On a blustery November day four centuries ago, the English were preparing
themselves for one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen.
Beneath the dome of St Paul's they gathered to celebrate
their tiny nation's victory over the world's greatest superpower, Spain.
On the walls hung the captured ensigns of the Spanish fleet, that was even then being dashed
on the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland.
The year was 1588...
..and the battle was the Armada.
Today's celebrations mark the centenary of the Fleet Air Arm, and it still seems
like the most natural thing in the world to devote a great cathedral to the Royal Navy,
a tradition that began on that autumn day 400 years ago.
1588 marked a turning point in our national story.
Victory over the Armada transformed us
into a seafaring nation and 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.
This series tells the story of how the Navy expanded from a tiny force
to become the most complex industrial enterprise on Earth.
Of how the need to organise it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy.
Of how it transformed our culture, our sense of national identity
and our democracy.
It's a story of heroism and innovation,
but also of disasters and dark chapters in our history.
It's the remarkable story of a 400-year struggle, fought at sea
and on land, of how the Navy drove Britain into the modern age and changed the world.
Clear the hatch! England's extraordinary journey
from a third rate nation to global superpower
began on a clear October day 20 years before the Armada.
OK, bring on the beer.
Not that anything so grand was on the minds of the sailors
who scurried to and fro in the old harbour in Plymouth,
making a small fleet of six ships ready for sea.
The gangplank groaned as last minute supplies were brought on board.
Large barrels of fresh water and beer and even whinnying goats, and chickens as well.
When anything was brought on board they were lashed down
to the bulkheads in expectation of a bumpy passage.
The two men in command were cousins.
On that fine autumn day, they were thinking not about making war but about making money.
The older of the two was John Hawkins who, at the age of just 35,
was already Plymouth's leading merchant venturer.
The younger was his cousin,
a poor relation who'd grown up with Hawkins, 27-year-old Francis Drake.
They were leaving behind a poor, insignificant town on the edge of a poor, insignificant country
which itself clung to the fringes of Europe.
But this place had one thing going for it - this,
one of the finest natural harbours on Earth, gateway to the Atlantic and, beyond that, the New World.
First discovered only 60 years before,
the New World of the Americas offered wealth beyond imagining -
if they could get there and bring it back, that is.
A round trip of 12,000 miles.
No mean feat in the 1560s.
Stand by. Two, six!
Two, six! Two, six!
Take a break.
Is that halfway? Yeah. You're kidding me! No!
This wonderful replica of the Tudor ship, The Matthew,
gives me a strong sense of what life might have been like on board.
Sailing one of these you're just so struck by the ingenuity, aren't you?
The sort of combination of wood, rope, bit of metal,
and you can sail round the other side of the world.
Among the profit-hungry investors in the venture was the Queen herself.
She'd lent two ships, the Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion.
Both were old, spent and rotten, as were most of the vessels in her tiny navy.
The crew, too, would get their share of the booty.
All were young. Some were just boys, among them Hawkins' nephew Paul
and the 13-year-old Miles Philips,
whose journal relates the terrors of frequent storms and leaking hulls.
There were no creature comforts for those on board either.
The single-minded Hawkins made his men sleep on deck.
Because every inch of hold space was reserved for the cargo that would make the cash.
On that expedition, the cargo was a human one.
Drake and Hawkins have the terrible distinction of being the first Englishmen
to bind African men, women and children in chains
and transport them in the holds of ships like this.
They were slave traders.
Six weeks out of Plymouth, they picked up 500 slaves in Guinea then headed west.
Few Englishmen had ever made this journey.
England had been slow to spot the opportunities of the New World and the Spanish had got their first.
Now Spain jealously guarded a lucrative American empire stretching from South America
through the Caribbean to Mexico and further north.
Drake and Hawkins just wanted a little slice of the action.
Nip in, sell a few slaves and return home with a hold full of silver.
The problem was that the Spanish had banned foreigners from trading within their lucrative empire.
Hawkins had managed it once or twice before and got away with it.
He hoped to do so again. But this time would be different.
In the Caribbean they traded their human cargo for silver, gold and pearls, then turned for home.
But it was hurricane season.
Storms drove them to San Juan on the coast of Mexico,
where a powerful Spanish fleet first promised them safe passage
then decided to teach them a violent lesson.
In the fight that followed, Hawkins lost three of his ships,
including the Jesus of Lubeck and 200 men killed or captured.
He managed to escape on the Minion,
and with him was the 13-year-old Miles Philips,
who watched what happened to the prisoners.
"They took our men ashore," he wrote,
"and hung them up by their arms until blood burst out from their fingers' ends."
And the moment of personal tragedy for Hawkins -
he realised that his nephew Paul was among them.
Disease and famine followed and by the time they limped home
fewer than 20 men were left alive aboard the Minion.
But, for the survivors, this disaster acted
not as a deterrent but as a spur to action.
The experience marked Drake and Hawkins for the rest of their lives.
Neither would ever forgive the Spanish for their treachery,
and they threw themselves into a bitter, personal crusade against Spain.
It was fuelled by the heady mix of a lust for cash, religious zealotry
and a desire for personal revenge.
In time, this crusade would become a national enterprise
and in doing so it would forge a new idea of Englishness.
But if England's seafarers were to have any chance of catching up with Spain,
they would need better ships to do it.
Hawkins' answer was the race-built galleon,
his radical breakthrough in warship design,
preserved in these original drawings.
By using maths and geometry instead of rule of thumb,
by cutting down high decks and by streamlining hulls,
Hawkins produced the fastest ships of their kind anywhere in the world.
The first was built in 1570 at the Queen's dockyard in Deptford.
More were to follow.
With greater space for guns, they were perfectly designed for war.
But 20 race-built galleons, the most the Tudor state could afford,
would not be enough on their own.
Hawkins landed a job on the Navy Board, the committee that ran the Queen's modest fleet.
And, in 1582, the board commissioned a series of extraordinary surveys
preserved here at the National Archives.
I've read about this but never seen it before.
This is a list of every ship in England compiled under Hawkins' leadership.
And as you can see, it's broken up by county.
Here Norfolk, Suffolk, absolutely meticulously written down It's beautiful.
Every single ship, with the tonnage here, so these ones are St Mary, the Solomon, 200 tonnes.
Absolutely incredible.
As we go further on, here, they didn't just list the ships,
they list the masters and then the number of mariners
and seamen there are as well for each port.
So here we go. In Cornwall, there are 108 masters,
626 mariners and 1,184 seamen.
So precise. Incredible.
This information is being gathered centrally in London at the beck and call of the Tudor state.
It's actually very moving seeing the names of people that lived all those centuries ago.
Once you have a list like this, when war comes, when there's a national emergency,
you can knock on the door of men like John Cooper and Peter Dolomore
and say, "Right, mate, you're coming in the Navy to protect the country."
It does make you wonder whether men like William Bennett, William Mort
from Littleham, whether they end up fighting against the Spanish Armada.
And this is just fantastic. You get right to the end.
The total number of mariners available to the Tudor state,
16,259.
Men that could be mobilised to protect little England
against the greatest superpower in the world.
Drake, meanwhile, was taking his revenge on Spain in a much more direct fashion.
On an April day in 1587, the residents of Cadiz woke to the sound of gunfire.
By the end of the day, over 30 Spanish ships lay at the bottom of the harbour
and Drake's fleet had sailed away with holds full of treasure.
It was the culmination of a ten-year pillaging spree
that had seen Drake circumnavigate the globe,
attack Spanish colonies and steal their loot.
Belligerent, venal, a peerless seafarer,
he was Protestant England's new hero.
In Catholic Spain, he was anything but.
Standing here, looking at it from the Spanish point of view,
the English appear little different from Vikings.
Men who came from the north in ships bent on plunder and destruction, to whom nothing was sacred.
The most infamous of all was Drake,
still hated, still known as El Draque, The Dragon.
And now The Dragon had pushed the King of Spain
to take his own terrible revenge on Drake and England.
That revenge came in July 1588.
When the Armada appeared off England's coast,
one eye witness wrote that the ocean groaned under their weight.
It had taken Spain three years and a titanic amount of silver to assemble it,
while the English fleet had been mobilised in just three months.
The battle raged for several days.
But the leadership of men like Drake and Hawkins had given the English a decisive edge.
People have tended to attribute victory over the Spanish Armada
to the courage of the English sailors
or the intervention of divine wind.
But the Spanish fought equally bravely,
and at different stages of the campaign the wind favoured both sides.
