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The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail
Philip Marsden


The story of Britain’s colourful maritime past seen through the changing fortunes of the Cornish port of Falmouth.Within the space of few years, during the 1560s and 1570s, a maritime revolution took place in England that would contribute more than anything to the transformation of the country from a small rebel state on the fringes of Europe into a world power. Until then, it was said, there was only one Englishman capable of sailing across the Atlantic. Yet within ten years an English ship with an English crew was circumnavigating the world.At the same time in Cornwall, in the Fal estuary, just a single building – a lime kiln – existed where the port of Falmouth would emerge. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Falmouth would be one of the busiest harbours in the world.‘The Levelling Sea’ uses the story of Falmouth’s spectacular rise and fall to explore wider questions about the sea and its place in history and imagination. Drawing on his own deep connection with Cornwall, award-winning author Philip Marsden writes unforgettably about the power of the sea and its ability to produce greed on a piratical scale, dizzying corruption, and grand and tragic aspirations.









Philip Marsden

The Levelling Sea


The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail

Nor is his thought on harp or on ring-taking,

On woman’s delight or on the world’s hope,

Nor on aught else save the tossing of waves:

He ever has longing who hastens on water.

From The Seafarer

(Trans. from the Anglo-Saxon by Jonathan A. Glenn)







To Arthur




List of Contents


Map of Falmouth

List of Illustrations

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part III

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part IV

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Other Books by Philip Marsden

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher




Map







Map of Falmouth (1693).




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


‘Falmouth – To Sir Peter Killigrew, Baronet presented by Captain Greenville Collins (1693)’, engraving, 47 x 58 cms. © Falmouth Art Gallery Collection FAMAG:20003.13

Author’s grandfather. © Philip Marsden

Liberty’s stern. © Philip Marsden

Glasney College. © Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

John and Elizabeth Killigrew, brass commemorative plaque in St Budock church. Reproduced from E.H.W Dunkin, The Monumental Brasses of Cornwall (Spottiswoode & Co., 1882)

Falmouth Haven. From Lord Burghley’s copy of Christopher Saxton’s Maps of the several counties of England. © The British Library Board. Royal MS. 18. D.III

Duke William and his Fleet Cross the Channel to Pevensey, from the Bayeux Tapestry (before 1082), wool embroidery on linen, by French School (11th century). © Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France/With special authorisation of the city of Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

Ship illustration from Matthew Baker, Fragments of English Shipwrightry. Courtesy of the Pepys Library, Cambridge

Killigrew family tree

A map of the river Fal and its tributatries from a survey made in 1597, by Baptista Boazio. From H.M. Jeffrey, Early topography of Falmouth, JRIC vol. IX (1886). Courtesy of Cornwall Centre

Map of Smithwick (1615). From H.M. Jeffrey, Early topography of Falmouth, JRIC vol. IX (1886). Courtesy of Cornwall Centre

The Lizard Light-houses, Cornwall, by William Daniell. © Crown Copyright; UK Government Art Collection

‘Sovereign of the Seas’, by John Payne (1637). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

Thomas Killigrew, by William Sheppard (1650). © National Portrait Gallery, London

‘A View of Falmouth Harbour’, by Hendrick Danckerts (circa 1678). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

Detail from ‘Falmouth – To Sir Peter Killigrew, Baronet presented by Captain Greenville Collins (1693)’, engraving, 47 x 58cms. © Falmouth Art Gallery Collection. FAMAG:2003.13

Peter Killigrew. Frontispiece from Susan E. Gay, Old Falmouth: The Story of the Town from the Days of the Killigrews to the Earliest Part of the 19th Century (Headly Brothers, 1903)

The Killigrew Monument (The Pyramid Arwenack), by Unknown artist (19th century), oil on canvas, 49.5 x 63cms. © Falmouth Art Gallery Collection. FAMAG:1000.42

‘Fatte hogges, pretty oranges, strange crabs’. From Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, vol. III, part I (Hakluyt Society, London 1919)

Avery the Pirate. CRO J/2277. Courtesy of the Cornwall Record Office

John Avery. From Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (Conway Maritime Press, 1998)

Armed guard for the Falmouth to London mail. © Mary Evans Picture Library/Bruce Castle Museum

Arwenacke House, Falmouth, Cornwall, by Unknown artist (1786). Engraver: Sparrow. Publisher: Hooper, S. Engraving, 15.3 x 20cms. © Falmouth Art Gallery Collection. FAMAG:1000.96

Cover of Samuel Kelly’s ‘Life & Voyages’, Vol. III. CRO X92. Courtesy of the Cornwall Record Office

Ship-worm (Teredo navalis). From Sir Charles Lyell, The Student’s Elements of Geology (Murray, 1871)

Jewish Cemetery, Falmouth. © Philip Marsden

Letter from George Croker Fox. By permission of Charles Fox

Books from the old G. C. Fox & Co. offices. © Philip Marsden

‘Sir Edward Pellew: Lord Exmouth’ after Sir Thomas Lawrence (c. 1797). © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

‘View of Falmouth & Sir J Borlase Warren’s prizes entering the harbour’, engraved by Thomas Medland (Bunney & Co., 1800). Courtesy of Cornwall Centre

The Indefatigable capturing La Virginie, by C. Sheppard (publisher) (1797). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

The wreck of the East Indiaman Dutton at Plymouth Sound, 26 January 1796, by Thomas Luny (1821). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

Extract from The Cornwall Gazette and Falmouth Packet, 7 March, 1801. Courtesy of the Courtney Libary (RIC), Truro

Grave of Joseph Emidy. © Philip Marsden

A View of Falmouth and places adjacent, by H. Michell (1806, published). Aquatint, 37 x 77cms. Lent by Cornwall Heritage Trust. © Falmouth Art Gallery Collection. FAMAG:L2000.4

‘Encounter with Robbers Near Kengawar’. From J. S. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia (Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830)

James Silk Buckingham by George Thomas Doo, after Unknown artist (1855), stipple engraving. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Falmouth, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, engraved by T. Lupton. © Tate, London 2011

Liberty’s bow. © Philip Marsden

From Falmouth Guide 1815. Courtesy of Cornwall Centre

Opening of the Falmouth and Truro railway (1863). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

Little Falmouth boatyard. © Philip Marsden



While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologize for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.



PART I




CHAPTER 1


For more than twenty years I have lived beside the sea, in Cornwall, in a house with a square of grass in front of it, a hedge, a road, a low cliff and then a shingle beach sloping to the water. To the north and west, I can see the whitewashed cluster of cottages around the arm of the quay. Out towards the headland, the houses grow larger: a facade of homes built during the great age of sail by trader-captains who exchanged shifting decks for solid ground, prize-money for building-stone, ship-life for a safe contemplation of the horizon. Beyond these are the newer buildings, villas from the 1930s and the 1960s in their rescued patches of land, built also for sea-contemplation but by those who never knew the dog-watch nor the terror of working the tops. On the point itself, like a high-plains beast come down to drink, its silhouette magnificent against the evening sky, stands one of Henry VIII’s castles.

The headland opposite bears no buildings. A stand of pine covers its dipping entry into the sea. Gorse-spotted ground runs back from the point to a wood of holm and sessile oak. These two headlands, the one peopled and the other unpeopled, have been the borders of my life for two decades, open-ended, framing the vast-skied view from my studio window. Between them, stretching away into the distance, is the water.

During these years I have wasted weeks – months probably, when all added up – looking out at it. I have watched its constantly shifting shapes: the silvery slop after a blow, the sparkling mosaic in a winter sun, the slow swells of a southerly gale. I have listened to the rush of a week-long Atlantic storm, to the court of black-headed gulls, to the rummaging oystercatchers and roistering children. On windless nights, the air taut with expectation, I have woken to the rhythm of waves on the beach, each one hissing its message from centuries past, unintelligible and endlessly repeated. And during that time I have wondered this: what cumulative effect does such sea-proximity have? Does it offer anything more than a chance for idle gazing? Does it encourage a sense of restlessness, or complacency? Does it promote some spirit of equilibrium, a daily reminder that all things find their level? Or is its influence ultimately corrupting, creating the illusion of fulfilment always over the horizon, and in shipboard life an opportunity for living free from the constraints of the shore?

I have known this place since I was a child and although we came here for only a few weeks every year, it spurred an engagement with the world that nowhere inland could ever match. It was here that began a string of enthusiasms that filled my boyhood – first the beginnings of a rock collection (serpentine from the Lizard, quartzite pebbles from Samphire Island), then a passion for butterflies and moths (blues and commas and red admirals), birds, fishing and boats, always boats. Later, in my mid-twenties, in the wrong job and confounded by things I craved but could not name, I came here for a few weeks, to this house beside the Cornish sea, armed with one of those comforting and utterly useless phrases of intent – something like: to try to find the calm to work things out.

Calm! I remember the first morning. It was January. I had driven through the night and then watched dawn reshape the familiar form of the bay. I was used to it being full of boats, but there were none now. Instead the waters heaved in a grey easterly, bursting against the harbour wall and flopping back against the swells. Everything was in flux, the sea surface, the rushing clouds, the gulls flitting and arcing in the wind. By the next day, the sky was clear, the wind had gone and the sea was still. For weeks I wrote and walked and wallowed in the weather shifts and felt surprised by each one. But I was aware, too, of a growing sense of urgency, a sea-prompted rage against the rush of time. With the summer coming, I went off to East Africa before returning for another winter writing it up. That set up a pattern that continued for many years, a decade-long odyssey that followed its lone and dusty course through the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Sometimes I spent a whole year away, in Addis Ababa, Jerusalem and Moscow. But always I came back here, to this house beside the sea.

When I married, I thought it must be over, that solipsistic sea-life, but we stayed. We lived here for another ten years and now for various reasons we are moving inland (partly to do with a run-down farmhouse that has stolen our hearts). We are leaving this village, with its face turned to the water, and people say constantly: ‘You will miss the sea.’ And my instinct is to resist. I won’t miss it. But how can I know? If I haven’t been able to understand the presence of the sea, what chance is there of understanding its absence?



One October, in the brief decades between the wars, a young man arrived in this village. He was a Scot. With him was an English wife whose naval connections went back for generations, but it was he who was the yachtsman, he who hired the boat and took it out into the harbour – between the twin headlands. So struck was he by that day, by the village and by the little boat, that he came back the next year, and the year after that, and each year for the next half a century. He brought his children every summer, to sail a small gaff-rigged sloop named Ratona (‘female rat’ in Spanish) and each evening wrote up the day in a series of leather-bound logs; embossed on their plain covers was the single word Ratona. If it was a particularly good day, or the first sail for one of his grandchildren, he would carefully flush the blue ink from his fountain pen and replace it with red.

In one of these logs, from the early 1960s, is this red-letter entry: ‘Philip, two years old, left in the arms of his mother as we rowed aboard, wailed until we gave in.’ I was bundled with the storm-sails in the forepeak and although I do not remember that first time, I do recall the hours spent there later, half sleeping and half waking, looking up at the underside of the foredeck with its white gloss scattered with rosettes of black mould. I can still hear the lap of the water and smell the rough folds of the Egyptian cotton sail-cloth beneath me.

One golden evening when I was 9 or so, my grandfather and I were out alone in Ratona. He handed me the helm. As we beat back and forth across the Carrick Roads, heeling to one of those northerlies that often follows a hot day, he pointed up at the sails and for the first time explained the principle of sailing – the miracle of hull-shape and sail-set that enables a boat, obliquely, to sail towards the wind. I watched him in that moment, with his hand arced against the icing-white mainsail, describing the technique with a cracked softness in his voice that he used only when he spoke of certain people, and of certain periods in his life. I realised then, in a way I could not articulate, that this was as powerful as any human attachment, this love of the sea.

But I know, too, that ‘love of the sea’ is not strictly accurate. Mariners do not love the sea. Love for the sea is something you feel from the shore. You can admire the sea from a deck; you can be drawn to it, awed and terrified by it. If you are out on the water, your affection is not for the shifting mass all around the hull, but for the hull itself. What seamen feel for their vessel is something that elevates it high above the inanimate. It is, said Conrad, ‘profoundly different from the love that men feel for every other work of their hands’.

