Interval of INTERVAL OF INACTION. 29 After the accession of Henry VIII. we hear of no more voyages till the ninth year of his reign. The voyages to the New World apparently offered no greater results than hawks inaction. and "popyngays," and Spain might well seem so firmly established as to defy invading. Before the end of the fifteenth century Hispaniola contained at least eight Spanish settlements. Ten years later the natives of that island had begun to die out before the invaders, and the new-found paradise of the West seemed to be Spanish soil almost as truly as Granada. While English sailors were jeopardizing their lives on the dreary coast of Labrador, and bringing home strange birds and savage men to amuse the citizens of London, Vasco Nunez was gazing from Darien on these southern seas which in a few years were to bear his countrymen to the scenes of their most dazzling triumphs and their direst crimes. Probably, too, the energies of the young king were employed in forming a war navy rather than in projects of distant exploration. It is worth noticing that once only in the first eight years of Henry VIII.'s reign does Cabot's name meet us. In 1512 we find him employed in drawing up a chart of the coast of Gascony and Guienne. Five years later we find him again in command of an English expedition. Of the number of ships sent out, and of the object and details of the voyage, we know nothing. One thing only is clearly recorded, that the voyage failed, and that the faint heart of Sir Thomas Pert, who was associated with Cabot in the command, was to blame for the failure.2 Thorne's A few years later we find various signs that English seamanship was entering upon a new era. Two letters written by Robert Thorne, one to the king, the other to Dr. Lee, the writings. royal chaplain and almoner, are of great interest as illustrating the new ideas which were already fermenting beneath the surface, and which were soon to be adopted and carried out by the English nation.3 They are the first writings which show that England was really beginning to take a part in the great naval movement of the age. They breathe of a time when navigation was passing into a new phase, when it was no longer a 1 State Papers, Henry VIII., ii. 1456. Richard Eden (of whom more hereafter), in the dedication of a book published in 1553, says that Henry VIII., about the eighth year of his reign, furnished and sent forth certain ships, under the governance of Sebastian Cabot, and one Sir Thomas Pert, whose faint heart was the cause that that voyage took none effect. Both letters are published in the first volume of Hakluyt. mere handmaid to trade, but a profession opening a career to the most ambitious, and calling out the highest powers of the sage and the hero. Looked at as illustrations of the age, these writings are worth our consideration. The writer had, as we have seen, a hereditary interest in the question of American discovery. He evidently foresaw the great maritime struggle between Spain and England, and knew how much we might learn from our rival. He had lately invested, jointly with his partner, fourteen hundred ducats in a Spanish adventure to America, chiefly for the purpose of sending two Englishmen on the voyage to gain information. The goal to be aimed at, in Thorne's opinion, was the Western Sea, not yet known as the Pacific Ocean. The difficulties of the Northwest passage are got over by a process of reasoning somewhat characteristic of the age. "As all judge, nihil fit vacuum in rerum natura,' so I judge that there is no land uninhabitable or sea unnavigable." English sailors thirty years later could tell him a different tale, yet his words foreshadow of the temper in which England entered upon her career of discovery in the northern seas. When the Northwest passage had been achieved, the Western Coast of America and the Spice Islands would be both at our command. Voyage of 1527. In the very year in which Thorne wrote, an attempt was made in the direction which he indicated. A rich canon of St. Paul's, one Alcert de Prado, fitted out, and himself took part, in a voyage to seek out the land of the great Cham.' Meagre as are the records, and barren as were the results of this expedition, it still has no small interest for us. It is the first of that long series of voyages in which we are brought face to face with the actors, and in which we can read their exploits almost in their own words. We are no longer confined to the slender outline which is all that our earlier records of English voyages have vouchsafed to us. The two ships, the Mary of Guildford and the Sampson, sailed from Plymouth on the 16th of June. About three weeks after their departure they met with a heavy storm, and the Sampson disappeared. Two days later the crew of the remaining vessel found themselves among icebergs in fifty Our knowledge of this voyage is chiefly derived from a letter in Purchas's Pilgrims (iii. p. 809) written by Rut, the master of one of the vessels, the Mary of Guildford, from Newfoundland. The voyage is also mentioned by Hakluyt (iii. 167). He erroneously calls one of the ships the Dominus Vobiscum. Mr. Biddle (pp. 272-282) has ingeniously connected this with a voyage mentioned by Herrera. He has also shown that it is very probable that Verrazani, the Italian navigator, went on this voyage and was murdered by the savages. three degrees of north latitude. They then turned southward, and on the 3d of August entered the harbor of St. John. There they found fourteen ships, twelve from France, and two from Portugal. By one of these Rut, the master, sent home a letter in "bad English and worse writing," addressed to the king. At the same time Albert de Prado wrote home to Wolsey. The Mary then pursued her course south, and after exploring the coast at various points, returned to England in October. Of her missing consort, the Sampson, we hear no more. Hore's voyage, For the next nine years we find no trace of any American voyages. In 1536 another attempt was made. We now feel that we are entering on the age when American voyages were to the gentry of England what the Crusades had been to their forefathers. Hore, the leader of the expedition, was a Londoner, a man of goodly stature and great courage, and a skillful cosmographer. The king favored his enterprise; landed squires and students from the Inns of Court enlisted, and out of the crews of the two ships thirty were gentlemen by birth and training. After mustering at