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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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There was a political distinction too. The Spanish empire was an autocracy, governed from the centre. With his treasury overflowing with American silver, the King of Spain could credibly aspire to world domination. What else was all that money for, but to enhance his glory? In England, by comparison, the power of the monarch never became absolute; it was always limited, first by the country’s wealthy aristocracy and later by the two houses of Parliament. In 1649 an English king was even executed for daring to resist the political claims of Parliament. Financially dependent on Parliament, the English monarchs often had little option but to rely on freelances to fight their wars. Yet the weakness of the English crown concealed a future strength. Precisely because political power was spread more widely, so was wealth. Taxation could only be levied with the approval of Parliament. People with money could therefore be reasonably confident that it would not simply be appropriated by an absolute ruler. That was to prove an important incentive for entrepreneurs.
The crucial question was, where should England build her anti-Spanish imperium? Hakluyt had been given a glimpse of infinite possibilities by his cousin and namesake in 1589:
... I found lying upon [my cousin’s] board ... an universall Mappe: he seeing me somewat curious in the view thereof began to instruct my ignorance, by shewing me the division of the earth into three parts after the olde account, and then according to the later & better distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bays, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes and Territories of ech part, with declaration also of their special commodities, & particular wants, which by the benefit of traffike and entercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107[th] Psalm, directed mee to the 23[rd] & 24[th] verses, where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deepe, &c.
 
But what his cousin could not show him was where else in the world there might be unclaimed supplies of silver and gold.
The first recorded voyage from England to this end was in 1480, when a shipload of optimists set sail from Bristol to look for ‘the island of Brasylle in the west part of Ireland’. The success of the undertaking is not recorded but it seems doubtful. The Venetian navigator John Cabot (Zuan Caboto) made a successful crossing of the Atlantic from Bristol in 1497, but he was lost at sea the following year and few in England seem to have been persuaded by his Columbus-like belief that he had discovered a new route to Asia (the intended destination of his fatal second expedition was Japan, known then as ‘Cipango’). It is possible that earlier Bristol ships had reached America. Certainly, as early as 1501 the Spanish government was fretting that English conquistadors might beat them to any riches in the Gulf of Mexico – they even commissioned an expedition to ‘stop the exploration of the English in that direction’. But if Bristol sailors like Hugh Elyot did indeed cross the Atlantic so early, it was Newfoundland they reached, and what they found was not gold. In 1503 Henry VII’s Household Book records payments for ‘hawks from Newfoundland Island’. Of more interest to the Bristol merchant community were the immense cod fisheries off the Newfoundland coast.
It was gold that drew Sir Richard Grenville to the southernmost tip of South America – or, as he put it in his 1574 petition, ‘the likelihood of bringing in great treasure of gold, silver and pearl into this realm from those countries, as other princes have out of like regions’. Three years later, it was the same ‘great hope of gold [and] silver’ – not to mention ‘spices, drugs, cochineal’ – that inspired Sir Francis Drake’s expedition to South America. (‘There is no doubt’, Hakluyt declared enthusiastically, ‘that we shall make subject to England all the golden mines of Peru ...’) The expeditions of Martin Frobisher in 1576, 1577 and 1578 were likewise all in pursuit of precious metals. The discovery and exploitation of ‘Mynes of Goulde, Silver and Copper’ were also among the objects of the colonization of Virginia, according to the letters patent granted to Sir Thomas Gates and others in 1606. (As late as 1607 there was still a glimmer of hope that Virginia was ‘verie Riche in gold and Copper’.) It was the
ideé fixe
of the age. The greatness of Spain, declared Sir Walter Ralegh in
The Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado)
(1596), had nothing to do with ‘the trade of sacks of Seville oranges ... It is his Indian Gold that ... endangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe’. Ralegh duly sailed to Trinidad where in 1595 he raided the Spanish base at San José de Oruña and captured Antonio de Berrio, the man he believed knew the whereabouts of El Dorado. Sitting in a stinking ship in the Orinoco delta, Ralegh lamented: ‘I will undertake that there was never any prison in England, that could be found more unsavoury and loathsome – especially to my selfe, who had for many yeeres before bene dieted and cared for in a sort farre more difering’.
