth both rapid and sustained-a development far other than that of Spain and Portugal, whose portentous bulk soon bore the signs of premature decline.

Nevertheless, the personal and political fads of the early Stuarts

1 Fugger News Letters, pp. 259, 317;

? Monson's Tracts, IV, 180-2; Čamb. Mod. Hist. iv, 728-34.

• Anderson, Origins of Commerce, II, 241; Oppenheim, op. cit. pp. 185-7.

Cal. St. Pap. Venetian, XVII, no. 603.

5 Motley, J. L., The United Netherlands, chap. lii.

now enfeebled England and therefore the Navy. After the heroic figure of Elizabeth came the timid pedant, James; and after him, the conscientious bigot, Charles, both of them stumbling-blocks in the way of English expansion. At once James offended his subjects by declaring his desire for peace with Spain, and by calling in all privateers. Much, however, could be said for such a course.1 The war had burnt itself out; English trade suffered more by virtual exclusion from Spanish lands than it gained by privateering. Above all, the new age needed organisation, and organisation implies peace and the desire for peace. Yet, as usual, James spoilt a good case by his garrulity, which led Philip III to raise his terms. In vain did Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, roundly assure the Spanish ambassador that England had proved she had the longer reach, and all the world knew it. James ever compromised the English negotiators. Finally, by the Treaty of London, signed in August 1604, he secured freedom of trade with Spain and the Netherlands, the retention of Flushing and Brill ("the keys of England"), and the abolition of the 30 per cent. duty on English imports into Spain. Letters of marque and reprisals were forbidden on both sides.

The Spanish negotiators, however, succeeded in obfuscating the clause concerning trade with the Indies so that the ambassador in London forthwith denied that right. "What for no?""-said the King. "Because (I replied) the clause is read in that sense.' 'They make a great error who hold this view (said His Majesty), the meaning is quite clear'."3 Disputes and private hostilities at once began on this question. By way of retort James allowed his subjects to enlist in the Dutch service, and made little difficulty when a Dutch fleet chased Spanish reinforcements into Dover, taking or sinking most of their ships and blockading the survivors (1605). After Heemskerk's brilliant victory over a superior Spanish fleet in Gibraltar Bay (1607) Philip III opened negotiations with the Dutch States; and, as a sop to Spanish pride, the peace of 1609 was termed a truce for twelve years, during which time Philip promised not to hinder Dutch trade wherever carried on. As the Dutch Navy ever waxed from commerce and the Spanish Navy waned for lack of it, the truce spelt ruin for Spain and primacy for the Dutch. During forty years of struggle they had worn down the Spanish power, and now made bold bids for empire in the East and West Indies, in South America and at the mouth of the Hudson River. In truth, the years 1600-1650 may be termed the Dutch half-century.

The commercial system of the Dutch being no less exclusive than that of Spain, friction between England and Holland lay in the nature of things, all the more so because the British Navy now underwent

1 Article by J. D. Mackie in Scottish Hist. Rev. July 1926.

2 Cal. St. Pap. Venetian, 1603-7, no. 142. 3 Ibid. nos. 267, 511, and vide supra, p. 76. Ibid.nos. 397, 404, 426; Motley, J. L., op. cit. chap. xliv.

DECLINE OF NAVAL EFFICIENCY

129

a rapid decline. The Venetian ambassador, Molin, after leaving England in 1607 reported it as comprising only thirty-seven ships, many of them old and rotten, but capable of being reinforced by nearly 200 well-manned merchantmen. He adds:

If England remains long at peace and does not make up her mind to keep up a larger navy and to stop the sale of ships and guns, which is already going on, she will soon be reduced to a worse condition. For the King does not keep more than three vessels armed, and that not as they used to be, and private individuals have no need to keep theirs armed, for the Crown is at peace, privateering forbidden, the Indian trade half stopped; and people do not know what to do with their ships, and so take to selling them, and their crews take to other business.1

Technically, this was a time of improvement in dockyard construction, due mainly to Phineas Pett, formerly of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who, profiting by mathematical training and the best examples of foreign shipping, produced in 1610 a ship, the Prince Royal, of 1200 tons which was deemed the paragon of warships. His, too, was the design of the first English three-decker, the Sovereign of the Seas (1637), which did good service up to 1696 and forms a link with the eighteenth-century three-decker.2

But sea power depends on a united national spirit as well as on ships; and the time of the early Stuarts is therefore a time of decline, witness James's failure to put down piracy in home waters and his permission to the Dutch to chase and destroy pirates in Irish harbours. Very characteristic was his extension of the former claim to sovereignty of the Narrow Seas into one of possession together with its corollary, collection of fishery tolls from alien fishermen. This last he utterly failed to enforce on the Dutch. James's toadying to Spain in the matter of Raleigh's execution aroused disgust at home and contempt abroad. In 1616 he surrendered to the Dutch for a sum of money "the cautionary towns" Brill and Flushing.a

A leading cause of naval decline was the pluralist proclivities of the now senile Howard, Lord High Admiral, which opened the sluices of corruption at the dockyards and throughout the whole service. At last, in 1618, the scandals in high places, the rottenness of the ships, and the hardships of the seamen ("a ragged regiment of common rogues") led to a royal commission of enquiry, which disclosed a veritable sink of iniquity. Howard, now Earl of Nottingham, though guilty only of negligence, thereupon resigned. The Surveyor and Controller of the Navy were both discharged; and their duties were assigned to a Board of Commissioners. 5 James's favourite, the Marquis of Buckingham, was appointed Lord High Admiral in 1619, and infused some energy into the service. But the old defects of favouritism,

1 Cal. St. Pap. Venetian, 1603-7, no. 739. So too Oppenheim, pp. 186-9.

* Corbett, Successors of Drake, pp. 418-30; Autobiography of P. Pett (N.R.S.), pp. 163–218. * Vide infra, p. 200. 4 Edmundson, G., Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, chap. ii.

5

Hannay, D., Hist. of the Royal Navy, 1, 157-61.

'Life and Works of Sir H. Mainwaring (N.R.S.), vol. 1, chap. vii.

CHBE I

9

corruption in the dockyards and neglect of the seamen continued,1 the results being seen in the cowardly conduct of Mansell and his crews in the abortive attempt against the pirates of Algiers (1620).

Several pamphleteers lament the decline of English energy and prestige. Thus, Tobias Gentleman bursts out-"O slothful England, look on the plump Hollanders; behold their diligence in fishing and our own carelesse negligence". So too Mun bemoans that we "besot ourselves with pint and pot", while the Dutch have "taken up our wonted valour" and gain incredible wealth from fishing in the English seas. Let us develop our fisheries and our immensely profitable East India trade; for foreign trade is "the nursery of our mariners, the walls of the kingdom and the means of our treasure, the sinews of our wars, the terror of our enemies". Also in his Discourse of Trade to the East Indies he states that for that trade alone seven or eight ships yearly are built at Deptford and Blackwall, employing at least 2500 seamen-a great source of power. Monson, though a hater of the Dutch, contrasts their enterprise with our slackness, which leaves us with not ten merchantmen in the Thames fit to help in national defence. England's dependence on shipping, and therefore on the fisheries and on colonial and foreign trade, is already a commonplace. Vaughan states that fishing "multiplieth shipping and mariners, the principal props of this Kingdom";4 and Sir William Alexander rejoices that some fifty ships sail yearly to the New England fisheries.5 The resolve to strengthen the merchant service as a nursery for the Navy explains in part the early restriction of colonial trade to English vessels, and the attempt to tax Dutch fishermen in the English seas. The North American colonies were also valued chiefly as supplying timber and naval stores which would render us independent of the Baltic lands. The pre-eminence of the naval factor appears in King James's Instruction (XII) to the Commission of Enquiry (1622) into the causes of the decline of trade: "Above all other things seriously and carefully consider by what good means our Navy and the shipping of this Kingdom may be best maintained and enlarged, and mariners bred up and increased." The enquiry was to deal with the reservation to Britons of "the herring fishery upon the seas and coasts appertaining to our own realms"; the exclusion of foreign imports while our shipping wanted employment; the regulation of the trade in corn and flax with the Eastland countries; and the method whereby the East India trade, "which is specious in show, may really be made profit

1 Hollond, J., His First Discourse of the Navy (ed. J. R. Tanner, N.R.S.), pp. 4-7, 35-44, 79-81.

Gentleman, T., England's way to win Wealth (1614).

3 Monson's Tracts, I, 238, 431.

• Vaughan, W., The Golden Fleece (1626), p. 14.

Alexander, W., Encouragement to Colonies (1624), p. 31.

Anderson, Origins of Commerce, II, 295. So too Beer, G. L., Origins of the British Colonial System, chaps. iii, viii, ix; Cal. St. Pap. Dom. 1649-50, p. 317.

COLONISATION AND MARITIME ENTERPRISE 131

able to the public". The close connection of industries and economics with the welfare of the Navy and the safety of the nation is here expressed in typically practical fashion. Englishmen were feeling their way towards a commercial policy which would assure supremacy at

sea.

Thus, even when the Government declined in energy, the nation showed signs of spirit and vigour as appeared in the contests of our East Indiamen with the Portuguese. Further it was in these years that the important settlements at Plymouth (1620), St Christopher (1623), and Barbados (1624-5) took place. The coincidence of these developments with a time of decline of the Navy might be urged as proof that there is no connection between sea power and expansion. Such reasoning would be superficial. For, as will again appear, the influence of sea power is often gradual and indirect, not immediate and obvious. Sixteen years had elapsed since the cumulative efforts of the English Navy had compelled Spain at least to cloak her former monstrous claim of exclusive possession of the New World. In the interval English and Dutch seamen had cancelled that claim in the East and exposed its hollowness in the West. But only by long years of struggle had that result been made possible. It was the Elizabethan seamen who were the prime founders of these Jacobean settlements. Nor must the services of mathematicians, cartographers and shipwrights be overlooked. In 1594 John Davis published his work The Seaman's Secrets, containing practical hints for navigation. Mercator's Atlas, first published in Flanders in 1595, provided a good résumé of the work of geographers and explorers. In 1599 Edward Wright, of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, advanced the science of navigation by his work Certain Errors in Navigation detected and corrected, and in 1600 gave to the world a greatly improved atlas. Napier's logarithms (1614) were applied to navigation by Gunter in 1620; and, as Raleigh had noted, great improvements had latterly been made in shipping, notably in the addition of top-sails, top-gallant sails, studding-sails, and sprit-sails; also the striking of the top-mast, the weighing of anchor by the "capstone", and the lengthening of the cable ("the life of the ship in all extremities") greatly added to the safety of ships.1

Compared with this vital development the decline of English prestige in Europe and the East is a passing symptom. Dutch rivals might murder twelve Englishmen in Amboyna and expel the rest (1623); but their resulting monopoly of the spice trade was of slight significance by the side of the settlements in Virginia and New England. English sea power, however weak, could generally shelter these young communities; for, by great good fortune the time of ever growing discord between the Stuart dynasty and the nation,

1 Raleigh, Sir W., A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, etc., p. 16; but see Oppenheim, p. 127. See too Cal. St. Pap. Venetian, XIII, p. 41.