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Documentary, Empire of The Seas S01E01 Heart of Oak
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00:00:00on a blustery november day four centuries ago the english were preparing themselves for one of the
00:00:12greatest national celebrations ever seen beneath the dome of st paul's they gathered to celebrate
00:00:25their tiny nation's victory over the world's greatest superpower spain
00:00:35on the walls hung the captured ensigns of the spanish fleet
00:00:39that was even then being dashed on the rocky shores of scotland and ireland
00:00:47the year was 1588 and the battle was the armada
00:00:55today's celebrations mark the centenary of the fleet air arm and it still seems like the most
00:01:04natural thing in the world to devote a great cathedral to the royal navy
00:01:09a tradition that began on that autumn day 400 years ago
00:01:171588 marked a turning point in our national story victory over the armada transformed us
00:01:24into a seafaring nation and it sparked a myth that would one day become a reality that the nation's
00:01:30new destiny the source of her future wealth and power lay out there on the oceans
00:01:40this series tells the story of how the navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex
00:01:46industrial enterprise on earth of how the need to organize it laid the foundations of our civil service
00:01:54and our economy of how it transformed our culture our sense of national identity and our democracy
00:02:02it's a story of heroism and innovation but also of disasters and dark chapters in our history
00:02:15it's the remarkable story of a 400 years struggle fought at sea and on land of how the navy
00:02:22drove britain into the modern age and changed the world
00:02:36the flood
00:02:40so
00:03:00clear the hats
00:03:01England's extraordinary journey from a third-rate nation to global superpower began on a clear
00:03:09October day, 20 years before the Armada.
00:03:15OK, bring on the beer.
00:03:18Not that anything so grand was on the minds of the sailors who scurried to and fro in
00:03:23the old harbour in Plymouth, making a small fleet of six ships ready for sea.
00:03:28The gangplank groaned as last-minute supplies were brought on board, large barrels of fresh
00:03:36water and beer and even whinnying goats and chickens as well.
00:03:40When everything was brought on board they were lashed down to the bulkheads in expectation
00:03:46of a bumpy passage.
00:03:48The two men in command were cousins and on that fine autumn day they were thinking not
00:03:52about making war, but about making money.
00:04:00The older of the two was John Hawkins, who at the age of just 35 was already Plymouth's
00:04:05leading merchant venturer.
00:04:10The younger was his cousin, a poor relation who'd grown up with Hawkins, 27-year-old Francis Drake.
00:04:22They were leaving behind a poor, insignificant town on the edge of a poor, insignificant country,
00:04:32which itself clung to the fringes of Europe.
00:04:35But this place had one thing going for it.
00:04:37This, one of the finest natural harbours on earth, gateway to the Atlantic, and beyond
00:04:43that, the new world.
00:04:56First discovered only 60 years before, the new world of the Americas offered wealth beyond
00:05:01imagining.
00:05:04If they could get there and bring it back, that is.
00:05:06It was a round trip of 12,000 miles, no mean feat in the 1560s.
00:05:13Slap by two, six, two, six, two, six.
00:05:21Take a break.
00:05:26Is that halfway?
00:05:26Yeah.
00:05:27Are you kidding me?
00:05:28No.
00:05:29This wonderful replica of the Tudor ship, the Matthew, gives me a strong sense of what
00:05:39life might have been like on board.
00:05:42Sailing one of these, you're just so struck by the ingenuity, aren't you?
00:05:46It's the sort of combination of wood, rope, a bit of metal, and you can sail around the
00:05:50other side of the world.
00:05:51Well, among the profit-hungry investors in the venture was the queen herself.
00:06:02She'd lent two ships, the Jesus of Lübeck and the Minion.
00:06:07Both were old, spent, and rotten, as were most of the vessels in her tiny navy.
00:06:13The crew, too, would get their share of the booty.
00:06:23All were young, some were just boys, among them Hawkins' nephew, Paul, and the 13-year-old
00:06:29Miles Phillips, whose journal relates the terrors of frequent storms and leaking hulls.
00:06:39There were no creature comforts for those on board, either.
00:06:43The single-minded Hawkins made his men sleep on deck
00:06:48because every inch of hold space was reserved for the cargo that would make the cash.
00:07:01On that expedition, the cargo was a human one. Drake and Hawkins have the terrible distinction
00:07:08of being the first Englishman to bind African men, women, and children in chains
00:07:13and transport them in the holds of ships like this.
00:07:16They were slave traders.
00:07:22Six weeks out of Plymouth, they picked up 500 slaves in Guinea, then headed west.
00:07:40Few Englishmen had ever made this journey.
00:07:42England had been slow to spot the opportunities of the New World, and the Spanish had got there first.
00:07:49Now Spain jealously guarded a lucrative American empire, stretching from South America,
00:07:55through the Caribbean, to Mexico, and further north.
00:07:57How much was it?
00:08:01Drake and Hawkins just wanted a little slice of the action.
00:08:04Nip in, sell a few slaves, and return home with a hold full of silver.
00:08:09The problem was the Spanish had banned foreigners from trading within their lucrative empire.
00:08:14Hawkins had managed it once or twice before and got away with it.
00:08:17He hoped to do so again, but this time would be different.
00:08:26In the Caribbean, they traded their human cargo for silver, gold and pearls,
00:08:32then turned for home.
00:08:38But it was hurricane season.
00:08:41Storms drove them to San Juan on the coast of Mexico,
00:08:45where a powerful Spanish fleet first promised them safe passage,
00:08:49then decided to teach them a violent lesson.
00:09:05In the fight that followed, Hawkins lost three of his ships,
00:09:08including the Jesus of Lubeck and 200 men killed or captured.
00:09:12He managed to escape on the minion,
00:09:14and with him was the 13-year-old Miles Phillips,
00:09:16who watched what happened to the prisoners.
00:09:18They took our men ashore, he wrote,
00:09:20and hung them up by their arms until blood burst out from their fingers' ends.
00:09:26And the moment of personal tragedy for Hawkins,
00:09:30he realised that his nephew Paul was among them.
00:09:40Disease and famine followed, and by the time they limped home,
00:09:44fewer than 20 men were left alive aboard the minion.
00:09:48But for the survivors, this disaster acted not as a deterrent,
00:09:54but as a spur to action.
00:09:56The experience marked Drake and Hawkins for the rest of their lives.
00:10:10Neither would ever forgive the Spanish for their treachery,
00:10:14and they threw themselves into a bitter personal crusade against Spain.
00:10:18It was fuelled by the heavy mix of a lust for cash,
00:10:22religious zealotry, and a desire for personal revenge.
00:10:26In time, this crusade would become a national enterprise,
00:10:30and in doing so, it would forge a new idea of Englishness.
00:10:38But if England's seafarers were to have any chance of catching up with Spain,
00:10:42they would need better ships to do it.
00:10:48Hawkins' answer was the race-built galleon,
00:10:54his radical breakthrough in warship design,
00:10:58preserved in these original drawings.
00:11:04By using maths and geometry instead of rule of thumb,
00:11:07by cutting down high decks and by streamlining hulls,
00:11:12Hawkins produced the fastest ships of their kind anywhere in the world.
00:11:18The first was built in 1570 at the Queen's Dockyard in Deptford.
00:11:25More were to follow.
00:11:27With greater space for guns, they were perfectly designed for war.
00:11:33But 20 race-built galleons, the most the Tudor state could afford,
00:11:46would not be enough on their own.
00:11:51Hawkins landed a job on the Navy Board,
00:11:53the committee that ran the Queen's modest fleet.
00:11:56And in 1582, the board commissioned a series of extraordinary surveys,
00:12:01preserved here at the National Archives.
00:12:04Yeah, see I've read about this but I've never seen it before.
00:12:18This is a list of every ship in England compiled under Hawkins' leadership.
00:12:23And it's actually, as you can see, broken up by county here.
00:12:28Norfolk, Suffolk, absolutely meticulously written down.
00:12:32It's beautiful.
00:12:33Every single ship.
00:12:34Oh, with the tonnage here.
00:12:35So these ones are St. Mary, Solomon, 200 tons.
00:12:39Absolutely incredible.
00:12:41As we go further on here, they didn't just list the ships.
00:12:46They list the masters and then the number of mariners and seamen there are as well for each port.
00:12:53So here we go.
00:12:54In Cornwall, there are 108 masters, 626 mariners and 1,184 seamen.
00:13:02So precise.
