books



previous page: Ceylon | by Alfred Clarkpage up: History Booksnext page: Magic And Witchcraft | by George Moir

Elizabethan Sea Dogs | by Gerhard R. Lomer and Charles W. Jefferys



Citizen, colonist, pioneer! These three words carry the history of the United States back to its earliest form in 'the Newe Worlde called America.' But who prepared the way for the pioneers from the Old World and what ensured their safety in the New? The title of the present volume, Elizabethan Sea-Dogs, gives the only answer. It was during the reign of Elizabeth, the last of the Tudor sovereigns of England, that Englishmen won the command of the sea under the consummate leadership of Sir Francis Drake, the first of modern admirals.

TitleElizabethan Sea Dogs
AuthorsGerhard R. Lomer and Charles W. Jefferys
PublisherYale University Press
Year1918
Copyright1918, Yale University Press
AmazonElizabethan Sea Dogs
-Prefatory Note
Drake and his companions are known to fame as Sea-Dogs. They won the English right of way into Spain's New World. And Anglo-American history begins with that century of maritime adventure and naval wa...
-Chapter I. England's First Look
In the early spring of 1476 the Italian Giovanni Caboto, who, like Christopher Columbus, was a seafaring citizen of Genoa, transferred his allegiance to Venice. The Roman Empire had fallen a thousa...
-England's First Look. Part 2
To sayle to all Partes of the East, of the West, and of the North. The pointed omission of the word South made it clear that Henry had no intention of infringing Spanish rights of discovery. Spanish c...
-England's First Look. Part 3
Sebastian said he coasted Greenland, through vast quantities of midsummer ice, until he reached 67 67' north, where there was hardly any night. Then he turned back and probably steered a southerl...
-Chapter II. Henry VIII, King Of The English Sea
The leading pioneers in the Age of Discovery were sons of Italy. Spain, and Portugal1 Cabot, as we have seen, was an Italian, though he sailed for the English Crown and had an English crew. Columbus, ...
-Henry VIII, King Of The English Sea. Continued
Charles had inherited a long and bitter feud with France about the Burgundian dominions on the French side of the Rhine and about domains in Italy; besides which there were many points of violent riva...
-Chapter III. Life Afloat In Tudor Times
Two stories from Hakluyt's Voyages will illustrate what sort of work the English were attempting in America about 15S0, near the middle of King Henry's reign. The success of' Master Haukins' and the f...
-Life Afloat In Tudor Times. Continued
A sack of straw were there right good; For some must lay them in their hood: I had as lief be in the wood, Without or meat or drink ! For when that we shall go to bed, The pump is nigh our bedde...
-Chapter IV. Elizabethan England
Elizabethan England is the motherland, the true historic home, of all the different peoples who speak the sea-borne English tongue. In the reign of Elizabeth there was only one English-speaking nation...
-Elizabethan England. Part 2
To understand how difficult her position was we must remember what sort of constitution England had when the germ of the United States was forming. The Roman Empire was one constituent whole from the ...
-Elizabethan England. Part 3
Marine insurance of the regular kind was, of course, a very different thing. It was already of immemorial age, going back certainly to mediaeval and probably to very ancient times. All forms of insura...
-Elizabethan England. Part 4
'I marvel how the fishes live in the sea'— 'Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.' The Newcastle coal trade grew into something very like a modern American trust with the ad...
-Chapter V. Hawkins And The Fighting Traders
Said Francis I of France to Charles V, King of Spain: 'Your Majesty and the King of Portugal have divided the world between you, offering no part of it to me. Show me, I pray you, the will of our fath...
-Hawkins And The Fighting Traders. Part 2
'At departing, in cutting the foresail lashings a marvellous misfortune happened to one of the officers in the ship, who by the pulley of the sheet was slain out of hand.' Hawkins appointed all the m...
-Hawkins And The Fighting Traders. Part 3
So here were the three rivals overlapping again — the annexing Spaniards, the would-be colonizing French, and the persistently trading English. There were, however, no Spaniards about at that time. Th...
-Hawkins And The Fighting Traders. Part 4
But this time things went wrong from the first. A tremendous autumnal storm scattered the ships. Then the first negroes that Hawkins tried to 'snare' proved to be like that other kind of prey of which...
-Chapter VI. Drake's Beginning
We must now turn back for a moment to 1545, the year in which the Old World, after the discovery of the mines of Potosi, first awoke to the illimitable riches of the New; the year in which King Henry ...
-Drake's Beginning. Part 2
Aboard this escort went Francis Drake as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Home in June, Drake ran down to Tavistock in Devon; wooed, won, and married pretty Mary Newman, all within a month. He was back...
-Drake's Beginning. Part 3
As Drake's men reached the Plaza, his trumpeter blew one blast of defiance and then fell dead. Drake returned the Spanish volley and charged immediately, the drummer beating furiously, pikes levelled,...
-Chapter VII. Drake's 'Encompassment Of All The Worlde'