The real reason is a lot less glamorous, it's the inspired organisation of Hawkins.
He ensured that England had a fleet of fast, manoeuvrable ships,
each of which carried something like three times the weight in armament of its Spanish equivalent.
He laid the foundations for modern naval warfare,
bringing ships, men and cannon together
in a decisive combination.
So when the great and the good arrived in their finery at St Paul's on that day in November 1588,
they were celebrating not just a victory,
but the beginning of a new future.
The Queen, as one author wrote, was carried in a golden chariot
through her city of London in robes of triumph...
while the still bloody heads of Catholic traitors,
executed for praying for the Armada's success,
stared down from spikes nearby.
The Tudor PR machine went into overdrive.
A new portrait showed the Queen triumphant, her hand on a globe,
the Spanish ships crushed on the rocks behind her.
The scale of the victory expanded the horizons of a small, impoverished nation.
One commentator wrote,
"The sea had become a means to seek new worlds,
"for gold, for praise, for glory."
# God save our gracious Queen... #
The English had been given a bright vision of a glittering future,
of riches beyond imagination,
of new frontiers that stretched way beyond the shores of tiny England.
Above all, it was a future that would be played out on the seas,
by the ships of the Navy and by a new breed of heroic seafarer.
England's view of its place in the world would never be the same again.
Guard of Honour, slope arms!
Right turn!
The Queen's navy had become a source of national pride as never before
and there was an insatiable demand for stories of seafaring adventure and discovery.
A new national identity - aggressive, ambitious and Protestant - was in the making.
If Hawkins was the architect of that new identity and Drake its firebrand,
then Richard Hakluyt was its biographer.
In 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, he wrote this.
"The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation."
An account of 1,600 years of history
containing over 250 seafaring adventures by Englishmen.
A mix of storytelling and myth making.
Here at the back of this one, for example, we have
Hawkins's ill-fated trip to the Caribbean, with Miles Philips' gruesome account
of the barbarous treatment they received at the hands of the Spaniards.
Here in the next volume we have the accounts of the defeat of the Spanish Armada itself, which ends
with this incredible paragraph that says, "Thus the magnificent, huge and mighty fleet of the Spaniards
"in the year 1588 vanished into smoke."
This was history with a purpose,
a call to arms to a nation on the verge of a new destiny.
That destiny could not have been made more obvious
than it was in a subsequent edition of Hakluyt's work,
which contained this stunning map.
This piece of paper is 400 years old.
It's incredibly beautiful.
Just look at the detail
of the world's coastlines and ports and rivers.
What's so remarkable about this map is that medieval maps show England
as an insignificant island clinging to the edge of Europe,
but now England's not at the edge. It's been picked up
and moved right to the heart of the world.
It's an image of the world we all recognise, but this map showed it for the first time.
It was a potent symbol of a nation that now had global ambitions.
Ships poured out of England,
bound for the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Baltic.
Numerous and aggressive, these English pioneers steadily eroded Spanish power
and founded the colonies that formed the beginnings of Britain's future empire.
Abroad and at home, business was booming.
Ports like East Looe in Cornwall now had scores of fishing boats
trading as far away as North America.
In these new, confident times they called themselves the western adventurers.
But economic success brought a new threat that no-one had foreseen.
Suddenly, whole fleets - 10 or 12 ships - would head out to sea and simply vanish.
There are reports of ships found floating out there in the Atlantic
without their crews, who were never seen again.
On one night in the summer of 1631,
in the village of Baltimore in southern Ireland,
over 100 people were removed from their beds,
leaving the place a ghost town.
A remarkable letter, written in August 1625, reveals the scale and horror of the problem.
It's from the mayor of Plymouth, Thomas Seeley, to the king's council.
"One poor maritime town in Cornwall called Looe hath within ten days
"lost 80 mariners, bound in fishing voyages to the deeps
"and there have been taken by the Turks."
Back then, Turks meant Muslims, and these were in fact pirates from North Africa.
Barbary pirates.
They came to these shores and took people as slaves back to North Africa.
It was a barbarous practice but it was, of course,
what these West Countrymen had been doing to Africans for decades now.
Even so, it turned the sea here from a source of wealth and prestige for England
into a place of terror and slavery.
The ports and fishing villages, it's said, were filled with
the pitiful lamentations of the victims' families.
In the next few years, Devon and Cornwall would lose a fifth of their shipping and crews.
This extraordinary and little-known episode in English history was to have far-reaching consequences.
Englishmen were bred on the myth of maritime invincibility.
But now they had to face hard truths.
Once the predators, they were now the prey, and people did what they usually did in a crisis.
They blamed the government. And they weren't entirely wrong.
Fishing vessel Trevose, fishing vessel Trevose.
This is protection vessel Tyne calling you channel one-six, over.
Tyne, Trevose.
I'm on one of the modern Navy's fishery protection vessels about 30 miles from Cornwall.
Just the territory where Barbary pirates
were seizing English shipping.
Trevose, this is Tyne. It's my intention to send a routine boarding team over to you.
My team will be with you in two-zero minutes, over.
In Elizabeth's time, the Queen's ships and the private vessels of freebooters like Drake
had kept these waters safe.
But the Queen was now dead.
The new Stuart regime had made peace with Spain and the Navy had been cut back.
With a predilection for self-aggrandisement,
the regime had spent its cash,
some of it raised illegally by notorious ship money,
on a few grand, vanity ships,
designed to impress the kings of Europe.
The trouble was, fishery protection wasn't the kind of job that these showy vessels were designed to do.
Just as the job that these guys do couldn't be done by an aircraft carrier.
In the absence of this kind of protection, the king's subjects,
particularly down here in the West Country, were completely vulnerable.
They and their cargoes made irresistible targets for North African pirates.
Shocked by the magnitude of the crisis,
West Country MP Sir John Elliot wrote to the king's council begging for action.
But the government did nothing.
Elliot was furious.
And he wasn't the only one.
Anger also oozes from the pages of this,
a best seller written around the time of the disappearances from East Looe.
It's called Sir Francis Drake Revived.
It's written by Drake's nephew,
and he recounts the glories and successes of what now seemed like a vanished age.
It's an indictment on the present with its all-pervasive sense of fear and its insecurity.
But it's also a call to arms, as the author makes very clear on the title page.
He writes, "Calling upon this dull or effeminate age,
"to follow his noble steps for gold and silver."
Sir John Elliot caught the mood,
calling for a return to the aggressive policies of the past.
England's new King, it seemed, was listening.
Charles I had been on the throne for just a few months
and, like a modern leader seeking crowd-pleasing policies in troubled times,
he funded an expedition to attack Spain.
It set sail from Plymouth in October 1625, waved off by a delighted John Elliot.
Their target was none other than Cadiz.
Their mission, a Drake-style smash and grab, returning home
with holds full of treasure to public acclaim.
But it didn't work out that way at all.
The expedition was commanded by Viscount Wimbledon, a man who'd never served at sea before
and was so indecisive his men quickly gave him the nickname "Viscount Sit Still".
Confusion reigned.
Ships collided and masts and rigging tumbled overboard.
When Sit Still ordered his captains to attack, many of them simply ignored him.
The lack of an experienced, charismatic commander, like Drake,
exposed terrible weaknesses in the English fleet.
Even with Drake in charge it would have been hard enough to impose order.
Now, many captains simply did as they wished.
They were a rabble.
The chaos continued when they landed 2,000 troops on the beach
but failed to give them any water.
The weather was scorching.
When they finally got into the town, these thirsty Englishmen stumbled on a warehouse.
It was full of wine.
All hell broke loose.
The men started drinking, and although the officers tried to stop them, it was no use.
"The whole army was drunken,"
wrote one eye witness, "and in one common confusion, some shooting at one another amongst themselves."
This wouldn't, of course, be the last time drunken English behaved disgracefully abroad.
But on this occasion, with the expedition descending into total farce,
the commanders had no choice but to call it off.
On the way home, farce turned to tragedy as disease took hold.
By the time they reached Plymouth, hundreds were dead and hundreds more were dying.
And who was standing up here waiting for them?
None other than Sir John Elliot.
The 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.
"The miseries before us are great,"
he wrote, as he watched corpses being tossed into the harbour from the ships.
And later he saw sailors drop down dead in the streets of Plymouth.
But soon his compassion for the sailors turned into another emotion - rage.
News of the fiasco soon reached London,
and when Parliament convened, John Elliot was on his feet,
his anger echoing around St Stephen's Hall.
