CHAPTER 19

The Merchant Service

THE NAVY AND THE MERCHANT SERVICE

ENGLAND POSSESSED perhaps 200,000 tons of merchant shipping in 1660, 340,000 tons in 1686.1 Apart from carrying on the trade of the nation, this was traditionally regarded as vital to the well-being of the navy; it provided both a reserve of ships (though this became less important after the 1650s) and a large pool of manpower. Certain trades, notably the Newfoundland fishery and the east coast colliers, were often perceived as ‘nurseries’ in which men could be bred up for future naval service.² But the ready (and growing) availability of places in merchant ships, along with the attractive wages that they paid, presented the navy with huge and ongoing problems of recruitment and retention.

LONG-DISTANCE TRADES

The long-distance trades boomed between 1660 and 1688; shipping on the American and West Indies trade routes doubled, as it did in the North European trades.³ The trade with the Baltic was dominated by the importation of naval stores, such as pitch, tar, hemp and masts. Large amounts of grain were imported from Poland-Lithuania and elsewhere, particularly in years when the domestic harvest fell short.⁴ The most lucrative of the American trades were those with Barbados and Virginia, primarily sugar from the former and tobacco from the latter, and the arrival of the fleets from the two colonies was given virtually the same importance on the London Exchange that the arrival of the East India fleet was given on the Amsterdam bourse. The Navigation Acts ensured that the American and Caribbean colonies depended almost wholly on English imports, especially cloths and manufactured goods, while the West Indian islands depended heavily on imports of Irish meat, butter and cheese.5 There was also a direct Scottish trade with Barbados and North America, circumventing the English Navigation Acts, which deliberately excluded Scotland from such trades.⁶

A Dutch ‘flyboat’.
(©TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

English merchants had been trading to the Mediterranean for many years. The Levant Company was formed in 1581, and held the monopoly on trade to and from Venice and Turkey, where it maintained consuls at Smyrna (Izmir) and Constantinople. The Levant trade was valuable, and centred on the exchange of English woollen cloth for Turkish or Persian silk.⁷ From the 1650s onwards the ships involved in the trade were usually provided with a naval escort, although they were often large enough and sufficiently well armed to look after themselves. Many naval men were involved in the Levant trade in one way or another; Richard Haddock, grandson of a Commonwealth admiral, who himself eventually rose to be joint admiral of the fleet and controller of the navy, commanded several ships in the trade during 1660–5 and 1667–71.⁸ The western Mediterranean was not covered by the Levant Company monopoly, and English ships carried on substantial trades with all the major ports, notably Malaga, Alicante, Genoa and Leghorn. Much wine was imported from Spain, especially from Malaga, with woollen cloth going in the other direction.⁹ Cloth, pepper, lead and herrings were exported to Italy, where Livorno (Leghorn) was the main port employed by English ships. The 1670s were a boom time for Mediterranean merchants; with France, Spain and the Netherlands at war with each other, English ships benefited from their position as neutral carriers.

An etching by Wenceslaus Hollar of a small English merchantman of about 1650, used in the title page of J Ussher, Annales (1654); comparison with the Dutch flyboat (opposite) shows the English ship to be less beamy, and thus less economical when employed in many of the bulk trades.

The East India Company (EIC), established by royal charter in 1600, had trading ports at Surat, Madras and (from 1668) Mumbai/Bombay, which had been acquired by the crown in 1662 and was legally and curiously counted as a part of the manor of East Greenwich.¹⁰ Kolkata/Calcutta was established in 1686. The EIC was controlled by a governor and a court of twenty-four directors, nominally responsible to a court of proprietors that represented the wider body of shareholders.¹¹ The company traded in high-value commodities, notably cotton, silk and saltpetre, with tea becoming increasingly prominent from the 1660s onwards as a taste for it developed within fashionable society. The number of outward sailings to Asia averaged just over a dozen per year from 1670 to 1680, then effectively doubled in the three-year period 1681–3 before falling back dramatically.¹² However, the relatively small volume of the trade was more than offset by its value. When the Berkeley Castle sailed home from Madras in 1681, its cargo was worth about £80,000.¹³ Given the sums involved, it was hardly surprising that the company faced constant challenges to its monopoly from interlopers, and only narrowly fought off a concerted attack in the 1690s.¹⁴ Several naval officers had connections with or experience in the East Indies trade. In 1683 eleven East India captains were given Admiralty commissions to enable them to wage war against the King of Bantam. Four of these had served in the navy (one of them, Sir John Wetwang, had been a senior officer) and a fifth was a member of a prominent naval ‘dynasty’, the Utbers of Lowestoft.¹⁵

