The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (89 page)

Richelieu was certainly justified in complaining of “
the ignominy of seeing our king, the foremost of Christian rulers, weaker than the pettiest princes of Christendom in terms of naval power.” Yet many English were equally contemptuous of the
Navy Royal. “
Such a rotten, miserable fleet, set out to sea, no man ever saw,” wrote one contemporary. “Our enemies seeing it may scoff at our nation.” Eager to restore the navy’s prestige, which had fallen since the days of Elizabeth and Drake, Charles I determined to reassert England’s
ancient if fanciful title to the waters around the British Isles by building a navy equal to the claim and securing publication, at long last, of
John Selden’s
Of the Dominion; or, Ownership of the Sea
. Having dissolved
Parliament in 1629, Charles raised money for the fleet not through direct
taxation payable to the Exchequer, the prerogative of Parliament, but by issuing writs for “
ship money” payable to the navy in kind or cash. This scheme generated more than £800,000 over six years and, money in hand, Charles informed the shipbuilder Phineas Pett of “
his princely resolution for the building of a great new ship.” Critics warned that “
the art or wit of man cannot build a ship fit for service with three tier of ordnance,” but they dissuaded neither Charles nor Pett’s son, Peter, who built the ship. Built at a cost of £65,586—the equivalent of about ten 40-gun ships—as her name advertised, the
Sovereign of the Seas
was as much an instrument of propaganda as of war. In a pamphlet otherwise devoted to interpreting the “
Decorements whiche beautify and adorne her … the carving worke, the figures, and mottoes upon them,” playwright and essayist
Thomas Heywood managed a brief account of the ship’s armament:

Heywood further notes that Charles’s responsibility for national honor and security “should bee a great spur and incouragement to all his faithful and loving Subjects to bee liberall and willing Contributaries towards the Ship-money.” In fact, the attention Charles lavished on his naval program was much resented by his faithful and loving subjects, and in the
Sovereign of the Seas
can be seen some of the excess and arrogance that contributed to his eventual overthrow.

Such ostentation might have been tolerated had the fleet proved equal to policing English coastal waters, but during a more than monthlong standoff between a Spanish fleet under
Antonio de Oquendo and the Dutch admiral
Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp in 1639 it proved completely ineffective. The year before, Olivares noted that Spain had won eighty-two victories at sea in seventeen years. But the tide was turning. The destruction of the squadron at Guetaria took place the same year and the following spring Dutch ships had captured seven hundred soldiers being convoyed to Flanders. In
September, Oquendo was sent north with more troops, but harried by Tromp, he anchored in
the Downs north of
Dover. This was obviously England’s territorial waters, but the English fleet was powerless to enforce a peace and after a long standoff, on October 21 the Dutch took or sank thirty-two Spanish warships and transports.
Dunkirk privateers had ferried five thousand of the soldiers to Flanders and Oquendo himself managed to reach Dunkirk and return to Spain, but the
battle of the Downs was a blow both to Spain and to Charles’s claim to sovereignty of the seas.

As important, it signaled the definitive arrival of the
Dutch Republic in the top rank of European naval powers, one whose management was a cross between that of the
French and the English. The Dutch navy,
the organization of which remained essentially unchanged from 1597 to 1785, included five admiralties in the maritime provinces of Friesland, Holland, and Zeeland. The fleets were paid for by taxes on merchants collected by the admiralties, and supplemented in wartime by extraordinary revenues voted by the
States-General. Each admiralty was responsible for levying its own crews, maintaining and building its own ships and warehouses, and organizing convoys, and they could issue privateers’ commissions and adjudicate prizes and other matters of maritime
law. This organization worked well against the Spanish and English fleets of the seventeenth century, but was outmoded in the subsequent age of highly centralized state violence calling for ever larger and more heavily gunned ships.

Three years after the humiliation of the Downs, Charles’s increasingly contentious relations with Parliament and
Puritan leaders erupted into civil war. Defeated by
Oliver Cromwell, Charles was tried for treason and executed. The substitution of the Commonwealth (1649–60) for the monarchy did little to alter the direction of English foreign policy, however, and in 1651 Parliament passed the Navigation Act. Under this protectionist legislation, the first of several such measures that came into force over the next two centuries, goods could be imported into England and its overseas territories “
only in such [ships] as do truly and without fraud belong only to the people of this Commonwealth, or the plantations thereof … and whereof the master and mariners are also for the most part … people of this Commonwealth.” The only exception was for ships carrying the
trade of their own country. So, for instance, a French ship could carry French wine to England or New England, but it could not carry New England wood to England. The law’s intent was to bolster English shipping and to undercut the Dutch. The government further insisted that all ships, foreign and domestic, dip their flags to English
warships as a mark of respect for England and its navy. In a reprise of Charles’s showboating, Cromwell authorized the construction of three “great ships,” including the eighty-gun
Naseby
. Nicknamed the “Great Oliver,”
Naseby
’s original adornments included: “
In the
Prow
…Oliver on horseback trampling 6 nations under foote, a
Scott, Irishman, Dutch, French, Spaniard
& English as was easily made out by their several habits: A
Fame
held a laurell over his insulting head, & the word
God with us
.”

On May 8, 1652, Tromp’s fleet was protecting Dutch convoys when it sought shelter in
the Downs—the site of his triumph over Oquendo thirteen years before. Ordered to leave, Tromp sailed for France, but was followed by the English, whom he engaged in what became known as the
battle of Dover (or the Downs), the casus belli for the English declaration of war, the most decisive engagement of which came at the
battle of the Gabbard Shoal (also known as North Foreland and Nieupoort) on June 2–3. Each fleet had more than a hundred ships, although the English vessels were generally larger and much of the Dutch fleet comprised hired or converted merchantmen.