00:13:03Incredible.
00:13:04This information is being gathered centrally in London at the beck and call of the Tudor State.
00:13:13It's actually very moving seeing the names of people that lived all those centuries ago.
00:13:19And once you have a list like this, when war comes, when there's a national emergency,
00:13:23you can go and knock on the door of men like John Cooper and Peter Dollimore
00:13:28and say, right mate, you're coming in the Navy, you'll come to protect the country.
00:13:31And it does make you wonder whether men like William Bennett, William Mort from Littleham,
00:13:36whether they end up fighting against the Spanish Armada.
00:13:42And this is just fantastic.
00:13:43You get right to the end, the total number of mariners available to the Tudor State, 16,259.
00:13:50Men that could be mobilised to protect Little England against the greatest superpower in the world.
00:14:01Drake, meanwhile, was taking his revenge on Spain in a much more direct fashion.
00:14:14On an April day in 1587, the residents of Cadiz woke to the sound of gunfire.
00:14:21By the end of the day, over 30 Spanish ships lay at the bottom of the harbour,
00:14:44and Drake's fleet had sailed away with holds full of treasure.
00:14:51It was the culmination of a ten-year pillaging spree that had seen Drake circumnavigate the globe,
00:14:57attack Spanish colonies and steal their loot.
00:15:01Belligerent, venal, a peerless seafarer, he was Protestant England's new hero.
00:15:10In Catholic Spain, he was anything but.
00:15:15Standing here, looking at it from the Spanish point of view,
00:15:18the English appear a little different from Vikings,
00:15:21men who came from the north in ships bent on plunder and destruction,
00:15:25to whom nothing was sacred.
00:15:27The most infamous of all was Drake, still hated,
00:15:31still known as Il Draque, the Dragon.
00:15:35And now the Dragon had pushed the King of Spain
00:15:38to take his own terrible revenge on Drake and England.
00:15:42That revenge came in July 1588.
00:15:59When the Armada appeared off England's coast,
00:16:02one eyewitness wrote that the ocean groaned under their weight.
00:16:06It had taken Spain three years and a titanic amount of silver to assemble it,
00:16:16while the English fleet had been mobilised in just three months.
00:16:23The battle raged for several days.
00:16:30But the leadership of men like Drake and Hawkins
00:16:33had given the English a decisive edge.
00:16:35People have tended to attribute victory over the Spanish Armada
00:16:56to the courage of the English sailors or the intervention of divine wind.
00:17:01In fact, the Spanish fought equally bravely
00:17:03and at different stages of the campaign, the wind favoured both sides.
00:17:06The real reason is a lot less glamorous.
00:17:09It's the inspired organisation of Hawkins.
00:17:12He ensured that England had a fleet of fast, manoeuvrable ships,
00:17:16each one of which carried something like three times the weight in armament
00:17:20of its Spanish equivalent.
00:17:22He laid the foundations for modern naval warfare,
00:17:24bringing ships, men and cannon together in a decisive combination.
00:17:29So when the great and the good arrived in their finery at St Paul's,
00:17:43on that day in November 1588, they were celebrating not just a victory,
00:17:50but the beginning of a new future.
00:17:54The Queen, as one author wrote, was carried in a golden chariot
00:17:58through her city of London in robes of triumph.
00:18:01While the still bloody heads of Catholic traitors, executed for praying for the Armada's success,
00:18:10stared down from spikes nearby.
00:18:17The Tudor PR machine went into overdrive.
00:18:20A new portrait showed the Queen triumphant, her hand on a globe,
00:18:25the Spanish ships crushed on the rocks behind her.
00:18:40The scale of the victory expanded the horizons of a small, impoverished nation.
00:18:46One commentator wrote,
00:18:48The sea had become a means to seek new worlds,
00:18:51for gold, for praise, for glory.
00:19:01The English had been given a bright vision of a glittering future,
00:19:05of riches beyond imagination,
00:19:07of new frontiers that stretched way beyond the shores of tiny England.
00:19:13Above all, it was a future that would be played out on the seas,
00:19:17by the ships of the Navy, and by a new breed of heroic seafarer.
00:19:22England's view of its place in the world would never be the same again.
00:19:26God of Honour!
00:19:28Slope!
00:19:29Arms!
00:19:30Arms!
00:19:31Arms!
00:19:32Arms!
00:19:33Free!
00:19:35The Queen's Navy had become a source of national pride as never before,
00:19:40and there was an insatiable demand for stories of seafaring adventure and discovery.
00:19:45A new national identity, aggressive, ambitious and protestant, was in the making.
00:19:56If Hawkins was the architect of that new identity and Drake its firebrand, then Richard Hackliott was its biographer.
00:20:04In 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, he wrote this.
00:20:09The principal navigations, voyages, traffics and discoveries of the English nation.
00:20:16An account of 1600 years of history, containing over 250 seafaring adventures by Englishmen.
00:20:24A mix of storytelling and myth-making.
00:20:27At the back of this one, for example, we have Hawkins's ill-fated trip to the Caribbean,
00:20:33with Miles Phillips' gruesome account of the barbarous treatment they received at the hands of the Spaniards.
00:20:39Here in the next volume, we have the account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada itself,
00:20:47which ends with this incredible paragraph that says,
00:20:50Thus the magnificent, huge and mighty fleet of the Spaniards, in the year 1588, vanished into smoke.
00:20:59This was history with a purpose. A call to arms to a nation on the verge of a new destiny.
00:21:10That destiny could not have been made more obvious than it was in a subsequent edition of Hackliott's work,
00:21:17which contained this stunning map.
00:21:20This piece of paper is 400 years old. It's incredibly beautiful.
00:21:25Just look at the detail of the world's coastlines and ports and rivers.
00:21:32What's so remarkable about this map is that medieval maps show England as an insignificant island clinging to the edge of Europe.
00:21:38But now England's not at the edge. It's been picked up and moved right to the heart of the world.
00:21:48It's an image of the world we all recognise. But this map showed it for the first time.
00:21:55It was a potent symbol of a nation that now had global ambitions.
00:22:02Ships poured out of England, bound for the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Baltic.
00:22:09Numerous and aggressive, these English pioneers steadily eroded Spanish power
00:22:14and founded the colonies that formed the beginnings of Britain's future empire.
00:22:19Abroad and at home, business was booming.
00:22:31Ports like East Lou and Cornwall now had scores of fishing boats trading as far away as North America.
00:22:38In these new, confident times, they called themselves the Western adventurers.
00:22:47But economic success brought a new threat that no-one had foreseen.
00:22:52Suddenly, whole fleets, ten or twelve ships, would head out to sea and simply vanish.
00:23:11There are reports of ships found floating out there in the Atlantic without their crews who were never seen again.
00:23:20On one night in the summer of 1631 in the village of Baltimore in Southern Ireland,
00:23:26over a hundred people were removed from their beds, leaving the place a ghost town.
00:23:30A remarkable letter, written in August 1625, reveals the scale and horror of the problem.
00:23:47It's from the mayor of Plymouth, Thomas Seeley, to the King's Council.
00:23:51One poor maritime town in Cornwall, called Lou, hath within ten days lost 80 mariners bound in fishing voyages to the deeps.
00:24:03And there have been taken by the Turks.
00:24:06Back then, Turks meant Muslims, and these were, in fact, pirates from North Africa.
00:24:17Barbary pirates.
00:24:18They came to these shores and took people as slaves back to North Africa.
00:24:23It was a barbarous practice, but it was, of course, what these West Countrymen have been doing to Africans for decades now.
00:24:28Even so, it turned the sea here from a source of wealth and prestige for England into a place of terror and slavery.
00:24:38The ports and fishing villages, it's said, were filled with the pitiful lamentations of the victims' families.
00:24:48In the next few years, Devon and Cornwall would lose a fifth of their shipping and crews.
00:24:58This extraordinary and little-known episode in English history was to have far-reaching consequences.
00:25:04Englishmen were bred on the myth of maritime invincibility, but now they had to face hard truths.
00:25:12Once the predators, they were now the prey.
00:25:15And people did what they usually did in a crisis.
00:25:17They blamed the government.
00:25:19And they weren't entirely wrong.
00:25:20Fishing vessel Trevose. Fishing vessel Trevose. This is protection vessel Tyne calling you channel one sector.
00:25:31Tyne Trevose.
00:25:35I'm on one of the modern Navy's fishery protection vessels about 30 miles from Cornwall.