THE COASTING AND SHORT-SEA TRADES

The word ‘coaster’ was already in common usage in this period. By far the most important trade was the shipment of coal from the north-east of England to the Thames, for in winter London’s warmth literally depended on the safe arrival of the coal ships. In 1660 over 70,000 tons of shipping was involved in the coal trade, compared with some 23,000 tons in the fisheries and 25,000 tons in the other coastal trades.¹⁶ Vast collier fleets, sometimes of several hundred vessels, formed up within Tynemouth Bar, joined with other ships coming out of the Tees and the Humber, and made their way along the coast before making the dangerous open-sea crossing across the mouth of the Wash, aiming for a landfall around Blakeney Point.¹⁷ Other lucrative coal trades included those from South Wales to France, Devon, Cornwall and the south of Ireland, from Liverpool and Cumberland to the east and north of Ireland, and from the northeast to Hamburg and Bremen. The ports of the south coast and South Wales traded with each other, with London and with the Breton, Norman and Biscay ports of France. Yorkshire butter and Cheshire cheese were both sent to London by sea, while salt went from the Tyne and Wear estuaries to the major fishing ports, such as Hull and King’s Lynn.¹⁸ The east coast ports traded primarily with the Spanish Netherlands, the Dutch, Germany and Scandinavia. A significant number of ships were employed in the lucrative wine trade, primarily with Bordeaux; the peak time for this was winter, which meant that ships could be transferred to it from the more numerous summer trades.¹⁹ Scotland had strong trading links with Norway, especially for grain exports and timber imports. However, the bulk of Norwegian timber went to England, especially to London, King’s Lynn and Boston. The trade doubled between 1640 and 1663, then doubled again by 1669 as Norway benefited directly from the reconstruction of London; or, as the Norwegians themselves put it, they‘warmed themselves at the Great Fire’.20

INLAND WATERWAYS

Significant amounts of trade moved along the small number of navigable rivers.²¹ The River Severn saw the greatest amount of traffic; trows plied between Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Worcester and so down to the estuary beyond Gloucester. The Avon, from Tewkesbury to Stratford, was another busy waterway, as was the Shannon in Ireland. The Great Ouse was made navigable from Bedford to King’s Lynn in a number of stages, with the final stretch to Bedford completed in 1689, and this was soon carrying substantial amounts of corn downstream and Newcastle coal inland.²² The Wey navigation in Surrey was completed in 1653. Like several of the other navigable rivers, this became important to the navy as a means of transporting timber and other commodities to the dockyards, while those who manned the barges and other riverine craft were eligible for the press.

A contemporary Dutch broadside showing a fight between English and Dutch fishermen in the North Sea.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

FISHING

The Iceland fishery was in decline by the 1650s, and whaling, primarily undertaken from Hull (where a ‘Greenland House’ opened in 1674), found it difficult to resist Dutch competition. The Newfoundland cod fishery was increasingly carried on by local colonists, with English ships (mostly from Devon) simply going there to buy the catch and transport it to Spain and the Mediterranean, where they arrived in the autumn.²³ Nevertheless, the Newfoundland fishery in particular continued to be regarded as a ‘nursery of seamen’ for the navy, and the same was true to an extent of the North Sea fishery, despite the difficulties that this faced throughout the period. Indeed, competition between English and Dutch fishermen to exploit the North Sea herring grounds was an important cause of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Since about the fifteenth century, the Dutch had fished almost without challenge in Scottish and English waters. During the 1640s, the Dutch had some 500 herring ‘busses’ in Shetland waters for up to four months at a time, but a concerted attempt to drive them away was finally made in the 1650s.²⁴ Many of the busses followed the herring as it migrated down to the waters off East Anglia and the Thames.* Despite the Dutch competition, a substantial English fishery worked the banks for three or four months in the late summer and autumn; large numbers of boats from as far afield as Sussex made their way to the Yarmouth fishery.²⁵ Ultimately, though, superior Dutch techniques drove English fishermen off the banks, bringing economic decline to Great Yarmouth and other East Anglian ports. In any case, herring stocks were in decline, and the Dutch were better equipped to exploit the diminishing reserves. A number of attempts to set up an effective English fishery had been made before the civil war, but these were all unsuccessful. A Royal Fishery Company was established in 1661 and converted into a corporation (of which Pepys became a member) in 1664, but this, too, failed to reverse the trend. It was unable to raise sufficient funds and resorted instead to a number of evidently desperate expedients, such as better enforcement of Lent and forcing inns and coffee-houses to buy a barrel of herrings once a year.²⁶