The two-day battle is significant as one of the first fought between two fleets drawn up in
line of battle, the classic formation that endured into the twentieth century. By this time, the ships of the major navies mounted their heaviest guns amidships rather than forward or aft. Once it was determined that ships could be maneuvered to bring a heavy concentration of
broadside fire on a specific part of the enemy fleet, the line of battle became the tactic of choice for fleet engagements. The preferred maneuver was “crossing the T,” so that one’s broadsides raked the enemy ships from stem to stern while the enemy could respond with only a handful of guns mounted in the bows. The Dutch lost nineteen ships at the Gabbard, and the English blockaded the Dutch coast. Two months later, Tromp was killed at the
battle of Scheveningen (or Texel, within sight of The Hague) but both fleets suffered heavily in what proved to be the last major engagement of the war.

Anglo-Dutch commercial rivalry reemerged in the early 1660s, when the English began raiding Dutch settlements in
West Africa under the guise of protecting slave traders of the newly chartered Royal African Company. In retaliation,
Michiel De Ruyter, whom James,
Duke of York, would later call “
the greatest [admiral] that ever to that time was in the world,” sailed to Africa, where he retook all but one of the captured outposts before crossing the Atlantic to raid English Caribbean islands and returning home via the Newfoundland fishing grounds. When war officially began in January 1665, the two fleets were roughly comparable in numbers, but the English ships tended to be larger, their guns heavier, and their fleet better organized. In the Four Days’ Battle of June 1666 English losses were double those of the Dutch, but the English prevented a junction of De Ruyter with the French,
who had declared war on England. Hastening to sea again, the English bested the Dutch in the St. James’s Day battle off North Foreland and went on to burn 160 merchant ships off the island of Vlieland.

The costs of the war, the
Great Plague of 1665, and the
London
fire of September 1666 exhausted the English treasury and forced Charles II to order the fleet laid up and to open talks with the Dutch in 1667. While these were under way, De Ruyter crossed to England and in the most bold and daring action of the wars sailed up the
Medway to the Chatham dockyard and relieved the English of twenty-three ships. Orders had been given to burn the
Royal Charles
(the old
Naseby
) to prevent her capture, but as Pepys relates, “
the Dutch did take her with a boat of nine Men, who found not a man on board her.… They did carry her down at a time, both for tides and wind, when the best pilot in Chatham would not have undertaken it, they heeling her on one side to make her draw little water; and so carried her away safe.” Incompatible with Dutch needs, the English flagship was displayed as a trophy at Rotterdam, and her counter decoration is still on display at the
Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam.

The peace of Breda confirmed the Dutch possession of what is now
Suriname and the diminutive Banda island of
Pulo Run, while the English acquired title to the North American colony of
Nieuw Amsterdam. Early in the war Charles had written his sister that this was “
A very good town, but we have got the better of it and ’tis now called New York”—in honor of his brother, the
Duke of York, later James II. The acquisition of New York removed an adversary from the middle of the English North American colonies, but the spices of the
Banda Islands were vastly more valuable at the time, and the financial power of the
Dutch Republic remained the envy of all Europe. “
In this city of Amsterdam,” wrote Sir
William Temple shortly after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, “is the famous Bank, which is the greatest Treasure either real or imaginary, that is known any where in the World. [The] security of the Bank lies not only in the effects that are in it, but in the Credit of the whole Town or State of Amsterdam, whose Stock and Revenue is equal to that of some Kingdoms.”

Early in the war the prospect of conquering the
Spanish Netherlands had led France to side with the Dutch, but their relations deteriorated when
the French doubled customs tariffs on Dutch imports. This was one of many mercantilist initiatives implemented by
Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
Louis XIV’s minister of finance from 1665, and of the navy from 1669, until 1683. Others included subsidizing French industry, luring foreign manufacturers to France, establishing or bolstering overseas colonies, and building up the French merchant marine and navy, which had fared poorly since the modest improvements of Richelieu’s day. Colbert also embarked on an ambitious
program of internal improvements: repairing roads, digging canals, abolishing or
consolidating the kingdom’s innumerable internal river and road tolls, and managing the forests with a view to ensuring supplies of ship timber.

Although the English and Dutch people would have preferred peace,
Louis XIV
subsidized Charles II to gain his help against the Dutch Republic. With war imminent, the Dutch had seventy-five ships of the line against which the French could field only twenty-two; the English contributed another sixty-five. Nevertheless, De Ruyter held the upper hand over the allies throughout 1672 and 1673. Tired of war with the Dutch and their alliance with the French, the English concluded a peace with the Dutch Republic, thus leaving the French to face the combined naval power of the Dutch and its ally, Spain. Focus of the conflict switched to the Mediterranean where the French defeated the Spanish and Dutch fleets and killed De Ruyter in the process, in 1676. The Franco-Dutch War dragged on for two more years by which time the share of
European trade carried by the
merchants of neutral England had grown considerably.

The ensuing peace did not lead to disarmament, and the expansion of the English and French navies mirrored the growth of their merchant fleets and foreign trade. Between 1661 and Colbert’s death in 1683, the French navy grew from 18 warships and a handful of auxiliary units to 276 warships, while England’s
Navy Royal had 173 warships. Such increases would not have been possible without a concomitant improvement in fleet administration, which became more bureaucratized and systematic. This is most evident in Pepys’s establishment of a standard system for rating warships on the basis of the number and size of guns carried, “
the final administrative recognition that the age of the line of battle had arrived.” This establishment determined officers’ pay, overall manning requirements (a fixed number of men being required for each gun), and provisioning. Small changes were made from time to time, but the rating system was remarkably static. In 1779 the establishment was: