Samuel Eliot Morison is credited with 22 solo history books, focused on navigation and education, as well as two efforts with other writers on the same. The man’s prose is pleasing, his deductions conservatively brilliant, and his experience as a sailor and navigator, having braved many of the same seas as his old time subjects, makes this read an exercise in enlightenment. I intend in four chapters to follow Morison and summarize the circumstances and means by which a terribly oppressed Europe, and a morally destitute England, approached the North Atlantic and North America from the early 1400s through 1600. I shall quote Morison directly, for only one passage in each chapter, as I am unsure of the copyright. I am extracting the dates of charters, voyages, letters, maps and events, from earliest to latest, and thank him for preserving the quotes of the Sea Dogs for our use.
Morison stood convinced that Medieval Europeans were unable to cross the Atlantic “both ways.” His command of the classics of Antiquity is excellent. His one lapse in dismissing ancient technology as the same or less then medieval is contradicted by his own observations on two accounts, that old ships of the 1500s were superior in heavy seas to modern yachts of the same length. Other volumes in this series have discussed evidence of European contact with North America in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. That was only important genetically, as Morison’s discourse will reveal, that the further north one went in America, the more European the folks looked, until encountering the Asiatic Eskimos of the arctic. Here, we are concerned with how Europe, wracked by class and religious wars, addressed America as a vent for her steam.
As an elite class man, Morison is liberal, not scorning the common sailor as much as his academic fellows. His compassion for the natives is also balanced. The conditions of the common sailing man is what I, as an inquirer into the condition of bound, pressed and convicted men “of the inferior sort,” am interested in. Let us look to Morison’s wonderful work for the methods, conditions and material means by which the Merchant Masters of Early Modern Europe exported their restive underclass and ambitious noble class to expand their realms of acquisition, extraction, production and consumption.
One will see that the various monarchs were not only puppets, but mere autopens—perhaps possessed of rage and wit, like Gloriana—but little more than vectors for the formation of companies towards the merchant dream of MONOPOLY.
Morison is vague on the Basques, who may have predated other Northwest Atlantic fishermen. He does not seem to know that the fisheries had drifted west from Ireland, beyond Iceland to Newfoundland over the first 200 years of the Little Ice Age beginning in the 1280s, when he does not an increase in deep water ships. [See Fagan, the Little Ice Age.]
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Sailing Conditions
The sailor was a creature of the rope, which was “his road.” The sailor slept on the open deck against the gun-wall, covered by whatever blanket he might provide. He was initially a free man signing on to a crew of 5 to 30 men, for a stake in fishing or trading voyages. Most ship’s crews were also hopeful pirates, composing songs about taking a prize. These men were a political mob ripe for mutiny from the beginning, often outnumbering the captain and his mate by 10 to 1. Noble adventurers, or “super cargo” were invited on board to stack the odds for the captain, but who might also include fractious actors. Many ships were captained by a mere “master” working for the owner. It was rare for a captain to own a ship. He labored above the mob of the rope and below the stockholders monarch or officers that supplied the ship and fiance. Human cargo was limited to the ships boys, orphans, who were treated terribly and turned the hour glass every half hour. As ships became larger and piracy became a facet of every expedition, as a threat or opportunity, men would be pressed into service from merchants or fishermen.
Fishermen seem to have been one or two generations, 20 to 40 years, ahead of the government-backed and merchant explorers. These men gathered in multinational fleets, camped together when “dry fishing” with fish cured on nearby land, or working in tandem for wet catches salted in barrels on board. These fishermen were the rescuers of a few explorers, and organized much like pirates, electing an “admiral.” The Basques seemed not to be allied with the Irish, English, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish fishermen, who feared them, indicating they might have been the first. Fishermen would trade with merchants and explorers, but often refused to cooperate and were so notoriously independent that they were not often pressed into crew service until the late 1500s brought the Military Age of Sail.
Dried biscuits, salted meat and a gallon of beer per man per day, were standard rations. Aquavitae, some medicinal brew, was sometimes shipped on major expeditions. Hundreds of ships were lost with all hands to history in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast guard estimated 600 sailing ships sunken off the Carolina Outer Banks alone. Later pirate rules of incorporation developed out of the democratic fisherman tradition and the limited, constitutional, floating monarchy of the merchant vessel.
The most common affliction of all voyages was that the merchants who contracted to provide supplies for the sailors were constantly cheating and providing the worst possible food and drink. This will be a consistent complaint through to the 1750s when up to half of German servants and free immigrants would be starved to death as part of survivor debt schemes by wicked captains. [1]
Gentleman adventurers would place shields painted with their arms at the waist of the ship, where the common men slept on the deck. The waist had a protective measure in the form of a canvas tarp that might be strapped between the fore and aft decks to keep off sea spray or enemies. Three masts made a ship, the rest being something less. Until Cook’s voyages in the late 1700s, it was a matter of guesswork to determine longitude. Most of the crew would be unable to navigate, lacking the required mathematical skills. An important tool was weighted sounding lines to probe the bottom. Knowledge of what kind of bottom their was and how deep it was, used for positioning and determining how close land might be. Light houses were rare in Europe and absent in America. A pilot was required for not wrecking in many of the harbors of Europe. Pilots did not exist for America until the late 1500s, and these were quite rare.
Hatches were used to keep heavy seas from flooding the hold. Guns below decks were gradually introduced, with most ordinance being light deck guns. For hunting on shore, bows, long bows and crossbows were preferred over guns. Carpentry tools and old fashioned hand weapons were carried by all ships, and also the boats and pinnaces of less than three masts which so often sank in rough seas.
First contact with natives almost always resulted in Europeans abducting hostages as a starting point. The record shows that these were not the first people to be kidnapped and enslaved in the Age of Sail, that poor Europeans were held in bondage on every ship as sailors, although all would be promised pay as an inducement not to mutiny. No provision was made for sailors learning to swim, for they could then easily escape their floating work house. A ships boy was a boy, and in the 1500s, a boy was nothing else than a slave. The aim of this study is to place America in gradual context; to seek an understanding of how the character and conduct of the passage from Europe to America effected the resulting Plantation Society.
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Expeditionary Characters
The Canary Islands were known since Antiquity and were conquered by Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese from the 1300s through 1600. Italians, such as Columbus, Cabot and Varranzanno, would take the lead as navigators in English and French service further north and west. This was in part due to the terrible financial conditions of the Early Modern monarchies, and the fact that Northern Italian Banking houses were busy relocating in France, England and Holland in competition with the German Hansiatic League operating in the Baltic. The only man to make a profit on Magellan’s 1521 heroic voyage was a Spanish banker who took that fortune to Flanders and relocated out of reach of the Inquisition. Magellan’s only surviving ship was lost in the Atlantic like so many other ventures. We shall see how the high risk nature of these sailing expeditions developed the military acumen of the seafarers and the ruthless axioms of corporate capitalism along the same adventurous arc.
Charts and maps in the chronological summary that follows reflect earlier discoveries, and often mistakes based on fraudulent maps. Claims of earlier discoveries of the 1400s by map makers and writers of the 1400s, 1500s and 1600s are often debunked by Morison. Based on the prevalence of scheming Italians in the North Atlantic, I suspect that there were intentionally false geographical sets promoted in order to lure competing explorers to their doom. Earlier examinations of Irish and Norse by Morison are not part of this Chronological study.
Notes
-1. The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, JL