00:25:40Just the territory where the Barbary pirates were seizing English shipping.
00:25:43Trevose, this is Tyne. It's my intention to send a routine boarding team over to you.
00:25:54My team will be with you in that 2-0 minutes, over.
00:26:00In Elizabeth's time, the Queen's ships and the private vessels of freebooters like Drake had kept these waters safe.
00:26:07But the Queen was now dead.
00:26:12The new Stuart regime had made peace with Spain and the Navy had been cut back.
00:26:21With a predilection for self-aggrandizement, the regime had spent its cash, some of it raised illegally by notorious ship money,
00:26:29on a few grand, vanity ships designed to impress the kings of Europe.
00:26:40Trouble was, fishery protection wasn't the kind of job that these showy vessels were designed to do.
00:26:46Just as the job that these guys do couldn't be done by an aircraft carrier.
00:26:50In the absence of this kind of protection, the King's subjects, particularly down here in the West Country, were completely vulnerable.
00:27:03They and their cargoes made irresistible targets for North African pirates.
00:27:08Shocked by the magnitude of the crisis, West Country MP Sir John Elliot wrote to the King's Council begging for action.
00:27:21But the government did nothing. Elliot was furious.
00:27:28And he wasn't the only one.
00:27:30Anger also oozes from the pages of this, a bestseller written around the time of the disappearances from East Lou.
00:27:39It's called Sir Francis Drake Revived. It's written by Drake's nephew.
00:27:43And he recounts the glories and successes of what now seemed like a vanished age.
00:27:49It's an indictment on the present with its all-pervasive sense of fear and its insecurity.
00:27:55But it's also a call to arms, as the author makes very clear on the title page.
00:27:58He writes, calling upon this dull or effeminate age to follow his noble steps for gold and silver.
00:28:13Sir John Elliot caught the mood, calling for a return to the aggressive policies of the past.
00:28:19England's new king, it seemed, was listening.
00:28:22Charles I had been on the throne for just a few months.
00:28:27And like a modern leader seeking crowd-pleasing policies in troubled times,
00:28:32he funded an expedition to attack Spain.
00:28:34It set sail from Plymouth in October 1625, waved off by a delighted John Elliot.
00:28:47Their target was none other than Cadiz.
00:28:57Their mission, a Drake-style smash and grab, returning home with holds full of treasure to public acclaim.
00:29:03But it didn't work out that way, at all.
00:29:11The expedition was commanded by Viscount Wimbledon, a man who'd never served at sea before.
00:29:17And were so indecisive, his men quickly gave him the nickname Viscount Sit-Still.
00:29:24Confusion reigned, ships collided, masts and rigging tumbled overboard.
00:29:29When Sit-Still ordered his captains to attack, many of them simply ignored him.
00:29:34The lack of an experienced, charismatic commander like Drake exposed terrible weaknesses in the English fleet.
00:29:41Even with Drake in charge, it had been hard enough to impose order.
00:29:45Now, many captains simply did as they wished.
00:29:48They were a rabble.
00:29:56The chaos continued when they landed 2,000 troops on the beach, but failed to give them any water.
00:30:05The weather was scorching.
00:30:09When they finally got into the town, these thirsty Englishmen stumbled on a warehouse.
00:30:17It was full of wine.
00:30:22All hell broke loose.
00:30:24The men started drinking, and although the officers tried to stop them, it was no use.
00:30:28The whole army was drunken, wrote one eyewitness.
00:30:31And in one common confusion, some shooting at one another amongst themselves.
00:30:37This wouldn't, of course, be the last time the drunken English behaved disgracefully while abroad.
00:30:42But on this occasion, with the expedition descending into total farce, the commanders had no choice but to call it off.
00:30:49On the way home, farce turned to tragedy as disease took hold.
00:31:05By the time they reached Plymouth, hundreds were dead and hundreds more were dying.
00:31:10And who was standing up here waiting for them? None other than Sir John Elliot.
00:31:20The man who in October had waved them off with such high hopes, now stood on a miserable day just before Christmas 1625 as the fleet limped in.
00:31:28The miseries before us are great, he wrote, as he watched corpses being tossed into the harbour from the ships.
00:31:38And later he saw sailors drop down dead in the streets of Plymouth.
00:31:42But soon his compassion for the sailors turned into another emotion.
00:31:47Rage.
00:31:48News of the fiasco soon reached London.
00:31:59And when Parliament convened, John Elliot was on his feet, his anger echoing around St Stephen's Hall.
00:32:08Our honour is ruined.
00:32:10Our ships are sunk.
00:32:12Our men are killed.
00:32:13Not by the sword, not by the hand of an enemy, but by those we trust.
00:32:18Those words, spoken by Elliot in this chamber where the House of Commons used to meet, were the sharpest denunciation of Royal Government ever heard in Parliament.
00:32:28Cadiz, Elliot said, proved that the King was unfit to run the Navy.
00:32:35In a series of extraordinary speeches in here, Elliot demanded that Parliament take a greater role in overseeing the affairs of state.
00:32:43When the Speaker, who sat in his chair on this spot, tried to shut him up, Elliot hired three thugs to hold him down.
00:32:52If it seemed like revolution was in the air, it was.
00:32:55The King's failure to run a modern, efficient Navy had sparked a constitutional crisis.
00:33:01John Elliot was thrown into the tower.
00:33:09But a new generation of MPs, immortalised here in St Stephen's Hall, took up his call for liberty.
00:33:19Relations between King and Parliament collapsed.
00:33:21In 1642, Charles fled London and the Civil War began.
00:33:26By fleeing the capital, Charles lost control both of the Navy and of the new burgeoning maritime economy that it supported.
00:33:42It made his defeat inevitable, and in 1649, on the orders of England's new Republic, he was executed.
00:33:57Parliament acted quickly to secure control over the Navy, putting men of proven loyalty in charge.
00:34:04They were known as the generals at sea.
00:34:11One of them was Robert Blake, West Country MP, hero of the Civil War, and a radical Protestant to boot.
00:34:18Blake had never fought at sea.
00:34:37Not a brilliant start for a man charged with protecting England's coasts against a multitude of foes.
00:34:42But Blake understood warfare and men, and he knew that chaos and indiscipline were as dangerous at sea as they were on land.
00:34:51Command problems that had dogged the English expedition to Cadiz still remained.
00:34:56In one of his first battles, he was appalled to see his captain disobey his orders and flee.
00:35:02He knew he had to find a way to assert his control.
00:35:05His solution was to produce the Navy's first ever set of rules and regulations.
00:35:16The laws of war and ordinances of the sea in 1652.
00:35:23For the first time, it gave English commanders a fighting chance of issuing orders that would be obeyed.
00:35:28It was a list of 39 offences, from stealing to spying, from cowardice to sleeping on duty.
00:35:39Most were punishable by death.
00:35:44Blake even sacked his own brother for discipline offences.
00:35:48The laws of war offered a blueprint for structure and discipline at sea that would later be applied through all areas of government.
00:36:05Blake was just what the Navy needed, a tough outsider.
00:36:09He could see that over the previous 50 years, the Navy had vacillated wildly between great successes like the Armada and total failures like Cadiz.
00:36:16But there was no reliability.
00:36:19Under charismatic leadership, men like Drake, the English could be great successes.
00:36:24But otherwise, denied that leadership, failure was often the result.
00:36:28Blake imposed order and discipline.
00:36:31He ensured that no matter who was in charge, the Navy would be effective.
00:36:35Blake left behind a Navy that was larger and more disciplined than the country had ever known before.
00:36:50The powerful fleet had protected the young Republic from its foreign enemies, but it could not fill the vacuum created when Cromwell, the English dictator, died.
00:37:01A new era was coming.
00:37:12On May 26th, 1660, one of the Navy's grandest ships, the Royal Charles, came within sight of England.
00:37:19On board was a man making his triumphant return home after years in exile.
00:37:29It was Charles, son of the murdered King, soon to be crowned King Charles II.
00:37:35The journey was the result of weeks of plotting between senior naval officers and exiled royalists to bring back the monarchy.
00:37:48The new king was eager to lay claim to England's potent Navy.
00:37:54He gave gold to the sailors and rebranded the fleet.
00:37:57It was now the Royal Navy.
00:38:07Disembarking with the Royal Party was the younger cousin and newly appointed secretary to the ship's commander.
