The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (90 page)

A warship of sixty guns and above was considered fit to lie in the battle line and referred to simply as a line-of-battle ship (later
battleship) or
ship of the line. First-rates had three full gun decks, but the backbone of the battle
fleet was the two-decker of sixty to ninety guns. In the age of sail, the standard ship’s gun fired an iron ball. The largest caliber was nearly seven inches and weighed forty-two pounds. A first-rate ship like Lord Nelson’s HMS
Victory,
launched in 1765, carried thirty 32-pounders, twenty-eight 24-pounders, forty-four 12-pounders, and two carronades. Developed at the
Carron iron works in Scotland in the 1770s and known as ship smashers or devil guns, carronades fired sixty-eight-pound shot at a range of no more than 375 meters, a quarter that of ordinary guns. They were designed specifically to cause as much damage as possible to the hull and crew, who were killed or severely wounded by the massive splinters created on impact. (
Sepsis from resulting infections was a leading cause of death.) Gunners also devised a variety of specialty ammunition designed to destroy masts and rigging (chain shot) and
sails (bar shot). Antipersonnel ordnance included grapeshot, canister (musket balls packed in a cylindrical canister), and langrage (canisters filled with metal scraps). The biggest change, however, was that ships’
guns were fired much more frequently. English ships normally carried forty rounds per gun during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, and in the eighteenth century French gunners were firing five or six rounds per hour and British crews could attain much higher rates of fire for short periods.

Tactics remained relatively unchanged after the seventeenth century, but strategy became ever more complex, involving not just fleet actions but convoy protection and extended
blockades. Frigates (fifth- or sixth-rates in the English system) cruised against enemy shipping, carried dispatches and diplomatic missions, scouted, and performed other assignments, while smaller types were used for various specialized activities such as bomb-ketches designed for shore bombardment. Taking a theoretical approach to the problem of naval warfare, Colbert established schools of gunnery and navigation. The English adopted the more empirical practice of issuing
Fighting Instructions
that built upon the experience of actual battle and transmitted lessons learned to be used in future actions. On balance, the English approach produced better results as would become abundantly clear in the eighteenth century.

Whatever their religious, commercial, or political differences, the leading powers of Atlantic Europe shared at the highest levels a commitment to maritime commerce. Because of this, they all wrestled with the question of whether to embrace the doctrine of the free sea, and to what degree. By the end of the seventeenth century, the proliferation of overseas settlements and commercial enclaves in the Americas and Asia forced European powers to recognize that the sea was less a private fiefdom than a commons held by all. The cases of
Jacob Van Heemskerck and
Henry Avery at either end of the century illustrate the shift. In taking the
Santa Catarina,
Van Heemskerck operated with the sanction of the government-sponsored VOC. Less than a century later, pirates of Avery’s ilk were falling victim to a collective quest for a more stable and secure trade. In the 1500s, he might have ranked among the Elizabethan sea dogs who opened the way for English ships and trade in hostile seas. But Avery was born after his time, and his rogue behavior threatened profits that his countrymen (and others) nurtured with diplomacy and political tact rather than indiscriminate force. Violence at sea was not a thing of the past: naval warfare in the eighteenth century would encircle the globe. Yet the conflicts to come were affairs of state administered by ever more centralized bureaucracies in the furtherance of more explicitly national interests.

The eighteenth century is the last in which sail-powered ships predominated worldwide. Sailing warships continued to be built well into the nineteenth century, and merchant ships into the twentieth, but it was in the eighteenth century that the full potential of the sailing ship was unleashed and the world first made whole. The 1700s also saw an unprecedented rise in the number of people who put to sea—merchant crews, naval sailors, voluntary and involuntary migrants, and explorers—as a result of European initiative. Large-scale migration by both free people and slaves began in the sixteenth century, and more people migrated in the nineteenth; but the 1700s are significant because this is when the commercial acumen that had been perfected in the carriage of cargo was adapted to that of people, who proved ill-suited to such treatment.