"Our honour is ruined. Our ships are sunk.
"Our men are killed, not by the sword, nor by the hand of an enemy,
"but by those we trust."
Those 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.
Cadiz, Elliot said, proved that the King was unfit to run the Navy.
In a series of extraordinary speeches in here, Elliot demanded
that Parliament take a greater role in overseeing the affairs of state.
When the Speaker, who sat in his chair on this spot,
tried to shut him up, Elliot hired three thugs to hold him down.
If it seemed like revolution was in the air, it was.
The King's failure to run a modern, efficient navy had sparked a constitutional crisis.
John Elliot was thrown into the Tower.
But a new generation of MPs,
immortalised here in St Stephen's Hall, took up his call for liberty.
Relations between King and Parliament collapsed.
In 1642, Charles fled London and the Civil War began.
By fleeing the capital, Charles lost control both of the Navy
and of the new, burgeoning maritime economy that it supported.
It made his defeat inevitable, and in 1649,
on the orders of England's new republic, he was executed.
Parliament acted quickly to secure control over the Navy, putting men of proven loyalty in charge.
They were known as the "generals at sea".
One of them was Robert Blake, West Country MP, hero of the Civil War,
and a radical protestant to boot.
Blake had never fought at sea.
Not a brilliant start for a man charged with protecting England's coasts against a multitude of foes.
But Blake understood warfare and men,
and he knew that chaos and indiscipline were as dangerous at sea as they were on land.
Command problems that had dogged the English expedition to Cadiz still remained.
In one of his first battles, he was appalled to see his captain disobey his orders and flee.
He knew he had to find a way to assert his control.
His solution was to produce the Navy's first ever
set of rules and regulations,
the Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea, in 1652.
For the first time, it gave English commanders a fighting chance of issuing orders that would be obeyed.
Port 15.
It was a list of 39 offences,
from stealing to spying, from cowardice to sleeping on duty.
Most were punishable by death.
Blake even sacked his own brother for discipline offences.
The Laws of War offered a blueprint for structure and discipline at sea...
..that would later be applied through all areas of government.
Blake was just what the Navy needed, a tough outsider.
He could see that over the previous 50 years the Navy had vacillated wildly
between great successes like the Armada and total failures like Cadiz, but there was no reliability.
Under charismatic leadership of men like Drake, the English could be great successes.
But otherwise, denied that leadership, failure was often the result.
Blake imposed order and discipline.
He ensured that no matter who was in charge, the Navy would be effective.
Blake left behind a navy that was larger and more disciplined than the country had ever known before.
The 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.
A new era was coming.
On May 26th 1660, one of the Navy's grandest ships,
the Royal Charles, came within sight of England.
On board was a man making his triumphant return home after years in exile.
It was Charles, son of the murdered king, soon to be crowned King Charles II.
The journey was the result of weeks of plotting between senior naval officers and exiled royalists
to bring back the monarchy.
The new king was eager to lay claim to England's potent navy.
He gave gold to the sailors and rebranded the fleet.
It was now the Royal Navy.
Disembarking with the royal party was the younger cousin
and newly appointed secretary to the ship's commander.
The young man was honoured to be given the job
of taking the King's spaniel off the ship.
He wrote in his diary, "It shit the boat,
"which made us laugh and methink that the King
"and all that belong to him are but just as others are."
As they came ashore, the young man saw huge crowds
of nobles and citizens alike who'd turned out to welcome their king.
"The shouting and joy expressed by all,"
he wrote, "was past imagination."
The 27-year-old from London had just completed his second sea voyage.
He didn't know it then, but this was just the start of an extraordinary naval career.
His name was Samuel Pepys.
Pepys was from humble origins,
the son of a poor tailor and a washerwoman,
but he left behind two extraordinary legacies.
He would transform the administration of the Navy like no-one before him,
and leave behind one of the most vivid
and colourful diaries of all time.
And here it is, volume one of Samuel Pepys' diary,
started on January 1st 1660,
possibly in response to a New Year's resolution.
It's in shorthand, so takes a bit of deciphering,
but it's an incredibly honest account of a colourful life.
There are descriptions of his trips to the theatre,
drinking, his affairs, music, money and even arguments with his wife.
That's all interspersed with descriptions of a job he loved.
Or at least, he came to love it.
When he first landed the job of Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board,
he hadn't the foggiest idea what it entailed.
But he was delighted with the pay - ?50 a year,
more than he'd ever earned in his life.
Eager to learn, Pepys threw himself into the complex new world
of the Navy's dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford.
All are now long gone.
But this yard on the Dutch coast
is building a replica ship of the same era.
The project manager is Aryan Klein.
It's great to see the ship at this stage,
cos you see what gives it its strength.
Usually you just see it floating around.
Yeah, it's all heavy timber construction.
So how many oak trees go into the building of this then? Several hundred.
Really? The estimates vary from 400-600 fully grown trees.
And some of these trees will be maybe 100 years old, maybe older.
How long would it have taken to build this back in the 17th century?
About nine months. Wow, that's quick.
Very hard labour. Hundreds of men working day and night almost.
And as soon as the ships were watertight,
they would be put into the water
to make room for the next ship on the slipway.
It just shows the value of the goods these ships were bringing back.
They were being built to bring back the riches of the world.
Well, yeah, the big East Indiamen were built for trade,
but this particular ship we're standing in now was a Man of War.
Who was it built to fight against, then?
The English, I'm afraid!
THEY CHUCKLE
The Dutch had a really large stake in world trade at that time
and England, of course, thought, "Well, we'll have some of that trade."
And it erupted into trade wars between Holland and England.
This ship is basically the result of an arms race between the two countries.
The Dutch had overtaken Spain
to become England's new maritime rivals.
They were aggressive, protestant and organised, just like the English.
To combat the Dutch threat, England was now spending a mighty 25%
of the national budget on her navy,
making it by far the country's largest industrial enterprise.
The dockyards consumed materials in vast quantities.
150 tonnes of iron a year,
100 miles of rope,
and had a vast workforce to match.
And, as Pepys soon discovered, corruption was rife.
Pepys reported corrupt officials to the Navy Board, but he soon realised
that the worst corruption was actually on the Navy Board itself.
He refers to his colleagues as "old fools and rogues"
and realised that one of them was even stealing
from the sailors' pension fund, known as the Chatham Chest.
The problem was that the Navy had become a vast receptacle of public funds.
There were no systems in place to spend that money,
and if a few thousand went missing, who would care?
Pepys cared, and realised that every aspect of the Navy had ballooned,
except for the central administration.
The fleet had grown far beyond the ability of the medieval Navy Board to manage it.
Back in the office, Pepys hired a team of clerks.
He gave them desks, with regular hours,
and together they set out imposing some order.
They spent a lot of time making lists.
This one here is an alphabetical list
of all naval officers that served in the Navy
during Pepys' time in office,
starting up here with A,
coming all the way down to Z down here.
The amazing thing is it contains information
about their service records, dates on which they were in different ships -
in some cases, it even has their fate.
So, for example,
this man died,
George Colt drowned,
and Humphrey Connisby was discharged by his Royal Highness.
Lists like these imposed a manageable symmetry
on the anarchic world that Pepys found himself in,
and he became an expert in the complex gathering
and storage of information.
He was determined to professionalise every aspect of the Navy's operations.
He designed a call book to keep records of dockyard hours worked,
compiled an alphabetical list of all contracts,
and kept detailed notes of everything he did.
Pepys wasn't the first naval administrator to make lists,
but he was the most systematic, the most brilliant, the most obsessive.
He adored the Navy, not because he loved storming aboard enemy ships
with the smell of gunsmoke in his nostrils,
but because he loved the bureaucracy.
He delighted, he wrote, "in the neatness of everything".
But the Samuel Pepys of the diary emerges as a man
who was far from being a dull paper-pusher and list-maker.
Here's a not untypical entry.
He has an orgy with the wife of one of his colleagues on the Navy Board
and her daughter.
He wrote, "There are a great many women in the chamber,
"My Lady Penn and her daughter among them, whereupon My Lady Penn
"flung me down upon the bed and herself and others,
"one after another upon me and very merry we were."
Well, I'm not surprised!
Every man has his vice they say, and for Pepys it was definitely the ladies...
Well, and bouts of heavy drinking, and fine dining, and nice clothes,
and music, and he loved the theatre, of course, and, well, you get the idea.
The point is Pepys was a man who lived life to the full.