00:38:12The young man was honoured to be given the job of taking the king's spaniel off the ship.
00:38:27He wrote in his diary, it shit the boat, which made us laugh and me think that the king and all that belong to him are but just as others are.
00:38:34As they came ashore, the young man saw huge crowds of nobles and citizens alike who'd all turned out to welcome their king.
00:38:47The shouting and joy expressed by all, he wrote, was past imagination.
00:38:52A 27-year-old from London had just completed his second sea voyage.
00:38:56He didn't know it then, but this was just the start of an extraordinary naval career.
00:39:01His name was Samuel Pepys.
00:39:07Pepys was from humble origins, the son of a poor tailor and a washerwoman.
00:39:13But he left behind two extraordinary legacies.
00:39:16He would transform the administration of the Navy like no-one before him
00:39:20and leave behind one of the most vivid and colourful diaries of all time.
00:39:29And here it is, volume one of Samuel Pepys's diary,
00:39:33started on January the 1st, 1660, possibly in response to a New Year's resolution.
00:39:38It's in shorthand, so it takes a bit of deciphering, but it's an incredibly honest account of a colourful life.
00:39:43There are descriptions of his trips to the theatre, drinking, his affairs, music, money, and even arguments with his wife.
00:39:51It's all interspersed with descriptions of a job he loved.
00:39:56Or at least, he came to love it.
00:40:00When he first landed the job of clerk of the axe to the Navy board,
00:40:04he hadn't the foggiest idea what it entailed.
00:40:06But he was delighted with the pay.
00:40:09£350 a year, more than he'd ever earned in his life.
00:40:17Eager to learn, Pepys threw himself into the complex new world
00:40:22of the Navy's dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford.
00:40:26All are now long gone.
00:40:29But this yard on the Dutch coast is building a replica ship of the same era.
00:40:34The project manager is Arjen Klein.
00:40:40It's great to see the ship at this stage, isn't it?
00:40:43Because you see what gives it its strength.
00:40:45Because usually you just sort of see it when it's floating around.
00:40:47Yeah, a mess of timbers. It's all heavy timber construction.
00:40:50So how many oak trees go into the building of this, then?
00:40:52Well, several hundred.
00:40:54Really?
00:40:56The estimates vary from 400 to 600 fully ground trees.
00:40:59And some of these trees will be maybe 100 years old, maybe older.
00:41:02And how long would it take them to build this back in the 17th century?
00:41:06It took about nine months.
00:41:07Wow, that's quick.
00:41:08Very hard labour.
00:41:10Hundreds of men working day and night almost.
00:41:12And as soon as these ships were watertight, they will be put into the water,
00:41:16so to make room for the next ship on the slipway.
00:41:18God, it just shows the value of the goods that these ships are bringing back, I suppose.
00:41:22That they were being built to just bring back the riches of the world.
00:41:24Well, yeah, the big East Indian men were built for trade, but this particular ship we're standing in now was a man of war.
00:41:32Who was it built to fight against, then?
00:41:35The English, I'm afraid.
00:41:37The Dutch had a really large stake in the world trade at that time.
00:41:41And England, of course, thought, well, we'll have some of that trade.
00:41:46And it erupted into trade wars between Holland and England.
00:41:51And this ship is basically the result of an arms race between the two countries.
00:41:54The Dutch had overtaken Spain to become England's new maritime rivals.
00:42:02They were aggressive, Protestant and organised.
00:42:06Just like the English.
00:42:12To combat the Dutch threat, England was now spending a mighty 25% of the national budget on her navy,
00:42:19making it by far the country's largest industrial enterprise.
00:42:24The dockyards consumed materials in vast quantities.
00:42:30150 tonnes of iron a year, 100 miles of rope, and had a vast workforce to match.
00:42:39And, as Pepys soon discovered, corruption was rife.
00:42:43Pepys reported corrupt officials to the Navy Board,
00:42:47but he soon realised that the worst corruption was actually on the Navy Board itself.
00:42:51He refers to his colleagues as old fools and rogues,
00:42:56and realised that one of them was even stealing from the sailors' pension fund, known as the Chatham Chest.
00:43:01The problem was that the navy had become a vast receptacle of public funds.
00:43:06There were no systems in place to spend that money.
00:43:09And if a few thousand went missing, who would care?
00:43:11Pepys cared, and realised that every aspect of the navy had ballooned except for the central administration.
00:43:22The fleet had grown far beyond the ability of the medieval navy board to manage it.
00:43:29Back in the office, Pepys hired a team of clerks.
00:43:34He gave them desks and regular hours, and together they set out imposing some order.
00:43:40They spent a lot of time making lists.
00:43:42This one here is an alphabetical list of all naval officers that served in the navy during Pepys time in office.
00:43:51Starting up here with A, coming all the way down to Z, down here.
00:43:55The amazing thing is it contains a fair amount of information about their service records, the dates on which they're in different ships.
00:44:02In fact, in some cases it even has their fate.
00:44:05So for example, this man died, George Colt drowned, and Humphrey Conisby was discharged by his Royal Highness.
00:44:15Lists like these imposed manageable symmetry on the anarchic world that Pepys found himself in.
00:44:21And he became an expert in the complex gathering and storage of information.
00:44:28He was determined to professionalise every aspect of the navy's operations.
00:44:33He designed a call book to keep records of dockyard hours worked,
00:44:38compiled an alphabetical list of all contracts, and kept detailed notes of everything he did.
00:44:46Pepys wasn't the first naval administrator to make lists,
00:44:49but he was the most systematic, the most brilliant, the most obsessive.
00:44:54He was a man who adored the navy, not because he loved storming aboard enemy ships with the smell of gun smoke in his nostrils,
00:45:00but because he loved the bureaucracy.
00:45:02He delighted, he wrote, in the neatness of everything.
00:45:05But the Samuel Pepys of the diary emerges as a man who was far from being a dull paper pusher and list maker.
00:45:19Here's a not-untypical entry.
00:45:34He has an orgy with the wife of one of his colleagues on the navy board.
00:45:37And her daughter.
00:45:40He wrote,
00:45:41There are a great many women in the chamber, my lady Penn and her daughter among them.
00:45:45Whereupon my lady Penn flung me down upon the bed, and herself and others, one after another, upon me.
00:45:52And very merry we were.
00:45:54Well, I'm not surprised.
00:45:56Every man has his vice, they say, and for Pepys, it was definitely the ladies.
00:46:01Well, and bouts of heavy drinking, and fine dining, and nice clothes, and music.
00:46:08And he loved the theatre, of course, and, well, you get the idea.
00:46:12The point is, Pepys was a man who lived life to the full.
00:46:15But what really shines out in these diaries is his love of his work.
00:46:19My business, he wrote, is all my delight.
00:46:31The Navy's Officer Training College here at Dartmouth was built long after Pepys' time.
00:46:37But the idea of professionally trained and qualified officers was his.
00:46:40Anyone with the right connections, Pepys realised, could become an officer, leaving the Navy's valuable ships in often unreliable hands.
00:46:55There was no quality control.
00:46:58Mitchum O'Briars.
00:47:00Sir.
00:47:01Peeps' solution, exams.
00:47:04The verbal test that he introduced for all would-be lieutenants still exists.
00:47:10Mitchum O'Briars, take a seat, please.
00:47:13These days, they call it Fleet Board.
00:47:16First question is, what are the responsibilities of the CBM at State 1?
00:47:23He's on upper deck roaming, sir, looking mostly for firefighting events.
00:47:27The whole idea of assessment and interview seems deeply familiar to us.
00:47:34What items of seamanship rigging must always be fully rigged?
00:47:38That would be the safety net underneath, sir.
00:47:40But that's because of Pepys.
00:47:42When he introduced his exam for lieutenants, it was the first time any employee of the English state had ever been tested in this way.
00:47:50And where is it located?
00:47:52Quick release marker, boy, sir.
00:47:53It's usually found on the quarter deck.
00:47:56Thank you very much.
00:47:57Mitchum O'Briars, please carry on.
00:48:02Using pen, paper and a tidy mind, Pepys had done for the Navy as an institution what Hawkins had done for its ships and Blake for the discipline of its crews.
00:48:13But could it survive the ultimate test?
00:48:17War.
00:48:18In 1665 came the inevitable clash with the Dutch.
00:48:27A series of English victories early on seemed to augur well.
00:48:32But Pepys was worried.
00:48:33He'd said from the start that Parliament hadn't voted enough money to fund the war.