Gravesend and taking the sacrament, they set sail at the end of April. The horrors of that ill-fated voyage are well-known to all who have studied the naval records of that age. No highly-wrought picture of suffering can equal in its effect the simple, unstudied tale of their misery. They touched at Cape Breton, then sailed northwest, and landed on the coast of Newfoundland. Then their sufferings began. They were soon driven to live on roots and berries, and such fish as they took from the nest of an osprey. Worse was in store for them. Man after man disappeared, and none knew what became of them. At length it was found that famine had lowered an Englishman to the level of the very savages. Their leader called them together and addressed them, dwelling on the heiniousness of such guilt, bidding them to trust in the power of God which had so often given help in the time of distress, and finally exhorting them rather to die manfully than to save themselves by such sinful means. His trust was not misplaced. Just, as it seemed, in the very moment of despair, when all had at length been driven by hunger to consent to that shameful relief which had hitherto been only the sin of one, a French vessel appeared, well furnished with provisions. There is A full account of Hore's voyage is given in Hakluyt, iii. p. 168. He obtained his informa. sion from one of the voyagers, Thomas Buts, son of Sir William Buts, of Norfolk. a strange transition from the tragic to the comic as we read the quaintly worded and somewhat euphemistic statement that "such was the policy of the English that they became masters of the same, and changing ships and victualing them they set sail to come to England." By the end of October they reached the coast of Cornwall. One touch of individual history gives dramatic completeness to the tale. The voyager by whom the story as we now read it was told, was so changed with hunger and misery that his father and mother did not know him till they found a secret mark. Such was the tale of the voyage, told to Richard Hakluyt by the last survivor. During the life of that survivor a generation had grown up to whom such adventures were episodes almost of every-day life. The dangers of the northern seas had but excited our countrymen to defy them, and sufferings like those of Hore and his supporters had become familiar events in the lives of Englishmen. It will be well to pause before entering on a more brilliant and more stirring era, to consider what progress England had made in the first half of the century towards the great task of colProgress of navigation. onizing America. Of outward result there was but little. In that as in so much else the reign of Henry VIII. was a period of preparation rather than action, of seed-time rather than harvest. During that time the English navy and English seamanship came into being. In justice to one with whom there is but little temptation to deal favorably, we must remember that this change is mainly due to Henry himself. We may be forgiven if for a moment we close our eyes to the other and darker side of his character; if we forget for a moment the tyranny of his rule, the foul tragedies of his home, the reckless and wasteful plunder of the Church, the murder of the righteous men who withstood his will, and of the evil councilor who served him but too well, and only remember that but for him one of the brightest and noblest chapters in English history might have been a blank. But for Henry England would never have had that fleet which saved her from bondage of body and soul, from the temporal tyranny of Spain, from the spiritual tyranny of Rome. Under Henry England no longer depended on fishing boats and privateers for her navy. Ships rivaling the largest that ever sailed from the ports of Italy or Spain were built in English docks. The Regent, the Grace de Dieu, and the Mary Rose were the visible first-fruits of the new system. But the king saw that it was not enough to NAVIGATION UNDER HENRY VIII. 33 change his navy, that new ships needed a new class of seamen. He saw that a time had come when seamanship was a science requiring special and minute training. In this Spain probably furnished him with a model. There seamanship was fully recognized as a subject of systematic and a scientific teaching. The Contractation House at Seville was virtually a college of navigation, giving instruction and conferring degrees.1 Lectures were given from a chair established and endowed by the Crown, and were subsequently published. No pilot or master was allowed to sail without satisfying the authorities of the Contractation House that he might be safely trusted with the lives of his countrymen. In the same spirit Henry founded three guilds or brotherhoods, at Deptford, at Kingston-upon-Hull, and at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. They were to be at once hospitals for retired seamen who had been disabled or had fallen into poverty, and colleges for the instruction of their younger brethren. In the same spirit Sir Thomas Gresham some years later founded lectures for the furtherance of seamanship. From the tone in which Hakluyt, who lived a generation later, wrote of these wellmeant efforts, it would seem that the result had fallen short of the intent, but we cannot doubt that they bore some fruit, and even as attempts they are characteristic of the age and honorable to those who made them. The removal of the privileges of the Steelyard Company in 1520 marked an epoch when the merchants of England should no longer depend on foreign ships and mariners. Another symptom of the increased demand for shipping, and of the importance of the trades connected with it, is the fact that in 1496 we find for the first time the wages of shipwrights fixed by law. Everything was leading up to a time when the perils of the seas should claim all that was most heroic in England's most heroic age. Distant 2 As I have said before, the first half of the sixteenth century was in naval history a period of promise rather than of performance, yet outward results were not wholly wanting to voyages. tell of the impending change. A Bristol merchant who sent cloth, pack-thread, and soap to be shipped at Cadiz for the Teneriffe market, and received back dyers' moss, sugar, and kid skins, would have seemed to men of his father's genera 1 For an account of the Contractation House at Seville see Appendix D. 2 Hakluyt: Epistle dedicatory to his Collection of Voyages, i. p. xiii. |