Tudor Ships’ Boats, part 1

Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485 to 1547)

The Tudors ruled England from 1485, when Henry VII ended the Wars Of The Roses, to the death of Elizabeth in 1603; this period really marked the beginning and development of a permanent Royal Navy.

Although a fair amount of material is available about the Royal ships themselves, precious little evidence has survived about the boats carried (or, more often, towed) by the ships. Following is a little of what does survive, in written records and pictures, to form an idea of what they were like.

Any historical study of the RN will use the publications of the Navy Records Society, and this is no exception. The first written evidence for the period is the NRS volume, ‘Naval Accounts & Invemtories of Henry VII’, which covers the early years of that reign – 1485 to 1497. There are, in the inventories for ‘great ships’, three boats mentioned (in order of size):

• Great (or ‘long’) boat
• Cock
• Jollyvatt (jollyboat)

There are also, in several other souorces, printed inventories from the reign of Henry VIII, in Oppenheim’s ‘Administration’, various books on the Mary Rose, the Anthony Roll and Hakluyt’s ‘Principal Navigations’.

During the years covered here this ‘establishment’ of boats changed little, although certain names came into more common use. For instance, the ‘cock’ was later known as the ‘shallop’, and the ‘jollivatt’ or ‘gellywatt’ came eventually to be known as the ‘jollyboat’ or ‘skiff’. What was originally called the ‘great boat’ – the largest ship’s boat – gradually became more usually called the ‘longboat’.

Uses

The carriage of officers, crew and passengers is the first use that comes to mind; normally the cock or shallop would be used for this, though a single (& unimportant) passenger would warrant only the jollyvatt, and large numbers of men would have to be moved in the great boat.

Supplies – mainly water and victuals – was another frequent use of the great boat and cock. Water, beer, salted meat – and, in fact, most victuals – were packed and carried in barrels (butts or hogsheads), so boats were often designed around the ability to carry the maximum number of these. If the ship was on a long, ocean-going trip the empty barrels would be taken ashore and filled there from local water or other supplies, so they had to be capable of carrying decent numbers of barrels.

Hakluyt’s ‘Principal Navigations’ mentions, during the course of a 1535 voyage:

The whole number of our companie in this ship were about 100. men, we were also furnished with a great bote, which was able to cary 10 tunnes of water, which at our returne homewards we towed all the way from Chio vntill we came through the straight of Gibraltar into the maine Ocean. We had also a great long boat and a skiff.

Ten tons of water in casks equates to 40 hogsheads, each of which being 64 gallons in capacity (a modern steel drum, 1.5 metres high, holds about 44 gallons). Richard Barker (a water engineer as well as naval antiquarian) has worked out that, to carry 40 such hohsheads would need a hull length of at least 54 feet – half the length of a big ship.

Anchor-work was another frequent use, and for this the largest boat (usually the great boat) was often fitted with a windlass and a large davit fitted with a sheave, overhanging the bow (or occasionally the stern), to either retrieve an snagged anchor when it came time to weigh, or carrying out a kedge anchor if the ship was stranded on a sand bar.

Boats were also frequently used for towing ships, either when becalmed through lack of wind or to overcome a contrary wind and tide. What is often not realized is the extent to which ships’ boats were used in action.

This use could be in one of several different ways. If the ship was becalmed with the enemy just out of range of her guns, one or more of the boats would then tow her into range. Boats were also often used to actually attack an enemy ship, as several could be used to board the ship from more than one point at the same time.

Oars, Masts And Sails

As a rough rule of thumb, the larger the boat the more likely it was normally to have been sailed rather than rowed. One mast was usual, and the rig was either square or spritsail – although there is a possibility that the square sail was set at times as a lugsail.

In all the inventories that I’ve seen – regardless of the size of the boat – only one mast, yard and sail is shown. A typical list for the ‘great boat’ of a large ship – the Sovereign of 1495 - reads:

Grete botes belongyng to the seid ship 1

Rothers to the same bote 1

Mastes 1

Sayle yerdes 1

Sayles 1

Shrowdes 13

Stayes to the mast 1

Shyvers of yron in the botes hede 1

Devettes with a shyver of yron to the same 1

Cheynes in the bowes of the seid bote armyng the ankers 1

Ores to the seid bote 18

Fforeskolles to the seid bote 1

Afterskulles to the same 1

This tells us quite a bit about the ship’s boat of 500 years ago. The rudder is listed separately, so it could be unshipped; the mast must have been big to warrant 13 shrouds (I’ve no explanation for the odd number here, shrouds usually being in pairs), but still carried only one sail, with its yard; this was probably a square sail. The most common fore-and-aft sail on a boat at the time was the spritsail, but that cannot apply here, as a yard is mentioned, not a sprit.