It would all have been worth it if someone had found the yellow metal. No one did. All Frobisher came home with was one Eskimo; and Ralegh’s dream of discovering the ‘Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana’ was never fulfilled. The most pleasing thing he encountered up the Orinoco was not gold but a native woman (‘In all my life I have never seene a better favoured woman: she was of good stature, with blacke eyes, fat of body, of an excellent countenance ... I have seene a Lady in England so like to her, as but for the difference of colour, I would have sworne might have been the same’). Near the mouth of the River Caroní they picked up some ore, but it was not gold. As his wife reported, he returned to Plymouth ‘with as gret honnor as ever man can, but with littell riches’. The Queen was unimpressed. Meanwhile, analysis of the ore found in Virginia by an excited Christopher Newport dashed his hopes. As Sir Walter Cope reported to Lord Salisbury on 13 August 1607: ‘Thys other daye we sent you newes of golde/And thys daye, we cannot returne yow so much as Copper/Oure newe dyscovery is more Lyke to prove the Lande of Canaan then the Lande of ophir ... In the ende all turned to vapore’. In the same way, three voyages to Gambia between 1618 and 1621 in search of gold yielded nothing; indeed, they lost around £5,600.
The Spaniards had found vast quantities of silver when they had conquered Peru and Mexico. The English had tried Canada, Guiana, Virginia and the Gambia, and found nothing. There was only one thing for it: the luckless English would simply have to rob the Spaniards. That was how Drake had made money in the Caribbean and Panama in the 1570s. It was also Hawkins’s rationale for attacking the Azores in 1581. And it was the primary purpose of Drake’s attack on Cartagena and Santo Domingo four years later. Generally, when an expedition went wrong – as when Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s expedition to the West Indies foundered off Ireland in 1578 – the survivors resorted to piracy to cover their expenses. That was also the way Ralegh sought to finance his expedition in search of El Dorado – by sending his captain Amyas to sack Caracas, Río de la Hacha and Santa Marta. It was a similar story when Ralegh tried again in 1617, having persuaded James I to release him from the Tower, where he had been imprisoned for high treason since 1603. With difficulty Ralegh raised £30,000 and with it assembled a fleet. But by that time Spanish control of the region was far more advanced and the expedition ended in disaster when his son Wat attacked the Spanish-controlled town of Santo Tomé, at the cost of his own life and in defiance of his pledge to James I not to create any friction with the Spaniards. The only fruits of this ill-starred voyage took the form of two gold ingots (from the Governor of Santo Tomé’s strongbox), as well as some silver plate, some emeralds and a quantity of tobacco – not to mention a captive Indian, who Ralegh hoped would know the location of the elusive gold mines. He and his men having been denounced (quite justly) as ‘Pirates, pirates, pirates!’ by the Spanish ambassador, Ralegh was duly executed on his return. He died still believing firmly that there was ‘a Mine of Gold ... within three miles of St Tomé’. As he declared on the scaffold: ‘It was my full intent to go for Gold, for the benefit of his Majesty and those that went with me, with the rest of my Country men’.
Even when English ships went in search of goods less precious than gold, collisions with other powers seemed unavoidable. When John Hawkins sought to break into the West African slave trade in the 1560s he very quickly found himself in conflict with Spanish interests.
From such shamelessly piratical origins arose the system of ‘privateering’ or privatized naval warfare. Faced with a direct threat from Spain – culminating in but not ending with the Armada – Elizabeth I took the eminently sensible decision to license what was happening anyway. Robbing the Spaniard thus became a matter of strategy. In the period of recurrent war with Spain from 1585 to 1604, between 100 and 200 ships a year set off to harass Spanish vessels in the Caribbean and the value of prize money brought back amounted to at least £200,000 a year. This was a complete naval free-for-all, with English ‘ships of reprisal’ also attacking any and every vessel entering or leaving Iberian ports.
