Other Foreign Naval Forces
DENMARK-NORWAY
ON PAPER, THE DANISH NAVY was a formidable fighting force. In 1650 it had forty-three warships displacing 25,000 tons, which made it significantly larger than the French navy. The years that followed saw a stark decline to only sixteen ships in 1660, but a revival saw it reach a strength of thirty-seven ships in 1670 and fifty-three in 1680, almost twice the size of the fleet of its closest rival and natural enemy, Sweden.1 This was due primarily to the stunning string of Danish victories during the war of 1675–9, during which they took over twenty Swedish vessels.2 Nevertheless, the bare figures conceal a number of weaknesses. The Danes had few really large warships, those that they did possess carried lighter broadsides than their British counterparts, and they kept their ships in service for many years, so that much of the fleet was old and worn out. They also depended heavily on foreign shipwrights, particularly Dutchmen, Scots like David Balfour and Daniel Sinclair and Englishmen like James Robbins, who built their largest warship, the 100-gun Sophia Amalia, in Norway in 1650, modelling her closely on the Sovereign of the Seas.3 However, the Danes had a much closer relationship with the Dutch, who intervened on their behalf against Sweden in 1657–8. This was also reflected in the career of Denmark-Norway’s greatest seaman of the age, Niels Juel, who began his naval career with the Dutch and fought with them during the first Anglo-Dutch war. He became an admiral in his own navy in 1657 at the age of only twenty-eight, and led the Danish fleet to a string of impressive victories in the war of 1675–9, fighting several of his earlier actions in a combined fleet under the command of the Dutchman Cornelis Tromp.4 However, at least one Englishman commanded in the Danish navy during this period: Robert Holland, who had led the Dutch up the Medway in 1667 but had been forgiven for his apostasy and commanded a fireship in 1673, was captain of the 74-gun Danish warship Mercurius in 1684.5
Denmark-Norway was nominally at war with Britain from 1666 until the Peace of Breda in 1667. A large Dutch subsidy was meant to guarantee that the Danes would keep forty ships in commission for the duration of each campaign, and eight additional ships were chartered from Dutch owners. However, the navy was still being rebuilt following the disastrous war with Sweden in the 1650s and the subsequent financial crisis which saw the Danish state as a whole become virtually bankrupt in the early 1660s.6 The navy was also in the throes of an administrative reorganisation: a new admiralty structure was a consequence of King Frederick III’s assumption of absolute rule in 1660. The difficulties of the Danish crown were well known, and even the ‘worst-case scenarios’ circulating in Britain assumed that the Danes would be able to set out fewer than two dozen major warships in 1666, and then only with great difficulty.7 These predictions were borne out. When Frederick III was asked to send up to eighteen ships to join the Dutch fleet for the 1666 campaign, he prevaricated, although by October he had managed to deploy into the North Sea a nine-strong squadron led by an 86-gun ship (which was soon lost in a severe storm). English newsletters of 1666–7 and John Evelyn’s contemporary notes indicate that there were occasional alarms over Danish preparations, but apart from molesting fishing boats off Iceland and fighting a sharp action with the British frigate Princess off the Swedish coast, the Danish-Norwegian navy proved to be a paper tiger. It certainly did not register on the consciousness of Pepys, who made no mention of it in his diary.8
SWEDEN
