The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (82 page)

Hemmed in on the west by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and
Poland, and to the south by Cossacks and the khanate of
Crimea,
Muscovy turned to the east. Ivan the Terrible, who assumed the title “Ruler of all Russia,” defeated the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates to gain access to the lower Volga and Caspian. Ivan also oversaw Russia’s advance across the Ural Mountains into Siberia, an effort that would push the empire’s eastern border to the Pacific by the 1630s. This expansion was initiated by a renegade Cossack named
Yermak who, “
being famed for attacking ships on the
Caspian sea and on the
Volga together with many free warriors, even plundering the royal treasure,” invaded the Sibir khanate
via river and portage from the Volga to the Irtysh and ultimately the Ob River between 1579 and 1584. Yermak’s men used flat-bottomed
riverboats called
doshchaniks,
powered by a single
square sail and up to twenty oars. These had a capacity of 35 to 150 tons and a maximum length of about thirty-eight meters. The double-ended
strug
measured between six and eighteen meters long.

Progress across Siberia continued at a brisk pace as merchants searched for furs, and tsars issued charters for rights to territories from which, as a deed of 1558 puts it, “
no kind of dues have come … to my [Ivan’s] royal treasury, and this land has not been given to anyone and has not been entered in anyone’s name in registers, deeds of sale or legal documents.” This was nothing more than a
Russian rendering of the doctrine later known as
terra nullius,
literally “no one’s land,” the conceit being that land not in productive use—that is, untaxed—did not belong to its inhabitants, and that nation-states were free to take title and impose their laws on its people.
Walter Raleigh invoked the same imagery in giving the name Virginia (which also honored Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen) to the undefined territory of North America to which he sent an expedition in 1584. He was more explicit still in his promotion of the settlement of
Guiana, which he described as “
a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance.” This constituted a more sophisticated rationale for colonization than the simple claim of discovery and symbolic taking of possession of land, but it only became a matter of diplomatic importance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the
Russians, Spanish, English, and Americans
staked competing claims in the
Nootka Sound area of North America.

Western Europeans were able to consolidate and build on the pioneering accomplishments of Columbus, Gama, and others of their generation thanks to advances in naval organization, shipbuilding, and gunnery. But the transformation was slow and uneven. Until well into the 1500s, and later still in some countries, the primary purpose of maritime conflict was not to advance a nationalist agenda. Most violence at sea was essentially commercial, carried out by private individuals to further their own interests, and even the Venetian convoy system was organized with a view to protecting merchants against pirates as much as for protection against hostile actions by other states. Few
people expected to conduct a voyage of any length without having to defend themselves against an aggressor. As one historian has put it, “
For those who used the sea lines of communication in order to explore economic opportunities, efficient use of violence was one of several entrepreneurial skills which were necessary for profit.”

Most rulers lacked the wherewithal to build or maintain standing navies. When monarchs ordered fleets to sea, they were generally made up of vessels and crews acquired on a temporary basis by ship musters, requisitioning, or chartering to supplement small warship squadrons built and maintained for the purpose. A hallmark of naval affairs in the sixteenth century was the development of state navies under central control and a gradual shift from private, commercial warfare to public, political warfare that presupposes conflict between two or more states with the material support of their respective citizens. States came to
monopolize the use of violence at sea in what was to some degree a mutually reinforcing system: as states generated the revenues to build and manage standing fleets and the apparatus for efficient revenue collection, they increased their capacity to protect their citizens’ trade and to channel commerce in ways beneficial to themselves.