SHIPS

The Navigation Act of 1651 was intended to give encouragement to English merchant shipping and shipbuilding, but the weakness of the domestic shipbuilding industry in the 1650s led many owners to buy ships abroad. However, it was feared that foreigners would see this as a loophole by which they could circumvent the Navigation Acts, so an Act of 1662 ended this practice and insisted that English-owned ships should also be English-built.²⁷ Despite this, many ships of the period were Dutch-built ‘flyboats’ (often prizes taken in the wars), which had broader and longer bottoms than English-built ships of the same overall length: one such was the Hope of London, carrying fruit and wine from Malaga to London when she was captured by a Dutch privateer in 1673.²⁸ Only a relatively few ships were larger than 300 tons, and most of those were employed in the East Indies or Levant trades. Most of the large ships were built in Thames yards, at Rotherhithe, Shadwell and Blackwall, where Henry Johnson built both warships and East Indiamen. The East India Company’s ships were large, well manned and well armed, as was only to be expected for ships making exceptionally long voyages with valuable cargoes in hostile seas that often teemed with pirates. Unlike the Dutch, the English EIC often hired its ships from private syndicates. In the 1670s and 1680s the ships employed in the trade were on average of 400–600 tons burthen, mounting an average of thirty or more guns per ship.29 Coasters, or those engaged in short sea trades, were often of no more than sixty to a hundred tons. The coasters of the east coast tended to be larger than those in the west, leading to greater economies of scale.³⁰ In 1656, most Scottish merchantmen were smaller than sixty tons burthen.³¹

OWNERS

Shipowners were often involved in many other commercial activities simultaneously, usually as merchants, though occasionally they were drawn from such seemingly unlikely spheres as banking.³² Particularly prominent merchants, such as Pepys’s friend Sir William Warren, often controlled their own fleets in their own trades (in Warren’s case, the timber trade with the Baltic).³³ Most ships in the overseas trades were owned by syndicates of perhaps twenty or more men who owned eighths, sixteenths or thirty-seconds of the vessel, a system that was intended to spread the (very high) risk of loss, rather than to provide the relatively modest capital required to build and fit out the ship.³⁴

Among merchants engaged in foreign trade, in particular, there was a criss-cross pattern of shareholding in a great number of ships. Every ship had a different list of owners, sometimes hardly less fortuitous a group of people than the buyers of tickets in a lottery, and with as little conscious identity or continuity.³⁵

Coastal shipping, especially in the east coast coal trade, was owned by an even more diverse cross-section of society.³⁶ Many naval men invested in merchant shipping. Pepys’s friend James Lambert, who had been lieutenant of the Naseby in 1659, held shares in three ships, and also had an interest in a wharf near Sittingbourne.³⁷ Sir John Kempthorne, who was resident commissioner at Portsmouth when he died in 1679, owned three-sixteenths of the big Levanter Turkey Merchant and one-sixteenth of three other ships; he had also been part-owner of a privateer during the third Anglo-Dutch war.³⁸ In 1686 Cloudesley Shovell bought one-sixteenth of the Unity for £186 6s, and a couple ofyears later he owned shares in her and four other merchantmen; at least three of the ships, including the Unity, were skippered by former naval officers, and the master of another was Shovell’s brother John.³⁹