In 1650 the Swedish navy had forty-two warships, displacing some 28,000 tons. The navy expanded in the years before the Northern War of the 1670s, reaching a peak of 35,000 tons in 1675, but attrition during that war caused a significant decline to only twenty-two ships of 21,000 tons in 1680. A major rebuilding programme during the 1680s brought the fleet back to a strength of thirty-five ships of 37,000 tons by 1690.9 Even so, the shallow draught necessary for Baltic operations ensured that Swedish warships were generally smaller than their Western European counterparts: in 1680 Britain had sixteen ships of over 1,500 tons and France had twenty-one, while Sweden had only one.10 These bare figures conceal the fact that Sweden effectively maintained two separate navies, a conventional force of square-riggers for operations in the Baltic and a fleet of small, shallow-draught oared vessels for service in the archipelagos of the east coast. Both forces were constrained by the limited operational areas available to them and by the climate: the northern Baltic, including the waterways between Stockholm and the open sea, was frozen for four months or more every winter. The performance of the Swedish navy during this period was distinctly mixed. Its fleet was defeated in battle against the Dutch in the Sound in October 1658, by the combined fleet of the Danes and Dutch at Öland in 1676 and by the Danes alone in Köge Bay in 1677. Even so, the navy succeeded in maintaining lines of communication and protecting Sweden’s own shores, and the failures of the 1670s triggered important reforms to the administration, dockyards and recruitment system.11 From 1634 the Swedish navy was run by an admiralty board of aristocrats and sea-officers under a Lord High Admiral (riksamiral). This system survived until the Northern War of 1675–9, when the disastrous defeats led to the purging of the aristocratic element in favour of sea-officers who owed loyalty directly to the newly absolute King Karl XI. A new naval base was established at Karlskrona in the 1680s, on land that had been under Danish control as recently as 1658.12 A unique element of the Swedish navy was its recruitment system, which depended heavily on the principle of båtmanshåll, whereby members of the coastal communities were available for naval service at short notice. This system, which was extended in the 1680s, provided crews that were less well trained than those in Western European navies, but this shortcoming was offset by the speed of mobilisation and by the fact that the men were volunteers, with higher levels of motivation.13
Relations between Sweden on the one hand and both the Commonwealth and restored monarchy on the other were generally very warm. Several young Swedish officers gained their early experience in Charles II’s navy. Gustavus, Count Horne (1651–86), served as a volunteer in Sir Thomas Allin’s Straits fleet in 1670 before commanding the Constant Warwick and Henrietta during the third Anglo-Dutch war. He then returned to Sweden, becoming a vice-admiral in 1676 at the age of just twenty-five, although he subsequently came off second best in battle against Niels Juel. Erik Sjöblad (1647–1725), who had studied at Oxford, served as a volunteer in the British fleet in 1664–5 before gaining a command in the Swedish in 1666; he commanded the Mermaid and Bristol during the third war, became an admiral of Sweden in 1676, and ended his career as governor of Gothenburg.14 Sir George Ayscue, a prominent flag officer during the first Anglo-Dutch war, went in the opposite direction. In 1658 he offered his services to King Karl X, and on 26 August he was commissioned as admiral, with a salary of 4000 riksdalers a year. He commanded part of the Swedish fleet during operations in 1659, and returned to England in the following summer.15 Captain William Lee of Whitby, who commanded fireships in 1666 and 1672–4, was in command of a Swedish warship in action against the Dutch in 1676.16 English shipwrights also served in Sweden: Francis Sheldon of Deptford and his assistant Robert Turner entered the Swedish service in 1659, and changed Swedish building methods from the Dutch to the English pattern (encountering fierce resistance in the process). Sheldon built the grandest but most controversial Swedish warship of the age, the 126-gun Kronan of 1668. She was the most heavily armed warship in the world at the time, but she lacked the beam to make her a stable gun platform, and during the battle of Öland in 1676 she capsized and then blew up.17
This statue in Copenhagen commemorates Niels Juel (1629-97), Denmark’s greatest admiral, who learned his trade fighting for the Dutch against the British.
