CHAP. I.] Sea-Fighting under King John. 21 the ships that were first approached, and so made it impossible for them to escape. The French, disconcerted by this bold manœuvre, were soon overcome by the vigorous fighting of their opponents. The English sailors, having no arms to use, threw unslaked lime into the air, that it might be blown by the wind into the enemy's eyes, and thus might blind them. Others deftly cut the rigging and haulyards, and so caused the sails to fall down "like a net upon ensnared small birds." The cross-bowmen and archers plied their weapons with deadly effect; and before long more than half of the French ships were captured. Fifteen managed to escape, and about as many were sunk during the contest. By his promptitude and tact and valour, Hubert de Burgh secured a victory unparalleled in the previous naval history of England.* It had many parallels, however, in the ensuing generations. The long and wasteful wars with France and Scotland, that lasted, with few intermissions, from Edward I.'s time down to Henry V.'s, afforded many opportunities for naval prowess, and resulted in the establishment, among all the European nations, of that reputation for good and brave seamanship which has been maintained by England down to the present day. The chief details of these engagements, and the general purport of the whole, are familiar matters of history, and therefore need not here be dwelt upon. So thoroughly were patriotic Englishmen, as early as * MATTHEW PARIS, Historia Major (ed. 1644), p. 206; ROGER OF WENDOVER, vol. iv., p. 28. the fifteenth century, impressed with the necessity of good seamanship to the well-being of the nation, that the prospect of naval degradation was regarded by them as the greatest of all impending evils. "Our enemies laugh at us," exclaimed one historian in 1441, when the disasters of the Wars of the Roses were beginning to be felt, "and say, "Take the ship off from your precious money, and stamp a sheep upon it, showing thereby your own cowardice.' We, who used to be the conquerors of all nations, are now being conquered by all nations! The men of old used to call the sea 'the wall of England;' and what think you that our enemies, now that they are upon the wall, will do to the inhabitants who are not ready to meet them? Just because this matter has been so long neglected is it that our ships are already so scanty, our sailors few, and those few unskilled in seamanship from want of exercise. May the Lord take away this reproach and rouse a spirit of bravery in our nation !"* In due time the spirit of bravery was revived, to be displayed, however, hardly any more in renewal of the ambitious projects for continental conquest in which the patriots of those times thought they saw the chief and best way of national aggrandisement, but generally in more peaceful and honourable ways. The warlike requirements of England continued to be, as they had been from the first, the leading motive to its naval advancement; but we shall see that, among the seamen of the Tudor period, fighting for fighting's sake was at any * CAPGRAVE, De Illustribus Henricis. CHAP. I.] The Water Walls of England. 23 rate only a secondary inducement, and that if fighting came it was mainly in consequence of the growth of maritime enterprise which has issued in the establishment of our vast colonial empire and the independent empires that have sprung and are springing therefrom all contributing in a very notable way to the growth in wealth and influence and character of England itself.* A very full and sufficient account of the earlier maritime progress of England, to which I am indebted for help in writing the foregoing pages, is to be found in the History of the Royal Navy, by SIR NICHOLAS HARRIS NICOLAS (1847), of which the only two volumes published treat of the period from Julius Cæsar's landing to the death of Henry V. 24 CHAPTER II. THE VOYAGES OF THE CABOTS. [1485-1517.] THE traditions of English effort at maritime discovery before the time of Henry VII. are few and unimportant. For the fable about Saint Brendan, the holy Irish abbot, who in the sixth century is reported to have sailed out, with twelve chosen monks, into the unknown western sea, and, after long and tedious voyaging, to have reached a land of wondrous beauty and luxuriance, where the sun never set and winter never came;* and for the fable about Madoc, the Welsh chieftain, who in the twelfth century is said to have crossed the Atlantic and founded a Celtic colony somewhere south of the "So cler and so light hit was, that joye ther was ynough; Treon [trees] ther wer ful of frut, wel thikke on everech bough; Saint Brendan, a Mediæval Legend of the Sea, ed. by WRIGHT CHAP. IL The Beginning of Maritime Discovery. 25 Missouri, there may have been some foundations in fact; and perhaps there is truth in the report that, near the middle of the fourteenth century, Madeira was discovered by a native of Gloucestershire named Macham. But no authentic and persistent attempt at Atlantic voyaging and research was made until the marvellous accounts of Cathayan wealth and splendour, brought home by overland travellers in the east, stirred up the cupidity and the adventurous disposition first of Spaniards and Portuguese and then of Englishmen. Cathay, or Khitai, is now known to have been a district to the north-east of China, peopled by an enterprising people who, alternately at feud and in alliance with the Tartars and the Chinese, were in due time the chief instruments of the Tartar conquest of the whole vast country. Some of them were Christians, and * "About this time (1344) the island of Madeira was discovered by an Englishman, called Macham, who, sailing out of England into Spain, with a woman of his, was driven out of his direct course by a tempest, and arrived in that island, and cast his anchor in the haven which is now called Machin, after the name of Macham. And because his lover was then sea-sick, he there went on land with some of his company, and in the mean time his ship weighed and put to sea, leaving him there. Whereupon his lover, for thought, died. Macham, who greatly loved her, built in the island a chapel or hermitage to bury her in, calling it by the name of Jesus Chapel, and wrote or graved upon the stone of her tomb his name and hers, and the occasion whereupon they arrived there. After this he made himself a boat, all of a tree, the trees being there of a great compass about, and went to sea in it with those men of his company that were left with him, and fell in with the coast of Africa without sail or oar; and the Moors among whom he came took it for a miracle, and presented him unto the king of that country, and that king also admiring the accident, sent him and his company unto the king of Castille."-GALVANO, Discoveries of the World, ed. for the Hakluyt Society, by Vice-Admiral BETHUNE (1862), pp. 58, 59. |