But what really shines out in these diaries is his love of his work.
"My business," he wrote "is all my delight."
The Navy's officer training college, here at Dartmouth,
was built long after Pepys' time, but the idea
of professionally trained and qualified officers was his.
Anyone with the right connections, Pepys realised,
could become an officer,
leaving the Navy's valuable ships in often unreliable hands.
There was no quality control.
Midshipman Briers! Sir.
Pepys' solution - exams.
The verbal test that he introduced for all would-be lieutenants still exists.
Midshipman Briers, take a seat, please.
These days, they call it Fleet Board.
The first question is,
what are the responsibilities of the CBM at State One?
He's on upper deck roaming, sir,
looking mostly for fire fighting events. OK.
The whole idea of assessment and interview seems deeply familiar to us.
What items of seamanship rigging must always be fully rigged?
The safety net underneath, sir.
But that's because of Pepys.
When he introduced his exam for lieutenants, it was the first time
any employee of the English state had ever been tested in this way.
And where is it located?
Quick release marker buoy, sir.
It's usually found on the quarter deck. OK.
Thank you very much, Midshipman Briers. Please carry on.
Using 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.
But could it survive the ultimate test -
war?
In 1665 came the inevitable clash with the Dutch.
A series of English victories early on seemed to augur well.
But Pepys was worried.
He'd said from the start that Parliament hadn't voted enough money
to fund the war and, just as he predicted, the money was soon gone.
The Navy lunged from triumph
to crisis.
Things soon reached boiling point.
The Navy was terribly in debt and sailors went unpaid.
In the dockyards, Pepys saw workers walking around like ghosts
and he heard the lamentable moans
of sailors that lay destitute in the street,
a sight which he said "troubled him to his heart".
To add to the sense of crisis, plague broke out in London
and Pepys and his clerks came here to Greenwich,
where they took up residence in this, one of Charles II's unfinished palaces.
But that put them in the heart of the fleet
with all the disgruntled sailors around them.
One day, their windows were broken
and Pepys and his staff were threatened with physical violence.
Pepys spent 24 hours composing a desperate letter to the King.
It's unambiguous and it would have made very disturbing reading for his royal master.
Pepys begins by apologising for being troublesome, he says
"troubling His Majesty on the subject which we often have done,
"the want of money, the effects of that want,
"under which His Majesty's service under our care
"hath long been sinking."
So Pepys is in no doubt that his Navy
is facing utter ruin and he comes up with a typically Pepysian solution.
He gives a list, carefully costed,
of everything that he thinks is necessary to prevent that.
He starts up here by saying 55 anchors of various weights,
800 bales of sailcloth, 4,000 loads of plank,
400 dozen oars, 12 tons of brimstone,
10,000 spars of all sorts,
and comes up with the incredibly precise figure,
as only Pepys could do, of the money required
to stave off disaster for the Navy and for England.
And that sum is 179,793 pounds
and ten shillings.
But the King had nothing to give and would not humiliate himself
by going cap in hand to Parliament to ask for more.
Just a few months later came the naval disaster Pepys had predicted.
It was the summer of 1667.
The fleet had been laid up because there was no money to pay crews to man it.
Upnor 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.
The exhausted and unpaid garrison were not at their best.
On that June day, the horrified defenders of this fort watched
as 62 Dutch ships made their way up the river on the rising tide.
Anchored here was much of Charles' fleet,
including four of his finest battleships.
In a desperate measure, the English sank some of their own ships here
to try and block the river, but that didn't work
and their cannon on shore opened up to try and turn the Dutch back.
But someone had delivered the wrong ammunition
and many of the cannonballs didn't even fit the barrels.
The Dutch ships ploughed in amongst the English ships with impunity, capturing them,
burning others, including three of the finest battleships in the land.
The river was covered in wreckage
and in the sky, there was a pall of smoke.
One of Pepys' clerks who lived and worked down here wrote,
"The destruction of those three glorious ships
"was one of the most dismal sights my eyes have ever beheld."
"It was enough," he said, "to make the heart of every true Englishman bleed."
In a final humiliation,
the Dutch towed back to Holland the Royal Charles itself,
a moment immortalised on canvas,
showing the pride of England's fleet flying the Dutch flag.
The Dutch raid on the Medway was at the time, and remains to this day,
the most embarrassing defeat in the history of the Royal Navy.
Not even the brilliant Pepys could avert this catastrophe.
The simple fact was that King Charles
just couldn't afford a modern navy.
The Medway disaster set the King and Parliament
on another collision course
over how the Navy was to be funded and controlled.
When Charles died in 1685,
relations between King and Parliament
were at their lowest ebb since the Civil War.
He was succeeded by his brother, James.
Now he had had a rather successful career as an admiral in the Royal Navy.
Could he be the man to work together with politicians and financiers
and businessmen to build a new kind of constitutional monarchy?
Well...
no.
And this extraordinary portrait tells us why.
James 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
and decked out in jewels at his throat, sword hilt and sandals.
And out at sea his navy, his plaything,
the royal banner flying from the main topmast.
This was not how the English wanted their kings to see themselves.
To make matters worse, James was openly, proudly Catholic.
He appointed Catholics to key positions in the armed forces.
He even put one of them in charge of the Royal Navy.
This was clearly a man who wouldn't send his Royal Navy out to attack
the great Catholic powers of Europe.
This was not a man to protect the legacy of Drake and Hawkins.
He would have to go.
In July 1688, a figure dressed as a common sailor arrived in Holland.
Beneath the disguise
was England's premier naval officer, Admiral Arthur Herbert.
Or, rather, ex-admiral.
He'd resigned weeks before, refusing to serve under King James.
Herbert was carrying an extraordinary letter.
It was signed by seven Englishmen, all grandees in the armed forces,
church and state, and it was addressed to the Dutch Prince,
William of Orange, who was not only protestant
but he was married to James II's daughter, Mary.
It was an appeal for William's help against their tyrannical king.
This was high treason, but Herbert and his fellow conspirators
were the desperate men from an exasperated nation.
And in William, they'd found their man.
On November 1st 1688, a vast Dutch invasion fleet -
463 vessels, 40,000 men -
left Holland, bound for England.
It was almost exactly 100 years since the Spanish Armada,
but this time not a single shot was fired.
On the top mast of William's flagship, he flew a banner
with his family motto on - "I will maintain".
But he added, in letters three-feet-high,
"the liberties of the English and the protestant religion".
The message was clear and when William landed here
on the south coast of England, he was greeted with cheers.
Over the next few weeks,
it became obvious the English weren't going to fight for James II
and he fled the country and was replaced as king by William.
James, 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.
That idea was opposed to absolutism and Catholicism
and proud of Parliament, liberty
and of sending the English Navy out against England's traditional enemies.
William's invasion of 1688 represented the final victory of those values.
It was the myth of the Armada made real.
In little over 100 years,
a rabble of West Country seafarers and a few royal ships
had become a recognisably modern institution,
with staff and systems to manage a vast, efficient navy.
This was England's heart of oak,
a navy that now lay at the centre of the national project and its future.