SPAIN
Although the ‘Decline of Spain’ in the seventeenth century has been exaggerated by many historians, the Spanish armada that served Kings Philip IV and Carlos II was plainly no longer the formidable instrument that had served their predecessors, and it suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Dutch in the Downs in 1639. Spain’s severe financial problems meant that it sometimes struggled to get an effective fleet to sea: in 1644 it planned for a fleet of thirty ships, costing over 1,150,000 ducats, and ended up with none, while in the 1660s it usually budgeted for only about twenty to forty ships in service every year.18 Spain had four permanent galley squadrons in the Mediterranean, one based at various ports on the Iberian Peninsula itself and the others at Naples, Sicily and Genoa. These declined in strength during the seventeenth century, and each contained about half a dozen vessels by the 1650s and 1660s.19 Spain also maintained a separate ‘Armada of Flanders’ in the North Sea. This was forced to move to Spain in the 1640s when its base at Dunkirk was lost, but the subsequent recapture of that port led to a revival both of the Armada and of the Dunkirk privateers that had wreaked havoc earlier in the century. These ships made serious depredations against English coastal shipping in the mid-1650s, when perhaps 500 merchant ships were captured, but the final loss of Dunkirk in 1658 effectively ended the careers of both the privateers and the ‘Armada of Flanders’. The latter survived in name alone, based at Ostend, but by the late 1660s it consisted of just one ship.20 Responsibility for naval administration was divided between several departments of state. The Council of War had responsibility for the Iberian Peninsula itself, and this had a sub-committee, the Junta de Armadas, which ran the Atlantic fleet, and another, the Junta de Galeras, which ran the galleys. The Junta de Guerra de Indias had responsibility for the Indies fleet.21
During the first half of the seventeenth century Spanish naval administrators and shipbuilders engaged in a long debate about the relative merits of beam and bulk on the one hand, fine lines and speed on the other. By the 1650s this had effectively been resolved (as it was in Britain) into a preference for larger, beamier ships that would be more effective gun platforms.22 The vast Nuestra Señora de la Concepción of 1,500 tons was launched at Pasajes in 1656, and several ships of 700–1,000 tons were launched in the 1660s, most of them built by Miguel de Oquendo at Usúrbil.23 Other ships were built in Spanish overseas possessions, notably at Havana, where the shipbuilders could exploit local hardwoods. Because they were intended to operate on the high seas, the largest Spanish ships were more heavily built but also more lightly armed than their British equivalents. They also seem to have retained ‘catwalks’ for quarter-galleries long after the fashion died out in other European navies.24
Lower naval administration, and victualling in particular, was undertaken by an elaborate hierarchy of officials known as veedors, proveedors, contadors and pagadors. The process of victualling was particularly problematic in Spain, where transport from the interior to the ports was often long and difficult, and which experienced many years of dearth during the seventeenth century.25 Recruitment, too, was a recurring problem. Unlike their British counterparts, Spanish seamen were almost all pressed, which ensured that desertion was endemic. Consequently, ships were rarely docked or repaired, to minimise the opportunities for desertion, but this inevitably had an adverse effect on their seaworthiness and lifespan.26 There were many exemptions, and independently minded provinces resisted the press ferociously.27 Shortfalls were common, though these were made up to some extent by the recruitment of foreigners from France, Genoa and especially Ragusa.28 Commissioned officers were drawn largely from the ranks of the nobility, and many were soldiers; indeed, the Spanish navy had a parallel hierarchy of officers for soldiers and seamen, and it was usually soldiers who were appointed capitán de maryguerra, the captain of the ship. The highest office of all, that of captain-general of the Armada del Mar Océano, invariably went to aristocrats, such as Francisco de la Cueva, eighth Duke of Albuquerque, a former cavalry general and colonial viceroy who commanded the armada in 1662–4. Nevertheless, a few career seamen still made it to high command.29
Britain was at war with Spain from 1654 until 1660.* The Restoration brought a de facto cessation of hostilities in European waters, if not in the West Indies, where intermittent fighting continued until at least 1663. British support for Portugal in its war of independence, which lasted until 1668, kept relations strained, but they improved in the 1670s and 1680s, when Cadiz and Gibraltar were often used as bases for ships operating against the Barbary corsairs. But tensions occasionally resurfaced, and there were a number of tetchy disputes over the exchange of salutes between British ships and Spanish fleets or ports. Admiral Arthur Herbert had a number of clashes with the authorities at Cadiz, and in the early 1680s Captains Matthew Aylmer and Cloudesley Shovell were both forced to salute Spanish fleets.30
PORTUGAL
Portugal nominally regained her independence from Spain in 1640, when a national revolt led to the proclamation of the Duke of Braganza as King John IV. A war of independence continued until 1668, but Portugal had already re-established itself as a major naval power. In 1650 its navy consisted of thirty-three warships of some 26,000 tons, a force comparable in size to those of Sweden, Denmark and even France. Thereafter it declined in size, until by 1690 it had only 11,000 tons of shipping; a major building programme in the decades that followed rectified the situation.31 The administration of the navy was controlled closely by the crown, and the service operated both warships for service in the Atlantic and large transport vessels for voyages to the East Indies.32 Portugal’s extensive overseas commitments (Brazil was recovered from Spain in 1654) meant that its naval resources were severely stretched, though in 1662 two colonies, Tangier and Bombay, were transferred to England in return for ongoing military assistance against the Spanish. Lisbon was often used by British warships for refitting, cleaning and replenishing stores and as a port of call for ships in transit to or from the Mediterranean.33 At least one Englishman commanded a Portuguese warship in this period: Jacob Reynolds, a Londoner, who was captain of the St Luis in 1661.34
A Van de Velde drawing of a Spanish two-decker of 1664.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)
The entrance to the arsenale of Venice.