When Drake left for Nombre de Dios in the spring of 1572, Spain and England were both ready to fly at each other's throats. When he came back in the summer of 1573, they were all for making friends — ...
-Drake's 'Encompassment Of All The Worlde'. Part 2
In the end Drake got away quietly enough, on the 15th of November, 1577. The court and country were in great excitement over the conspiracy between the Spaniards and Mary Queen of Scots, now a prisone...
-Drake's 'Encompassment Of All The Worlde'. Part 3
Drake solemnly 'pronounced him the child of Death and persuaded him that he would by these means make him the servant of God.' Doughty fell in with the idea and the former friends took the Sacrament t...
-Drake's 'Encompassment Of All The Worlde'. Part 4
But Drake went faster by sea than their news by land. Every vessel was overhauled, taken, searched, emptied of its treasure, and then sent back with its crew and passengers at liberty. One day a water...
-Drake's 'Encompassment Of All The Worlde'. Part 5
Lima, Panama, and Nombre de Dios were in wild commotion at the news; and every sailor and soldier that the Spaniards had was going to and fro, uncertain whether to attack or to defend, and still more ...
-Drake's 'Encompassment Of All The Worlde'. Part 6
From California Drake sailed to the Philippines; and then to the Moluccas, where the Portuguese had, if such a thing were possible, outdone even the Spaniards in their fiendish dealings with the nativ...
-Chapter VIII. Drake Clips The Wings Of Spain
For three years after Drake had been dubbed Sir Francis by the Queen he was the hero of every class of Englishmen but two: the extreme Roman Catholics, who wanted Mary Queen of Scots, and the merchant...
-Drake Clips The Wings Of Spain. Part 2
The first port of call was Vigo in the northwestern corner of Spain, where Drake's envoy told the astonished governor that Elizabeth wanted to know what Philip intended doing about embargoes now. If t...
-Drake Clips The Wings Of Spain. Part 3
But again there was a dearth of booty. The Spaniards were getting shy of keeping too many valuables where they could be taken. So negotiations, emphasized by piecemeal destruction, went on till sickne...
-Drake Clips The Wings Of Spain. Part 4
The next objective was Cape St. Vincent, so famous through centuries of naval history because it is the great strategic salient thrust out into the Atlantic from the southwest corner of Europe, and th...
-Chapter IX. Brake And The Spanish Armada
With 1588 the final crisis came. Philip — haughty, gloomy, and ambitious Philip, unskilled in arms, but persistent in his plans—sat in his palace at Madrid like a spider forever spinning webs that ene...
-Brake And The Spanish Armada. Part 2
The 30th of March, 1588, is the day of days to be remembered in the history of sea power because it was then that Drake, writing from Plymouth to the Queen-in-Council, first formulated the true doctri...
-Brake And The Spanish Armada. Part 3
In every one of the Armada's hundred and twenty-eight vessels, says an officer of the Spanish flagship, 'our people kneeled down and offered a prayer, beseeching our Lord to give us victory against th...
-Chapter X. 'The One And The Fifty Three'
The next year, 1589, is famous for the unsuc-cessful Lisbon Expedition. Drake had the usual troubles with Elizabeth, who wanted him to go about picking leaves and breaking branches before laying the a...
-'The One And The Fifty Three'. Continued
Grenville's men were last. The Revenge had only 'her hundred fighters on deck and her ninety sick below' when the Spanish fleet closed round him. Yet, just as he had sworn to cut down the first man wh...
-Chapter XI. Raleigh And The Vision Of The West
Conquerors first, prospectors second, then the pioneers: that is the order of those by whom America was opened up for English-speaking people. No Elizabethan colonies took root. Therefore the age of E...
-Raleigh And The Vision Of The West. Part 2
Next year Sir Richard Grenville, who was Raleigh's cousin, convoyed out to Roanoke the little colony which Ralph Lane governed and which, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, Drake took home discomf...
-Raleigh And The Vision Of The West. Part 3
There was a break of no less than fifteen years in English efforts to colonize America. Nothing was tried between the last attempt at Roanoke in 1587 and the first attempt in Massachusetts in 1602, wh...
-Chapter XII. Drake's End
Drake in disfavor after 1589 seems a contradiction that nothing can explain. It can, however, be quite easily explained, though never explained away. He had simply failed to make the Lisbon Expedition...
-Appendix. Note On Tudor Shipping
In the sixteenth century there was no hard-and-fast distinction between naval and all other craft. The sovereign had his own fighting vessels; and in the course of the seventeenth century these gradua...
-Appendix. Note On Tudor Shipping. Continued
But the much advertised Great Harry was not a mighty prototype of a world-wide-copied class of battleships like the modern Dreadnought With her lavish decorations, her towering superstructures fore an...
-Bibliographical Note
A complete bibliography concerned with the first century of Anglo-American affairs (1496-1596) would more than fill the present volume. But really infor-matory books about the sea-dogs proper are very...







TOP
previous page: Ceylon | by Alfred Clarkpage up: History Booksnext page: Magic And Witchcraft | by George Moir