The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (83 page)

At first, sailing warships had no way to counter armed galleys. Mounting heavy guns high on the main deck made ships unstable and ineffective against low-slung galleys, and so long as ships were clinker-built, as was normal in northern Europe until the sixteenth century, it was impossible to cut watertight gun-ports in the hull. When sailing ships did start carrying heavy guns, they were mounted aft, as close to the waterline as possible, and aimed through gun-ports pierced in the flush planking of the transom stern. This was not an ideal platform for offensive operations, as tactics of the day demonstrate. Ships attacked first with their bow chasers, came up into the wind
to fire their lighter broadside guns, turned into the wind to bring the heavy stern guns to bear, and then fell off to fire the opposite broadside. The importance of stern-mounted guns is reflected in the fact that well into the seventeenth century paintings of warships generally featured the stern with its heavy guns (and lavish ornamentation) rather than a broadside profile. By the 1570s, English shipwrights began launching sailing galleys and
galleons, the latter characterized by carvel (flush) planking with high sterns and cutaway forecastles—“
crudely … the forepart of a galley with the afterpart of a ship”—which allowed heavy guns to be mounted forward. Only later did the heavy guns spread fore-and-aft to create the broadside battery standard between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

In terms of armament, the English had a pronounced advantage over other countries thanks to the availability of iron. While technically inferior, harder to cast, and heavier than bronze guns, cast-iron guns had the virtue of costing only a fifth as much, which led to their widespread adoption in the
Navy Royal (as it was called until 1707) and created a brisk export market. Among the most willing buyers were the Danes during the
Scandinavian Seven Years’ War (1563–70), the first to involve repeated battles between armed sailing war fleets. The Swedes appear to have relied more on state-owned, purpose-built warships but the greatest inequity between the fleets came from the Swedes’ access to high-quality, long-range bronze guns, while the Danes initially relied on wrought-iron guns before they began purchasing more advanced English cast-iron guns. No detailed accounts of the fleet engagements fought between 1563 and 1566 survive, but superior gunnery and greater maneuverability seem to have enabled the often outnumbered Swedes to keep the Danish-Lübecker fleet from forcing a boarding action until the
battle of Bornholm. Here, on July 7, 1565, the evenly matched fleets of about twenty-seven ships each fought a pitched battle at close range from which the Danish-Lübecker fleet withdrew after the loss of the flagship. The utility of shipboard gunnery was still uncertain, however. Ships’ guns usually fired
one shot per hour on average, and most guns of the day fired only twenty-five to thirty rounds in a
season
. Although ships’ guns could prevent the enemy from closing, they had not proven their worth as antiship weapons.

The English, Danes, and Swedes had demonstrated the value of rationalized approaches to naval administration and the destructive potential of modern armaments, but until the 1570s the epicenter of naval power remained firmly in the Mediterranean. In the course of barely a quarter century, however, the focus shifted dramatically to northwest Europe. The outlines of this
transformation can be traced through three naval campaigns (all involving Spain): the battle of Lepanto (1571), the
battle of São Miguel in the
Azores (1582), and the
Spanish Armada (1588).

In 1570, the
Ottomans besieged the port of Nicosia on Venetian-occupied
Cyprus. Desperate for allies, Venice secured help from
Pius V, who set aside the
Papal States’ traditional rivalry with the Most Serene Republic, and from Spain’s Philip II, who was indifferent to Venetian troubles but eager to reverse the Ottomans’ capture of
Tunis, Tripoli, and Djerba (1551–60). Prospects for joint action were dim, but Venice, Spain, and the Papal States hammered out a
Treaty of Alliance in May 1571.
Don Juan of Austria, Philip II’s half brother, was designated commander-in-chief over
Sebastiano Venier, Venice’s general-at-sea, and
Marcantonio Colonna, the
pope’s commander-in-chief. On October 7, the fleets met off the
Curzolari Islands, forty miles west of Lepanto (Naupaktos, Greece), at the mouth of the
Gulf of Corinth. To ensure that the Christian fleet would fight as one, ships of all flags were mixed through the different squadrons, with Don Juan, Venier, and Colonna sailing side-by-side in the center squadron of a combined fleet of 207 galleys and 6
galleasses. Commanded by Müezzinzâde
Ali Pasha, with
Uluç Ali Pasha and
S¸uluç Mehmed Pasha, the Ottomans had 213 galleys and 33 galiots.