No other arena of human endeavour has proved quite so challenging as the ocean. It has driven individuals and whole nations to do remarkable things – innovative, courageous and brutal. I have seen plenty of men, and it is almost always men, who are ill at ease on land, dazed, whose shore life is a mess; but put them on a boat, and they are transformed. They become athletes, commanders, strategists, heroes. The skills needed on a boat are unlike any on land, because everything is different at sea.

Take the language. Many think that nautical language is some dialect generated by cultural divergence long ago, in an age when mariners and landsmen rarely came into contact with each other. They think the modern sailor perpetuates it like some quaint outdated code, the lexical equivalent of dressing in eighteenth-century costume. But each sea-term has no translation in land language, because there is no equivalent on land. Every strange force the sea exerts, every quirk of tidal stream and every reef and twist of shoreline, every tackle-snapping, deck-swamping, broaching, pooping, pitch-poling and sinking, and every lone drowning, booms out the same warning: you should not be out here!

Yet it was the ability to build ships for passage, for oceanic voyages, to transport commodities and people, to line their sides with cannon, that shaped the modern world. More than any other agent, ships spread political power, ideas, goods and technology. Naval dominance – achieved first by the Spanish, then the Dutch and the British – decided whose ships went furthest, and who brought the greatest wealth home.

The maritime states’ struggle was one of dominance on the ocean rather than of the ocean. Their success came not by taming the sea but by recognising its essential hostility, and working with its constraints. Basil Greenhill, chronicler of the end of wind-driven shipping, spoke of the age of sail as the ‘the age of collaboration’: the sailing ship represents ‘the height of [man’s] achievement in adapting the existing forces of nature … as opposed to the achievement of changing their direction and function’.

Sometimes reading the accounts of the sea battles of that time, the engagements involving privateers or ships-of-the-line, you have the sense less of the total war of the twentieth century than of some watery medieval tournament, a grand and deadly game in which each side, however pitiless, is bound by natural rules – the no-go areas to windward, the fatal advantage of the weather gage.

In the recent, post-industrial attraction to the wild, a yearning driven above all by the realisation of our distance from it, the sea is rarely mentioned. Yet it is perhaps the only true wilderness. You cannot manipulate the sea, you cannot cultivate it. Efforts to ‘farm’ its margins have in most cases proved disastrous. Fishermen are not agriculturalists; to find their equivalent on land you have to go back beyond written history, to hunter-gatherer groups of the Mesolithic age. The sea teaches the lesson every ecologist urges us to understand about the natural world: that it cares nothing for us, that it will survive us. Try to impose your will upon it and it will destroy you. Swim through it or pass over it in a boat, and you leave not a trace. In time it will, like sand over the works of Ozymandias, close over every brick, every avenue and every last relic of our civilisation.

That is the wisdom of the sea, its essential paradox. It quickens us, extends us, prompts feats of innovation and courage, then washes them all away. No trace remains; man and mountain yield to the levelling force of the sea. In its omnipotence, its beauty and its purity, the sea is the earthly manifestation of the divine. Building a vessel and crossing a body of water is a transcendent achievement, and afterwards nothing in this life quite compares.

During my first winter on the Fal estuary, my grandfather would telephone frequently from his home in Hampshire. He was now 90. He wanted to know exactly what the weather was doing, about the sea state, what ships had been going in and out of Falmouth. No detail was too trivial. Spring tides or neaps? Is the ferry running? He examined the weather maps and asked: has the wind backed yet down there? Has the cold front passed over you? He quizzed me about all those boats he knew, the people of the shore, the fishermen and part-time gardeners, the summer sailors and retired boat-builders. And then one storm-dark December afternoon, he rang and asked me: would I be kind enough to do something for him? Would I go up the river, have a look at Ratona?

In the dusk I walked through the cliff-top fields to where Ratona was wintering. She stood on legs at the rim of a tidal pool. Her bowsprit pushed up towards the serpentine roots of a group of Monterey pines; behind them was St Just churchyard, a mossy necropolis of slate and granite headstones. Two mooring warps looped out from Ratona’s stern, down into the ebbing tide. Twice a day the water rose and fell around her, keeping her boards tight with moisture. The church clock’s chimes rang out across the creek every quarter of an hour.

Climbing down to the muddy foreshore, I ran my hand along the curve of her waterline – the green topsides and scum-crusted red of her anti-fouling. I looked at the chain-plate, and the place where her mast should be and the winter cover stretched down tight over the ridge-pole, and was overwhelmed by a sense of the vanished past, of a hundred half-remembered scenes – squinting up the mast to check the lift of the cotton luff, gazing at the lee gunwale as the water rushed past it, rowing ashore in some hidden cove and looking at her at anchor, or lying again in the forepeak, cushioned by sail-cloth. With a squelch, I yanked my boots out of the mud, and climbed back up to the churchyard. The winter wind combed through the pines. It was almost dark.

I rang my grandfather that evening and told him Ratona was in fine shape. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s splendid …’ His words sounded distant. Just two weeks later, at his Hampshire home, he developed pneumonia and died.

When I was very young, I thought there were two grandfathers, one in Hampshire, in woollen tie and leather-elbowed jacket, listening to music in his book-lined study. The other one lived in Cornwall, and was wilder, and more adventurous, and more appealing to a young boy. He wore sea-boots and salt-crusted trousers; he draped sails from the banisters to dry; he tinkered with tackle and rope, rowed his dinghy standing up. The memorial service for the first took place in a flint-walled church near the River Test, a dark-suited parade of family and surviving friends. It was several weeks later when there was a ceremony for the other grandfather. His ashes were brought to St Just. Only three of us stood with the vicar at the graveside. The wind sighed in the Monterey pines. We placed his ashes among the roots. Just yards below him, as if he was some Norse hero buried with his boat, lay Ratona.






My grandfather.




CHAPTER 2


I have been away for a few weeks and now I go down to the water. Summer rain has left my upturned dinghy with green fur around the gunwales. I scrub it down, haul it to the beach and into the shallows. I sense the sudden lightness as the stern lifts and bobs free. The rowlocks clunk-clunk into the silence of the Percuil river. On the far side, beneath a flocculent strip of woods, lies the 21-foot harbour launch I bought some years ago with a friend. In the 1920s she was built as a liberty-boat, a solid workhorse of a naval craft, used to ferry men and supplies around Chatham harbour. Traditionally these launches took sailors ashore, from ship-bound service to shore-bound freedom – hence the name. For me, it has exactly the opposite meaning.

In the rounded clinker sides, the spade-like rudder, the steep and solid stem, I like to imagine centuries of maritime evolution. I picture the shipwright between the wars, circled by fresh-faced groms, instructing them in laying the keel, fixing the garboards, conjuring the lines outwards and upwards with each riveted strake, working as countless generations had before him, without plans, with no more than a practised eye and a couple of notions – to make the bilge a little deeper this time, the quarter a little fuller, and having the instinctive means to do it. A War Department registration is carved into the transom: WD 347. We call her Liberty.






Liberty’s stern.

She is the last moored boat, at the far edge of a forest of spars. Beyond is a crescent of wooded shoreline and beach that now, towards the bottom of the tide, dries to mud. One or two punts lie on their sides, the sag of their painters hung with fronds of channelled wrack and eel grass. I am always amazed by the stillness of this place. Even in a rising gale, with gusts racing down from the slopes to scurry across the water, with the halyards beating out warnings from the masts in the river, the pool retains a calm so intense that I often sit here long after I have packed away the gear, engulfed by its presence.

It is thought that this small inlet was among the earliest-used anchorages of the Fal, the natural refuge of a ship groping in from the storms of the Western Approaches, running for the lee of St Mawes harbour, round into the mouth of the Percuil, then round again to settle on its side in this muddy cul-de-sac – tin ships from the Gironde, Breton traders, and those who brought no worldly goods, who kept within them no thought of return to their native ports. Long before the estuary’s main shoreside settlements had appeared, monastic communities were measuring out their days here, with prayer and fishing and contemplation.

This then is how history begins on the shores of the Lower Fal, with groups of beehive huts and shaggy men half attached to the world, who immersed themselves up to the neck in the freezing water and pressed songs of devotion from their chattering lips. They were holy sea-wanderers, peregrini, who in the name of Christ took to the open water in the post-Roman centuries, trusting less to the rigours of seamanship than to divine providence. The sea was their desert, a blank alternative to the troubled world, and retreating to it an enactment of the reckless example of St Anthony. But the waters of north-western Europe are a harsher place by far than the wastes of Egypt. How many perished, drowned or starved in the great flat-horizoned emptiness, we shall never know. In the Fal, salvation was a labyrinth of wooded creeks, tidal waterways that pushed up far into the hinterland. They left their names in a series of creek-side churches. The one here is St Anthony’s – the dedication honouring not the father of Christian monasticism, but the Cornish royal martyr, Entenius.

I work the mooring-chain over the samson post and watch it splash into the water. The weight of the chain as it sinks tugs the mooring buoy away from the boat. It is always a moment of anxiety, the severing of attachment. At the same time, Liberty’s bows are caught by the wind and blown further from the retreating buoy, down towards the shore. I jump inboard, jab the engine into gear, and head out of the river.

It is a bright day. A brisk westerly is driving gun-puffs of cloud across a clear sky. The water is flecked white, with short wind-turned seas that set up a barrelling motion in the boat. I lean back against the tiller. I can feel it in the small of my back. I can correct the lurch of the bows with the slightest movement. The village looks different from the water; all these years here and I’m still surprised by that: how seeing the land from the sea transforms it so completely.

Beyond St Mawes Castle, the estuary opens out, running several miles inland. I can see distant woods and fields and a few dot-clusters of white houses. Between them stretches the wide basin of the Carrick Roads, agreed by all who have written about it for hundreds of years to be one of the finest natural harbours in the world. I bring Liberty in past the town of Falmouth. The early sun lights up the town’s terraces, each one following its own contour-line along the slopes, a stadium crowd of a thousand windows. Against the outer arm of the docks lies a rusting stone-barge named Charlie Rock. Towering over it is a Monrovia-registered tanker waiting for repairs. High up on the rail, a tiny figure raises its hand to wave down at me. As I pass in under the stern, the dock opens out. So close to the houses, the ships look out of scale.

Until as late as the seventeenth century, there was no town here. There was nothing – no docks, no quays. Where the wharves are were shingle beaches and mudflats. A sandbar enclosed a swampy lagoon where the National Maritime Museum Cornwall now stands. The slopes above the low cliff were open country, copsed and dotted with furze. The town centre itself was a bog. (It is still known as ‘the Moor’, a place where swampy land meets the tide.)

Yet within a century and a half, Falmouth was one of the great ports of the fast-expanding world – a global thoroughfare of war-news and innovation, whispered espionage and gold bullion, its quayside crowded with footsore explorers, high-worded gospellers bound for the New World. The view from the wharves was a pitch-pine, hempen jungle of yards and sheets, masts and ratlines. The decks were so numerous, it was said, that you could walk from one side of the harbour to the other on them.

The steep arc of Falmouth’s growth reflects that of the era of sail, those ship-driven centuries that followed the Middle Ages. From the periphery of Europe, England emerged as a maritime power with such suddenness that it surprised her own people as much as it did her enemies. In the far south-west of the British Isles, Falmouth sprang from its bog with the same brash assurance. The Reformation prompted technical, political and cosmological changes that revolutionised mobility and fostered the restless urge to seek far-off lands. Falmouth itself was like a colony, an empty shoreline without a past, where the rootless and the hopeful could settle as equals.

Until that time, the Fal estuary had three ports. Each lay at the top of a long, tidal reach. Any settlement further downstream attracted the marauders who peopled the open seas and liked to burn the places they visited. Of the three, the most exposed was Penryn, a couple of miles up river from the site of Falmouth, where a chain could be stretched across the creek to repel incomers.