Next week - how the Navy triggered a series of revolutions
in finance, industry and agriculture,
generating unimaginable wealth
and propelling Britain into the modern world.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media
Email subtitling@bbc.co.uk
四个世纪前十一月某个风起云涌的日子,英国人正在准备
他们历史上最大规模的国庆
在圣保罗教堂的穹顶之下英国人赶来庆祝
他们取得的一次小小胜利
英国战胜了当时世界上最强的帝国西班牙
在城墙上悬挂着缴获的西班牙战舰的舰旗
当时这面掉落西班牙舰旗
一度被海浪冲到了苏格兰和爱尔兰的海岸
当时是1588年
对垒的是西班牙的无敌舰队
今天是庆祝海军航空兵的百年庆典其中一个不争的事实是
皇家海军依旧是庆典的主角
这个传统便是起源于400年前的那个秋天
1588年标志着我们国家历史上的一次转折
无敌舰队使得我们
变成了一个海洋国家同时也引发了一个传奇
终有一天这个国家的新使命
财富和权利的一切采源部寄于海洋
本系列剧讲述英国海军是如何从微不足道
扩张为世界上复杂的工业部门
怎样组织相关的行政和经济基础
怎样改变我们的文化国家意识
以及民主
是国家历史上英雄与创新的故事
也是黑暗与苦难篇章
这是个值得铭记的400年奋斗史的故事包括海战
与陆战以及我们的海军如何引领英国进入现代改变世界
清扫甲板-英国的非凡旅程
从一个三流国家跃人世界大国
这一切始于十月一个晴天距无敌舰队之战20年之前
把啤酒弄上来
士兵们的想想法可不是那么乐观
他们在普斯茅斯的旧港里忙前忙后
组建一个六艘船的小型舰队准备出海
吱吱作响的跳板作为最后一件补给品被带上了船
以及大桶的谈水啤酒甚至羊鸡
这些东两被带上船后会被牢牢的
绑到舱壁以应付颠簸的旅途
船长是一对表兄弟
那个晴朗的秋天他们所想的不是赢得战争而是赚钱
其中哥哥John Hawkins只有35岁
却已经是普斯茅斯的最大商品投机商
年轻人是他的堂弟
是从小和Hawkins一起长大的穷亲戚27岁的Francis Drake
他们驶离这个位于穷困国家边缘的穷困的小镇
这里是欧洲的边缘
但是这里有它独特的地方就是这个
世界上最好的天然海港之一
通往大西洋的门户以及远方的新世界
距第一次发现不过50年
但是美洲这片新大陆却提供了超乎想像的财富
当然如果人们能到达那里并把财富带回来
往返12000英里的航行、
这在1560年代绝非易事
准备26
26
休息下
才上到一半?是啊 骗我呢 没
这艘都铎式舰船的复制品马修号
给我深刻的认识甲板上的生活到底是怎样的
驾驶这样一艘船，你会被这其中的智慧深深震撼吧？
木头绳索金属组合在一起
然后你就能航行干世界另一端
这项活动中最大的投资家就是皇后本人
他提供了两条船Lubeck耶稣号和Minion号
就如她的弱小海军中大部分船只一样，两艘船都是又破又旧
船员可以留下他们的战利品
都是年轻人有些只是孩子其中有Hawkins的侄子Paul
以及13岁的Mlles PNlips
他的日记里写满了对一次次暴风而及船体漏水的恐惧
这些船员没有基本的生活条件
坚定的Hawklns让他的人都睡甲板上
因为仓库里每一寸空间都用于存放值钱的货物
当时的远航货物就是人
Drake和Hawkins拥有一个恶名即他们是最早将链锁
绑在非洲男人女人小孩身上的英国人
并用这样的船舱把他们运走
他们是奴隶赈子
离开普斯茅斯6周后
他们在几内亚收集到500个奴隶然后一路西行
没有多少英国人走过这条航线
英国慢慢的发现了新大陆具有的机遇
而西班牙早已现行一步了
现在西班牙正贪婪的巩固赚钱的美洲大帝国从南美穿
过加勒比海一直到墨西哥殛更远的北部
Drakel Hawkins只是想要分一杯
快点去买些奴隶然后满载银币回家
问题是西班牙禁止外国人在他们的帝国领域内从事贸易活动
Hawkins偷着干了一两次并且还没有被抓住
他希望再干一次，但是这次事情可不同了
在加勒比海地区
他们贩出奴隶赚到了金银珍珠
然后返航回家
但是当时正是飓风季节
风暴将他们赶入墨西哥沿岸的圣胡安
在那里一队全副武装的西班牙舰队起先答应他们安全放行
后来却决定要让他们吃点苦头
之后的战斗Hawk ns损失了三艘船
包括Lubeck耶稣号以及200人丧命或被俘
他自己乘Mn10n号逃脱
与他一起逃跑的还有13岁的Miles Philips
他也看到了俘虏身上发生了什么事情
他写道“他们把我们的船员带到岸边”
通过胳膊吊起来直到血液冲破他们的指尖
此时Hawkins的个人悲剧
是他知道了他的侄子Paul也在俘虏之中
紧接着是疾病与饥饿他们衣衫褴褛的到家了
Mln on号上只剩下不到20个人
但是对于这些幸存者这场灾难
没有吓退他们反而激发了斗志
这段经历给Drake和HawkinsA的余生留下了创伤
他们永远不会原谅西班牙人的背信弃义
他们投身到反抗西班牙的尖锐的个人斗争运动
斗争运动借着度金钱的欲望宗教狂热以及复仇的渴望
很快发展到燎原之势
很快这次运动成为国家事务
并形成英国大众的新观念
但是如果英国的海员期望有机会能追上西班牙舰队
那么他们必须要更好的船
Hwak ns的回答是建造快速大型帆船
他在舰船设计方面激进的突破
体现在这些原始手稿上
通过用数学与几何来代替经验
通过降低甲板高度流线船身
Hawkins制造出了世界上最快的帆船
第一艘建成于1570年位于得特福德的女王船坞
之后还有更多
具有更大火炮空间的这些战船为专为战争而生的
但是都铎政府最多只能买得起20艘快速帆船
靠他们的力量是远远不够的
Hawkins在海军部找到了差事
他们的装备是女王的最一般的舰队
1582年海军部开展了一系列的特别调查
都保存在国家档案馆
我之前看过这些调查但是从来没发现这个
这是一份编制在Hawkins领导下的所有船只的名单
可以看到以不同国家区分的
这是No rfolk Suffolk清清楚楚的记录下了不可思议
每一艘船对应的吨位比如圣玛丽号所罗门号200吨位
太惊人了
让我们接着看看这儿他们不仅记录了船只
还有船王水手和海员人数
每个港口都是
找到了在康维尔有108名船主
626名水手1184名海员
如此精确难以置信
这些信息被集中到伦敦以备都铎政府随时使用
看到这些几世纪前的人名真是情何以堪啊
只要有了这样的名单一旦发生战争或国家危机
你就可以去敲他们的门找到这些人
比如John Coope r Peter Dolomo re
告诉他们“哥们你得加入海军保卫祖国”
显然你很想知道
是否如来自小海姆的WiIIiam Bennett殛William Mort这样的
参加了对抗西班牙无敌舰队的战斗中
实在是太惊奇了要一直追查到底
都铎政府可用的海员总人数是
16259
这么多人可以被动员去保护小小的英国
来对抗全球最强的国家
与此同时D rake采取了更直接的方式来报复西班牙
1587年四月某天西班牙南部加迪斯港的居民被炮声吵醒
一天下来30多艘西班牙船只沉入港口的海底
同时D rake的舰队满载胜利品而归
算是DrakelO年来掠夺生涯的最疯狂一次
之前D rake就环球远航
袭击西班牙殖民地抢夺战利品
好战贪婪无人匹敌
他就是英国新教的英雄
在天主教的西班牙他绝无立足之地
站在这里从西班牙人的视角来看
英国不亚于维京海盗
维京人自北方乘船而来干尽掠夺和破坏的事
这种人天不一怕地不怕
现在最恶名昭著的就是这位D rake了
’憎恨不断仍能听到恶龙D rake的词
现在这条恶龙已经把西班牙国王
推入了向D rake和英国可怕的复仇中
复仇z战发生干1588年七月
当无敌舰队出现在英国海岸时
一名目击者记载说舰队的重量令海洋在呻吟
西班牙花了3年时间无数银币聚集起如此规模的舰队
而英国舰队仅仅在3个月内被动员起来
战斗持续了多日
但是Drake和Hawkins这样的领袖带给了英国决定性的优势
人们总是将战胜无敌舰队
归功于英国士兵的勇气
或者上帝垂爱的风势
但是西班牙九同样战斗很英勇的
而且在战争不同阶段风向对双方也是各有利害的
真正的原因不是那么引人入胜
实际是Hawkins机智的组织能力
他确保了英国具备一种快速灵巧的舰队
舰队的每艘船都能携带3倍干西班牙船只同等的军备
他奠定了现代海战的基础
将船人员火炮
形成优化组台
所以在圣保罗教堂当1588年11月的伟大美好的那天到来时
他们庆祝的不只是胜利
还有崭新未来的开始
女王犹如一位作者记叙的,坐车金色的马车
穿著凯旋的长袍走过伦敦城
尽管天主教叛徒们的人头
被砍下用以祈祷无敌舰队的胜利
但栅栏外一切陡变
都铎王朝的机器开始提速
新画像展示了女王的得意她手放在地球仪上
后边的西班牙船只撞毁在礁石
胜利打开了这个狭小贫穷国家的视野
一个评论家写到
海洋已经变成了探索新大陆的工具
为了黄金为了赞美为了荣誉
#上帝保佑我们伟大的女王#
英国人对自己光彩夺目的未来展开了美好的想象
难以估量的巨大财富
沿着英格兰狭小的海岸无限延展出去的新边境线
最重要的是这个美好的未来将在海上实现
将通过海军的坚船利炮通过新一代英勇的航海家来实现
英格兰在世界上将再也不会像原来一样默默无闻
仪仗队扛枪上肩
向右转！
女王的海军第一次成为了民旗自豪感的来源
大家对海上冒险和探索的需求热情也达到了前所未百的高度
新的民族性正在形成英国人成为咄咄逼人野心勃勃的新教’
如果说Hawkins是这个新民族性的奠基者
那么Drake就推进了它的发展
而Richard HaklLlyt则是如实记录了这一过程
1589年战胜西班牙无敌舰艘后的那一年他写道一
这是英国最重要的航程
最重要的海上旅行最重要的海上交通和发现
在这个1600年的历史记录上
记录了英国人250次以上的海上探险
这里面充满了故事和离奇的神话
比如在这一本书的嚣后我们可以看到
Hawki rls在加勒比海遭到的不幸
Miles Philips以阴森恐怖的笔触
描绘了西班牙人对他们的残酷虐待
而在接下来的一章里
我们看到了打畋西班牙无敌舰队的记录这份记录的结尾
令人难以置信的写到西班牙人数量巨大装备先进的华丽舰队
在1588年就这么灰飞烟灭了
这是别有用心的历史记录
这是对一个即将接受新命运的民族的战斗召唤
这一新的命运被描述的十分具体
在Hakluyt接下来的一部作品里
这部作品中包含着一幅令人惊奇的地图
这张纸差不多有400年之久了
简直太漂亮了
来看看这些细节
这些世界上的海岸线港口和河道的细节
这幅地图这么值得注意主要是因为在中世纪的地图上英国
一直是一个位于欧洲边缘的无关紧要的小岛
但是在这幅地图上英国不是在原来的位置它被
画到了世界的中心位置
这种地图是我们现在经常见到的
但是就是这张地图第一次把英国放在了世界中心
这是一个强有力的证明证明这个国家有着全球扩张的野心
英国的船只倾巢而出
开往世界各地姜洲非洲亚洲以殛波罗的海
大量野心勃勃的英国拓荒者
有条不紊的侵蚀着西班牙的海上力量
建互了大量的殖民地为以后的日不落帝国打下了基础
不论是国内还是国外商业莲勒发展
像康沃尔郡的东卢港这样的港口有大量的渔船
这些渔船的生意远至北美洲
在这个充满自信的新时代他t1]称自己为西方冒险家
但是经济的繁荣带来了一个任何人都没有预料到的威胁
实然之间一整个舰队
有10 12艘船的舰队在本应该出海的时候就这么消失了
有报道称这些船后来被发现飘荡在大西洋上
只是船员都不见了他们再也没有出现过
1631年一个夏天的夜晚
爱尔兰南部一个叫做Balf mo re的小村子里
100多人在睡梦中离开了他们的家园
这个镇子从此成了鬼镇
一封写干1625年8月的信很值得注意
它揭示了这一问题当时的影响规模和恐怖程度
这封信是普利茅斯的市长Thomas Seeley写给国王顾问的
在康沃尔郡一个叫做Looe的靠海小镇里十天之内
失踪了80名水手他们本来要到海上打渔的
那里已经被土耳其人占领
在那时土耳其人等同于穆斯林他们其实是来自北非的海盗
巴巴里海盗
他们来到英国沿岸把那里的居民带回北非当奴隶
这可真是一件残酷的事情当然了当时的
西方人也是这么对待非洲人长达数十年之久
即使这样这种事情把大海从财富的来源英国的骄傲
变成了一个恐怖充满奴役的地方
据说那些港口和渔村中回荡了
受害者家人吟唱的耶利米哀歌
接下来的几年中
德文郡和康沃尔郡损失了五分之一的船只和船员
这个英国历史上离奇的小插曲鲜为人知
然而它却造成了深远的影响
英国人一向被灌输的都是他们在海上不可战胜的神话
但是现在他们必须直面残酷的现实
曾经的捕猎者变成了今天的猎物
人们做出了应对危机时应有的反应
他们谴责政府他们这么做也是有道理的
渔船Trevose号渔船Trevose号
卫船Tyne号呼叫16频道完毕
Tyne这是Trevose
我现在在一艘先进的海军渔业警卫船上
这里离康沃尔郡大约30英里
当时的巴巴里海盗就是在这里
抓住了英国的船只
Trevose号这是Tyne号
我们需要让一队日常事务检查队登上你的船
我们的小队将会在你的船上呆20分钟完毕。、
在伊丽莎白女王时代女王的船舰和Drake这类海盗的船舰
保卫着这片海域的安全
然而女王已经去世了
继位的斯图尔特政权与西班牙握手言和削减了海军
有着强烈的自我扩张倾同的斯国尔特
政权大肆挥霍金钱
这些金钱一部分是来自声名狼藉的造船税
这些船部是徒有其表的豪华大船
这些船是为了取悦欧洲的皇帝而设计的
问题是这些引人注目的大船并不是设计出采保护渔业的
正如这些船员不能做航空母舰上的工作一样
对渔业保护的缺失使得国王的子民们
尤其是在西南各郡的人们更容易受到海盗的攻击
他们以及他们的货物成为北非海盗不能拒绝的攻击目标
被这次危机的强度所震撼
西南各郡的国会议员John Elliot男爵
向国王顾问写信请求采取行动
但是政府毫无反应
Elliot非常愤怒
他并不是唯一一个为此愤怒的人
这本书的字里行间也渗透着愤怒
这本书是写于东声港舰队消失事件时期的畅销书
这本书叫做《复活的Francis Drake男爵》
是由Drake的侄子写的
他重述了那个光荣与成功并存的时代
那个对现在来说已经消失了的时代
它通篇以无孔不入的恐惧感和不安全感来控诉当代的社会
也是一篇战争的檄文这一点作者在扉页上就表示的清清楚
他写道呼吁这个沉闷柔弱的时代
紧跟着他高贵的步伐迈向辉煌
John Elliot男爵被这种心情所感染
呼吁过去那种侵略性政策的回归
看起来好像英国的新国王听取了这一意见
查理一世在位仅仅几个月的时间
就像现代的领导人在困难时期
想要寻求一个取悦大众的政策一样
他组织了一次对西班牙的远征
军队在1625年10月干普利茅斯出发
由兴高采烈的John Elliot欢送他们离港
他们的目标就是西班牙的加的斯省
他们的目标是在经过D rake式的烧杀抢掠之后他们
在人民的欢呼声中满载财富胜利归来
但是事实并不和想象相符
这次远征由Wimbledon子爵担任总指挥
而他却没有在海上作战的经验
他遇事犹豫不决很快他的部下给他起了一个外号静坐于爵
一时军心涣散
船只相撞桅杆和绳索茬甲板上翻滚乱成一团
当静坐下达攻击命令时许多船长对他的命令不屑一顾
缺乏像Drake这样芒至验丰富
有领导气质的指挥官
是英国舰队最危险的弱点
即使是Drake来指挥舰队
在执行命令力面也很可能会遇到不少困难
现在很多的船长为所欲为各自为战
他们是一帮乌合之众
这种混乱一直持续到他们的2000士兵顺利登陆
他们没有得到任何淡水供应
天气异常炎热
当他们走到小镇以后
这些渴的嗓子冒烟的英国人无意中发现了一个仓库
里面全是酒
最后的防线崩溃了
这些士兵开始狂灌酒
虽然指挥官试图阻止他们可是完全没有作用
所有的士兵都喝醉了
其中一个目击者写道
在模糊的混乱意识中我们好像在对着自己人相互开枪
然喝醉的英国人在国外的这种不光彩的举止并不是最后一次
但是这一次远征完全成为了一场彻头彻尾的闹剧
指挥官别无他法只能取消这次远征
回家的航程中闹剧变成了悲剧,疫病开始病蔓延
他们抵达普利茅斯的时候
已经有几百人因病去世还有几百人的生命危在旦夕
是谁在等待他们的归来?