00:48:42And, just as he predicted, the money was soon gone.
00:48:46The Navy lunged from triumph to crisis.
00:48:50Things soon reached boiling point.
00:48:55The Navy was terribly in debt and sailors went unpaid.
00:48:59In the dockyards, Pepys saw workers walking around like ghosts.
00:49:03And he heard the lamentable moans of sailors that lay destitute in the street.
00:49:09A sight which he said troubled him to his heart.
00:49:11To add to the sense of crisis, plague broke out in London.
00:49:15And Pepys and his clerks came down here to Greenwich where they took up residence in this, one of Charles II's unfinished palaces.
00:49:22But that put them in the heart of the fleet with all disgruntled sailors around them.
00:49:27One day their windows were broken and Pepys and his staff were threatened with physical violence.
00:49:32Pepys spent 24 hours composing a desperate letter to the King.
00:49:43It's unambiguous and it would have made very disturbing reading for his royal master.
00:49:48Pepys begins by apologising for being troublesome, he says.
00:49:52Troubling His Majesty on the subject for which we often have done, the want of money, the effects of that want,
00:49:57under which His Majesty's service under our care hath long been sinking.
00:50:04So Pepys is in no doubt that his navy is facing utter ruin.
00:50:08And he comes up with a typically Pepysian solution.
00:50:11He gives a list, carefully costed, of everything that he thinks is necessary to prevent that.
00:50:16He starts up here by saying 55 anchors of various weights, 800 bales of sailcloth,
00:50:214,000 loads of plank, 400 dozen oars, 12 tons of brimstone, 10,000 spars of all sorts.
00:50:30And he comes up with the incredibly precise figure, as only Pepys could do,
00:50:34of the money required to stave off disaster for the navy and for England.
00:50:39And that sum is £179,793 and 10 shillings.
00:50:46But the King had nothing to give, and would not humiliate himself by going cap in hand to Parliament to ask for more.
00:50:56Just a few months later came the naval disaster Pepys had predicted.
00:51:05It was the summer of 1667.
00:51:08The fleet had been laid up because there was no money to pay crews to man it.
00:51:12Upna Castle, 30 miles up the Thames from London, had been built in Elizabeth's time to protect the fleet across the river Medway at Chatham.
00:51:24The exhausted and unpaid garrison were not at their best.
00:51:28On that June day, the horrified defenders of this fort watched as 62 Dutch ships made their way up the river on the rising tide.
00:51:39Anchored here was much of Charles's fleet, including four of his finest battleships.
00:51:45In a desperate measure, the English sank some of their own ships here to try and block the river.
00:51:50But that didn't work, and their cannon on shore opened up to try and turn the Dutch back.
00:51:55But unbelievably, someone had delivered the wrong ammunition, and many of the cannonballs didn't even fit down the barrels.
00:52:01The Dutch ships ploughed in amongst the English ships with impunity, capturing them, burning others, including three of the finest battleships in the land.
00:52:11The river was covered in wreckage, and in the sky there was a pall of smoke.
00:52:18One of Pepys's clerks, who lived and worked down here, wrote and said,
00:52:22The destruction of those three glorious ships was one of the most dismal sights my eyes have ever beheld.
00:52:28It was enough, he said, to make the heart of every true Englishman bleed.
00:52:32In a final humiliation, the Dutch towed back to Holland the Royal Charles itself,
00:52:52a moment immortalised on canvas, showing the pride of England's fleet, flying the Dutch flag.
00:52:58The Dutch raid here on the Medway was, at the time, and remains to this day, the most embarrassing defeat in the history of the Royal Navy.
00:53:11Not even the brilliant Pepys could avert this catastrophe.
00:53:14The simple fact was that King Charles just couldn't afford a modern navy.
00:53:28The Medway disaster set the King and Parliament on another collision course over how the navy was to be funded and controlled.
00:53:42When Charles died in 1685, relations between King and Parliament were at their lowest ebb since the Civil War.
00:53:50He was succeeded by his brother James.
00:53:59Now, he had had a rather successful career as an admiral in the Royal Navy.
00:54:03Could he be the man to work together with politicians and financiers and businessmen to build a new kind of constitutional monarchy?
00:54:11Well, no. And this extraordinary portrait tells us why.
00:54:20James has had himself painted in the garb of a Roman emperor, with a haughty stare, his golden tunic, magnificent purple robe flowing off his shoulders,
00:54:30and decked out in jewels at his throat, sword hilt and sandals.
00:54:36And out at sea, his navy, his plaything, the royal banner flying from the main top mast.
00:54:43This was not how the English wanted their kings to see themselves.
00:54:48To make matters worse, James was openly, proudly Catholic.
00:54:52He appointed Catholics to key positions in the armed forces.
00:54:57He even put one of them in charge of the Royal Navy.
00:55:01This was clearly a man who wouldn't send his Royal Navy out to attack the great Catholic powers of Europe.
00:55:08This was not a man to protect the legacy of Drake and Hawkins.
00:55:13He would have to go.
00:55:23In July 1688, a figure dressed as a common sailor arrived in Holland.
00:55:33Beneath the disguise was England's premier naval officer, Admiral Arthur Herbert.
00:55:39Or rather, ex-admiral.
00:55:42He'd resigned weeks before, refusing to serve under King James.
00:55:46Herbert was carrying an extraordinary letter.
00:55:52It was signed by seven Englishmen, all grandees in the armed forces, church and state.
00:55:58And it was addressed to the Dutch Prince William of Orange,
00:56:01who was not only Protestant, but he was married to James II's daughter, Mary.
00:56:06It was an appeal for William's help against their tyrannical king.
00:56:09This was high treason, but Herbert and his fellow conspirators were the desperate men from an exasperated nation.
00:56:18And in William, they'd found their man.
00:56:20On November the 1st, 1688, a vast Dutch invasion fleet, 463 vessels, 40,000 men, left Holland bound for England.
00:56:39It was almost exactly a hundred years since the Spanish Armada.
00:56:51But this time, not a single shot was fired.
00:56:54From the top mast of William's flagship, he flew a banner with his family motto on, I will maintain.
00:57:12But he added, in letters three feet high, the liberties of the English and the Protestant religion.
00:57:17The message was clear, and when William landed here on the south coast of England, he was greeted with cheers.
00:57:24Over the next few weeks, it became obvious that the English weren't going to fight for James II,
00:57:29and he fled the country and was replaced as king by William.
00:57:32James, like his brother and his father before him, had proved himself incompatible with the new idea of Englishness that had crystallised since the days of the Armada.
00:57:50That idea was opposed to absolutism and Catholicism and proud of Parliament, liberty, and of sending the English Navy out against England's traditional enemies.
00:58:03William's invasion of 1688 represented the final victory of those values.
00:58:10It was the myth of the Armada made real.
00:58:12In little over a hundred years, a rabble of West Country seafarers and a few royal ships had become a recognisably modern institution,
00:58:27with staff and systems to manage a vast, efficient navy.
00:58:31This was England's heart of oak, a navy that now lay at the centre of the national project and its future.
00:58:40Next week, how the navy triggered a series of revolutions in finance, industry and agriculture, generating unimaginable wealth and propelling Britain into the modern world.
00:59:00And Empire of the Seas continues next Saturday at the slightly earlier time of six o'clock.
00:59:06A fresh perspective on modern warfare in the legacy of Lawrence of Arabia over on BBC Two now.
00:59:13And here on BBC HD, stay with us for Drama with Gracie.
00:59:16On a blustery November day, four centuries ago, the English were preparing themselves for one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen.
00:59:30On a blustery November day, four centuries ago, the English were preparing themselves for one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen.
00:59:43Beneath the dome of St Paul's they gathered to celebrate their tiny nation's victory over the world's greatest superpower, Spain.
00:59:59On the walls hung the captured ensigns of the Spanish fleet that was even then being dashed on the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland.
01:00:11The year was 1588.
01:00:17And the battle was the Armada.
01:00:21Today's celebrations mark the centenary of the fleet air arm.
01:00:26And it still seems like the most natural thing in the world to devote a great cathedral to the Royal Navy.
01:00:37A tradition that began on that autumn day 400 years ago.
01:00:411588 marked a turning point in our national story victory over the Armada transformed us into a seafaring nation.
01:00:54And it sparked a myth that would one day become a reality that the nation's new destiny, the source of her future wealth and power lay out there on the oceans.
01:01:05This series tells the story of how the Navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex industrial enterprise on earth.
01:01:18Of how the need to organize it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy.
01:01:24Of how it transformed our culture, our sense of national identity and our democracy.
01:01:31It's a story of heroism and innovation.
01:01:36But also of disasters and dark chapters in our history.
01:01:41It's the remarkable story of a 400 years struggle fought at sea and on land.
01:01:49Of how the Navy drove Britain into the modern age and changed the world.
01:01:54That's why the Navy did a great job in the American history of the community.
01:01:56That's why it is so important.
01:01:57Who can we do?
01:01:58We're all in the modern age.
01:01:59What's the same story of the Navy named Littlerovolve scene?
01:02:00That's why we're doing many of the lately.
01:02:01My family met a few times for the Navy.
01:02:03We're all in the military.
01:02:04You were in the military.
01:02:05It's from the military.
01:02:06We're in the military more than a military.
01:02:08You were.
01:02:09This was been the military.
01:02:10And then the military, the military has become a military.
01:02:11Those bravely essential workers in the military.
01:02:12Old air force in the military.
01:02:13The military needed to the military has become a military or military.
01:02:18The military has been a military to operate.
01:02:19You're all in the military.
01:02:20This was a militaryühllin's military,
01:02:21Clear the hatch.
01:02:32England's extraordinary journey from a third-rate nation to global superpower
01:02:36began on a clear October day, 20 years before the Armada.
01:02:44OK, bring on the beer.
01:02:47Not that anything so grand was on the minds of the sailors
01:02:50who scurried to and fro in the old harbour in Plymouth,
01:02:54making a small fleet of six ships ready for sea.
01:02:59The gangplank groaned as last-minute supplies were brought on board,
01:03:03large barrels of fresh water and beer,
01:03:06and even whinnying goats and chickens as well.
01:03:10When everything was brought on board,
01:03:11they were lashed down to the bulkheads in expectation of a bumpy passage.
01:03:16The two men in command were cousins.
01:03:18And on that fine autumn day,
01:03:20they were thinking not about making war,
01:03:23but about making money.
01:03:28The elder of the two was John Hawkins,
01:03:31who, at the age of just 35,
01:03:33was already Plymouth's leading merchant venturer.
01:03:38The younger was his cousin,
01:03:40a poor relation who'd grown up with Hawkins,
01:03:4327-year-old Francis Drake.
01:03:45They were leaving behind a poor, insignificant town
01:03:57on the edge of a poor, insignificant country,
01:04:00which itself clung to the fringes of Europe.
01:04:03But this place had one thing going for it.
01:04:06This, one of the finest natural harbours on Earth,
01:04:10gateway to the Atlantic,
01:04:12and beyond that,
01:04:13the New World.
01:04:24First discovered only 60 years before,
01:04:27the New World of the Americas
01:04:29offered wealth beyond imagining.
01:04:31If they could get there and bring it back, that is.
01:04:36A round trip of 12,000 miles.
01:04:39No mean feat in the 1560s.
01:04:42Slabby.
01:04:43Two, six.
01:04:45Two, six.
01:04:47Two, six.
01:04:50Take a break.
01:04:51Is that halfway?
01:04:56Yeah.
01:04:56Are you kidding me?
01:04:57No.
01:05:03This wonderful replica of the Tudor ship,
01:05:06the Matthew,
01:05:06gives me a strong sense
01:05:08of what life might have been like on board.
01:05:11Sailing one of these,
01:05:12you're just so struck by the ingenuity, aren't you?
01:05:15It's the sort of combination of wood, rope,
01:05:17a bit of metal,
01:05:18and you can sail around the other side of the world.
01:05:21Among the profit-hungry investors in the venture
01:05:27was the queen herself.
01:05:31She'd lent two ships,
01:05:33the Jesus of Lübeck and the Minion.
01:05:36Both were old, spent, and rotten,
01:05:39as were most of the vessels in her tiny navy.
01:05:46The crew, too, would get their share of the booty.
01:05:51All were young.
01:05:53Some were just boys.
01:05:55Among them, Hawkins' nephew, Paul,
01:05:56and the 13-year-old Miles Phillips,
01:05:59whose journal relates the terrors
01:06:01of frequent storms and leaking hulls.
01:06:08There were no creature comforts
01:06:10for those on board, either.
01:06:12The single-minded Hawkins
01:06:13made his men sleep on deck
01:06:15because every inch of hold space
01:06:19was reserved for the cargo
01:06:20that would make the cash.
01:06:22On that expedition,
01:06:31the cargo was a human one.
01:06:34Drake and Hawkins
01:06:35have the terrible distinction
01:06:36of being the first Englishman
01:06:38to bind African men, women,
01:06:40and children in chains
01:06:41and transport them
01:06:43in the holds of ships like this.
01:06:45They were slave traders.
01:06:46Six weeks out of Plymouth,
01:07:02they picked up 500 slaves in Guinea,
01:07:05then headed west.
01:07:08Few Englishmen had ever made this journey.
01:07:12England had been slow
01:07:13to spot the opportunities of the New World,
01:07:15and the Spanish had got there first.
01:07:18Now Spain jealously guarded
01:07:20a lucrative American empire,
01:07:22stretching from South America
01:07:23through the Caribbean
01:07:24to Mexico and further north.
01:07:30Drake and Hawkins
01:07:31just wanted a little slice of the action.
01:07:33Nip in, sell a few slaves,
01:07:35and return home
01:07:36with a hold full of silver.
01:07:38The problem was
01:07:39the Spanish had banned foreigners
01:07:41from trading
01:07:41within their lucrative empire.
01:07:44Hawkins had managed it
01:07:45once or twice before
01:07:45and got away with it.
01:07:46He hoped to do so again.
01:07:48But this time,
01:07:49it would be different.
01:07:55In the Caribbean,
01:07:57they traded their human cargo
01:07:59for silver, gold, and pearls,
01:08:01then turned for home.
01:08:03But it was hurricane season.
01:08:11Storms drove them to San Juan
01:08:13on the coast of Mexico,
01:08:14where a powerful Spanish fleet
01:08:16first promised them safe passage,
01:08:19then decided to teach them
01:08:21a violent lesson.
01:08:22In the fight that followed,
01:08:36Hawkins lost three of his ships,
01:08:37including the Jesus of Lubeck,
01:08:39and 200 men killed or captured.
01:08:42He managed to escape on the minion,
01:08:43and with him was the 13-year-old Miles Phillips,
01:08:46who watched what happened to the prisoners.
01:08:48They took our men ashore,
01:08:50he wrote,
01:08:50and hung them up by their arms
01:08:52until blood burst out
01:08:54from their fingers' ends.
01:08:56In the moment of personal tragedy
01:08:58for Hawkins,
01:08:59he realised that his nephew,
01:09:01Paul, was among them.
01:09:10Disease and famine followed,
01:09:12and by the time they limped home,
01:09:15fewer than 20 men
01:09:16were left alive
01:09:17aboard the minion.
01:09:20But for the survivors,
01:09:21this disaster acted
01:09:23not as a deterrent,
01:09:25but as a spur to action.
01:09:31Take it for all that.
01:09:36The experience marked
01:09:37Drake and Hawkins
01:09:38for the rest of their lives.
01:09:40Neither would ever forgive
01:09:41the Spanish
01:09:42for their treachery,
01:09:43and they threw themselves
01:09:44into a bitter,
01:09:46personal crusade
01:09:47against Spain.
01:09:48It was fuelled
01:09:49by the heavy mix
01:09:50of a lust for cash,
01:09:52religious zealotry,
01:09:53and a desire
01:09:54for personal revenge.
01:09:56In time,
01:09:57this crusade
01:09:58would become
01:09:58a national enterprise,
01:10:00and in doing so,
01:10:01it would forge
01:10:01a new idea of Englishness.
01:10:07But if England's seafarers
01:10:09were to have any chance
01:10:10of catching up with Spain,
01:10:11they would need
01:10:12better ships to do it.
01:10:20Hawkins' answer
01:10:21was the race-built galleon,
01:10:24his radical breakthrough
01:10:26in warship design,
01:10:28preserved
01:10:28in these original drawings.
01:10:33By using maths
01:10:34and geometry
01:10:35instead of rule of thumb,
01:10:37by cutting down
01:10:38high decks
01:10:39and by streamlining hulls,
01:10:42Hawkins produced
01:10:43the fastest ships
01:10:44of their kind
01:10:45anywhere in the world.