Despite the Ottomans’ numerical superiority in ships, their galleys tended to be more lightly built, and with nothing comparable to the heavy firepower of the six Venetian galleasses, they were probably outgunned by a ratio of two to one. The allies also had better protection in the form of pavisades, screens of shields that protected the crews against Turkish arrows and small arms, and they carried a greater number of harquebuses, which though cumbersome were more effective at close range than arrows. The power of the galleasses told early, and they disrupted the Turkish line as it passed and veered toward the shore. By early afternoon Ali Pasha was dead, the Turkish standard captured, and the Turkish fleet in disarray. The Ottomans lost 210 ships, including 117 galleys and 13 galiots captured, and about thirty thousand casualties, three times that of the allies. The celebrated victory demonstrated to Christian Europe that the Turks were not invincible, but in the short run the Ottomans proved more resilient than the coalition. As one official told the Venetians, “
You have shaved our beard, but it will soon grow again; but we have severed your arm, and you will never find another.” Uluç Ali oversaw the construction of a new fleet the next year, but the Venetians built hardly any new galleys, and while Venetian merchants were allowed to resume their trade to Alexandria, the Ottomans completed their capture of Cyprus in 1573.

Lepanto proved the last major Ottoman-Habsburg confrontation at sea. The Christian alliance did not long survive the battle, and the Ottomans concluded truces with Venice in 1573 and the
Habsburgs four years later. This
freed the two imperial powers to concentrate on other crises: for the Ottomans, Safavid Persia; for the Spanish Habsburgs, the
Dutch Revolt and the Portuguese succession. Spain’s lack of a standing Atlantic fleet was put to the test in 1580, when Portugal’s
King Sebastian died without an heir and Philip II claimed his throne. The Azores refused to accept Philip as king and sided with the pretender, Dom Antonio, who was also supported by European rulers who felt threatened by the expansionist Habsburg Empire and eyed the Azores as a strategic prize from which they could harry Spain’s transatlantic treasure fleets. In 1582, the French decided to support Dom Antonio’s aspirations with an expedition of about sixty ships led by
Philippe Strozzi. A Spanish fleet under the
Marquis of Santa Cruz brought the French to
battle off the island of São Miguel. Descriptions of the battle suggest that it opened with ships firing their
broadside guns before closing for a boarding action. Though outnumbered two to one, Santa Cruz smashed Strozzi’s force and with it the Azorean threat to Spanish rule in Portugal.

Strozzi’s force included a contingent of English ships, volunteers with no official sanction from Elizabeth I, one of whose diplomatic preoccupations was dealing with Philip II, her former brother-in-law and suitor. While inclined to support her fellow Protestants in the Netherlands—which took two-thirds of English wool exports—Elizabeth was at pains to check the more belligerent of her Protestant subjects who sought to despoil the despised Catholic monarch. England’s navy was not yet an effective instrument of state policy and as in Spain royal ships comprised only a fraction of what might be needed in wartime. At the same time, the line between personal prerogative and affairs of state was poorly defined, and Elizabeth had no compunction about lending her ships for private commercial ventures by which she could both profit and covertly challenge her enemies.

Elizabeth’s greatest provocation came in 1585 when she secretly approved a mission by
Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. The voyage had several aims: to reconnoiter the Pacific coast of Spanish America and, if it could be found, return via a
Northwest Passage; to establish relations with people not yet subject to European princes; and to plunder Spanish shipping. In December 1577, Drake sailed with five ships and 180 men. They captured half a dozen Spanish ships and a Portuguese
pilot near the
Cape Verde Islands before pressing on to South America. Drake executed a mutineer at
Puerto San Julian, the same place Magellan had executed a mutineer on his circumnavigation in 1520, and he renamed his ship the
Golden Hind.
Down to three vessels, Drake transited the
Strait of Magellan and the English flag first flew in the Pacific on September 6, 1578. A severe storm sank one ship, while another, under
John Winter, returned to England. Driven south, Drake established that the Strait of Magellan did not separate South America from a southern
continent,
Terra Australis, as previously believed, but that its southern shore was made up of islands to the south of which lay open ocean, now known as the Drake Passage.