只有John Elliot男爵
这个在金秋十月满怀希望欢送他们离港的男人
在1625年圣诞节的前一天痛苦的等待着舰队缓慢的驶进港口
我们面临着巨大的灾难
他写道当时他眼看着尸体被从船上抬下来扔到海港里面
后来他看到水手把尸体直接扔到了普利茅斯的大街上
但是很快他对水手的同情就转化为另外一种感情愤怒
惨败的消息很快传到了伦敦
当议会召集会议的时候J0_1n[10[已经出离愤怒了
他的怒吼回荡在st Stephen 大厅之中
我们的荣誉已经蒙羞我们的船沉在海底
我们的人死在战场上不是被剑所伤不是死于敌手
而是被我们信任的人害死
Elliot在这个房间中说的这些话
在这个下议院召开集会的地方说的这些话
是议会有史以来听到的对政府最尖锐的谴责
Elliot说加的斯战役充分证明了国王没有领导海军的能力
在这里发表了一系列惊人的演讲之后Elliot要求
议会在监督国家事务方面应该承担起更大的责任
当时在场的下议院掌权发言人
试图让他闭嘴但是ElIof雇了三个恶棍把他摁在椅子上
看起来到处都是革命的气息事实也确实是这样
国王不能领导一个现代的有能力的海军
这件事引发了一场宪法上的危机
Johrl Ellot被关进了监狱
但是新一代的国会议员
在St Stephen大厅中继承了他对自由的呼唤
国王和议会之间的关系全面崩溃
1642年查理一世逃离伦敦内战开始
因为逃离了首都查理一世失去了对海军的控制
也失去了对海军所支持的快速发展的新生海上经济的控制
这就注定了他的失败1649年
在英国新的共和政体的要求下他被斩首
议会迅速掌控了海军在海军中安置了心腹作为领军人物
他们被世人称为海上将军
其中一个就是Robed Blake
他是西南郡的国会议员是内战的英雄
除此之外还是一名激进的清教徒
Blake从来没有在海上打过仗
面对大的敌人的同时
还要负责守卫英国海岸线对他来说可不是一个美好的开始
但是B ake深知战争和人心
他清楚的知道混乱和无纪律
无论是在海上还是在陆地上都是一样的危险
远征加的斯所带来的指挥上的问题依然存在
在他的第一场战斗中
他惊恐的发现他的船长完全不听从他的命令径自逃走了
他知道他必须找到一个方式来确立他的权威
他的解决方式就是制定出海军有史以来
第一个规章制度
战争法和海洋法条例1652年制定
英国的指挥官第一次
能够发布那些一旦被发出就必须被执行的任务
15号港口
这张单子上有39起罪行
从偷盗到间谍从怯懦到值班时睡觉应有尽有
大多数都可以判定为死刑
Blake甚至解雇他的弟弟以儆效尤
战争法为构建海洋秩序提供了蓝图
这些法律后来被世界各国的政府所应用
Blake正是海军所需要的人物一个态度强硬的局外人
他清楚的认识到在这之前的50年中海军一直失控地徘徊在
对无敌舰队的巨大胜利和加的斯的完全溃败之间
这时的海军根本不可靠
在Drake这样的魅力领袖的领导z下
英国人可以取得巨大的成功
否则如果没有这种领导者失败则是必然的
Blake崇尚指令和纪律
他确保无论是在谁的领导之下
海军将永远是一只不可战胜的力
在Blake的领导下，
海军成为了一支前所未有的数 巨大祟尚纪律的军队
强大的舰队保护着新生的共和国不受到国外敌人的侵害
但是却不足以弥补英国的独裁者克伦威尔去世时留下的漏洞
崭新的时代到来了
1660年5月26日海军最豪华的舰船之一
皇家查理号出现在国民的视野之中
船上站着一个人他经过多年流放之后终于衣锦还多
他就是查理查理一世的儿于不久之后他就蹙基成为查理二
@
这次旅程就是几个星期密谋的成果
这些高级的海军军官和被流放的保皇党人
复辟了君主帝制
这位新登基的君主迫不及待的要把强大的海军收为己有
他大肆打赏水手又重新编制舰队
他们现在成为了皇家海军
和皇家党派一起登陆的是查理二世的表弟
他刚被任命为这艘船的指挥官的秘书
这个年轻人非常荣幸能得到这份
把皇帝的西班牙猎犬带下船的工作
他在日记中写道它在船上拉了屎
这让我们哄堂大笑我觉得皇帝
和他的所有的东西跟我们所有人都是一样的
当他们上岸的时候这个年轻人看到了拥挤的人群
他们是盛装打扮的贵族和市民他们是来迎接国王的
所有人都呼喊着表达他们的快乐
他写道这简直难以想象
这个来自伦敦的27岁的年青人刚刚完成了他的第二次海上旅
他当时并没有意识到这些
但是这确实是一次特别的海军生涯的开始
他的名字是Samuel Pepys
Pepys出身卑微
他父亲是个穷裁缝他母亲是一名洗衣女工
但是他却留下了两笔惊人的遗产
他史无前例的对海军当局进行了改革
更留下了有史以来最生动
最丰富多彩的日记
这就是Samuel Pepys日记的第一卷
开始于1660年1月1日
或许是为了纪念新年的决心
他是用速记的方式写的所以我们需要破译一下
但是这的确是对多彩生活非常真实的记录
他详细描写了他的所有行动去剧院
去喝酒他的风流韵事音乐金钱甚至他与妻子之间的争吵
其间点缀着他对所热爱的工作的描写
或许至少是他开始爱上的工作
当他拥有他的第一份工作海军董事会法案的书记员的时候
他根本不知道这份工作有着怎样的责任
但是他对薪水还是非常满意的每年350磅
这些钱比他这辈子赚的都要多
Pepys非常好学他全身心的投入到这个复杂的新世界中
这个世界是由
位于Chatham Woolwich,和Depfford的海军造船厂组成的
现在这些船厂都不存在了
但是这个在荷兰岸边的船厂
主要就是制造当时船舶的复制品
项目经理叫做A ryan Klein
现在能看到这些船真是太好了
你可以看到是什么让它们那么有力
通常你只能看到它们漂在水面上
是的它们都是重型木结构的船
那么要建造这么大的一艘船需要多少橡树呢7 需要几百
真的吗?据估计大约需要400 600棵不等的长成的树
其中有些树甚至已经超过100年树龄了甚至更老
在17世纪要建造这样的一艘船需要多长时间?
大约9个月哇那还是很快的
非常繁重的劳动几百名工人夜以继日的工作才能做到
只要这艘船不会漏水了
他们就会把船放进水里
给船台上的下一艘船腾地方
这就显示出这些船舰带回来的货物是多么的珍责
它们的建造是为了带回全世界的财富
额是的巨大的东印度商船就是为了做买卖才造的
但是我们现在所站的这艘船是一艘战舰
这艘战舰是为抵抗那个国家而建的?