OFFICERS AND MEN

Each ships had a master, who was often the managing owner of the syndicate; a mate (more than one in Levant and East India ships); a boatswain, gunner, carpenter, cook and surgeon (some or all of whom might not be present in the smaller ships); and perhaps three to eight men and boys in ships of up to a hundred tons, a dozen or so in ships of 200. East Indiamen often had almost the full panoply of mates and petty officers that could be encountered on a warship.⁴⁰ The master (who earned £6 a month on foreign voyages) and the chief mate were usually the only men aboard with a reasonable grasp of navigation, though even that was not always the case, and the quality of the education provided by the private tutors and rudimentary navigation schools in port towns was often hit-and-miss.⁴¹ Pepys’s establishment of a Royal Mathematical School was intended to remedy the deficiencies of navigational training in both the naval and merchant services*. Advancement to master depended overwhelmingly on the goodwill of owners and merchants, and family or other connections were all important.42 Nevertheless, it was possible for a man to work his way up. Edward Barlow, who compiled the best lower-deck journal of the seventeenth century, went to sea at seventeen as apprentice to the chief master’s mate of the Naseby, alternated between naval and merchant service for much of his life, became a chief mate in his late thirties and then stayed at that level until he was sixty-three, when he finally became master of an East Indiaman (in which he lost his life a few months later).⁴³ This degree of social mobility was unheard of in the majority of terrestrial occupations.

The port and royal arsenal at Hull in the latter part of the seventeenth century.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

Dutch ‘flutes’ or ‘flyboats’ by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1647. Although Hollar exaggerated the shape of these ships, especially at the stern, his etching gives a good impression of the capacity of these vessels and of the Dutch dominance of the trade in this un-named harbour.

Seamen were hired by the voyage, and the seasonal nature of many trades meant that many of them were out of work over the winter. Many of the men and boys were apprentices, bound to more senior members of the ship’s company in a system that was meant to (and did) provide a permanent supply of trained candidates for positions of responsibility. These apprenticeships were often for four or five years, rather than the seven that was common in trades ashore.⁴⁴ Monthly wages were paid on longer voyages, lump sums on most coastal and short sea voyages, and shares of the ship’s earnings on fishing vessels and some coastal voyages. Monthly wages were about 19–20s in the early 1650s, 30–38s for most of the 1650s (a period of almost continuous warfare), 20s or so again from 1660 until 1664, 3538s during the second Anglo-Dutch war, 35–40s during the third, 2728s from 1674 to 1679, then 24–25s until 1688. The attractive wartime wages were both a response to widespread recruitment into the navy and a considerable incentive to those in the navy to get out of it and take advantage of what were virtually double the rates of pay provided by the king.⁴⁵

PORTS

London benefited most from the expansion of long-distance trades. Paradoxically, the Great Fire of London benefited the port; timber imports grew by 150 per cent, and the increase in demand for Baltic naval stores also benefited London more than any other port.⁴⁶ London had only twenty-one legal quays with a total frontage of 466 yards in 1666, although there were many so-called ‘sufferance wharves’ below the Tower and on the South Bank; these added another 1,227 yards. This wharfage was wholly inadequate for the number of ships seeking to use the port, and most had to anchor in midstream and discharge into lighters, as they would do for many decades more.⁴⁷ However, a large new wet dock for the EIC was built at Blackwall, and this greatly impressed Pepys when he saw it in 1661.⁴⁸ Bristol traded chiefly with Ireland, France and Spain, but had already established its strong (and ultimately controversial) trading relationship with the West Indies, despite the facts that the Avon was often overcrowded and that ships were regularly damaged by grounding.⁴⁹ Exeter depended heavily on her cross-Channel trades to France, and was particularly badly hit by the disruption caused by the Anglo-Dutch wars.⁵⁰ Hull and Newcastle were major centres of the Baltic or‘Eastland’ trade, with Hull exporting textiles and increasing amounts of lead to the Netherlands, but its wharfage was severely restricted by the great royal arsenal which dominated much of the foreshore of the Humber.⁵¹ Dublin imported cloth, tobacco and coal from England and Wales, but its cattle trade was curtailed by a ban on the import of Irish cattle into England (1667).⁵² Like London, the outports had wharves that could accommodate only a small proportion of the ships using the harbour. In even smaller ports, such as some of the coal ‘shipping places’ on the South Wales coast, ships simply waited for the tide to leave them high and dry, when trains of packhorses would bring the sacks of coal out them.

* See Part Ten, Chapter 4, p209.

* See Part Seven, Chapter 28, pp145-6.