The ‘sculls’ mentioned were, in the accounts, always cheaper than oars, so must have been smaller; there are several possible explanations for these. Two hundred years later sculls were always used in pairs, one in each hand, but as here one fore-scull and one after-scull are listed, they are probably squeezed in at the extremities of the boat, where there was not enough beam to work a full-sized oar. They could also have been used on either side, when approaching a ship or wharf, where space was tight and precision needed.

The eighteen oars mentioned (plus the sculls) give some idea of the size of the boat, and that number was by no means exceptional. If we look at an 18-oared boat from much later, when measurements are available, the smallest I can find is just under 36 feet in length; if the two sculls are allowed for – one at each end – this increases to 42 feet.

Note that this was the smallest 18-oared boat: others were found of 46 feet or even more. To keep the boat within a reasonable size they were rowed double-banked, ie, two men sat on each thwart (bench), each one rowing an oar on each side.

In an account of 1410 – much earlier than most records – a ship’s great boat is noted as having 13 oars and 2 sculls, so their use has a long history; that boat, though, had two masts, something which was not to happen again for nearly 200 years.

Lastly, the gear needed for handling the ground tackle is listed: a sheave of iron in the boat’s head, a davit (bow or stern?) with a sheave of iron, and chains in the bows for ‘arming the anchors’. This has me puzzled; the davit and the sheave in the head are obviously for carrying or hauling up the anchor; the chains could be used to suspend the anchor safely from the boat, or it could be a description of a ‘fore-ganger’, which was the name for the chain section of the cable closest to the anchor, where a rope cable was more likely to be damaged by obstructions on the sea floor.

Other equipment mentioned in the inventories for the great boats (but not cocks or jollyboats) are a windlass and boathooks, the former for weighing the anchor with a cable reeved through the sheave in the davit or boat’s head.

Manning The Boat

A ‘station list’ for the Great Harry, from about 1545, has survived; these lists showed who, or how many men, were to be stationed where, in time of action. Out of her crew of 514 men, all the key locations in the ship are covered, for example, 4 men on the helm and 12 in the main top. The three boats are assigned men:

Boat 40

Cock 20

Gellywatte 10

..which asks yet more questions. If 18 men were needed for the oars and two for the sculls, what of the other twenty? Did they handle the purely sailing roles on board the boat? That would be unusual, as sailors were generally adaptable and multi-skilled if nothing else.

Looking at the inventory of Great Harry’s boats to see where these men would be needed, on how many oars, it gets confusing: spares are included as well, so the 60 oars shown for the great boat and 23 for the cock does not mean that they rowed that number! There is, though, a bit more detail with regard to the great boat’s rigging: 14 shrouds and 28 pulleys, meaning that, although the shrouds of the ship herself were set up with deadeyes in the familiar manner (inventoried as ‘deadmenseyes’), the boat’s mast was set up with blocks – presumably so the mast could be raised or struck more quickly and easily.

If we look at the only known (named) portrait of the Great Harry, from the 1546 Anthony Roll, we can see what looks like a very large boat being towed, just like all the other large and medium-sized ships in the Roll; only the smaller pinnaces and row-barges don’t show towed boats.

The boat shown – one of the clearest pictures, although all are more or less the same – has a few distinctive features. First is her size which, although the artist didn’t have much drafting skill, is obviously meant to be considerable. Secondly, the boat is double-ended, like all the other boats shown; last, two posts can be seen at the stern(?) of the boat, in one of which we might guess is the sheave of iron mentioned in the inventories, assuming that is her bow.

One other clear picture from that time is the famous ‘Embarkation Of Henry VIII For The Field Of The Cloth Of Gold’, in which several boats are shown, one of which (with flags) appears near the heading of this article. Although the picture is very stylized, and not totally trustworthy, it does again show boats that are big, solid and this time, have a transom with a rudder clearly shown. In this picture nearly 20 passengers are shown, all being rowed by 2 oarsmen(!)

Next: the King who died young, Bloody Mary and Good Queen Bess: 1547 to 1603