that hit Hawkins’s ships off Cuba in 1568, he was forced to turn back to shelter at San Juan de Ulua, where she received a severe mauling from the Spanish. This was the incident which provided Drake with the excuse to set out on his rampage of revenge and reprisal. If Jesus had been a more seaworthy vessel, perhaps, the course of pirate history would have been much altered. A similar ‘what if’ happened a few years later with another unseaworthy royal ship, Tyger.
Tyger had been built as a galleass in 1546, but converted to a ship in 1549. In 1584 she sailed as Grenville’s flagship in his voyage to Virginia to establish Ralegh’s pirate base at Roanoke. Here, in an attempt to pass through a gap in the Carolinas Outer Banks, ‘through the unskilfulness of the Master whose name was Fernando, the Admiral struck ground, and sunk.’ In fact she only grounded but, unlike Golden Hind, the effect was to split open her timbers, so that ‘the salt water came so abundantly into her, that the most part of his corn, salt, meat, rice, biscuit and other provisions that he should have left with them that remained behind him in that country was spoiled.’ Also lost was the seed for the crops, meaning that Ralph Lane and his 107 men would not be self-sufficient for their year-long sojourn on the shores of Virginia. This forced them to scrounge from a resentful, hostile, native population, whose subsistence economy could not support the strangers who were then reduced to grubbing roots and gathering shellfish. No wonder they abandoned their settlement when Drake offered them the opportunity so to do, just one year after they had landed so full of hope. Thus did poor ship-husbandry influence the early history of the English in America.13
Tyger’s grounding did her no permanent harm, for she was finally condemned in 1605, almost sixty years old! Sadly, she was built one year too late to feature in the wonderful, if inaccurate, roll of royal vessels, created by Anthony Anthony, Henry VIII’s armourer in 1545.
A year after Tyger returned to England, having made the fleet’s admiral, Richard Grenville, a fortune when he seized the laggardly unescorted treasure ship Santa Maria on the voyage home, Ralegh ordered from the yard at Deptford a flagship for his growing private pirate fleet, the great Ark Ralegh which, at 555 tons, would be one of the largest ships constructed in England to that date. Her keel length was 103ft, her beam 37ft and she had a draught of 16ft. A fully rigged, four-masted vessel, she needed a crew of 250 seamen and thirty-two gunners to sail and man her forty-two guns, distributed on two gun decks.
Ironically, but indicatively, Ark Ralegh was never deployed as the flagship of her eponymous owner’s pirate fleet, nor loaned for any of his pirateering voyages. She was too grand for the queen not to covet and before her maiden voyage, the more elderly maiden, Elizabeth, wheedled it out of Ralegh’s possession with the sweetest smile that ever twisted an arm and had her transferred into her own navy, in an arrangement with which Ralegh could only gallantly consent. Renamed Ark Royal, she became the first of a many an illustrious Royal Navy ship to bear that name, winning her first battle honours just two years later as Howard’s flagship in the fight against the Spanish Armada. The Lord Admiral was in no doubt as to the bargain Elizabeth had procured telling her ‘that her money was well given . . . for I think her the odd ship in the world for all conditions; and truly I think that there can be no great ship make me change and go out of her.’ The fact that the queen had not paid a single penny for her does not detract from Howard’s enthusiasm.
In 1596 Howard again flew his flag in Ark Royal when he led the raid on Cadiz, but she saw little action after that date. During the reign of James I she had both a name change, becoming Anne Royal, after his Danish queen, and a refit, overseen in 1608 by the famous shipwright Phineas Pett. But her days of glory were over. In 1625 she sailed again to Cadiz as the flagship of Lord Wimbledon on that ignominious failed expedition. After that she remained idle but seaworthy until she stove in her timbers with an unsecured anchor and sank in the Medway in 1636, only to be raised and almost immediately condemned, being broken up in 1638.
The queen’s ships that did sail under pirate command had limited success. In 1593 Elizabeth loaned Cumberland several vessels as part of a strong squadron despatched to ‘invade, and destroy the powers, forces, preparations and provisions of the King of Spain.’ Two of the royal ships, Golden Lion and Bonaventure, would have been a match for any Spaniard that they encountered. The former, a bulky 560 tons, had been built in 1582 and was fitted with four demi-cannon, eight culverin, fourteen demi-culverin, nine sakers, one minion and eight fowlers. Bonaventure, with an 80ft keel length, was 20ft shorter than Lion, but carried a similar armament. Both ships had a crew of about 250 men which represented a wage and victualling bill of £379 3s a month, a price that explains why so many vessels sailed poorly provisioned and why Cumberland preferred organising his own supplies. Whoever the supplier, the costs were never negligible and frequently not covered by the residual return once charges and expenses had been met (Appendix 5). Victualling proved not to be a problem on this voyage, for a serious illness led Cumberland to abandon the voyage and return home. Thus the queen’s ships missed an opportunity to prove their worth against a Spanish fleet and extract a vengeance for Revenge.
Cumberland, being a charmer, a champion and a close relative, benefited greatly from the loan of the queen’s ships. In 1591, two years after his horrendous return voyage in her 565-ton Victory which was recounted earlier, he sailed with a small squadron to patrol off the coast of Spain while Lord Thomas Howard and Grenville lay in wait for the flota off the Azores. Cumberland himself commanded the 600-ton queen’s ship, Garland, which had a keel length of 95ft, a beam of 33ft and a draught of 17ft. Her impressive armament included sixteen culverins, fourteen demi-culverins, four sakers, two fowlers and two port pieces. In company sailed Cumberland’s own Samson, Golden Noble commanded by Monson as rear admiral, Allagarta, and the pinnace Discovery. It was on this voyage that Monson was captured, escorting a group of prizes homeward, which were recaptured by the untaken ships in their convoy, with Cumberland unable, for lack of wind and the fact that Garland was ‘evil of sail’, to come to his vice admiral’s rescue. As a result Monson spent a year in the galleys and prison before organising his escape, an episode in his career for which he took a while to forgive Cumberland. On the positive side of this voyage, Cumberland dispatched Discovery westward to warn Howard of the departure of Admiral Alonso de Bazan’s powerful fleet sailing to bring him to battle. As a result, Howard managed to get his ships out of Flores Bay moments before the Spaniards arrived, leaving just Grenville in Revenge to stay behind for death and glory, having given a fine, but foolish, demonstration of English firepower.
a Another Spanish prisoner records fifteen pieces of artillery onboard.
b Similar suffering was endured by the crew of the Bristol pirate ship Delight whose crew wrote a petition outlining why they had behaved mutinously in the Straits in February 1589.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам
