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

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.’