It is approaching high water when, later that day, I round the last bend in the Penryn river and see the ancient coinage town spread out over two valleys. Weekend yachts, day trawlers, houseboats and punts bob at the fringes of the creek. Alongside them lie semi-submerged hulks and wrecks, and the project-hulls of would be ocean-crossers, part-completed or long abandoned. I leave Liberty at Exchequer Quay and in sea-boots go up to the main road, standing to wait for the beep-beep-beep of the pedestrian lights before crossing. I follow the Antre river through the lower town and with the sun low find myself standing in the middle of an empty municipal field. The grass has just been cut. The trimmings lie in stripes at my feet, matted by the morning’s rain.

In the thirteenth century the Bishop of Exeter was visited in a dream by Thomas à Becket. Come to this place, he was told, to the marsh known as Polthesow, Cornish for ‘arrow-pool’, so named because hunted beasts would flee into its waters and disappear. Build an altar there and in that place ‘marvellous things’ shall be seen. The bishop drained the swamp and raised Glasney church based on his cathedral at Exeter and a full two-thirds of its size. It helped that the land at Penryn, its woods and pastures, for some way inland and for miles south along the shore towards the open sea, belonged to the diocese of Exeter, as did all the money-spinning rights of the coast – the fundus, oysterage, shrim-page and right of wreck.

A college was established, and a constitution drawn up, a wise and prudent document that proposed a presiding council of ‘13 discreet persons of the more substantial sort’. Thereafter at night, and ‘testified by the neighbours’, a heavenly light was often seen at Glasney glowing high above the heads of the holy men of the college gathered to praise the name of God. Marvellous things indeed.

Glasney College was soon one of the largest ecclesiastical centres of Cornwall. As the English state pressed westwards, on the tide of its own language, the college became a great promoter of Cornish. Around it, the port of Penryn prospered. Tin and stone were loaded on its strand. Hogsheads of salted pilchard left for the Continent. The fortified walls of the college offered protection from the sea, as did the barrage of stakes and stone and chain put across the river.

Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as sea trade increased around the coast, and as the coastal peoples of Atlantic Europe became more restless, so Penryn grew into one of the busiest ports in Cornwall. It was a frequent point of refuge. In 1506 King Philip and Queen Juana of Castile sheltered there for several weeks: ‘We are in a very wild place,’ wrote the nervous Venetian ambassador with them, ‘in the midst of a most barbarous race.’ Yet even in the Middle Ages, the sea had produced a cosmopolitan settlement. In 1327, half of Penryn’s population was described as ‘foreign’, Breton for the most part. As a language, English was the third or fourth most used. The college and the port complemented each other perfectly – ships coming to the Fal for shelter were drawn to Glasney, while their victualling needs produced a thriving commercial centre.






Glasney College.

But in time something of the worldly success of Penryn appeared to seep into Glasney College’s inner rooms. By the sixteenth century its officials were being described as ‘men of great pleasures, more like temporal men than spiritual’. The provost had little time for his ministry, preferring to ‘drink and joust’. Henry VIII’s Star Chamber was told how he ‘doth slay and kill with his spaniels, some days two sheep, some days three and divers times five in a day’. The college’s shoreside position, which had helped it to grow, now counted against it: ‘By reason of the open standynge of the same on the sea,’ gloated the Crown Commissioners shortly after Henry VIII’s death, ‘by tempest of weather felle into suche decaye.’

Yet it was Henry and not the weather that was to blame. Glasney College survived the dissolution of the monasteries, but was prey a few years later to the same covetous forces. Lead was peeled from its vaulted roofs and shipped to the Isles of Scilly to use in fortifications. Piece by piece the buildings were broken up. The bells were sold off. The stone was removed. For generations, vestments and treasures had been bequeathed to the college by wealthy men hoping for prayers in perpetuity. Now copes of green and crimson velvet were bundled up and taken off, as were bolts of cloth-of-gold, albs and chasubles, six altar-cloths of black, gold, green, blue and red velvet, and one of ivory satin, embroidered with images of roses and Our Lady, a bell with a handle of gold and red silk, breviaries, tabernacles and missals, and a piece of paper painted with the five wounds of the Saviour.



Standing alone in that playing field, I look around for traces of the college buildings. A panel-board shows the points at which archaeologists have recently conducted a series of digs. The dotted lines of their trenches are set against a plan of the church, and I am struck by its great size. Glancing away from the board, I picture the nave and aisles peopled by tiny figures, raising their heads and whispering – the grateful storm-survivors, passengers and merchants from the Low Countries, from France and Spain and Portugal.

Glasney was a part of that network of ports and havens and anchorages which for thousands of years had been not so much on the land-fringes of European countries, as on the edge of a loose nation linked by the sea. As they grew, sovereign states superseded many of those maritime links. Of centuries of ship-voyages, little evidence remains. Glasney’s archaeological digs turned up floors and tiles and fragments of worked stone. But the digs themselves have now been covered up, the portable finds removed, and there is nothing on this late summer day, not a bump or hollow or mound, to break the green of the empty acre.

Afternoon is sliding into evening. I return to Liberty and head out into the river. The tide has turned, and with it the moored boats have swung round to face the ebb. Somewhere here – between the wharves and warehouses to starboard, the woods to port – stretched the barrier that had protected Penryn and Glasney. It was the chain, and the narrow approach to Penryn, that enabled its rise during the Middle Ages, but it was the chain too, the closing out of the sea, that helped shut Penryn off from the bold and expansive age that was coming.




CHAPTER 3


One day a few weeks later, I row out to Liberty, fold up the cover and pump the bilges. The summer yachts have thinned out, laid up in the sheltered corners of the creeks. The shoreside oaks are still green, but something tired now shows in their foliage. A few hundred yards to the south, the Victorian facade of Place Manor rises from its sweep of lawn and gravelled drive. Almost completely hidden behind it is the much older church of St Anthony’s, its tower just clearing the manor’s roof like the mast of a sunken ship.

I drop the mooring and head out towards St Mawes Castle. From the far headland rises Pendennis Castle, and the two stand guard over the estuary’s approaches. When the religious community around St Anthony’s church was dissolved during the Reformation, the buildings were pulled down and the stone barged across the harbour to build St Mawes Castle. With a neat circularity, the castle had been commissioned to oppose the threat of papal retribution that followed the Reformation and the Dissolution.

In Falmouth, I moor up at the pontoon and walk through the town, over the railway, through a just-ploughed field to the hilltop church of St Budock. According to the boast on the service board, the church was founded in AD 473–1,000 years before the first buildings of Falmouth appeared above the strand. Budoc himself was one of the greatest of the sea-soaked saints of the Celtic Church. Venerated in Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, his story was carried between them, embellished by a thousand tellings. On Brittany’s hazardous shoreline, he has been called ‘le patron de ces côtes’ and in the miracles of his life, you can sense the particular licence of maritime myth: an adventure from the start, beginning in the middle of the English Channel, where Budoc was born in a bobbing barrel. Shaped by the winds, his earthly mission left him here for several years, above the Fal estuary, with his small group of monks, before he again took to the Channel, floating to Brittany in a stone coffin.

The church interior is damp and dark. Morning light falls through the high altar window, flashing on and off as clouds slide across the sun. A harvest tableau stands in a niche – bread rolls and a vase of poppies and cornflowers. Kneeling in front of the altar rail, I take the edge of the runner and roll it back beneath the chancel, revealing a grid of terracotta tiles. In the centre, set into stone, glints the panel I am looking for:

HERE LYETH IOHN KILLIGREW ESQVIER, OF ARWENACK …

AND ELIZABETH TREWINNARD HIS WIFE … GOD TOOK

HIM TO HIS MERCY THE YEARE OF OUR LORD 1567 …

Above the inscription, mottled with age, lie the couple’s brass images. I bend to examine them more closely. No trace of human softness crosses their faces, none of the flamboyance of the later Elizabethans. They are standing in prayer. Framed by a wimple, Elizabeth Killigrew’s expression is stern and manly. John Killigrew’s hair and beard are cropped short and he is dressed in armour – vambrace and breastplate, and sword trailing to the ground.

Yet these two can rightly be called the grandparents of the port of Falmouth. With their ten children, they produced a dynasty that spread far beyond Cornwall, a line of mariners and politicians, pirates and felons, diplomats and courtiers who played a part in succesive royal courts, while here in their patch of shoreside territory, they carved a fief from open fields and cliffs, and from a minor estate a port connected to the furthest points of the known world.






John and Elizabeth Killigrew.

The family was not originally from the coast. The small farm of Killigrew – meaning ‘nut-grove’ (not ‘grove of eagles’ as is often supposed) – was located to the north of Truro, half a day’s ride from the open sea. (Long after the Killigrews had gone from the town at Falmouth, the yard at Killigrew could still be seen. Not until the late 1990s was it finally destroyed, when teams of yellow earth-movers and diggers parked in it while they reshaped the land for the Trispen bypass.) It was through marriage, at about the turn of the fourteenth century, that the Killigrews became associated with the manor of Arwenack. From then on their name crops up in the records of Glasney College – as does that of John’s wife, Trewinnard. But while Penryn and Glasney prospered, safe behind their chain-barrage, Arwenack remained of little importance.

For years, the Killigrews lived the provincial life of Cornwall’s gentry, those families who owned land around the county, who married each other and visited each other in an atmosphere of leisure and conviviality. ‘A gentlemen and his wife,’ wrote Richard Carew, ‘will ride to make merry with his next neighbour, and after a day or twain those two couples go to a third, in which progress they increase like snowballs.’

With the breaking-up of the church estates and the building of the two castles at St Mawes and Pendennis, power shifted on the shores of the Fal. Like a crab with a new shell, John Killigrew crept out from under his rock and snapped up much of Glasney’s land. Soon he controlled the tithes of sixteen parishes. By buying up the south bank of the Helford, he controlled most of that river too. The land for Pendennis Castle was leased from him. Two of his sons received lucrative commissions for overseeing its building. When the castle was complete, John became its first captain and remained so for the rest of his life.

Pendennis Castle made a little king of John Killigrew, protecting Arwenack from marauding ships and fortifying his status with Crown bombards and perriers, pyramids of stone shot and keep-walls 11 feet thick. He joined that class of Tudor men who grew suddenly wealthy from the easy pickings of church land. Killigrew was particularly fortunate: not only did he have an enlarged estate and a brand-new castle, he also had the sea. The combination gave him control of one of the best anchorages in the land, and a power that was constrained by little more than the laws of wind and tide.

When Queen Mary came to the throne in 1554, and began to reverse the heretical advances of the Protestants, John Killigrew at once involved himself in the insurrection against her. Having no real authority as far west as the Fal, the new queen was forced to try to win him over. She reappointed him to his post at Pendennis. Her Privy Council confirmed his command of the castle, which he must ‘diligently, faithfullie and truly kepe, save and defende with all his power, connyng and industrie’. He and his sons did nothing diligently, faithfully or truly. They continued to plot against the Queen. Two were implicated with Sir Peter Carew in Wyatt’s rebellion. They fled to France where Henry II was happy to provide them with ships to attack the Spanish vessels of Mary’s husband, Philip II. Along with a number of other families from the Cornish and Devon coasts, the Killigrews conducted an ongoing campaign against Philip’s shipping in the Channel. Their small-time piracy, the habit of centuries among seafarers of Channel shores, became more political. The maritime historian Kenneth Andrews identifies a shift in motive at about this time: ‘the gentry took the lead, especially the west country families connected with the sea, for whom Protestantism, patriotism and plunder became virtually synonymous … the Cornish Tremaynes and Killigrews embarked on an unofficial war with Spain.’

Back and forth across the Channel the Killigrews sailed – harrying the Spanish and taking Protestant rebels into exile in France. During the hot summer of 1556 – heat which drove the frail queen to her bed – Mary’s Privy Council lost patience with the pirates. At Arwenack, John Killigrew was arrested and with his heir, also John, brought up to London. The two were thrown into the Fleet Prison. At the same time, in the Queen’s name, a small squadron was sent into the Channel to round up rebel ships. The force was commanded by the veteran pirate-hunter, Sir William Tyrell.

Tyrell had immediate success. Soon, just above the low-water mark at Wapping Stairs, six pirates swung from gibbets. He went to sea again and, according to the Acts of the Privy Council, captured ‘ten English pirate vessels’. One of the commanders escaped to Ireland in a small boat, where he was killed by local men as he struggled ashore. Another – who had escaped Tyrell for years – was Peter Killigrew.

Of all the five sons of Arwenack Manor, Peter was the best-known sea-rover. The Venetian ambassador in London described him as ‘an old pirate, whose name and exploits are most notorious, and he is therefore in great repute and favour with the French’. At first, Peter Killigrew escaped again, was recaptured, tried to stuff 150 crowns into the skirts ‘of his woman’ and was finally taken in chains to London. Twenty-four of the ordinary seamen were hanged at Southampton, and another seven at Wapping.

Peter was not killed at once. He and his brother were taken to the Tower where they later alleged they were tortured. From their confession comes a tale that resonates down the ages with an authenticity more convincing than the J. M. Barrie, dyed-in-the-wool brigand. Peter Killigrew was weary. He had known too many night chases, too many hostile landfalls, too many deceptions and betrayals. All he wished to do, he now explained, like any self-respecting mariner of the times, was to sail to the gold mines of Guinea and return with enough to retire on. He would then, he claimed, buy a house in Italy and never again put to sea.

By this time, his father had been released from the Fleet, and promised to pay compensation to anyone wronged by his miscreant sons. With their marine skills and position, the Killigrews were deemed ‘useful’. Peter Killigrew was put in charge of the Jerfalcon, part of a naval squadron active in the war against France. John and his eldest son returned to Cornwall. Within a year Elizabeth was queen and John Killigrew’s Protestant fiefdom, centred on Arwenack and Pendennis Castle, was once more in sympathy with the Crown. Pugnacious seamen like the Killigrews were no longer outlaws but set to become the very drivers of the new regime.

During the later years of his life, John Killigrew amassed a sizeable fortune. As governor of Pendennis, he continued to use the waters of the lower Fal to his advantage, in line with many of Elizabethan England’s most colourful ventures, seizing chances as they came, exploiting the legal ambiguity and anonymity of the sea. Even so, his maverick methods infuriated the state. Throughout the mid-1560s they received reports of his piracy and ‘evill usage in keeping of a castell’.

John’s son Peter may genuinely have intended to retire, to reach Guinea, and buy a house in Italy. But it was easier to carry on doing what he did best, using the Killigrew lands on the Helford river as a base for his dubious trading. Helford – nicknamed Stealford – became known as a safe haven for pirates, a place to offload and distribute plunder without risk. The Killigrews operated their own mini-state around Falmouth. When an envoy of the Privy Council was sent to Arwenack to claim 184 rubies stolen by Peter, John Killigrew – then in his seventies – reached for his sword and threatened to stick him.

With sea-gained bounty, the elderly John Killigrew set about rebuilding Arwenack Manor. Carts brought granite from Mabe quarry and, for ornament, barges of free stone from along the coast at Pentewan. Gables and high chimneys multiplied out from a three-storey central tower. A line of battlements ran along the top of the banqueting hall. A courtyard was enclosed on three sides, while on the fourth it opened onto a water-gate with a short canal dug out from the marshy ground of Bar Pool. John Killigrew’s expansion of Arwenack, according to the family’s chronicler, made it ‘the finest and most costly house in Cornwall’. The bill rose towards £6,000. But just as the last fittings were put in place, in November 1567, John Killigrew died.

The sun flashes again on his brass likeness. Half-armoured, he looks every inch the late-Tudor strongman, his stance and expression set hard against the centuries between us. Opportunistic, fiercely Protestant, equating any sense of authority with the priestly rule of the past, he found in the sea an arena in which to exercise his will with impunity, a new breed of man, a semi-licensed rogue as yet untamed, clanking out of the Middle Ages to help lay the foundations of modern Britain.




CHAPTER 4


From the decades following John Killigrew’s death comes one of the earliest and most striking images of Falmouth. Buried deep in the British Library, under ‘highly restricted’ access, the picture is bound into a volume of Christopher Saxton’s maps of England’s counties – known as the first English atlas. The volume was collated by Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state Lord Burghley during the 1570s – a period which happened also to see the most explosive progress in the history of English seafaring.

In the hush of the Manuscripts Room, I rest Burghley’s volume on a foam cradle. I raise its pasteboard cover. The pages turn with a stiff and biblical crinkling. Saxton’s Atlas reveals an England of crimson villages, rivers of heavenly blue, well-spaced market towns, lime-coloured hills and a jagged coastline back-shaded with gold. Its pretty pages, each showing its bordered shire, speak of the merits of regional order, and echo Burghley’s own tireless efforts to achieve it.

Gathered in among them, Folio 9 is of a wholly different character, less stylised and much more exuberant. An inlay of vellum in a paper frame, the folio has on its reverse the title ‘Map of Falmouth Haven’. The words are written in a curator’s pencil, lightly marking the paper, like a whisper.

I turn the page and stand back. ‘Map’ is not right. Folio 9 is a painting, a wonderful vista of greens and yellows and browns, without symbol or key, without abstraction, with none of the functionality of Saxton’s counties. A half-inch rim of black ink runs around the map’s edge, sharpening its earthy tones. The image itself is a bird’s-eye view of the familiar shoreline of the lower Fal – the view of a lark somewhere high above Feock. It is early summer. The hedges are full. Woods and copses are thick with new growth, mounds of fresh-cut hay dry in the fields. You can sense the air’s fly-buzz and gorse-scent, follow the winding lanes, and feel beneath your feet the soft-grass ridge between the cart-furrows. But the image is really about the water: from almost every slope stretch the tidal tributaries and the pale-blue estuary of the Carrick Roads.

One of the first things you notice about the Burghley Map of Falmouth Haven is that it is upside down. The traditional south–north orientation is reversed. It does not, as you expect, start out at sea and guide you up from the Lizard towards the sheltering channel of the Fal. Folio 9 brings you in from the north, from the land, leads the gaze up and outwards into open space. Falmouth is no longer merely a bolt-hole for ships, or a handy aperture for the kingdom’s enemies. It is here presented as a conduit to the empty horizon. The overall effect is an urging, a siren cry: leave behind the old terrestrial certainties! Join in the great sea-based bonanza!






Detail from the Burghley Map of Falmouth Haven.

A glow of patriotism radiates from the manuscript. The castles appear jaunty and solid. Over the lower blockhouse of Pendennis rises a St George flag so large that it looks set to topple the little tower. From the castle itself flutters a Royal Standard of impossible size – peer closely and you can see the gilded symbols flashing like tiny jewels: six rampant passant lions, one rampant, and the curves of the Irish harp.

By contrast, the ancient town of Penryn, with its outdated, pre-Reformation dominance, is shunted to the bottom of the map. The cross-river chain is shown, and below it the remains of Glasney College. Years earlier, before the Norman Conquest, Penryn had been one of Cornwall’s largest population centres, second only to the county town, Launceston. Here it is almost ignored, pressed to the margins, where four centuries of thumb-grasps and page-turnings have flaked the paint so that the town now looks to be in the midst of a snowstorm.

Where Falmouth will emerge during the coming century there is just shale and shingle in the very slight recess of Smithwick Creek, and on the cliff above, open ground. Only one building is drawn, a low shed marked lym-kiln. The great port has its lowly origins here: on an empty beach, in the swampy ground above, and in the cob-walls of a small lime-kiln.

Dominating the picture, dwarfing the ancient town of Penryn, is Arwenack Manor, the most opulent and expensive house in Cornwall. Placed between Pendennis Castle above and Penryn below, the house appears in style to be the child of both. With its battlements and towers, it has taken on the martial character of Pendennis. But in the courtyards, the mullioned windows and the long facade, the vast manor carries an ironic resemblance to Glasney College whose destruction allowed the Killigrews to create it. Aglow with Protestant triumphalism, surrounded by its neatly fenced demesne land, it fills the map with its worldly fortitude.

Such is the precedence given to Arwenack that the whole image suggests a piece of propaganda for the Killigrew family. It is usually assumed that Burghley himself commissioned the map, yet although he bound other manuscript maps into Saxton’s Atlas, Falmouth is the only large-scale depiction of a harbour. Whether he asked for it or whether it was presented to him unsolicited is not clear.

The Killigrew family and Lord Burghley were certainly known to each other. Burghley would have been aware of old John, Pendennis’s first governor, his sudden rise, his imprisonment, his pirate son Peter and all the nefarious sea-tales of the family. But he also knew more directly, from court, two of the sons who were rather better behaved. William Killigrew was an MP, who in his career represented Cornish constituencies in a total of seven Parliaments (no Cornish family of the time provided more MPs than the Killigrews). William was also Groom to Elizabeth I’s Bed Chamber. His brother Henry Killigrew was even closer to the Queen’s inner circle, by turns Teller of the Exchequer and Surveyor of the Armoury, and her chosen envoy on a number of vital missions to Scotland, France and the Netherlands. But the closest link was that Henry Killigrew and Lord Burghley were married to sisters, the famous daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (a third was married to Sir Nicholas Bacon).

An upbringing in the rowdy atmosphere of Arwenack, with its visiting ships, its Huguenot rovers and Dutch sea-beggars, had prepared Henry Killigrew for an adventurous political career. He spent Mary’s reign in exile and perfected his French and Italian. He was not a tall man and acquired a permanent limp from a wound picked up in the siege of Rouen in 1562. When he was released, and Rouen relieved, it seemed Elizabeth and England were in the ascendant. Henry Killigrew wrote to his wife’s brother-in-law, Lord Burghley (then William Cecil): ‘God prosper you as He has begun, and inspire her Majesty to build up the temple of Jerusalem.’

Burghley has annotated each of his county maps with a list of its ‘justices’. There is a sense of him trying to order the kingdom, to catalogue it for better governance – or any governance. In Mortlake, the mystic John Dee was building a mythical Jerusalem for his queen, while Burghley, the great administrator, was assembling the more solid building-blocks for a civil state.

But Lord Burghley and the Killigrews of Arwenack were also at odds. In their respective attitudes to the sea, each represents a distinct thread of English interests which, when wound together, stretched taut through the coming centuries. One was legitimate, using the sea for the collective good; the other was illegal, exploiting it for private gain. One produced the Royal Navy, the other spun off into piracy. Each developed seamanship and a certain arrogance at sea, contributing in its own way to the victories of Drake, Cochrane and Nelson.

Burghley was among those who understood that the country’s future – indeed its survival – lay in naval strength. He took personal control of the political aspects of the Royal Navy, and spent the 1560s and 1570s building up capacity, commissioning surveys of shipping and mobilising. He had a great love of geography and his copy of Saxton’s Atlas also includes a map of the coast of Norway, Sweden and northern Russia. He was famous for his meticulous knowledge of the places of Europe. Yet he himself left British shores only once in his life, for a brief visit to the Low Countries.

The rise in piracy, represented by the Cornish Killigews, angered him; fish were the rightful yield of the seas, not plunder. Those who lived by the coast should spread nets to feed the people, not sail off on prize-grabbing adventures. But since the Reformation, and the relaxation of fast days, demand for fish had shrunk: to eat meat on a Friday, to roll your jaws over bloody slabs of beef, became an affirmation of Protestant faith, and it left fishermen with a shrinking market. They stowed their nets and joined privateers. To try to induce them back, Burghley – still William Cecil at the time – introduced a government bill to make twice-weekly fish-eating compulsory. His measure was jeered in the House for its Popish implications, and dubbed ‘Cecil’s Fast’.

The Killigrews on the other hand saw the sea as a source of personal gain. Arwenack became a hub for the illicit side of seaborne enterprise, for privateering, a practice which took off during the last decades of Tudor rule. Elizabethan ‘privateering’ was, strictly, distinct from the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century practice which spawned the term, but it offered the same dubious licence to attack foreign ships as redress for lost cargoes. In the sixteenth century, this licence was provided through a ‘letter of marque’. If a merchant or captain was robbed of his goods by a foreign power, he was given a chit which allowed him to snatch compensation in kind from any ships of that power. Often the letters themselves were exchanged for money, and often not held at all. In practice, privateering was little more than semi-sanctioned piracy.

To Burghley, it made a mockery of the rule of law, and jeopardised relations with other nations, particularly Spain. But with hindsight, the spirit of privateering characterises the Elizabethan age – the ship as the vessel of the wildest hopes, the heady myth-making, the heroic sea voyages, the failure of the Spanish Armadas. Privateering also had one great practical benefit: it proved the nation’s greatest school for maritime skills.

The countless and nameless figures who manned the privateers learned the advantages of the modern rig with its auxiliary sails. They learned to use the mesh of halyards and lifts and sheets. They learned how to charge the guns with volatile serpentine powder, and how to damp the recoil. And they learned something far more important, that despite the risks and discomforts, a successful foray into the Channel, or the taking of a Spanish prize, could bring greater reward than a lifetime of toil. The sea and quick wealth become part of a powerful association for coastal communities, brought together in the arts of seamanship.

Life on board a privateer was brutal and anarchic, lacking either the hierarchical order of Spanish ships or the fierce discipline of the later Royal Navy. Privateers were mutual enterprises, operated on the same basis as fishing boats, with the crew receiving no wages but reaping a third of the takings. They would coerce the captain if they disagreed with him – ‘shite on thy commissions!’ – or simply mutiny. There were open fights. The ships were often shockingly overmanned and under-victualled. Scurvy and the flux laid whole companies low; there were instances of starvation. But when a prize was sighted, all disputes were forgotten. The men took to their stations, gaining the weather-gage, firing on the prize not to sink it but to disable it. With small arms – fowlers and murderers, muskets and calivers – the ship was boarded. If booty was not revealed by searching, it was discovered by persuasion – wrapping ropes around the head, or bowstrings around the genitals.

As well as rewarding those with sea-skills, such enterprise encouraged private investment in ships. By the end of the century, the English merchant fleet outnumbered the Queen’s own by twenty to one. The ships landed up to £200,000 a year in illicit prize money, establishing new fortunes, no longer tied up in land, as liquid as the sea that yielded them, a fund of robber capital that grew and grew, doubling by the decade, funding more ships and more ventures, and swelling through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the prosperity on which Britain’s global power was based.



On the Burghley Map, ships fill the blank sea-spaces with gleeful profusion. To the west of Pendennis an English three-master fires, rather gratuitously, on a caravel (its southern shape suggesting devious papist intentions). Another three-master waits to the south of Pendennis. In the Carrick Roads, marked by a couple of paddock-size St George’s ensigns, a powerful squadron lies at anchor. But there are other ships, too, which fly no official flags. Mylor has a couple, St Mawes a couple more (Penryn has none); three more lie off St Methick’s Point. But the greatest number, arranged in neat formation, lie off Killigrew land, a cluster of eight off Arwenack Manor.

Burghley’s own handwriting has been identified on his map of Falmouth Haven and it is easy to imagine him during the dangerous years of the late sixteenth century, surveying his atlas and pausing to scrutinise Folio 9. He would have ignored the Killigrews’ display of standard-waving from Pendennis Castle, seeing it for the sham it was, likewise the bellicose men-of-war. But he would have noticed, too, that anonymous group off Arwenack, their pack-like poise and confidence, and been reminded of the renegade threat of privateering.

Their rig is identical. Three masts, two bare yards on the fore and main, and a spar aft on the mizzen. A bumpkin juts from a high transom stern. The images are too small to see what guns they carry – typically a clutch of sakers, minions and falconets. They are not big, perhaps fifty or sixty tons burden, easily affordable for a private syndicate – but in the history of ship design they represented the most efficient vessels that had ever sailed.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sailing ships had evolved more quickly than in the previous 5,000 years. Such was their success that they remained essentially unchanged for the next 200 or 300 years, until the coming of steam and ironclads began to make them obsolete. With only a little hyperbole, the maritime historian Alan McGowan equates the development of this type of rig with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel.

The standard sailing ship in most of Europe had, until well into the Middle Ages, tended to use a large, single sail, a very powerful driving force if the wind was steady, and moderate, and blowing from behind, or at least aft of the beam. Such a rig was pretty useless to windward and gave little scope for varying sail area in light airs or as the breeze freshened. So auxiliary sails were added – a maintop above the maincourse and ahead of them a foretop and forecourse. In time a spritsail appeared in the bows and lateen sails were set aft – which enabled the ship to manoeuvre through the wind with an ease never known before. A fourth mast and bonnets were sometimes added. Over time, sails grew upwards – top-gallants, royals and skysails – while the headsails pushed forward, out along the bowsprit. Staysails filled the gaps ahead of and between the masts while, eventually, studding-sails stretched far out over the sides.






From the Bayeux Tapestry.

As to the hulls of northern European ships, they had tended to be clinker-built. The strength lay in the overlapping boards; an inner frame was added later, towards launching. When demands on ships grew, and voyages became longer and the risks from hostile ships increased (or rather, in the case of English privateers, the rewards from being hostile oneself), an alternative construction became popular, spreading from Spain and Portugal. Carvel building placed the boards of the hull flush against one another and relied for firmness and shape on an inner frame of ribs and crosspieces. (It is possible that, in Cornwall and Brittany, carvel construction had always been practised; the Veneti were reported to have used such ships against the Romans.)

Carvel building also helped solve one of the greatest problems of sixteenth-century fighting ships: how to mount heavy guns on board in a way that would be efficient in battle and not compromise seaworthiness. Having one large gun to fire from the bows suited the Venetians with their great galleys but in the waters of northern Europe, despite many attempts, galleys never really worked. Although bow-mounted guns and stern-chasers were fixed well into the seventeenth century, it was the broadside arrangement that decided the outcome of countless battles. The carvel structure allowed ports to be cut in the ship’s sides without undermining their strength; in England, developments in iron-founding swept aside the constraints of expensive bronze barrels. Arming a ship, to the alarm of men like Burghley, became possible not only for the Crown but for privateers such as those of the Killigrews.

For want of a better model, early tactics at sea had followed the orthodoxies of land battle. The Spanish in particular took on board a military mentality based on strict rank, fortresses and close combat. They built ships with ever more elaborate upperworks. Soldiers would assemble for attack high in the floating arcades while sailors, with the status of water-carriers, performed their strange business with canvas and cordage. European kings were slow to see the strategic value of smaller, free-ranging fleets, preferring the ships they built to reflect their own magnificence. The Swedish king built the 230-foot Elefant. James IV of Scotland went one foot bigger with the Great Michael, which encouraged Henry VIII to join in and build the Henry Grace à Dieu. When he sailed to meet Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the gilded sails glowed like the morning sky. Francis I himself took royal hubris further with the Grand François: a crew of 2,000, an onboard windmill, tennis court and chapel. Before even reaching the open sea, the Grand François was wrecked.

The success of English ships from the 1570s onwards stemmed in large part from leaving behind land-based hierarchies and abiding by the laws of the sea. Ventures were plotted in small harbours, in shoreside manors like Arwenack, not in court. Ships were self-contained, small-scale units of enterprise and power, and in Elizabethan England their design developed accordingly, producing compact and agile craft. Far from shore, and in the capricious hands of wind and waves, the spirit on board was more egalitarian than anywhere on land. ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner,’ declared Drake on his circumnavigation, having just executed the troublesome courtier Doughty.

Even now, though, it is hard to glean very much about sixteenth-century ship design. The preserved boards of the Mary Rose are among the few actual relics. Otherwise there are only chance images – tapestries in Portugal, paintings in the Alhambra, the seal of Louis de Bourbon, Henry VI’s psalter, chest designs, or manuscripts like that of Anthony Anthony or Burghley’s folio of Falmouth Haven. From these sources, a vague outline of development can be traced. Masts grow in number along the deck, yards sprout from them. A bow-rigged flagstaff in one period has mutated into a spritsail in the next. Sometimes a ship will be shown with an experimental spar, which then disappears like some redundant limb. Rarely has the growth of a technology so closely mirrored biological evolution.

The vessels themselves have long since vanished, wrecked or destroyed by fire, or after countless gravings and rebuildings and re-riggings, the cutting down of decks, stripped of all blocks and fittings, then taken up some muddy creek to settle slowly back to nature, their timbers broken down by the drilling shell of shipworms. Like some race of aquatic dinosaurs, Tudor ships have been reassembled from the faintest of traces. But in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge is a set of papers that gives the only detailed glimpse of the process and thinking behind their construction, and of this decisive moment in man’s relationship with the sea.




CHAPTER 5


Storm-clouds press down dark and close above the Fens. I scuttle across Magdalene’s quads just as the first patter of rain rises to a crescendo. It is the day after seeing the Burghley Map, and now in the upper room of the Pepys Library, with the same thrill of expectation, and to the sound of approaching thunder, I lay out another ancient volume, between another pair of pasteboard covers.

When he died, Samuel Pepys left a collection of some 3,000 books. Among the large number concerning maritime history was a series of loose folios which he had bound into a volume, naming it Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry. They include the country’s earliest record of paper plans for building ships. Looking at them, you can sense the process of experimentation, with the dividers’ prick-marks still visible, and the arcane grids of hull curves framed with marginal calculations. Other folios place the art of shipbuilding in a much wider context. Included by Pepys is a painted image of Noah’s Ark – ‘Noah did according unto all that God commanded him even so did he make thee an arke of pine trees …’ Another page has jottings about Jason’s voyage to Colchis, and the invention of ships in the Hellespont. The overall impression is less of an inquiry into a practical problem than a quest to rediscover some lost secret – closer to the spirit of the Renaissance than the Enlightenment.

The papers are attributed to Matthew Baker, greatest of Elizabethan shipwrights. Baker was the first to leave a record of the abstraction of hull design into numerical proportions, the first to have a ship built from his blueprints (the private warship Galleon). It was he who built the Revenge, Drake’s flagship in 1588, from whose decks Grenville later fought the most famous rearguard action in English history. Martin Frobisher’s three Baffin Island expeditions used Baker’s ships. In his Seaman’s Secrets John Davis said that as a shipwright Baker ‘hath not in any nation his equall’. To many of his contemporaries, Baker’s craft put him on a par with Vitruvius and Dürer.

Among his bound papers in the Pepys Library is what is believed to be a self-portrait. Baker is shown standing at his plan table which is spread with instruments of drawing and mensuration. He holds a pair of dividers and is marching them over the drawing of a hull. The dividers are exaggerated, some three feet high, and there is something faintly comic about the image. Though Baker’s head is bent in earnest concentration, his left leg is kicked up behind him, giving the impression that he is skipping as he works.

It is Baker who is credited with the design that revolutionised English shipping. Rejecting the cumbersome, castellated upperworks that compromised ships’ seaworthiness, he helped develop a much lower, sleeker form, recognisable in the shapes of those on the Burghley Map lying off Arwenack Manor. Initial resistance to the new hull shape came, it seems, from Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley (as well as possibly from John Hawkins, the Navy’s treasurer to whom, paradoxically, Baker’s innovation is often attributed). Baker had a battle to fight in gaining approval for his revolutionary design, a battle that produced the most unusual image in his collection.

Baker has used a fish. He has transposed the profile of an Atlantic cod below the waterline of his ship. The curve of the fish’s belly gives the distinctive ‘crescent’ shape to the keel. The long upward slope towards the tail represents the pinching of the floor that produces the sharp and narrow after-keel section. (The convention of good ship design was long framed in the expression ‘cod’s head and mackerel tail’, which persisted for yachts right up to the 1960s, when the convention was suddenly reversed, the sleek tail in the bows, and the bulk of the beam aft.)

Baker’s cod is not an exact fit, the cod’s distinctive fat lips stick through the stem while the flukes of the tail do not correspond to very much. But that makes its use more interesting. Clearly, the cod was persuasive.






From Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry.

Such animism has always been a part of seafaring. So much is unknown, so much goes on unseen beneath the surface, and such are the uncertainties and risks of being on the water that pure reason rarely survives very far from the shore. A certain imitative instinct is in the name of the high-bowed West Country boat, the balinger (balaena – Latin for ‘whale’). Likewise, the forces of the sea should be absorbed rather than resisted. It was believed that a ship that flexed with the water was a good one, and there were instances of pirates who removed some of the ship’s frames to make it even more flexible. Whatever the exact thinking behind Baker’s cod, it represented an alternative to building ships like castles, a recognition that the best way to prosper away from land was not by transposing terrestrial forms but by realising that the sea operates by its own set of rules.

In 1588, when Elizabeth’s fleet (made up in large part of privately owned craft) at last engaged with the Spanish Armada, observers said that the English ships could tack six times to the Spanish galleons’ one. The clash was one of diverging maritime cultures, the apostate newcomer against the lords of the old order, the English in their nimble, cod-bellied ships manned by freebooting mariners, against the great floating fortresses of papal Spain.

More than a generation later, Thomas Fuller wrote about the verbal sparring of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The skit gives a sense of how much ship design had entered the thinking of the age:

Many were the wit-combats between [Shakespeare] and Ben Jonson: which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Mister Jonson like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.

During the late 1560s and the 1570s, when Matthew Baker was at work, something of a watery revolution was taking place. Until then, English mariners had lagged far behind their European counterparts. They were coast-bound, ill-equipped, ignorant and unambitious. The Navy consisted of no more than a couple of dozen serviceable ships. Navigation charts were imported from Lisbon. In 1568, months after the completion of Arwenack Manor, it was said that only one Englishman was capable of sailing a ship to the West Indies without a foreign pilot. Yet within ten years Francis Drake was sailing around the globe. Another decade on, the Venetian ambassador to France wrote that the English were, ‘above all Western nations, expert and active in all naval operations, and great sea dogs’.

Like all such revolutions, this one was a result of the coincidence of means and motivation. As ships became more efficient and more affordable, so there was a rush to use them, not only for plunder in the Channel, but for more distant ventures. Riches were one incentive; the glittering promise of El Dorado, the bullion-filled holds of the Spanish Flota or the route to Cathay drove many an oceanic crossing. But there were others, equally persuasive: patriotism, curiosity and sheer restlessness.

The work of Richard Hakluyt reveals the questing spirit of the times. So shamed was he by the French view of the stay-at-home English and their ‘sluggish security’ that he began to collate records of English overseas adventures. Hakluyt’s own epiphany took place right at the beginning of this period, in the late 1560s, with a visit to his cousin’s office in the Middle Temple. Lying open on the table were an atlas and several books of cosmography. As he watched, his cousin took up a staff and guided the young Richard through the atlas, pointing ‘to all the knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bayes, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes and Territories’. With each wand-struck feature, each tapped length of coastline, each sweep of open ocean, Hakluyt grew more excited. His cousin then reached for the Bible, flicking through its pages to the oft-quoted verses 23 and 24 in Psalm 107: ‘They that go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep …’

Hakluyt did not go to sea himself but spent the rest of his life gathering accounts of those who had. The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation was published some years after the Middle Temple meeting, and opens with an account of King Arthur (taken from the pseudo-Zeni document): ‘This kingdom was too little for him, and his mind was not contented with it. He therefore valiantly subdued Scandinavia.’ There then follows a long list of all the other territories that Arthur valiantly subdued.

After the first volume, Hakluyt added another two, and a further million words of stirring quests and sea battles. By the time of his death, ten more volumes had been produced while his unpublished papers were edited and added to by Samuel Purchas in twenty further volumes. Since 1846, the Hakluyt Society has published two volumes of voyages every year. It would be impossible to assess the legacy of that encounter in the Middle Temple during the reign of Elizabeth I – the contagion that spread from it through English literature, or the number of sea-miles it generated, or the fortunes it helped create – but it is easy to measure it on library shelves.

As Hakluyt began his great page-odyssey, prodding less book-bound souls than himself into roaming the world, advances in scientific literature helped them on their way. In 1570 the first English translation of Euclid was published. ‘No other work in the English tongue,’ wrote the historian of Tudor science D.W. Waters, ‘has been so influential in stimulating the growth in England of the arts of mathematics, navigation, and hydrography.’ Perhaps even more important at the time than Euclid’s text was the introduction to it written by John Dee, Elizabeth I’s favourite philosopher and astrologer.

Dee’s introduction applies Euclidian method to seamanship. He provides the first English definition of navigation, stressing the range of sciences it relies on – ‘hydrographie, astronomie, astrologie and horometrie’ – as well as the basics of arithmetic and geometry. At the time the word ‘navigation’ referred to all aspects of seamanship and Dee could not restrain himself from presenting maritime skills not just as a practical discipline but as some sort of transcendent communion. Be attentive, he urged ships’ masters, be attuned to all things, for in their changes lie both threats and opportunities. If signs were noted ‘of Moon, Sterres, Water, Ayre, Fire, Wood, Stones, Birdes, and Beastes, and of many thynges els, a certain Sympatheticall forewarning may be had’. Such attentiveness, he added, could lead to ‘pleasure and profit’.

His essay emboldened a generation of seafarers, particularly those in the West Country, for whom patriotism, adventure and greed were beginning to coalesce in maritime enterprise. Going to sea, reaping its rewards (by any means), was both the right and the destiny of the English people. ‘What privilege,’ wrote Dee, ‘God had endued this Iland with, by reason of situation, most commodious for Navigation, to Places most Famous and Riche.’ Dee was much taken with rebuilding an English mythology, and like Hakluyt was drawn to the Arthurian cycles (he called his own son Arthur). He, too, celebrated the far and ancient wanderings of the English, quoting Geoffrey of Monmouth as well his own collection of esoteric texts. Such was the importance of his task for the nation that it was sometimes necessary for Dee to embellish them with his own inventions. It was Dee who first coined the term ‘British Impire’ in his 1577 book General and Rare Memorial Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, and a few years later, Burghley and Queen Elizabeth were presented with Dee’s two voluminous rolls explaining the English queen’s extensive rights to the world’s territories.

The 1570s also saw great advances in cosmology, adding to expanding perceptions and the range of geometrical techniques. In 1576, John Dee’s pupil Thomas Digges published Pantometria, the ground-breaking work of his father, Leonard. At the same time, Thomas Digges was the first advocate in England of Copernicus’s strange idea that the Earth revolved round the Sun. Thomas Digges even extended the Copernican vision: the stars you see at night, he suggested, are just a fraction of them all, running off from our sight in numbers unimaginable, into eternity. Awareness of a tiny Earth in a celestial infinity found an equivalent in the sense of a rapidly expanding terrestrial world. Closer to home, Digges applied his science to harbour engineering and an overhaul of the art of navigation using mathematical methods. Unlike Hakluyt and Dee, Digges validated his theories – for himself, and in the eyes of mariners – by testing them during a fifteen-week stint at sea.




CHAPTER 6


In Cornwall, the Killigrews were perfectly placed to take advantage of the new age – Protestant, proficient at sea and in control of one of the best anchorages in the country. Emphasis had shifted away from the east coast, away from the Narrow Seas towards the Western Approaches, the Atlantic and the adventure of the New World. Plymouth was already the springboard both for Crown-sponsored missions and for fleets defending the Channel; Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh and Grenville had all sailed from Plymouth on their heroic voyages.

In many ways Falmouth had even greater natural advantages than its rival up the coast. Comparing the two havens, Richard Carew found much to favour the Cornish one. Falmouth ‘lieth farther out in the trade way, and so offereth a sooner opportunity to wind-driven shipping than Plymouth’. Where Plymouth had ‘fairer towns’, Falmouth had the great asset of secrecy – ‘a hundred sail may anchor within his circuit, and no one of them see the other’s top, which Plymouth cannot equal’. Whichever is the better, he concluded, they each have ‘precedence over all other havens in England’.

Heir to the harbour’s entrance, during these heady years of maritime progress, was the second John Killigrew. Succeeding from his father in 1567, he inherited not only the just-rebuilt Arwenack but a lucrative scroll of freeholds from the Lizard to Penryn, fee simple farms as far afield as Penwith – and the captaincy of Pendennis Castle. He became the local Commissioner of Musters. He was twice returned as MP for Penryn, and along with his two brothers at court – William and little limping Henry – was a member of the crucial Parliament which rid Queen Elizabeth of her Catholic plotters and led to the execution of the Duke of Norfolk. Once imprisoned with his father under Queen Mary, twenty years later – in 1576 – John Killigrew was knighted.






The Killigrew family.

A year later, the Crown turned to deal with a perennial problem. To help purge the Channel of its growing number of bandits, a Commission for Piracy was established. In London, its receiver of fines was Sir John’s own brother, Henry Killigrew. Among the offenders was another brother, the notorious pirate Peter, forced to part with £25 to make amends for his felonies. In Cornwall, Sir John Killigrew himself – no stranger to the business of piracy – was appointed the Commission’s head.

On paper, Sir John Killigrew was now one of the most powerful men in the West Country, but his name is not among the far-sighted figures of the Elizabethan age. Sir John was a consummate, dyed-in-the-wool rogue. To his father’s bullying, he added profligacy and a taste for southern wines. He established a family trait that would push him further and further from the track of the law – extravagance. Among those he owed money to was the convict Anthony Bourne, holed up in his own Pendennis Castle. When Bourne escaped, Cornwall’s vice-admiral accused Killigrew of complicity. Sir John challenged him to fight; the two men clashed swords at Truro but without resolution. Arbitration found in the vice-admiral’s favour, but Killigrew still refused to pay the £100 fine.

The limitations of Tudor sources, and the reluctance of lawless privateers to commit their adventures to paper, have left little but glimpses of the second John Killigrew and his affairs. (One contemporary described him ‘as proud as Ammon, as covetous as Ahab and as cruel as Nero’.) But from the proceedings of the Privy Council come details of a particular incident.

It was the winter of 1582. A Spanish ship, the Marie, some 140 tons burden, had been struggling down the Channel. Days of gales had left her rigging badly damaged. Rather than tack south into the weather, towards her home port of San Sebastian, the Marie did what any stricken ship would have done: sought shelter in Falmouth. She bore away to the north, loosening sheets for St Anthony’s Head, past Pendennis Castle and Black Rock, and into the flat waters of the Penryn river. There her master commissioned repairs.

On shore, the people of Penryn watched the Marie. They watched the pinnaces come and go and in the evening they watched her crew at the inn of Ambrose Cox. The days passed. The gales fell away and the swells flattened; the waters of the Carrick Roads became glassy. Now the Marie could not leave for want of wind and so she sat there still, her masts restepped, her new sails bent, while her anchor chain dropped vertically into the flat winter water.

At Arwenack, Sir John Killigrew, too, had been watching the Marie. Together with his wife and a number of his men, he put together a plan. Having set it in motion, Sir John – Cornwall’s Crown Commissioner for Piracy – saddled his horse and rode far away from any taint of involvement. At nine in the evening, a couple of Killigrew’s men appeared at Cox’s inn and told the Spaniards: there is illness on the Marie, you must board at once. Bess Moore agreed to tell anyone who might ask that two more of Killigrew’s servants, Kendall and Hawkins, were with her that evening and tarried until midnight while one had his shirt dried.

In fact they and the others hurried out to Arwenack, launched Killigrew’s pinnace, and rowed across the moonlit water to the Marie. Among the Marie’s crew were two Flemings who had secretly agreed to hide the ship’s weapons. The boarding party had little difficulty in tying up the Spaniards. Inspection of the holds, though, proved a disappointment – all they found was holland cloth and some nice leather chairs. They would have to rely on the ship itself for a return; they set sail for Ireland and, as the Privy Council was later told, ‘most of the men cast overboarde’.

When a London merchant, with a venture of his own aboard the Marie, called for an investigation, the Commissioner for Piracy in Cornwall strangely failed to muster any evidence. But in this case the Privy Council made one or two of their own inquiries and managed to breach the local cordon of alliance and alibi. Soon Killigrew himself was being sought as a suspect. He fled Arwenack. He travelled to London ‘where he secretlie lurked in some place’. When he was discovered, he was held at Greenwich, bound before the Earl of Bedford for sureties of £1,000.



The case against Sir John Killigrew for the ransacking of the Marie was still outstanding when he died a year or so later, in 1584. In seventeen years as master of Arwenack, Sir John had managed to outdo his father in extravagance, the wanton exploitation of official appointments, and impunity. Now with Europe slipping into war, the Channel becoming ever more dangerous, the next John Killigrew sailed back to Cornwall, leaving behind the court of Elizabeth where he had been living under the wing of his uncle Henry. He promised not merely to ‘make large satisfaction for his father’s faults’, but to correct the wrongs of all his other freebooting uncles. He pledged to honour Her Majesty by doing everything in his power to protect, during these dark days, the strategic part of her realm that was his charge. He took over Arwenack Manor and the governorship of Pendennis Castle, and in due course, was elevated to the position of vice-admiral of Cornwall.

But the third John Killigrew, according to a later charge-sheet, ‘kept not within the compass of any law, as his father now and then, from fear of punishment, did’. To try to stem his growing debts, he sold off land, parts of Penryn and farms in the hundreds of Penwith and Kerrier. He managed, though, to cling to his house at Arwenack and also the wooded-off creeks of the Helford river where the plunder-mart provided income. Looted ships slipped with ease in and out of the river, swelling his shoreside cellars with cloth and metal and wines. He had his supporters in the surrounding area, those with little regard for the English state, who decorated their houses and their person with the pickings of pirated cargoes. The clamour of creditors and writs did not stop Killigrew filling the banqueting hall at Arwenack with a host of high-living merchants and privateers. He lived a life of risk and sudden reward, of brazen ship-ventures, and in the interludes between them recreated their spirit at his own gaming table. Of all the Killigrews, the third John Killigrew of Arwenack was by far the most dissolute.

The Privy Council became used to petitions for his debts. They summoned him frequently from Cornwall, but he never appeared. In 1588 they received a complaint from a Danish merchant: Killigrew had ransacked his ship. The Council was furious, not least to learn that he was still at large: ‘for as much as divers messingers have been sent for the said Killegrew … he goeth up and down the countrey accompanied with divers and lewde and disordered persons for his gard, armed with unlawfull weapons’.

All available force should be used, they urged, to apprehend him, even if he was in the keep of Pendennis Castle. Only the following year, still uncaptured, was he deemed not a ‘fytt man to beare anie office of authoritie’. He was removed as vice-admiral (yet remained governor of Pendennis). A few months later, the Privy Council went further. They requested a writ of rebellion to be raised against Killigrew.

But he survived. His case was swamped by the great tide of Spanish-invasion fear. And within a few years, with a common enemy, he was trumpeting his loyalty. He asked the Council for money to fortify Pendennis: £1,400 or £1,500, he wrote, should cover it. He himself would provide for half the garrison. There was no response. He wrote again: he understood, of course, that with his record, they might have reservations about giving him money, but the Council may award it through a third party. Still nothing.

In 1595 a force of a couple of hundred Spanish landed near Penzance and burned the villages of Mousehole and Paul. They were driven back, but the people of Cornwall remained terrified of the next attempt. John Killigrew’s pleas became more shrill. He urged Hannibal Vyvyan, governor of St Mawes Castle, to try to convince the Council on his behalf. Vyvyan excelled. Killigrew, he explained to the authorities, had diligently repaired the castle when required and ‘used her majesties money (yea rather more) for mounting of his great ordnance’. (A lie – the courses of Pendennis Castle were sprouting with fern and only one gun in the entire castle was serviceable.)

The following month, Killigrew himself wrote, saying he was ready to sacrifice his own life and those of his men to protect the castle: ‘better 1000 as good as myselfe should loose theire lives, rather than the enemy should possese the place’. The threat, he pleaded, was becoming ever more urgent, and in this he was perfectly correct.

In Spain, a plan had resurfaced, one that had first been presented by Pedro Menendez de Aviles long before the 1588 Armada. To invade England, it was not necessary to sail up the Channel and risk interception. Instead, a fleet could head straight into Falmouth, take Pendennis Castle and cut its link to the land. Then as many ships as were required could be brought into the Carrick Roads. Sea-surrounded Cornwall would be easy to defend from Crown forces. Ten thousand men could march to Plymouth, and from a western bridgehead, the errant land be rescued from its godless rulers.






From the Boazio map of Falmouth.

In order to illustrate the danger, Killigrew cited a recent incident. A Spanish force had landed at Arwenack at midnight, and laid barrels of gunpowder around the house. Only one charge went off and the raiding party fled, taking a fisherman and a local boy with them back to Spain. The intention, said Killigrew, had been to kidnap his own wife and children. When they reached King Philip the Spanish detail tried to cover their failure by dressing the boy up in fine clothes and telling the King that they ‘burnt Mr Kyllegrews house to the grounde being the finest house of one of the finest cavaliers in all the weste partes’. Pointing to the boy, they told Philip that he was a younger son of Killigrew. King Philip made him the page of his own younger son, and rewarded the captain with a gold chain of 200 ducats and an annual pension. The fisherman returned, reporting the intention of more raids.

But there was a much easier way for the Spanish to secure Pendennis Castle. It was common knowledge in coastal ports, ‘table talk’. A Spanish prisoner, captured at Calais, confessed that he had been ‘feasted, entertained and lodged’ at Arwenack. He was then secretly sent to Spain with an offer from the Englishman Killigrew: when he saw the approach of Spanish ships, he would hand the castle to them without a fight.

On 8 October 1597 another Spanish Armada left La Coruña for Falmouth. There was, this time, no fleet to stop them. The English fighting ships, under Essex, were far to the south, in the Azores. One hundred and thirty Spanish vessels pushed north across the Bay of Biscay. On board were crammed 10,000 troops, along with chests of booty to establish themselves in Falmouth and the West Country. On the great St Bartholomew alone were 100,000 ducats and sheaves of printed posters proclaiming in English: Peace and immunity for all who turn Catholic! Devastation to apostates! The country lay like a ripe fruit before them. But twenty leagues short of the Isles of Scilly, the winds veered and strengthened, coming out of the worst and also the rarest direction, east-north-east. The fleet was scattered and the St Bartholomew lost with all its treasure.

Once it became known that the Adelantado’s plan was to capture Pendennis and the Fal, Killigrew’s pleas were answered. A high-ranking delegation was sent to Pendennis to survey its defences. It included Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Ferdinando Gorges. They were horrified by what they found. ‘It is now,’ spluttered Raleigh as he inspected the headland, ‘the most dangerous place that I ever saw and the worst provided for.’ Only a few months separated the realm from disaster – with better weather in the coming spring, the Spanish would try again. Hundreds were drafted to dig earthworks and erect around the headland a series of 200 wooden perches. As the men trenched the slopes of Pendennis Point, and the order went through to the foundries for more guns, so in Castile, Philip II lay dying. Thoughts of invading England receded. As for John Killigrew, he was summoned to London when the true state of Pendennis was revealed. He was thrown into a cell in the Gatehouse at Westminster.

For England, the Elizabethan era had been shaped by the sea, with its bounty, its threats and its natural cordon. It had also shaped the fortunes of the Killigrews. Just over fifty years earlier, they had been minor gentry, living in a modest house in a far-off province. Within decades, they had land and money, command of a castle, family members in Parliament and among the Queen’s ministers, and the highest offices locally. Now there was nothing to show for it. The line between villainy and heroism in Elizabethan England was always a fine one. Perhaps it was their own fault that the Killigrews found themselves on the wrong side of it, unable to resist the temptations that the sea offered them. Or maybe it was just bad luck.




CHAPTER 7


The uncanny failure of the Spanish to land their forces, repeated again and again, stamped itself on English identity for centuries to come. The weather had played its part in 1588 and had helped turn back two subsequent Armadas. What it took away from the English in terms of naval might, it gave back to them in mystique. But to speak of luck is to fail to understand the divine hand half hidden in the breeze and in the mysterious folds of the sea. A.L. Rowse was echoing a widely held belief when he wrote of the ‘anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish winds of the Channel’.

The moment in 1591 when Sir Richard Grenville died off the Azores, with his crippled Revenge surrounded by enemy ships, the winds freshened to a gale. Soon fish were being hurled against the Spanish topsides. Grenville, muttered the watching Spanish (according to the Dutch traveller and historian Van Linschoten), ‘was raising all the Devils of Hell from the bottom of the sea’. Van Linschoten also reported that, after all these years of war between Elizabeth I and Philip II, the Spanish believed that ‘fortune or rather God was wholly against them’ while the English, ‘seeing all their enterprises do take so good effect, that thereby they are become lords and masters of the sea’.

The same spirit fills the second volume of Richard Hakluyt’s anthology. Amidst the epic tales of sea fights, the taking of Spanish prizes and the firing of their carracks, is a strange presumption of eventual triumph. ‘It is evident in all the writings of that period,’ wrote the literary historian Anne Treneer, ‘that English sailors relied consciously or unconsciously on a force external to themselves, which made them invincible.’

That English seafaring emerged so suddenly and so effectively contributed to the sense of destiny. From the high ground of the 1890s the jingoistic historian James Froude pointed to the early Elizabethan years: ‘the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond their own fishing-grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing from the port of London was scarce bigger than a modern coasting collier’. But within a couple of decades, ‘these insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards’ grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign’. For puff-chested British imperialists, the improbability of Elizabethan sea victories helped explain the improbability of Victorian global supremacy.

Conceptions of the sea itself shifted during the late sixteenth century. In the early years it remained something unimaginably vast, a watery infinity, the most visible example of God’s power. But by the death of Elizabeth I, some of that power had been brought to earth. Those men who crossed the ocean removed a little of its dread, as they returned with worldly wonders, strange new plants, sparkling jewels and silver, and wondrous tales of golden cities.

In the work of Shakespeare, which coincided with England’s maritime blooming, references to the sea increase over the years. To begin with, it was used simply to convey great size. In the early poem Lucrece: ‘“Thou art,” quoth she, “a sea, a sovereign king”’, or in Romeo and Juliet: ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea / My love as deep.’

Whether Shakespeare went to sea or not is a question that has been much discussed. In 1910 a professional seaman Captain Whall trawled the plays for technical language and published his thoughts in Shakespeare’s Sea-Terms Explained. Amazed at Shakespeare’s accuracy, he was persuaded that the playwright spent time at sea (possibly during the seven years of his adult life for which there is no biographical material). How else, wonders Whall, could he have learned such a supple command of terms if not aboard ship?

While much of his sea imagery is sophisticated, there are phrases in the plays that do not suggest sustained experience at sea: ‘He, that hath the steerage of my course, / Direct my sail!’ (from Romeo and Juliet) is not how a mariner would use language. Describing the fleet in the prologue of the third act of Henry V, he reports that the sails ‘Draw the huge bottomes through the furrowed sea’ – ignoring the intricate mechanics of sailing apparent to those on board; and those agricultural ‘furrows’ suggest swells seen not from on deck but looking down from a cliff-top.

Shakespeare’s precise use of sea-terms, where they occur, probably came by the same route as everything else in his writing, via an astonishing ear for language. As the port of London became a-bustle with ships and sailors and talk of voyages and far-off places, so his work filled with the drama of the sea, with wharfside tales of storms and distant shores, and the briny spirit of the age. All his foreign towns were ports. According to G. Wilson Knight’s intricate study of marine reference in Shakespeare, ‘his one general rule was that all distant towns are by the sea side; and if not they should be.’ By the time of The Tempest, written in the last decade of Elizabeth’s rule, the sea is not just a source of metaphor, but a conduit for the exotic. Ships come back with reports of ‘men of Ind’, the ‘Arabian Phoenix’, Tunis and Carthage. Wilson Knight concluded that, in Shakespeare’s work, ‘fate is to be equated with the elements, any human enterprise with the ship’. In the plays, ocean-going craft tend to be hapless pawns of the weather, and storms and shipwreck their frequent lot. Putting yourself in a ship on the sea is the same as embarking on a course of worldly power: those who do each are risking tragedy.



John Killigrew sat in his cell in the Westminster Gatehouse, a tragic character left alone to contemplate the wreck of his own life. It was June 1598. He had been there for over four months and was already suffering. The damp stone stiffened his joints. He had pawned his horse and his clothes for food, and there was little left. He had glimpsed his wife and some of his eleven children at the prison window but now they had returned to Cornwall. His only distraction, as he wrote in the surviving letters, was to dwell on all ‘his past vanities’.

Fifteen years had passed since he left Elizabeth’s court. For several decades before that, under the protection of his uncles Henry and William, he had played an anonymous part in the Queen’s wider circle. Even there his reckless greed helped him through a large part of his wife’s estate, forcing her to sell £3,500 worth of her land. But it was at Arwenack, as governor of Pendennis, during the great rise in privateering in the 1580s, that the sea spread its glitter before him.

‘It is true’, he reflected from prison, ‘that a golden prey enticeth many a man.’

Locked in the Gatehouse, he wrote a petition, outlining a plan to settle his debts. Gather a committee, he pleaded, call my Lord Anderson, Sir Anthony Mildmay, Sir Edward Dyer, the old friends from his days at court – Sergeant Heale, Mr Poynes (clerk of the Queen’s Kitchen) and Mr Moore (sheriff of London). Ask them to tot up the amounts owed, then he would mortgage his remaining estates. Given time, he could meet all legitimate demands. Had he not already settled the £1,000 he owed Her Majesty?

But forty years of bullying and coercion were catching up with him. Tenants were refusing to pay rent. The sheriffs of Cornwall, in gathering debt from his property, had helped themselves to another £1,000. ‘My enemies and creditors,’ he complained, ‘are malicious towards me.’ He was unable to defend either his estates or his reputation. Down on the Galician coast, in La Coruña, no one was surprised to hear the false rumour that, following Killigrew’s arrest, he had been executed as a traitor. They were convinced like many others that Killigrew, desperate and renegade, had secretly turned Pendennis Castle for the Spanish.

Whether he had can never now be proved. But like his forebears, he was a proud Protestant. Only weeks before his arrest, a pirated ship from Waterford had fallen into his hands. When its cargo was discovered by Killigrew’s agent to be Catholic missals, beads and relics bound for England, they were publicly burned in Penryn market. The Killigrews had, in their own wayward manner, upheld principles – like Shakespeare’s ‘sanctimonious pirate’ in Measure for Measure who takes a wooden board to sea with the Ten Commandments written on it, or rather nine, as he has scrubbed out Thou shalt not steal.

John Killigrew remained in prison while officials picked at the bones of his Arwenack estates. He grew more and more concerned for the upkeep of his wife and children. In 1600 Queen Elizabeth ‘most graciously pyttieng the extremities whereunto the said John Killigrew hathe of late fallen’ allowed him home for three months.

So he went back once more to Arwenack. In forty years, through its high-ceilinged rooms and banqueting hall, had passed countless adventurers and riches. But the estate now lacked the land to support itself. On the headland to seaward of Arwenack, and visible from the curtilage, Pendennis Castle was, for the first time, not governed by a Killigrew. As it had once been the agent of their rise, so its neglect had marked their downfall. The new governor, Sir Nicholas Parker, was immune to the temptations of the sea. He was a soldier, veteran of campaigns in the Low Countries. As soon as John Killigrew was removed, he hastened to restore the castle. Falmouth was regarded as one of the country’s most vulnerable corners. ‘There are two places in these western parts,’ Sir Francis Godolphin wrote to Burghley, ‘where, if not fortified, the enemy may prevail; the harbours of Falmouth and Scilly.’ Elizabeth addressed Sir Nicholas Parker directly, suggesting in a letter that he was having to start from scratch: ‘We committed to you the charge of our fortifications intended to be built upon the haven of Falmouth.’

Parker took to his duties with zeal. He employed 400 men to dig ditches, curtaining the castle with earthworks and look-out posts. He applied for new guns to add to the one that remained in the castle. In examining the castle grounds, he spotted a more effective land boundary and annexed fifty acres of Arwenack land. Short of timber, he felled 1,700 of Killigrew’s trees.

John Killigrew complained, but he could do little. Parker was a proven hero. Richard Carew considered that Pendennis’s ‘greatest strength consisteth in Sir Nicholas Parker, the governor’. Tacitly Carew admonished the Killigrews’ years of local bullying, in contrast to Parker ‘who demeaning himself no less kindly and frankly towards his neighbours … than he did resolutely and valiantly against the enemy when he followed the wars’. His presence and leadership were exemplary. At Pendennis he had two companies of 100 men, as well as being colonel-general of all forces in Cornwall. He commanded, gushed Carew, ‘not only their bodies by his authority, but also their hearts by his love’.

John Killigrew died in prison in 1605. His heir – the fourth John Killigrew – inherited the house and little else. He had married a lively woman named Jane Fermor whose inheritance managed to give a little respite from his father’s debts. But according to all accounts, she caused him much misery. At Pendennis Castle, succession had a new heredity. When Sir Nicholas Parker died, his son became governor and added a further humiliation to the fallen Killigrews. It was this man, according to the Killigrew chronicle, who ‘first debauched’ Jane Killigrew.



With the death of Elizabeth I and the arrival of James I in England, travelling overland from Scotland in his great cavalcade, came a radical shift in official policy to the sea. Gone was support for those who pursued sail-driven adventure. The state would no longer tolerate mavericks like the West Country sea-barons for whom the Channel was a free-for-all, who made a grab for whatever ships passed within their reach. King James appeased the Spanish with an instant treaty, locked up Sir Walter Raleigh, banned the practice of privateering, and presided over a Navy that, though generously funded, rotted like some diseased shrub from the top down. The number of admirals, who rarely went near the water, soon exceeded that of serviceable ships, while crews went unpaid.

James had little understanding of the sea, finding that his attempts to bring order to it had exactly the opposite effect. Released from naval service, unable to sail on privateers, tens of thousands of seamen were now idle. Nothing ashore could match the returns of their life at sea, so they went back. The first years of James’s rule witnessed a rise in English piracy never seen before or since. By 1608 an estimated 500 English pirate ships were at large, ten times as many as in the time of Elizabeth. Brutalised by war, emboldened by their nautical skills, the bandit mariners – the finest pirates in Europe – infested the seas, spreading the spirit of lawlessness from the English Channel, out across the North Atlantic and down into the Mediterranean.

The seamen of the West Country were well represented in this great flowering of robber enterprise. In Plymouth, the mayor complained of the ‘great number of sailors, mariners and masterless men, that heretofore have been at sea in men of war [and their] intolerable outrages’. In 1605 the Jonas was seized off the Isle of Wight with £10,000 of lawns and cambrics. Over the coming months, the Jonas was sailed westward, stopping off to flog its cargo, a travelling bazaar of looted cloth. At Helford, numerous bales were taken ashore, carried to Penryn and sold openly in the market.

In Devon and Cornwall the pirates had nothing to fear from the authorities. Richard Hawkins, son of Sir John, and Hannibal Vyvyan – respectively vice-admirals of Devon and South Cornwall – themselves benefited from piracy. They sold pardons to the leaders and took generous bribes for allowing plundered goods to be sold. Tolerance of piracy spread beyond the West Country, along the coast and right up the hierarchy of the Navy, to the Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham.

If piracy and privateering were the principal blemishes in the emergence of England as a maritime power, naval corruption came a close second. In the final years of Elizabeth’s reign some ingenious scams appeared in the service. Finding no check, they multiplied. James’s regime of official profligacy encouraged naval leaders like Sir Robert Mansell (treasurer of the Navy) and Sir John Trevor (surveyor of the Navy) to help themselves to Crown supplies, and their example was imitated down through the ranks. Everything, from cordage and spars, canvas and crews, to ships themselves, was written in the books at vastly inflated quantities. As the actual fleet shrank, so the Navy’s ledgers recorded a phantom version of itself, growing larger with each passing month. When at last the Earl of Northampton forced a public inquiry – at which the full extent of corruption was revealed – the King did little more than wag a beringed finger at Mansell and Trevor. Likewise, when Hannibal Vyvyan was summoned from Cornwall, he too was let off. Holding pirates like Captain Jennings to ransom in the Helford river, allowing the release of Robert Duncomb at Falmouth, merited a summons, but no penalty.

Strangely, among all the complaints of wrongdoing in the early years of James’s reign, in the State Papers and Acts of the Privy Council and Star Chamber, even the extensive account of reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring, the name of Killigrew is nowhere to be seen. The fourth John Killigrew, it turned out, was a stickler for the law. The picture of his own father dying bankrupt and alone in prison convinced this John that it was worth following the path of legality. He spent a great deal of time in litigation – riding up and down to London, attending courts first for his divorce from Jane, then lobbying for a scheme that he hoped would re-establish his family’s position.

On the northern boundary of what little land remained to Arwenack – just half a mile along the coast from the manor – lay Smithwick Creek. There above the low cliff, where a stream cut back into the soil and splashed to the shingle, stood the lime-kiln. A small inn had been built there, too, to provide for visiting crews – the single seed from which the port was about to grow.

According to the Killigrew family chronicle, the idea had been Walter Raleigh’s. Returning from the Caribbean in 1595, he put into Falmouth. His ships carried none of the journey’s hoped-for treasure, but he did bring tales of glittering cities on the Orinoco and the promise of future expeditions to discover them. In Falmouth, he sent his men to the single inn at Smithwick while he himself dined just along the shore with the Killigrews.

Raleigh was a mariner at heart and he had an instinctive attraction to Falmouth’s natural merits, its sheltering headlands and network of deep-water creeks, its position far out towards the Western Approaches. Now he spoke of Arwenack’s potential as a staging-post in the coming age. Old John Killigrew was in no position to pursue it – an outlaw, laden with a lifetime of debt and felony. But his son picked up on it. The chronicler, who wrote with scorn about his forebears, spoke of the fourth John Killigrew as ‘a sober good man’. His misfortune was the legacy of his father and grandfather. He had been forced into an ‘unfortunate’ marriage with Jane Fermor who had brought £6,000 to the family. But her adultery and the ensuing divorce made it a costly dowry. Countless trips to the archbishop’s court in London did little for Killigrew’s health and ‘quite ruined his estate’.

John Killigrew poured his energies into making money. He was the first at Arwenack to understand the basic rule of business, that it is better to offer people a service than rob them, better to victual ships than plunder them. And he knew that, by dint of geography, inheritance and timing, he was sitting on something priceless. For despite the piracy and corruption of King James’s court-bound regime, peace with Spain had led not only to a rapid increase in overseas trade but to a revival of the question of colonisation. Traffic through the Channel – Dutch and English, commercial and colonial, legal and illegal – was growing rapidly. John Killigrew seized his chance. He presented a petition that, with the Killigrews still well represented at court, was approved by King James. It was a modest beginning for a great port: permission to build four inns on what remained of his land.

The scheme was not without its critics, at least locally. The burghers of Penryn had nurtured a hatred for the Killigrews ever since the destruction of Glasney College. More and more ships took shelter off Arwenack land, rather than sailing up to Penryn. So when Jane Killigrew sought sanctuary from her estranged husband, Penryn was where she fled. She in turn presented the town with a 2-foot-high, silver loving-cup which is still borne around the town streets as part of the mayor’s parade. Jane Killigrew’s grateful message can be seen running around its rim: To the town of Penryn when they received mee that was in great misery.




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