At its most basic, naval administration is concerned with military operations and logistics—acquiring, repairing, and provisioning ships and crews—and sound finances and physical infrastructure are essential to the development of a permanent navy. (In this period and for several more centuries, prize courts for the adjudication of ships and cargos lawfully captured and the distribution of prize money raised from their sale were also integral to naval administration.) The most sophisticated European fleets of the time were those of the Venetians, the organization of which was substantially the same as in previous centuries, and the
Ottomans, whose navy reached its peak during the reign of
Suleiman the Magnificent. In the 1550s, there were more than 120 double slipways at the Imperial Arsenal in Pera on the
Golden Horn, another thirty at
Gallipoli, and a shipyard at
Sinop on the Black Sea. Subsidiary fleets were stationed in the Aegean at Kavala,
Lesbos, and
Rhodes and at Alexandria and Suez in Egypt, while a smaller squadron at
Mocha guarded the entrance to the Red Sea. There were also river squadrons on the Danube and Sava in the
Balkans. Independent of this structure was the
corsairing fleet at
Algiers, which was not under obligation to fight for the Ottomans but which produced a number of the Ottomans’ best known officers, starting with
Hayreddin “Barbarossa,” a native of Lesbos who with his older brother ruled
Tunis and Algiers.

Shipyard workers were grouped into various occupational corps: carpenters, oar makers, caulkers, ironsmiths, pulley makers, and so on. Galleys, which
comprised the bulk of the fleet until the seventeenth century, were for the most part manned by crews levied in the provinces and who were, in the view of a Venetian diplomat at
Istanbul, “
very well treated and paid.” Although captives tended to form a high proportion of the crews in corsair fleets, including the Algerines and the Christian Knights of
Malta, galley
slaves and convicts comprised a smaller percentage of Ottoman than of Christian crews. In 1562, a Venetian official estimated that only thirty Ottoman galleys had any slaves in their crews. Nine years later, the year of the
battle of Lepanto, convicts comprised 47 percent and slaves 10 percent of the crews of thirty Neapolitan galleys, and in 1584 convicts comprised 60 percent and slaves nearly 20 percent. One reason for the reliance on unfree crews was the adoption of
a new style of rowing called
a scaloccio
. Instead of having one man per oar with three to five oars per bench in the
alla sensile
manner,
a scaloccio
put three to five rowers on each oar. A primary benefit of this arrangement was that skill counted for less than brute strength, and it was possible to have only one or two experienced rowers per oar, the others being employed solely for their muscle. A further benefit of relying on convicts was that their maintenance cost half that of free sailors.

The only two western
European states with standing navies were Portugal and England, and only Portuguese ships were deployed beyond European waters. Little is known of the administrative structure of the fleet, but the Portuguese were able to operate throughout the eastern hemisphere thanks to their
access to bases of operation from Brazil to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Macau, some three hundred in all at one time or another, including Melaka, Hormuz,
Mozambique Island, and especially Goa, and, in Brazil, Bahia. The latter two developed renowned shipyards whose vessels were fully the equal of those built in Portugal. Of course ships were fundamental to success, and Portuguese vessels tended to be bigger and more heavily armed than their contemporaries. As important, Portuguese shipwrights tailored the design of their ships to the work for which they were intended.

The most important
Portuguese ship types for the
Carreira da India
(the India run) were the merchant
nau
or
carrack, the
galleon, and the fleet
caravel (
caravela de armada
). The last was an enlarged version of the
caravela redonda
used in the Portuguese exploration of
Africa and Columbus’s transatlantic voyages. Of between 150 and 180 tons with two covered decks, fleet caravels were too small to carry cargo on long voyages, but they were well suited for service as escorts for the Indies voyage or for coast guard functions. Generally four-masted, they were square-rigged on the foremast and lateen-rigged on the other three and set a square spritsail forward. Beamier than its predecessors, to make it a steadier gun platform, the fleet caravel is regarded as
“the
first ocean-going sailing ship developed exclusively for war at sea by any European navy.” (Although some Venetian shipwrights were committing design concepts to paper by the fifteenth century, the
first printed shipbuilding manual did not appear until 1587—published in
Mexico City of all places—by which time the caravel was well past its heyday.) More than twice as big as fleet caravels, galleons developed around the middle of the century. The word “galleon” was applied to a variety of broadly similar vessels found from Venice to the Netherlands, but the Portuguese galleon was designed chiefly for naval duties. They were generally longer but narrower than
naus
and had lower forecastles, and they carried four masts with square sails on the fore and main and lateens on the mizzen and bonaventure mizzen, all of which made them faster and more maneuverable than
naus
.

