when he states that over-shooting ‘often happeneth to those that make the land in foggy weather, and use no good diligence by sound, by lying off the land, and other circumstances to search the truth, and is the cause of the loss of many a ship, and the sweet lives of multitudes of men’, to which he adds a few lines later the sound advice that, ‘I found by experience that one of the principal parts required in a mariner that frequenteth our coasts of England, is to cast his tides, and to know how they set from point to point, with the difference of those in the channel from those of the shore.’
No sooner safe, or so he thought, in Plymouth than fog gave way to gale. Hawkins, who was ashore at the time, found himself unable to regain his ship because of the storm and could only pray and watch as he noticed the mainmast of Dainty ‘driving by’, which must have been a startling experience. Luckily, that loss lightened the vessel and kept her off the rocks. Not so lucky was Hawkins’s pinnace, Fancy, which was beaten upon the rocks and had to be salvaged over the next few days.
The woes of Hawkins’s consort continued, for when they finally got underway from Plymouth, she signalled frantically to Hawkins that they had sprung a great leak and needed to return to the Sound. On examination it was found that the caulkers had left a great seam uncaulked, just running pitch along its length which the sea soon removed, allowing a powerful ingress. As so often in Hawkins’s yarn, he no sooner suffered a setback than he quotes a similar example so as to gain the satisfaction of a woe shared. On this occasion it was Ark Ralegh, which on her maiden voyage was found to be leaking because a trenail hole had not had a trenail driven home. This embarrassing departure made Hawkins a keen caulker, and when the planks of his ship shrank in the tropical sun, he turned out his whole crew to recaulk all the area that they could reach, both inboard and outboard.
Such good husbandry caused another near fatal accident through fire. One day, the ship’s carpenter, supported by the master and against Hawkins’s better judgement, heated some caulking pitch in a pot on the galley fire. Unwatched, it bubbled up, spilled over and ignited. The carpenter fled the flames. Another, braver, man put on a double pair of gloves and grabbed the pitch pot, but was forced to drop it, overturning its contents into the fire, which now raged fiercely. Hawkins saved the ship by commanding his men to tie lines around their watch-gowns (garments he had provided them with to keep them warm at night) and to throw the coats overboard until they were soaked. A succession of soaking gowns dampened the blaze, surely a unique way to douse a fire at sea. True to form Hawkins then related that:
With drinking of tobacco [ie, smoking] it is said that the Roebuck was burned at Dartmouth.
The Primrose of London was fired with a candle at Tilbury and nothing saved but her keel.
The Jesus of Lubeck had her gun-room set on fire with a match, and had been burned without redemption, if that my father, Sir John Hawkins, then general in her, had not commanded her sloppers [scuppers] to be stopped and the men to come to the pumps, whereof she had two, and plying them in a moment, had three or four inches of water on deck . . . which they threw upon the fire.
Along with fire, Dainty’s crew were also subject to another of the seamen’s fears – grounding. One day, just as he was about to conduct morning prayers, Hawkins noticed a change in the colour of the sea, which he thought might indicate that they were nearing shoals. Being assured by his master, officers and his own observations that they could not be nearer than two hundred miles from land, Hawkins continued with the service. But his suspicions were not driven away by prayer and he ordered soundings to be taken, which showed them to be in fourteen fathoms of water. Lookouts were quickly sent aloft and continuous soundings taken and, in a short while, they found themselves just five leagues off the low-lying coast of Africa. The sudden arrival of shallow water was a common experience, which most mariners acknowledged was often due to them having no sure way to measure longitude. Hawkins, while acknowledging this defect in navigation, blamed the, fallacious, presence of strong but variable ocean currents, which meant that some ‘coming from the Indies and looking for the Azores have sight of Spain and some having looked out for Spain have discovered the Azores.’ The suspected presence of this fickle current was also commented on during Cumberland’s return from Puerto Rico when the narrative relates that:
though the winde was not worthy to be called so, nor scarce by the name of a breath, and besides so narrow, that we stood upon a bowling, yet we were found in that last passed artificiall day, to have run above fiftie leagues at the least.9
Reading the accounts, and the fact that no such current exists, indicates that the problem was caused by faulty positional fixing, which is unsurprising given the inchoate state of knowledge and instrumentation available for celestial navigation. Whatever the cause, the potential hazard of such errors was best handled by the keeping of a good lookout which Hawkins, being Hawkins, acknowledged, but did not enforce.
The cause of another near grounding is shocking, for had it been been common practice it would have meant many a good ship would have found herself cast up upon the coast. Tracking along the coast of Brazil one night, content that a steady wind would keep the ship on track, both Hawkins and his master decided to turn in for the night, leaving one of the master’s mates at the helm. This man was also overcome by drowsiness and allowed the ship to track more westerly towards the shore. By one of those inexplicable moments of luck, to which many a seaman will vouch, the writer included, the master woke with a start, realised all was not well, went on deck, saw white water to starboard, and ordered the helm put hard over. When soundings were taken it was discovered that the ship was in just over three fathoms of water and had been heading directly for the shoals.
In his commentary Hawkins observed that they ordered such things better in Spain and Portugal, where a seat was provided by the compass in which sat, throughout the voyage, the master or one of his mates, in the role, as we would refer to it today, of officer of the watch. Sat here, he would not only keep a check that the ordered course was being steered, but make sure that the helmsman was ‘continually excited’ to keep him alert. Whether Hawkins himself adopted this precaution he does not say, but one excellent practice he did follow was to make sure every opportunity to reprovision with fresh food and water was taken. Additionally, like Drake, if a stopover was of any length, he had the ship’s company exercise. He had, without realising it, solved the problem of scurvy which so ravaged the crews on most long voyages.
The inevitable grounding took place in the Straits of Magellan, while Dainty was being conned by some who thought they knew the waters around Tobias Cove. They did not, and steered the ship onto a rock shortly after a mighty wind blew itself out, giving her a calmer collision than might have been the case. Worryingly, it was found that she was trapped on a pinnacle amidships, so that the weight of bilge-water, both forward and aft, was in danger of weighing her down and breaking her back. Despite trying to wind her off, they had to wait until the next high tide to float clear. Months later, when she was grounded near Panama, they saw that ‘a great part of her sheathing was beaten off on both sides in her bilges, and some four foot long and foot square of her false stem, adjoining the keel, rested across, like unto a hog yoke, which hindered her sailing very much.’
Another threat to ships on lengthy voyages through the tropics was an attack on their timbers by worm, Teredo navalis, a pest not present in colder northern waters, but a ship destroyer in warmer climes. The remedy was to provide a sacrificial sheathing, such as Nuña da Silva noted was fitted to Golden Hind. Indeed, the provision of such sheathing on certain ships was interpreted by spies as an indication that the English were planning voyages of plunder. Hawkins, as ever, provided his expert view, ‘for the ignorant’, on the dangers of worm which ‘enter in no bigger than a Spanish needle, and by little and little their holes become ordinarily greater than a man’s finger.’ Noting that the Iberians used lead for their sheathing, he dismissed this as too costly, too heavy and too frail. He also dismissed simple double-planking as too heavy and only suitable as a delaying factor as regarded penetration. A method which he did consider efficacious was to burn the outer