‘The sea is the only empire which can naturally belong to us’, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had written at the end of the seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, James Thomson wrote of Britain’s ‘well earned empire of the deep’. The key to the rise of the British Empire is the fact that, in the space of around a century after the Armada, this maritime empire went from aspiration to reality.
Why were the British such good pirates? They had to overcome some real disadvantages. For one thing, the clockwise pattern of Atlantic winds and currents meant that Portuguese and Spanish vessels enjoyed relatively easy passage between the Iberian Peninsula and Central America. By comparison, the winds in the North-East Atlantic tend to be south-westerly (that is, they come from the south-west) for most of the year, blowing against English ships heading for North America. It was much easier to head for the Caribbean, following the prevailing north-easterly winds in the South Atlantic. Traditionally coast-hugging English seamen took time to learn the arts of oceanic navigation, which the Portuguese had done much to refine. Even Drake’s West Indian expedition in 1586 set off from Cartagena to Cuba only to return to Cartagena sixteen days later as a result of errors in navigation and the cumulative effect of compass variation.
In naval technology too the English were laggards. The Portuguese were the initial leaders when it came to speed. By the end of the fifteenth century, they had developed a three-masted ship, which generally set square sails on the fore and main masts and a triangular lateen sail on the mizzen mast, allowing the ship to tack more easily. They were also pioneers of the carvel, which was constructed around a strong internal frame rather than clinker-built. This was not only cheaper; it was also able to accommodate watertight gunports. The difficulty was that there was a clear trade-off between manoeuvrability and firepower. The Iberian carvel was no match for a Venetian galley when it came to a shooting match, because the latter could carry far heavier artillery, as Henry VIII discovered off Brittany in 1513, when Mediterranean galleys sank one of his ships outright, damaged another and killed his Lord Admiral. By the 1530s Venetian galleys could fire cannonballs weighing up to 60 pounds. It was not until the 1540s that both the English and Scottish navies were able to launch carvel-style ships with load-bearing decks capable of carrying anything like as much firepower.
But the English were catching up. By the time of Elizabeth I, the hybrid ‘sailing-galley’ or galleon, capable of mounting four forward-firing guns, had emerged as the key British vessel. It still lacked the punch of a galley, but made up for that in speed and manoeuvrability. At the same time as ship design was evolving, English artillery was improving thanks to advances in iron founding. Henry VIII had needed to import bronze cannons from the continent. But home-made iron cannons, though harder to cast, were far cheaper (almost one-fifth the price). This meant significantly more ‘bangs per buck’ – a technical advantage that was to endure for centuries. English sailors were also becoming better navigators thanks to the reorganization of Trinity House at Deptford, the adoption of Euclidian geometry, better understanding of the variation of the compass and its dip, the translation of Dutch charts and tables in books like
The Mariners Mirrour
(1588) and the publication of improved maps like the ‘new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ mentioned in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
.
The English were also pioneers in improving the health of crews at sea. Sickness and disease had in many ways proved the most persistent of all the obstacles to European expansion. In 1635 Luke Fox described the seaman’s lot as ‘but to endure and suffer; as a hard Cabbin, cold and salt Meate, broken sleepes, mould[y] bread, dead beere, wet Cloathes, want of fire’. Scurvy was a major problem on long voyages because the traditional naval diet lacked vitamin C; crews were also vulnerable to wet beriberi and food poisoning, plague, typhus, malaria, yellow fever and dysentery (the dreaded ‘bloody flux’). George Wateson’s
The Cures of the Diseased in Remote Regions
(1598) was the first textbook on the subject, though it did not help much (since treatment revolved around bleeding and changes of diet). It was not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that real headway began to be made in this area. Still, the British Isles seemed to have an endless supply of men tough enough to withstand the hardships of life at sea – men like Christopher Newport of Limehouse, who rose from being a common seaman to become a wealthy shipowner. Newport made his fortune as a privateer in the West Indies, losing an arm in a fight with Spaniards and ransacking the town of Tabasco in Mexico in 1599. Henry Morgan was far from unique.
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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