There is no difficulty about dates until 1582–3, when the Catholic states of Europe accepted Pope Gregory XIII's correction of the Julian calendar, by which 5 October 1582 became 15 October; most Protestant states followed suit in 1700, but Great Britain not until 1752. In this book, dates for English voyages after 1582 (Cavendish, Richard Hawkins) are in Old Style (ten days behind New), but the year is taken as beginning on 1 January, not 25 March as was contemporary English practice.
Although the metric system is used in this book, distances are often given in leagues, since these were the most common unit used at sea for distance run. The ‘sea league’, Portuguese in origin, was 4 Roman miles (3·2 nautical or approximately 3·7 statute miles, 5·9km). However, following the erroneous Ptolemaic estimate of the circumference of the globe, the Spanish reckoned 16⅔ leagues to a degree instead of the better Portuguese value of 17½: a factor of great importance in the Luso-Castilian debates over the partition of the globe. Moreover, ‘English sailors, however, at least in the last half of the [16th] century, used the value of 20 leagues or 60 miles’ to the degree, for convenience (a mile a minute!), neglecting the difference between Roman and English miles (Taylor). It is worth remembering that the mean length of a degree of latitude (or of a degree of longitude on the Equator) is roughly 69 statute miles or 111km.
See C. Jack-Hinton, The Search for the Islands of Solomon 1567–1838 (Oxford 1969), 1–2, 99–101; E. G. R. Taylor (ed.), [Roger Barlow's] A Briefe Summe of Geographie, HS 2nd Ser. 69 (London 1932), 186–7; D. W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London 1958), 65–6.
Sums of Spanish money in our period are given in maravedis, ducats, or pesos, of which the first two after 1497 became merely moneys of account, the ducat being 375 maravedis, while salaries and so on were usually expressed in maravedis. Actual coinage was in reales or subdivisions or multiples of them. Much the commonest unit in our sources is the peso, but unfortunately it is often not clear which of several pesos is meant; and scholars as authoritative as Chaunu (I.269–71) and H. R. Wagner (Sir Francis Drake's Voyage around the World, Amsterdam 1966, 506–8) give different values in maravedis for the peso de oro.
Pesos de oro of 16 reales (544 maravedis) are sometimes stipulated, but the ‘heavy’ peso ensayado or de minas (13¼ reales, 450 maravedis) was more usual as a money of account in the Indies. It must be remembered that much ‘monetary circulation’ was in uncoined silver bullion. Much the most important actual coins seem to have been the Mexican pesos de a ocho reales or pesos corrientes (8 reales, 272 maravedis); these, the famous ‘pieces of eight’ or ‘Mexican dollars’ were destined to a great future as an international medium (see Ch. 7). According to Wagner, the piece of eight was worth between four and five English shillings of the time, but others make it nearly twice as much. Very roughly, 30,000 gold pesos could be taken as rather over £13,500—J. A. Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth (2nd London ed., 1969), 148. The wild debasements of the seventeenth century (see Ch. 7) introduce further confusion.
With these uncertainties, and given the inflations of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, not to mention the vastly changed conditions of economic life, any attempt to translate these currencies into modern equivalents seems a nonsense.- xxii -The figures in pesos cited in this book are, then, given for what they are worth, and that is simply as indices or orders of magnitude.
Accents were not used in sixteenth century Spanish, and are omitted here except in one or two given names (Andrés, Bartolomé); they are of course retained for quotations, personal names, and book titles in modern Spanish. They have also been omitted from place-names: Perú, Panamá seem pedantic. As a rule Spanish or English forms of place-names are used according to context: Magellan's ‘Puerto San Julian’ becomes ‘Port St Julian’ when visited by Drake or Cavendish. Occasionally there may be a bastard form in quotations, e.g. Hakluyt has ‘cape of S. Lucar’ when either ‘Cape St Lucas’ or ‘Cabo (de) San Lucar’ would be correct. Normally the form used today in the respective country is used, e.g. ‘Cape Mendocino’ (California) but ‘Cabo Deseado’ (Chile). Some inconsistencies may doubtless be found.
Titles of rank are given as in the original language, e.g. ‘Marques de Montesclaros’, with some exception for world-famous figures whose titles have taken on an English style, such as ‘Duke of Alba’ (not ‘Duque de Alba’) and ‘Prince Henry’, not ‘Infante Dom Henrique’ (still less ‘Henry the Navigator’!). Names of foreign sovereigns are also as in the original, e.g. ‘João III’ (of Portugal), not John. But for the Emperor Charles V and the Philips of Spain, this would be mere pedantry, since they are so well-known in English historiography. But sometimes there is a departure from this rule for the sake of emphasis; e.g. in the context of the Treaty of Zaragoza, ‘D. Carlos I’ makes the point better than ‘Charles V’; similarly at times with ‘Nueva España’ and ‘New Spain’.
Spanish terms such as encomienda, almiranta/almirante, obraje, Japanese such as daimyo, and so on, are italicised at their first appearance, thereafter in Roman. Their meaning is given (sometimes by context) at first appearance or main treatment, and these can be found from the index.