In northern Europe, the first country to attempt the creation of a state navy was England. Although Henry VII is notable for ordering the construction of a dry dock at
Portsmouth, his successor, Henry VIII, was the first king in nearly a century to promote English naval ambition. Early on he ordered construction of the
Mary Rose
—launched in 1510, accidentally sunk in battle against the French in 1545, and raised from the seabed in 1982—and the monumental
Henri Grace à Dieu
of 1514. With its echoes of competition between the Hellenistic kings of antiquity, this early-sixteenth-century
trend toward gigantism—shared by
Denmark, France, and under James IV,
Scotland—quickly gave way to smaller, more compact galleons with better sailing qualities, stouter construction, and greater operational versatility. Yet the stability of the
English naval establishment had its roots not in the ships per se, but in setting up facilities for naval stores and ship maintenance and the infrastructure to oversee them. The clerk of the king’s ships was an ancient office supported by the clerk controller and the keeper of the storehouses, most of which were on the Thames. Henry enlarged the naval bureaucracy in the 1540s with the appointment of a lieutenant of the admiralty, treasurer, surveyor and rigger of ships, and master of the naval ordnance, and an administrative and advisory body collectively known as the
Navy Board. In 1557, the navy was given a fixed budget and the following year, when Elizabeth came to the throne, “the Queen’s Majesty’s Navy” was found to have twenty-three serviceable ships maintained in the
Medway, which enters the Thames estuary below Chatham.

Denmark followed England in attempting the creation of a state navy, thanks to
Hans of Denmark’s determination to maintain Sweden as part of the
Kalmar Union and to counter the commercial and military pretensions of the Hanse cities. Around the turn of the century Hans began to develop a navy of heavily armed ships paid for from the
Sound tolls levied on ships passing
through the
Øresund. These were not duties so much as protection money, justified on the grounds that the Danes provided security in the
Skagerrak,
Kattegat, and Baltic, over which they claimed dominion. This was particularly resented by the Hanse merchants, who were likewise troubled by the
favor shown the Dutch. The Baltic fault lines were confirmed in 1522 when the future
Gustav I Vasa jump-started the
formation of a Swedish navy by purchasing about a dozen armed merchant ships from the Hanse cities of
Lübeck and Stralsund. Five years later, Gustav took the bold step of dissolving the monasteries (a year before his Danish counterpart did so, and nearly a decade before England’s Henry VIII) and used the proceeds to build Sweden’s first permanent fleet, the flagship being the
Stora Kravelen
of 1,700 tons.

The expanded use of
ships’ guns was as important to the naval revolution of the sixteenth century as improved administration. Rudimentary cannon were developed in the thirteenth century but were not practically employed at sea until the 1470s, when the Venetians began mounting large centerline guns in their galleys, which had long been overshadowed, literally, by the high
freeboard of
carracks and
cogs. Mounting a single large gun in the bow, galleys became the offensive naval weapon par excellence. The largest class, the
galleass, was a Venetian invention based on the three-masted
great galley, whose large hull made an
excellent gun platform and which the Venetians fitted with the heaviest guns they could. An accounting of four Neapolitan
galleasses that sailed with the
Spanish Armada is probably typical: each carried five cannon (which fired stone or metal shot weighing about twenty-five kilograms) and forty-five smaller guns designed to fire shot ranging in weight from twelve kilograms down to antipersonnel grapeshot. In all, this was enough guns to arm five ordinary galleys. Upward of fifty meters long, these galleasses were powered by oars and sails. With twenty-one to thirty oars per side and three to seven rowers per oar, galleasses were too expensive to supersede the ordinary galley as the standard warship. Somewhat smaller were the galiot (sixteen to twenty oars per side) and the
bergantin (as few as eight oars per side), both of which were favored by Mediterranean
corsairs.