01:10:49The first was built
01:10:51in 1570
01:10:52at the Queen's Dockyard
01:10:54in Deptford.
01:10:55More were to follow.
01:10:58With greater space
01:10:59for guns,
01:11:00they were perfectly designed
01:11:01for war.
01:11:11But 20 race-built galleons,
01:11:14the most the Tudor state
01:11:15could afford,
01:11:16would not be enough
01:11:17on their own.
01:11:21Hawkins landed a job
01:11:22on the Navy Board,
01:11:23the committee that ran
01:11:24the Queen's modest fleet.
01:11:26And in 1582,
01:11:29the Board commissioned
01:11:30a series of extraordinary surveys,
01:11:32preserved here
01:11:33at the National Archives.
01:11:45Yeah, see,
01:11:46I've read about this,
01:11:47but I've never seen it before.
01:11:48This is a list
01:11:49of every ship
01:11:50in England
01:11:51compiled under
01:11:52Hawkins' leadership.
01:11:53And it's actually,
01:11:54as you can see,
01:11:54broken up by
01:11:56county here,
01:11:58Norfolk,
01:11:59Suffolk,
01:11:59absolutely meticulously
01:12:01written down.
01:12:01It's beautiful.
01:12:03Every single ship,
01:12:04oh, with the tonnage here,
01:12:05so these ones are
01:12:05St Mary,
01:12:07Solomon,
01:12:07200 tonnes.
01:12:09Absolutely incredible.
01:12:11As we go further on
01:12:12here,
01:12:13they didn't just
01:12:14list the ships,
01:12:16they list
01:12:16the masters
01:12:17and then the number
01:12:18of mariners
01:12:19and seamen
01:12:21there are as well
01:12:21for each port.
01:12:23So here we go.
01:12:24In Cornwall,
01:12:25there are 108 masters,
01:12:26626 mariners
01:12:28and 1,184 seamen.
01:12:31So precise.
01:12:33Incredible.
01:12:33This information
01:12:34is being gathered
01:12:35centrally in London
01:12:36at the beck and call
01:12:38of the Tudor state.
01:12:42It's actually very moving
01:12:43seeing the names
01:12:45of people
01:12:46that lived
01:12:46all those centuries ago.
01:12:48And once you have
01:12:49a list like this,
01:12:50when war comes,
01:12:51when there's a national
01:12:52emergency,
01:12:52you can go and
01:12:53knock on the door
01:12:54of men like
01:12:55John Cooper
01:12:56and Peter Dolemor
01:12:57and say,
01:12:58right mate,
01:12:58you're coming in the Navy,
01:12:59you're coming to protect
01:13:00the country.
01:13:01And it does make you wonder
01:13:02whether men like
01:13:02William Bennett,
01:13:04William Mort
01:13:04from Littleham,
01:13:06whether they end up
01:13:07fighting against
01:13:08the Spanish Armada.
01:13:08and this is just fantastic.
01:13:13You get right to the end.
01:13:14The total number
01:13:15of mariners
01:13:16available to the Tudor state,
01:13:1816,259.
01:13:20Men that could be mobilised
01:13:22to protect
01:13:22Little England
01:13:23against the greatest
01:13:24superpower in the world.
01:13:25Drake, meanwhile,
01:13:36was taking his revenge
01:13:38on Spain
01:13:38in a much more
01:13:40direct fashion.
01:13:44On an April day
01:13:45in 1587,
01:13:47the residents of Cadiz
01:13:48woke to the sound
01:13:49of gunfire.
01:13:55By the end of the day,
01:14:11over 30 Spanish ships
01:14:13lay at the bottom
01:14:14of the harbour
01:14:14and Drake's fleet
01:14:16had sailed away
01:14:17with holds
01:14:18full of treasure.
01:14:21It was the culmination
01:14:22of a ten-year
01:14:23pillaging spree
01:14:24that had seen
01:14:25Drake circumnavigate
01:14:27the globe,
01:14:28attack Spanish colonies
01:14:29and steal their loot.
01:14:32Belligerent,
01:14:33venal,
01:14:34a peerless seafarer,
01:14:35he was Protestant
01:14:36England's new hero.
01:14:39In Catholic Spain,
01:14:41he was anything but.
01:14:44Standing here,
01:14:46looking at it
01:14:46from the Spanish
01:14:47point of view,
01:14:48the English appear
01:14:49a little different
01:14:50from Vikings,
01:14:51men who came
01:14:51from the north
01:14:52in ships bent
01:14:53on plunder
01:14:54and destruction
01:14:55to whom nothing
01:14:56was sacred.
01:14:57Most infamous of all
01:14:58was Drake,
01:15:00still hated,
01:15:01still known
01:15:02as Ildraque,
01:15:03the dragon.
01:15:05Now,
01:15:05the dragon
01:15:06had pushed
01:15:07the king of Spain
01:15:07to take his own
01:15:09terrible revenge
01:15:09on Drake
01:15:10and England.
01:15:18That revenge
01:15:19came
01:15:20in July 1588.
01:15:21In July 1588.
01:15:28When the armada
01:15:30appeared off
01:15:30England's coast,
01:15:32one eyewitness
01:15:33wrote that the ocean
01:15:34groaned under their weight.
01:15:39It had taken Spain
01:15:41three years
01:15:41and a titanic amount
01:15:43of silver
01:15:44to assemble it,
01:15:45while the English fleet
01:15:47had been mobilized
01:15:48in just three months.
01:15:53The battle raged
01:15:54for several days.
01:15:59But the leadership
01:16:00of men like Drake
01:16:02and Hawkins
01:16:02had given the English
01:16:03a decisive edge.
01:16:05people have tended
01:16:24to attribute victory
01:16:25over the Spanish armada
01:16:26to the courage
01:16:27of the English sailors
01:16:28or the intervention
01:16:29of divine wind.
01:16:31In fact,
01:16:31the Spanish
01:16:32fought equally bravely
01:16:33and at different stages
01:16:34of the campaign
01:16:34the wind favoured
01:16:35both sides.
01:16:37The real reason
01:16:37is a lot less glamorous.
01:16:39It's the inspired
01:16:40organisation
01:16:41of Hawkins.
01:16:42He ensured
01:16:43that England
01:16:43had a fleet
01:16:44of fast,
01:16:45manoeuvrable ships,
01:16:46each one of which
01:16:47carried something
01:16:47like three times
01:16:49the weight in armament
01:16:50of its Spanish equivalent.
01:16:52He laid the foundations
01:16:53for modern naval warfare,
01:16:55bringing ships,
01:16:56men,
01:16:57and cannon together
01:16:58in a decisive combination.
01:16:59So when the great
01:17:11and the good
01:17:12arrived in their finery
01:17:13at St Paul's
01:17:14on that day
01:17:15in November 1588,
01:17:17they were celebrating
01:17:18not just a victory,
01:17:20but the beginning
01:17:20of a new future.
01:17:23The queen,
01:17:24as one author wrote,
01:17:26was carried
01:17:26in a golden chariot
01:17:27through her city
01:17:29of London
01:17:29in robes of triumph,
01:17:32while the still
01:17:33bloody heads
01:17:34of Catholic traitors
01:17:35executed for praying
01:17:37for the Armada's success
01:17:39stared down
01:17:40from spikes nearby.
01:17:46The Tudor PR machine
01:17:48went into overdrive.
01:17:50A new portrait
01:17:51showed the queen
01:17:52triumphant,
01:17:53her hand on a globe,
01:17:54the Spanish ships
01:17:56crushed on the rocks
01:17:57behind her.
01:18:10The scale of the victory
01:18:11expanded the horizons
01:18:13of a small,
01:18:14impoverished nation.
01:18:16One commentator wrote,
01:18:18the sea had become
01:18:19a means to seek
01:18:20new worlds,
01:18:21for gold,
01:18:22for praise,
01:18:23for glory.
01:18:31The English
01:18:31had been given
01:18:32a bright vision
01:18:33of a glittering future,
01:18:35of riches
01:18:36beyond imagination,
01:18:38of new frontiers
01:18:39that stretched
01:18:39way beyond
01:18:40the shores
01:18:41of tiny England.
01:18:43Above all,
01:18:44it was a future
01:18:45that would be played
01:18:45out on the seas,
01:18:47by the ships
01:18:47of the navy
01:18:48and by a new breed
01:18:49of heroic seafarer.