Like the currency, the question of shipping tonnages is almost intolerably complex. The basic English ‘ton’ in our period derived from the tun (French tonneau) of the Bordeaux wine trade, which when full and including the weight of the cask itself was reckoned as 2240 lbs (1016kg) in England and 2000 livres (979kg) in France. Allowing for the space wastage resulting from the shape of casks, the cubic equivalent was reckoned at about 60 cu.ft (1·7m3). Payment by weight at this equivalence for lighter cargoes than wine was obviously not in the carrier's interest, since his ship's space would be full before she had taken on as much weight as she could carry, and hence ‘In England the space obtained by paying for a ton [weight] of freight became standardised fairly early at 40 cu.ft [1·13m3]’ (Lane, 354). In Spain the corresponding unit was the tonelada, and early in the sixteenth century the equivalents are straightforward: 1 deadweight ton=1- xxiii - tonneau de mer=1 Seville tonelada, all of which luckily approximate to 1 metric tonne burden. Conveniently also, 1 tonne in weight terms is very close to 1 ton avoirdupois. So a ship of 100 tons could carry 100 tuns of wine, or translated into volume, she had a cargo capacity of 56–60×100cu.ft (1·58–1·70m3) (Lane, 364, 366). Deadweight tonnage was the difference between the displacement of the ship empty and laden, i.e. the maximum weight of cargo which could be safely carried, and this was used for heavy cargoes, which would bring the ship to its maximum draft long before it was ‘full’. (Venice had the equivalent of ‘Plimsoll lines’ in the thirteenth century.)
So far all is more or less straightforward, but now conveniency ceases and complications set in. The units varied from time to time, from place to place, from function to function; there was a continual interplay between a desire to keep the nominal tonnage down, so as to minimise port dues and so on, and one to keep it up so as to charge more when the ship was chartered or (as was very common) hired by the government for war; hence the development of various ‘registered tonnages’, complicated by various formulae for equating the dimensions of a ship with the reckoning of its tonnage, while the methods of measurement varied in English, Spanish, and French practice.
For our purpose, the most important points are the differences between English and Spanish reckoning. In 1520 the ton and the tonelada were virtually the same, but during the century the Spanish reckoning changed, and by 1620 the Spanish registered tonelada was only about 0·6 of a ton. The date generally given for this change is 1590, but Chaunu (I.132–6) argues plausibly that so great a change could hardly be made at a stroke of the official pen, but was in effect a codification of a practice which had been going on since mid-century: that of reckoning in a sort of registered ton, based on the ship's dimensions rather than on toneladas. The upshot was that a ship of 500 toneladas at the end of Charles V's reign would be only, say, 350 tons at the end of Philip II's; and hence an English ship of 100 tons would be the equivalent of a Spanish of about 145 tons, more or less. There was a further difference between Spanish ‘Merchant’ and ‘War’ tonnage, a merchantman taken into the Armada Real having 20 per cent added to her nominal tonnage. (This practice seems to have come much later in the Royal Navy—Lane, 364–5.) By the time comparisons are significant for this book (say 1570+), the differential between Spanish and English reckonings was substantial, and the necessary adjustments are damaging to the patriotic English view of the odds in 1588: thus the San Salvador was registered in Spain as 953 tons, but when measured by her English captors came out as only 600 (M. Lewis, The Spanish Armada (Pan ed., London 1966), 75).
The tonnages given in this book are those in the immediate source, Spanish or English; and all such figures should be regarded, like sums of money, as orders of magnitude rather than as absolutes: according to Naish, Drake's Golden Hinde could be 100, 120, or 150 tons, according to where and how she was measured. The important point to remember is that by the time of Drake's activity in the- xxiv -Pacific, one must add 30 to 45 per cent to an English figure to get the Spanish equivalent.
It is not necessary at this stage to go into the more modern refinements of registration, such as: is a deckhouse an enclosed space?—a matter of financial importance when it comes to tolls (see G. Mack, The Land Divided (New York 1944), 522–8). Given the differences not only in laws but in ship construction, comparisons with modern figures are pointless. One must agree with Joseph Needham (Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 4, Part 3 (Cambridge 1971) at 628), that ‘Perhaps the most urgent need of naval archaeology to-day is a systematic, sober and definitive study of estimated tonnage in all historical periods and cultures. Obviously this work cannot be done here.’
This note is based mainly on F. C. Lane, ‘Tonnages, Medieval and Modern’, in Venice and History (Baltimore 1966), 345–70 (also in Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd Ser. 17, 1964, 213–33), and Chaunu, I.130–41. See also C. R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon (Lisbon 1959), 13; F. C. P. Naish, ‘The Mystery of the Tonnage and Dimensions of the Pelican-Golden Hind’, MM 34, 1948, 42–5; L. G. C. Laughton, ‘English and Spanish Tonnages in 1588’, MM 44, 1958, 151–4; A. P. Usher, ‘Spanish Ships and Shipping in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in A. H. Cole et al. (eds), Facts and Factors in Economic History (Cambridge (Mass.) 1932), 189–213 at 208; J. H. Parry, ‘Transport and Trade Routes’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, III (1967) 155–219 at 218–19. The only other measure which needs mention is the quintal, which was 46kg or 100 lb avoirdupois.
Every effort has been made to trace the owners of the copyright in the plates; any omission is inadvertent and will be willingly rectified.
The abbreviations ‘ANU’ and ‘NLA’—respectively The Australian National University and the National Library of Australia—indicate the sources of some of the plates.
‘Straits’ unless otherwise stated or clearly implied by context means the Straits of Magellan; ‘Cape’, the Cape of Good Hope; ‘Islands’ (except for named groups such as Falkland Islands), those of Oceania; ‘Galleon’ or ‘Galleons’ when capitalised refers to those used on the Manila-Acapulco run, as distinct from galleons in general. A distinction is made between the shores of oceans or seas and the coasts of landmasses. ‘Conquista’ with initial capitalisation is used for the historical process, on the analogy of the ‘Reconquista’ in Spain itself, or the ‘Reformation’; ‘conquista’, with lower case ‘c’, for specific episodes.