Working their way north, the English looted
Valparaíso, Arica, and
Callao, and on March 1, 1579, captured
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción
off
Colombia with a cargo that reportedly included eighty pounds of gold and twenty-six tons of silver. Drake followed the west coast of North America perhaps as far as the
Strait of Juan de Fuca before abandoning his search for the Northwest Passage. After anchoring in a “
convenient and fit harbor” generally believed to be Drake’s Bay, about twenty-five miles north of
San Francisco Bay, he named the coast
Nova Albion and claimed it for England. After a twelve-week passage to the Philippines, the English refit the
Golden Hind
and then purchased spices in the
Spice Islands. Their last stop in Asia was on Java, from where they embarked on a nonstop passage of nearly ten thousand miles—remarkable for its lack of incident—before anchoring off Sierra Leone. The first English circumnavigation of the globe ended on September 26, 1580. After lying low while the consequences of his voyage were considered at
London, Drake was knighted by Elizabeth aboard the
Golden Hind
. She also “
ordered the ship itself to be brought ashore and placed in her arsenal near Greenwich as a curiosity,” one of the earliest museum ships on record.

The diplomatic contortions over Drake’s expedition reveal something of the complexities of sixteenth-century diplomacy. England and Spain were not at war, but the Spanish considered the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific coast of South America Spanish territory to which foreigners could not sail without permission. Elizabeth could have issued a
letter of marque, though not without risking war with Philip. At the same time, Drake was not a common criminal or pirate seizing property indiscriminately, and he had Elizabeth’s tacit support. News of Drake’s exploits inflamed Spanish opinion and elicited a variety of reactions in England. Even before Drake’s return, Portuguese protests forced
John Winter to surrender his share of the spoils—goods, in the words of the lord admiral (and one of Drake’s chief investors), “
piratically taken on the seas by Francis Drake and his accomplices.” Elizabeth’s eventual embrace of Drake was due largely to the phenomenal success of the voyage. The accounting is murky, but £264,000 (equal to about half the English crown’s annual revenues) was officially deposited in the Tower of London; Drake’s crew divided £14,000; and Drake himself was allowed to keep £10,000. Yet some Iberian merchants claimed the value of
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción
’s cargo alone to be £330,000, and a published estimate of 1581 put the total value of Drake’s booty at £600,000, twice the amount officially accounted for.

Tensions between England and Spain were further strained by Elizabeth’s
execution of her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and by her increasingly open support of the
Dutch Revolt. In 1585, Philip began formulating plans for an invasion of England using troops gathered under the
duke of Parma in the
Spanish Netherlands supported by a powerful fleet from Spain. To accomplish this, Philip authorized a force of twenty-eight thousand crew and soldiers and 130 ships, 27 of which belonged to the crown: 19
galleons of the Castilian and Portuguese squadrons, 4 Neapolitan
galleasses, and 4 Portuguese galleys. The balance was a mix of armed merchantmen and unarmed storeships requisitioned or leased from their owners. Ranged against
this formidable assemblage, the English had nearly 200 ships, 34 belonging to the crown, 105 armed merchantmen, and victuallers and coasters, with a combined complement of just under sixteen thousand men.

When the Armada finally sailed in June 1588, it was under the reluctant
duke of Medina Sidonia, who had assumed command following the death of Santa Cruz, hero of São Miguel. The loss of Santa Cruz was regrettable, but it only compounded the deficiencies of the fleet’s inadequate administration, corrupt provisioning, and poor strategic planning by the autocratic Philip, who had no naval experience. The ships sailed from La Coruña on July 22 and a week later were off Plymouth. The Spanish knew that their only hope of beating the English was in boarding actions, which they could not force.