Pirate Nation. David Childs
to the South Seas in Dainty. The ship had been built at the end of 1588, to voyage, so Hawkins claimed, to Japan, the Philippines and Moluccas by way of the Straits of Magellan, and to make a ‘perfect discovery’ of those parts and to establish ‘the commodities which the countries yielded, and of which they have want’, which is as disingenuous a description of piracy as wielded by any pen. Dainty was originally named Repentance by Hawkins’s puritanical stepmother, until Elizabeth sighted her and ordered a name change. She was larger than Golden Hind, being of some 350 tons, but she had those same essential attributes, being ‘profitable for stowage, good of sail, and well conditioned.’
All of these attributes she seemed to have demonstrated in her brief pirateering career before she sailed for the Pacific in 1593. She was part of the pack that captured the great and richly cargoed Portuguese carrack, Madre de Dios, in 1592 and was one of Frobisher’s squadron that seized a 600-ton Biscayan laden with iron that same year. Nevertheless, the elder Hawkins considered that she ‘never brought but cost, trouble and care’, and he had little hesitation in selling her to his son for he was, above all else, a businessman. The younger Hawkins wasted little time in readying her for the voyage for which she was built.
The account of Dainty’s Pacific voyage was written wonderfully well in The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, who proved to be a better raconteur than rover, ultimately losing his ship in a fight with the Spanish. Yet the whole voyage lurched towards this final ignominy with Hawkins always learning lessons after the event, while refreshingly admitting his own culpability in most of the incidents that occurred.
It began on day one, 8 April 1593, when Hawkins saw Dainty off from Blackwall, determined to join her himself that night at Gravesend. However, seeing the ship anchored at Barking he rowed out and clambered onboard to be greeted with a tale of near woe. Dainty had sailed with her gunports open and they, because the vessel was deeply laden, lay perilously close to the waterline. A sudden fresh wind had caused the ship to heel and water to rush in at the open ports pulling the vessel over. Luckily, once this was noted and the ‘sheet flowne, she could hardly be brought upright.’ Danger described, Hawkins recommended that ports be shut and caulked, although the example he quotes in evidence is the loss of Great Harry at Portsmouth in 1545 not, as it in fact and famously was, Mary Rose. It had been a close thing and Hawkins’s crew insisted that the ship be lightened before she proceeded into the Channel, so some 6 or 8 tons were duly offloaded into a hoy hired for the purpose.
The passage down-channel was a drearisome one against contrary winds, with Dainty having to anchor on the flood tide before weighing to gain westings on the ebb. The ship then ran into fog so dense that for three days they had no sight of land and had to feel their way gingerly down the coast, until a bark from Dartmouth informed them they were not far off the Eddystone, while they thought they were off Exmouth. Cue for another lesson from Sir Richard about navigation in mist when he states that over-shooting ‘often happeneth to those that make the land in foggy weather, and use no good diligence by sound, by lying off the land, and other circumstances to search the truth, and is the cause of the loss of many a ship, and the sweet lives of multitudes of men’, to which he adds a few lines later the sound advice that, ‘I found by experience that one of the principal parts required in a mariner that frequenteth our coasts of England, is to cast his tides, and to know how they set from point to point, with the difference of those in the channel from those of the shore.’
No sooner safe, or so he thought, in Plymouth than fog gave way to gale. Hawkins, who was ashore at the time, found himself unable to regain his ship because of the storm and could only pray and watch as he noticed the mainmast of Dainty ‘driving by’, which must have been a startling experience. Luckily, that loss lightened the vessel and kept her off the rocks. Not so lucky was Hawkins’s pinnace, Fancy, which was beaten upon the rocks and had to be salvaged over the next few days.
The woes of Hawkins’s consort continued, for when they finally got underway from Plymouth, she signalled frantically to Hawkins that they had sprung a great leak and needed to return to the Sound. On examination it was found that the caulkers had left a great seam uncaulked, just running pitch along its length which the sea soon removed, allowing a powerful ingress. As so often in Hawkins’s yarn, he no sooner suffered a setback than he quotes a similar example so as to gain the satisfaction of a woe shared. On this occasion it was Ark Ralegh, which on her maiden voyage was found to be leaking because a trenail hole had not had a trenail driven home. This embarrassing departure made Hawkins a keen caulker, and when the planks of his ship shrank in the tropical sun, he turned out his whole crew to recaulk all the area that they could reach, both inboard and outboard.
Such good husbandry caused another near fatal accident through fire. One day, the ship’s carpenter, supported by the master and against Hawkins’s better judgement, heated some caulking pitch in a pot on the galley fire. Unwatched, it bubbled up, spilled over and ignited. The carpenter fled the flames. Another, braver, man put on a double pair of gloves and grabbed the pitch pot, but was forced to drop it, overturning its contents into the fire, which now raged fiercely. Hawkins saved the ship by commanding his men to tie lines around their watch-gowns (garments he had provided them with to keep them warm at night) and to throw the coats overboard until they were soaked. A succession of soaking gowns dampened the blaze, surely a unique way to douse a fire at sea. True to form Hawkins then related that:
With drinking of tobacco [ie, smoking] it is said that the Roebuck was burned at Dartmouth.
The Primrose of London was fired with a candle at Tilbury and nothing saved but her keel.
The Jesus of Lubeck had her gun-room set on fire with a match, and had been burned without redemption, if that my father, Sir John Hawkins, then general in her, had not commanded her sloppers [scuppers] to be stopped and the men to come to the pumps, whereof she had two, and plying them in a moment, had three or four inches of water on deck . . . which they threw upon the fire.
Along with fire, Dainty’s crew were also subject to another of the seamen’s fears – grounding. One day, just as he was about to conduct morning prayers, Hawkins noticed a change in the colour of the sea, which he thought might indicate that they were nearing shoals. Being assured by his master, officers and his own observations that they could not be nearer than two hundred miles from land, Hawkins continued with the service. But his suspicions were not driven away by prayer and he ordered soundings to be taken, which showed them to be in fourteen fathoms of water. Lookouts were quickly sent aloft and continuous soundings taken and, in a short while, they found themselves just five leagues off the low-lying coast of Africa. The sudden arrival of shallow water was a common experience, which most mariners acknowledged was often due to them having no sure way to measure longitude. Hawkins, while acknowledging this defect in navigation, blamed the, fallacious, presence of strong but variable ocean currents, which meant that some ‘coming from the Indies and looking for the Azores have sight of Spain and some having looked out for Spain have discovered the Azores.’ The suspected presence of this fickle current was also commented on during Cumberland’s return from Puerto Rico when the narrative relates that:
though the winde was not worthy to be called so, nor scarce by the name of a breath, and besides so narrow, that we stood upon a bowling, yet we were found in that last passed artificiall day, to have run above fiftie leagues at the least.9
Reading the accounts, and the fact that no such current exists, indicates that the problem was caused by faulty positional fixing, which is unsurprising given the inchoate state of knowledge and instrumentation available for celestial navigation. Whatever the cause, the potential hazard of such errors was best handled by the keeping of a good lookout which Hawkins, being Hawkins, acknowledged, but did not enforce.
The cause of another near grounding is shocking, for had it been been common practice it would have meant many a good ship would have found herself cast up upon the coast. Tracking along the coast of Brazil one night, content that a steady wind would keep the ship on track, both Hawkins and his master decided to turn in for the night, leaving one of the master’s mates at the helm. This man was also overcome by drowsiness and allowed the ship to track more westerly towards the shore. By one of those inexplicable moments of luck,