Though not necessarily the most arduous, the longest voyages were those of exploration, whether driven by merchants seeking new markets and sources of raw materials or governments intent on annexing new lands. Mariners of all stripes had an abiding interest in improvements to navigation, from greater accuracy on charts to easier and more reliable methods for determining course and position. These entailed a more nuanced understanding of the physical sciences and more precise instruments for measuring angular distance,
compass direction, and time, and explorers were in the forefront of testing and refining these. The age was also characterized by a new interest in zoology, botany, and ethnography. The results of late-eighteenth-century explorations were widely disseminated and resulted in unprecedented efforts at cross-cultural comparisons articulated in an ever-expanding body of written and visual representation that transformed people’s awareness of the physical world and each other.

At the start of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the Royal Navy’s Commodore
George Anson sailed from England with six ships. He was charged with harassing
Spanish shipping on the Pacific coast of the Americas and capturing the
Manila galleon,
an apparently straightforward mission that took four torturous years. The story of the planning and execution of this voyage is one of almost unrelieved misery and reveals many of the logistical challenges faced by naval administrators in the half century after European fleets began oceanic operations. These sufferings were not unique to naval crews, however, and although civilians and slaves ordinarily spent less time at sea, the ships that carried them were subject to less official oversight and many endured conditions worse than those faced by Anson’s crews.

Soon after his assignment, Anson discovered that he was short three hundred sailors. He collected 170, thirty-two of them from the naval hospital at Chatham. He was also assigned five hundred invalid “
soldiers, who from their age, wounds, or other infirmities, are incapable of service in marching regiments,” and more than half of whom deserted before embarkation. The crews began to suffer from
scurvy and other ailments after a withering autumn rounding of Cape Horn in 1741. The lieutenant of Anson’s flagship, the
Centurion,
reported that he could “
muster no more than two Quarter-masters, and six Fore-mast men capable of working; so that without assistance of the officers, servants and the boys, it might have proved impossible for us to have reached [Juan Fernández] Island, after we had got sight of it.” They were there joined by three other ships, one of which had “already thrown over-board two thirds of their complement.” The English burned Paita, Peru, before sailing north to cruise off Acapulco. After repairs on the coast, the
Centurion
and
Gloucester
(which was later scuttled) sailed for
Macau. While cruising off the
Philippines seven months later, Anson captured the Manila galleon
Nuestra Señora de la Covadonga
with a cargo worth about £250,000.
Despite the loss of three ships (two others had turned back from South America) and more than thirteen hundred crew—just four of them to enemy action—Anson’s capture of the Manila galleon outshone any other achievement of the war. Under the prize system of the day, members of the ship’s company were
entitled to a share, proportionate to one’s rank, of the value of captured enemy ships. As head of the expedition and captain of the
Centurion
, Anson made about £91,000, while a surviving seaman’s share was worth £300—the equivalent of about twenty years’ pay. Spectacular though the results were for these men, the four-year voyage did nothing to alter the outcome of the war, and the appalling cost in
men and matériel underlined the enormous difficulties of conducting long-range naval operations.

As ordeals like the Anson voyage show, European navies would never have been able to operate effectively beyond home waters if they did not attend to their crews. Larger ships on longer voyages put ever more sailors at risk of previously rare or unknown ailments whose virulence was exacerbated by an inadequate knowledge of communicable disease, a poor understanding of hygiene and nutrition, and primitive means of food preservation. French and British crews suffered the most from these deployments thanks to their governments’ commitment to controlling trade from North America to Southeast Asia. Yet following the War of the Austrian Succession, progress was remarkably swift. Barely a decade after the
Centurion
’s circumnavigation, the
Seven Years’ War (1757–63) was the first in which European fleets deployed around the world, in the Americas, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean, and while tropical disease continued to ravage fleets, malnutrition became less of a problem. Closer to home, it was by ensuring a constant supply of fresh food to ships on station that Admiral
Edward Hawke was able to maintain a close blockade of the port of Brest. “
It is an observation, I think, worthy of record,” wrote naval surgeon
James Lind, “that fourteen thousand persons, pent up in ships, should continue for six or seven months, to enjoy a better state of health upon the watery element, than it can well be imagined so great a number of people would enjoy, on the most healthful spot of ground in the world.” Attention to his crew’s diet paid handsome dividends and enabled Hawke to stifle French merchant trade and to contain the demoralized Brest squadron and prevent its resupply by sea. When the French broke out with twenty-one ships in November 1759, they lost seven of them and twenty-five hundred men fighting or fleeing from the British in the rocky confines of
Quiberon Bay.