(ANN COATS)
MEDITERRANEAN NAVIES: VENICE
The republic of Venice maintained a formidable galley fleet of some sixty vessels throughout the period, but it also increased its number of large square-rigged warships from only two in 1670 to twenty-one by 1690.35 It was engaged in a series of long-running wars against the Ottoman Turks, firstly the Candian War from 1645 to 1669, then the Morea War from 1684 to 1698. The loss of Crete in the former seemed to be amply avenged by the conquest of the Morea in the latter, but ultimately Venice held its new prize for only twenty years. The Venetian republic, la serenissima, had a highly developed and sophisticated system of naval administration typified by the extraordinary Arsenale in Venice itself, an elaborate system of docks, covered slipways and storehouses, manned by some 1,200–2,000 men, that sustained its galley fleet and which survives, more or less intact, to the present day.36 Not surprisingly, Venice fascinated foreign visitors. One of these was Edward Dummer, a Portsmouth shipwright and clerk to the surveyor of the navy, who visited Venice during a Mediterranean voyage in 1682–4. Dummer’s detailed and copious draughts were intended for presentation to King Charles II, and the lessons that he learned in the Venice Arsenale and elsewhere may have provided some of the inspiration that he drew on in the 1690s when he was entrusted with designing and building the entirely new dockyard at Plymouth.37 The king himself was avid for information about the Arsenale and the Venetian galley fleet, and regularly quizzed the ambassador from the doge and senate about such matters.38
MEDITERRANEAN NAVIES: MALTA, GENOA, TUSCANY AND THE PAPAL STATES
Since 1530 Malta had been ruled by the Knights of St John, who had survived a concerted Ottoman effort to expel them during the ‘Great Siege’ of 1565. Defending both Christendom and themselves against further attack was the knights’ chief priority, and to that end they maintained a galley fleet of seven vessels (increased to eight by 1685).39 This force was based at a well-equipped arsenal in Birgu (or Vittoriosa), across the Grand Harbour from Valletta. The galleys were supplemented by some ten to thirty corsair ships, most of which flew the Maltese flag, although others operated under a variety of unlikely colours, such as those of Poland, and over many years they caused ongoing problems for prize courts throughout the Mediterranean. Both the knights and the Maltese corsairs regarded themselves as being in a permanent state of war with Islam, and therefore preyed relentlessly on Ottoman and African shipping. The order’s galleys also took part in combined operations with other Christian states, and played a particularly prominent part as allies of Venice during the latter stages of the Candian war in the 1650s and 1660s. Relations between England and Malta had not always been cordial, and in 1628 the English merchantman Mary Sampson had fought a battle with several of the order’s galleys. Matters improved after the Restoration, partly because the Grand Masters of the order hoped that Charles II and James II and VII would return the British lands that it had lost during the Reformation. A number of friendly diplomatic exchanges took place, Malta was used as the main base for Sir John Narbrough’s fleet in 1675–6, and another fleet, commanded by the Duke of Grafton, called there in 1687.40
Genoa maintained a galley fleet of some ten vessels until 1656 and six thereafter, while both Tuscany and the Papal States maintained about five each.41 Genoa added some galleons in the 1650s, using them to ship Spanish bullion, but they quickly became largely redundant in that role because Dutch and British warships could provide more effective protection for the precious cargoes.42 Relations between Britain and both Genoa and Tuscany were generally good; Genoa was an important entrepot for English ships in the Mediterranean, as was Livorno (Leghorn) in Tuscany, which also frequently served as a victualling and refitting station for British warships. This relationship was reflected in the decision taken in 1670 to build two galleys for the defence of Tangier, one at Genoa and one at Pisa. The Genoa galley was never completed, but the Pisa galley was commissioned as the Margaret, although she proved to be an expensive failure.* There were also occasional encounters between British warships and the papal galley fleet; in 1671 Captain Sir William Jennens had an argument with the Pope’s admiral over the number of salutes to be offered on each side, but it ended amicably with Jennens and the admiral drinking a lengthy round of toasts.43
An Ottoman warship and Dutch ships off an unidentified eastern port.