01:18:52England's view
01:18:52of its place
01:18:53in the world
01:18:54would never be
01:18:55the same again.
01:18:56Guard of honour,
01:18:58sloop,
01:18:59arms.
01:19:02Front,
01:19:03hand,
01:19:04feet.
01:19:05The Queen's navy
01:19:06had become a source
01:19:07of national pride
01:19:09as never before
01:19:09and there was
01:19:10an insatiable demand
01:19:12for stories
01:19:12of seafaring adventure
01:19:14and discovery.
01:19:15A new national identity,
01:19:19aggressive,
01:19:20ambitious
01:19:20and Protestant,
01:19:22was in the making.
01:19:25If Hawkins
01:19:26was the architect
01:19:27of that new identity
01:19:28and Drake
01:19:29its firebrand,
01:19:30then Richard Hackliet
01:19:32was its biographer.
01:19:35In 1589,
01:19:36the year after
01:19:37the Spanish Armada,
01:19:38he wrote this,
01:19:39The Principal Navigations,
01:19:41Voyages,
01:19:42Traffics
01:19:42and Discoveries
01:19:43of the English Nation.
01:19:46An account
01:19:47of 1600 years
01:19:48of history
01:19:49containing over
01:19:50250 seafaring
01:19:52adventures
01:19:53by Englishmen.
01:19:54A mix of
01:19:55storytelling
01:19:55and myth-making.
01:19:57Here at the back
01:19:58of this one,
01:19:59for example,
01:19:59we have Hawkins'
01:20:00ill-fated trip
01:20:02to the Caribbean
01:20:03with Miles Phillips'
01:20:05gruesome account
01:20:06of the barbarous
01:20:07treatment they received
01:20:07at the hands
01:20:08of the Spaniards.
01:20:10Here in the next
01:20:12volume,
01:20:13we have the account
01:20:14of the defeat
01:20:15of the Spanish Armada
01:20:16itself,
01:20:16which ends
01:20:17with this incredible
01:20:18paragraph that says,
01:20:20Thus the magnificent,
01:20:21huge and mighty
01:20:22fleet of the Spaniards
01:20:24in the year 1588
01:20:26vanished into smoke.
01:20:32This was history
01:20:33with a purpose,
01:20:35a call to arms
01:20:36to a nation
01:20:36on the verge
01:20:37of a new destiny.
01:20:40That destiny
01:20:41could not have been
01:20:41made more obvious
01:20:42than it was
01:20:43in a subsequent
01:20:43edition of
01:20:45Hakluyt's work,
01:20:46which contained
01:20:47this stunning map.
01:20:50This piece of paper
01:20:51is 400 years old.
01:20:53It's incredibly beautiful.
01:20:55Just look at the detail
01:20:56of the world's coastlines
01:20:58and ports and rivers.
01:21:02What's so remarkable
01:21:03about this map
01:21:03is that medieval maps
01:21:04show England
01:21:05as an insignificant island
01:21:06clinging to the edge
01:21:07of Europe,
01:21:08but now England's not
01:21:09at the edge.
01:21:10It's been picked up
01:21:11and moved right
01:21:11to the heart
01:21:12of the world.
01:21:17It's an image
01:21:18of the world
01:21:18we all recognise,
01:21:19but this map
01:21:21showed it
01:21:22for the first time.
01:21:25It was a potent symbol
01:21:27of a nation
01:21:27that now had
01:21:28global ambitions.
01:21:31Ships poured
01:21:33out of England,
01:21:34bound for the Americas,
01:21:35Africa,
01:21:36Asia,
01:21:37and the Baltic.
01:21:39Numerous and aggressive,
01:21:40these English pioneers
01:21:41steadily eroded
01:21:43Spanish power
01:21:44and founded the colonies
01:21:46that formed
01:21:46the beginnings
01:21:47of Britain's future empire.
01:21:48Abroad and at home,
01:21:59business was booming.
01:22:01Ports like East Loo
01:22:02and Cornwall
01:22:03now had scores
01:22:04of fishing boats
01:22:05trading as far away
01:22:07as North America.
01:22:09In these new,
01:22:10confident times,
01:22:11they called themselves
01:22:12the Western Adventurers.
01:22:14But economic success
01:22:20brought a new threat
01:22:21that no one
01:22:22had foreseen.
01:22:36Suddenly,
01:22:37whole fleets,
01:22:3810 or 12 ships,
01:22:39would head out to sea
01:22:40and simply vanish.
01:22:44There are reports
01:22:45of ships found
01:22:46floating out there
01:22:47in the Atlantic
01:22:47without their crews
01:22:49who were never seen again.
01:22:50On one night
01:22:51in the summer of 1631
01:22:53in the village of Baltimore
01:22:54in Southern Ireland,
01:22:56over 100 people
01:22:57were removed
01:22:57from their beds,
01:22:59leaving the place
01:23:00a ghost town.
01:23:07A remarkable letter
01:23:09written in August 1625
01:23:11reveals the scale
01:23:13and horror of the problem.
01:23:16It's from the mayor
01:23:18of Plymouth,
01:23:19Thomas Seeley,
01:23:20to the king's council.
01:23:23One poor maritime town
01:23:24in Cornwall
01:23:25called Loo
01:23:26hath within 10 days
01:23:28lost 80 mariners
01:23:29bound in fishing voyages
01:23:31to the deeps
01:23:31and there
01:23:33have been taken
01:23:35by the Turks.
01:23:36Back then,
01:23:41Turks meant Muslims
01:23:43and these were in fact
01:23:44pirates from North Africa,
01:23:46Barbary pirates.
01:23:47They came to these shores
01:23:49and took people as slaves
01:23:50back to North Africa.
01:23:52It was a barbarous practice
01:23:54but it was of course
01:23:55what these West countrymen
01:23:56have been doing to Africans
01:23:57for decades now.
01:23:58Even so,
01:23:59it turned the sea here
01:24:01from a source of wealth
01:24:02and prestige for England
01:24:03into a place of terror
01:24:05and slavery.
01:24:08The ports
01:24:09and fishing villages,
01:24:10it's said,
01:24:11were filled with
01:24:12the pitiful lamentations
01:24:13of the victims' families.
01:24:17In the next few years,
01:24:19Devon and Cornwall
01:24:20would lose a fifth
01:24:21of their shipping
01:24:22and crews.
01:24:23This extraordinary
01:24:29and little-known episode
01:24:30in English history
01:24:31was to have
01:24:31far-reaching consequences.
01:24:33Englishmen were bred
01:24:35on the myth
01:24:36of maritime invincibility
01:24:38but now they had to face
01:24:39hard truths.
01:24:41Once the predators,
01:24:43they were now the prey
01:24:44and people did
01:24:45what they usually did
01:24:46in a crisis.
01:24:46They blamed the government
01:24:48and they weren't
01:24:49entirely wrong.
01:24:50Fishing vessel Trevose,
01:24:56fishing vessel Trevose.
01:24:57This is protection vessel
01:24:58Tyne calling you
01:24:59Channel 1 sector.
01:25:01Tyne, Trevose.
01:25:04I'm on one of the
01:25:05modern Navy's
01:25:06fishery protection vessels
01:25:07about 30 miles
01:25:08from Cornwall,
01:25:10just the territory
01:25:10where the Barbary pirates
01:25:12were seizing English shipping.
01:25:20Trevose, this is Tyne.
01:25:21It's my intention
01:25:21to send a routine
01:25:23boarding team over to you.
01:25:24My team will be with you
01:25:25in that 2-0 minutes.
01:25:27Over.
01:25:30In Elizabeth's time,
01:25:31the Queen's ships
01:25:32and the private vessels
01:25:33of freebooters like Drake
01:25:34had kept these waters safe.
01:25:37But the Queen was now dead.
01:25:40Stop the other thing!
01:25:42The new Stuart regime
01:25:44had made peace with Spain
01:25:46and the Navy had been cut back.
01:25:48With a predilection
01:25:52for self-aggrandizement,
01:25:54the regime had spent its cash,
01:25:56some of it raised illegally
01:25:57by notorious ship money,
01:26:00on a few grand, vanity ships
01:26:02designed to impress
01:26:04the kings of Europe.
01:26:09Trouble was,
01:26:11fishery protection
01:26:12wasn't the kind of job
01:26:13that these showy vessels
01:26:14would have had.
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