Not all illnesses were peculiar to tropical climates, and ships were natural incubators of contagious ailments the causes of and cures for which were unknown. Called generically
ship fever, these included typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, dysentery, and other afflictions. The names of these usually fatal diseases are familiar, but their symptoms are not. Dysentery is characterized by diarrhea mixed with mucus and blood. Typhoid is caused by
Salmonella
bacteria and results in high fever, headache, intestinal disorders including diarrhea, and physical and mental collapse. Never in short supply in eighteenth-century Europe or aboard ship, lice spread typhus, a near relative to typhoid that generates high fever, delirium, and rashes. Carried by mosquitoes and therefore more prevalent in the tropics, yellow fever comes on suddenly and often fatally, though not before its dying victims are rendered prostrate from fever, headache, hemorrhaging, jaundice, and other symptoms. Also borne by
mosquitoes, malaria induces fever, chills, nausea, and anemia; left untreated it is fatal.

Malnutrition was another leading cause of death at sea.
Scurvy was commonplace among crews
forced to subsist for long stretches on salted meat or fish and grains, chiefly in the form of hardtack, or ship’s biscuit. In the late 1700s, sailors in the
Royal Navy were issued weekly four pounds of salt beef, two pounds of pork, two pints of peas, three pints of oatmeal, eight ounces of often rancid butter, and twelve ounces of cheese. Some sailors realized that fresh vegetables and especially lemons were invaluable in preventing scurvy as early as the sixteenth century, and in 1615 the East India Company’s Captain
William Keeling noted when “
I began to allow each messe a pottle [half gallon] of water to drinke by night ordering allso the due expence of our lemon water to prevent scurvvie.”
James Lind is frequently credited with having proved the efficacy of lemons in preventing scurvy following Anson’s voyage, but his own writings suggest an uncertainty about both its cause and its cure. The Royal Navy did not mandate that ships carry antiscorbutics until 1796, and similar provisions in the merchant marine were not adopted for another fifty years.

Drink was of equal importance to food. Clean water was hard to find and more difficult to preserve. Most water was drawn from
rivers just upstream from the ports through which they flow, the Thames above
London, for instance. Even if the source of the water was relatively clean, its quality on long voyages could hardly be maintained. Writing on his passage to Southeast Asia in 1614, VOC governor-general
Gerard Reynst observed that, “
The water and the wine which are daily taken from the hold are about as hot as if they were boiling, and this is the reason why much of the victuals go bad.” Apart from being vile, the usual allowance of water—one liter per day per man in Spanish ships of the 1600s—was inadequate for the maintenance of good health. A 150-pound man consuming thirty-five hundred calories per day
normally needs about two to three liters of water, and in hot climates the requirement is about ten liters. A method for distilling freshwater from salt was known within a decade of Reynst’s complaint but improvements were slow. In 1762, Lind demonstrated a distillation process and recommended that stills be put aboard Royal Navy ships. Eight years later,
Parliament awarded
Charles Irving £5,000 for a device that could render almost one hundred liters of freshwater from three hundred liters of saltwater in an hour. In the 1780s, the still carried by
HMS
Bounty
distilled only about twelve gallons of water per day—not so much for the ship’s complement of 117 men as for the cargo of breadfruit trees they were trying to get to the West Indies. Finally, in 1772 the Royal Navy required that all warships carry a still. Merchant crews and passengers were again less fortunate. British regulations did not require
government-run emigrant ships to carry distillers until 1864, and even then the law did not apply to privately run ships.