(PRIVATECOLLECTION)
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The Ottomans maintained a huge force of up to a hundred galleys until the end of the 1660s. This force declined rapidly in the 1670s and 1680s, to sixty in 1676, fifty in 1682, forty in 1684 and perhaps only some thirty vessels by 1690.44 At much the same time, the Ottomans greatly increased their force of square-rigged sailing warships, perhaps quadrupling their numbers between 1680 and 1690.45 The largest vessel in the fleet was the bastarda, the admiral’s flagship. Mavna were ships of the second rank, and kadirga were the galleys. The main Ottoman fleet was divided into two squadrons, one based at Istanbul, the other in the Aegean archipelago and operating from harbours at Rhodes, Chios, Nauplie and Negroponte.46 The ships were manned initially by quotas sent in by the provinces and by drafting gebran-i miri (imperial slaves) and convicts, who served as rowers in the galleys. Of the Christian slaves in the galleys, the majority were prisoners from the Ottoman land campaigns in the Balkans and Black Sea littoral; in 1656 1,087 out of 2,120 were Russians, 189 were Poles and 132 were Hungarians, and there were also as eighty-two Frenchmen, forty-nine Venetians, thirty-nine Spaniards and one Englishman.47 The latter was presumably Thomas Galily, who had been in the Venetian service, was captured by the Turks, served in their galleys for nineteen years, and petitioned in 1671 to become a master’s mate or midshipman in Charles II’s navy.48
These methods of recruitment never even came close to completing the crews, and the shortfall was made up by hiring men. This could be cripplingly expensive for the Ottoman state: the seventy galleys set out in 1648–9 required 17,550 men and the initial drafts brought in only 10,160, so the remainder had to be hired at a cost of 1,500 akçes a month. Even larger fleets of up to 25,000 men were set out in the five years that followed, at the height of the Candian War. This level of expenditure contributed to the gradual switch to less heavily manned and thus more economical sailing ships, but even so, the Ottoman navy made this change long after most of its rivals, notably Venice.49 The main naval arsenal at Istanbul had been greatly expanded in the sixteenth century; the future admiral Thomas Allin, who saw it in January 1661, estimated that it had sixty to seventy covered arches for building galleys, and had at that time twenty-eight galleys on the stocks and another eleven newly launched.50 Other arsenals were maintained at Gallipoli, Suez, Basra and Rusçuk (for the Danube flotilla). Most of the dockyard workers were Greek, but there was no overt racial discrimination in the yards, and they were paid the same as Muslims. This did not apply among the naval crews, where Christians again formed the majority but were paid less than their Muslim counterparts.51
British warships rarely encountered ships of the Ottoman navy proper, although they frequently met (and fought) the ships of the sultan’s notional subordinates, the Barbary regencies of North Africa. The meetings that did occur could be tense affairs. On 20 May 1680 the Leopard and Foresight, sailing through the Aegean towards Tenedos (Bozcaada), encountered an Ottoman galley squadron. Its ‘Admiral Pasha’ demanded to know why the British warships would not salute him and why their captains did not come aboard to present their compliments. The captains (Berry of the Leopard and Killigrew of the Foresight) hastily conferred, fully aware of the strict royal injunction against saluting foreign flags without assurance of a return of the salute. They decided that discretion was the better part of valour and saluted the admiral with eleven guns, ‘for fear they might offer some abuse on our merchants or their ships’, and perhaps also because they were seriously outgunned and outmannedby the galley fleet.52 No return of the salute was received.
* See Part Eleven, Chapter 47, pp236-7.