恐怕是英国．
他们轻笑
当时的荷兰人在世界贸易上面押的赌注很大
当然当时的英国是这么想的-好吧我们也应该进行类似的贸易
在英国和荷兰之间就爆发了贸易战争
这艘船基本上就是这两个国家搞军备竞赛的一个产物
荷兰超越了西班牙
成为英国在海上新的敌人
他们和英国人一样咄咄逼人他们也是有组织的清教徒
为了抵抗荷兰人的威胁英国当时花费了高达25％
的国家预算来发展海军
使海军发展成为迄今为止最为强大的工业企业
造船厂消耗大的原材料
每年要消耗150公吨铁
100英里绳子
还雇佣着大量的工人
Pepvs很快发现贪污腐败非常常见
Pepyst把贪污的军官名单报给海军董事会但是他很快意识到
海军董事会本身就是最大的腐败机构
他称他的同事们为老白痴和老流氓
他还发现他们中的某人甚至还偷了
水手的退休金 水手的退休金被称为chafham金库
问题是海军已经成为了公共基金的巨大容器
但是却没有相关的制度来规定这笔钱该怎么利用
那么即使几千英镑就这么不见了又有谁会在意呢？
Pepys会他还发现海军的每一个万面都已经充分膨胀
除了海军的中央军部
舰队迅速膨胀已经远远超过了海军董事会所能掌控的范围
回到办公室以后Pepys雇佣了一组书记员
他给他们办公桌给他们固定的工作时司
让他们一起开始起草制定一些规章制度
他们花费大量时间来列清单
这是一份按字母顺序排列的清单
这上面是所有海军军官的名字
他们在Pepys执政期间任职
这里从A开始
然后一直顺着下来到z这里结束
令人惊奇的事情就是它包含着
还有他们在不同军舰上服役的具体日期
有的时候甚至还有他们的死亡日期
比如这里
此人已故
George Colt溺水而亡
Humphrey Connisby被女王撤职
这种清单强制推行了一种易于管理的集中性
在这个Pepvs被迫生存的无法无天的世界里
他；斩渐成为一个专家专门从事复杂的
信息采集和存储
他下定决心要让海军管理的各个方面都变得专业化
他设计了一个叫更簿用来记录造船厂的工作时间
编辑了一个所有合同的按字母顺序排列的清单
然后把他做的每件事情都详细记录下来
Pepvs并不是第一个制作清单的海军行政长官
但是他的清单是做的最有系统的
最杰出的也是最富于强迫性的
他祟尚海军不是因为他喜欢猛攻敌人的战舰
喜欢鼻孔中充满硝烟的味道
而是因为他喜欢官僚制度
他兴高采烈的写道所有的一切整洁又有序
但是Samuel Pepys的19记显示出他远不是一个
无趣的官僚王义者和一个单纯的列清单偏执狂
这是一个典型的突破口
他与一个海军董事会的同事的妻子有着风流韵事
还有他的女儿
他写道房间中有很多女人
我的爱人Penn和她的女儿都在房间里在那里我的爱人Penn
把我扑倒在床上她和其他女人
一个接一个的扑到我身上我们非常快乐
额我一点儿也不惊讶
常言道人无完人,对Pepys来说他的弱点就是这些女人们了
当然还有多次的烂醉如泥高级餐厅精美华服
音乐还有他喜欢去剧院当然还有你懂的
重点就是Pepvs是一个热爱生活的人
在他的日记中有一件事情让别的所有都黯然失色
就是他对工作的热爱
我的工作他写道是我的快乐之源
位于Darlmouth的海军军官职业学院
是在Pepvs时代之后很久才建造的但是
这里专门训练和培训合格军官的思想是继承于他的
任何有着恰当关系的人Pepvs认识到
都可以成为一名军官
就这样把海军贵重的船舰交到了靠不住的人手中
根本没有严把质量关
见习军官Briers长官
Pepys的解决方式就是考试
他引进的文字测验至今仍然作为晋升中尉的必考科目
见习军官Briers请坐
当时人们称他们为舰队董事会
第一个问题就是
在声明一中cBM的职责是什么？
他在上层甲板巡逻长官
主要是寻找消防方面的隐患好的
评估和面试的主要思想看起来跟我们的十分相似
航海技术的装备有哪些项目是必须备齐的?
下层安全网长官
这都是因为Pepys
当他引进中尉考试制度的时候这是英国历史上第一次
以这种方式来考察英国的国家雇员
它的位置在哪?
快拆杆标志浮筒长官
它一般情况下位于船尾很好
十分感谢见习军官Brle rs请继续
用钢笔纸张和一个清醒的头脑
Pepvs树立了一个海军的机构
正如Hawkins为他的船队
B ake给他的船员指定的纪律一样
这些制度能否接受最后的考验
战争？
1665年英国迎来了与荷兰人不可避免的战争
英国最初的一系列胜利似乎预示着一切顺利
但是Pepys却很担心
一开始的时候他就说过议会没有给足够的军饷
来维持战争正如他所预言的这些资金很快捉襟见肘
海军迅速从胜利迈向
危机
事情很快到了紧要关头
海军负债累累水手们的薪水也一直拖欠
在造船厂Pepys发现工人们想幽灵一样四处打转
他听到水手们哀伤的抱怨
他们一无所有游荡在街上
他称这一画面让他心如刀绞
让这次危机雪上加霜的是伦敦爆发了瘟疫
Pepys和他的书记员一起搬到了格林尼治
他们在那里定居下来住进了查理二世尚未完工的宫殿
这使他们处于舰队的中心位置
周围全是心存不满的水手
某天他们的窗户被打碎
Pepys和他的团队受到了身体暴力的威胁
Pepys花了24个小时给国王写了一封充满绝望的信
它表达的意思非常清晰这封信可能会让亲爱的国王坐立不安
Pepys这封信以道歉开头先就自己添的麻烦表示了歉意他说
再次因为我们的老生常谈打扰到敬爱的国王
我们需要钱我们需要财物支持
如果没有军饷在我们领导下的国王的军队
就要消失了
因此Pepys坚定的认为他的海军
面临着彻底毁灭的危险
然后他想到了一个典型Pepvs式的解决方式
他仔细估算了一个清单
这个清单包括他所想到的任何可以避免毁灭的事情
他从这里开始列举55个重量不一的锚
800捆帆布4000块负重支架
400打船桨12吨硫磺
10000条各式桅杆
提出了难以置信的精确数字
正如Pepys P唯一能做的他提出了所需的精确钱数
来避免海军和英国的灾难
这些钱是179793英镑
零十个先令
但是国王根本就没有钱，他也不会像羞辱自己似的
毕恭毕敬的向议会伸手要钱
几个月之后如同Pepys所预言的一样海军出现了大灾难
那是1667年的夏天
舰队都已闲置下来因为没有薪水可以偿付给驾驶船舶的船员
Upnor城堡它为离伦敦30英里远的泰晤士河上游
它建于伊丽莎白时代主要是为了保护舰队
当它们在Chatham穿过Medwayi河的时候
精疲功尽又身无分文的驻守部队的状态很不好
在某个6月的一天被吓坏的要塞守卫士兵发现
62艘荷兰的船舰趁涨潮时驶入了河道
驻扎在这里的很多都是国王的舰队
其中包括四艘他最好的战舰
在绝望心情的促使下英国人凿沉了他们自己的船舰
试图堵塞河道但是这根本没起作用
他们设在岸上的加农炮也开炮试图击退荷兰人的进攻
但是有人装错了弹药
很多炮弹跟炮筒的型号完全不匹配
荷兰人的船舰平安无事的冲开了英国人的防线捉住了他们
烧掉了其他的东西其中包括国王3艘最好的战舰
河道里飘满了船的残骸
天空中烟雾弥漫
一个Pepvs的书记员这样写道他曾在这里生活工作
对那三艘华丽战舰的摧毁
是我所见过的最凄凉可怕的场景
他还说这一场景足以使每一个真正的英国人心鲜血淋漓
作为最后的羞辱
荷兰人把皇家查理号拖回了荷兰
这一个瞬间被永恒的留着画布上
展示着英国舰队的骄傲上飘扬着荷兰的国旗
在那时荷兰人突袭了Medway给今天留下了
皇家海军历史上最令人羞隗的一次溃败
即使是Pepys这样的天才也不能避免这场惨败
事实很简单查理二世
根本无力领导一个现代海军
Medway惨败让国王和议会
起了另一场冲窭
冲突王要围绕海军应该如何控制和发饷
当1685年查理二世去世时
国王与议会的关系
已经降到了内战以来的最低点
他的弟弟詹姆斯二世继位
现在他作为皇家海军的海军上将
已经拥有了一份十分成功的职业
他能否与这些政客融资人还有商人共事
来建互一个新的君王互宪制国家呢?
额。。。
不
这幅惊人的肖像可以告诉我们答案
詹姆斯二世在画像中穿的像一个古罗马的皇帝
眼神傲慢
他穿着金色的紧身短上衣华丽的紫色长袍从肩膀滑下
他的领口剑柄还有凉鞋上都有珠宝为饰
远在海上的海军是他的玩物
皇家旗帜在船的中桅上高高飘扬
这并不是英国人所希望看到的君王的样子
更糟糕的是詹姆斯二世是一个公开的傲慢的天主教徒
他在军队的主要位置都安插了天王教徒
他甚至还让一个天王教徒掌管皇家海军
显然这个人不会让他的海军出海去攻击
欧洲大的天主教国家
这个人也不是一个会保护Drake和Hawkins遗产的人
他应该离开这里
1688年7月一个普通水手打扮的人抵达了荷兰
在这个伪装之下的
是英国首席海军军官Arthur Herberi上将
或者应该说是前上将
几周前他已经辞职拒绝继续在詹姆斯二世手下服役
Herbert带着一封特殊的信件
这封信上有7个人的签名这些人都是各个领域的政要军队的
教堂的还有国家的政要这封信写给荷兰亲王
奥兰治亲王威廉他不仅是新教徒
他还娶了詹姆斯二世的女儿玛丽
这封信恳求威廉帮助他他们摆脱这个暴君的统治
这是叛国罪但是Herben和他的同谋者们
都是这个激愤的国家中绝望的人
而威廉就是他们要找的拯救者
1688年11月1日大规模的荷兰侵略舰队
463艘船40000名士兵
从荷兰出发向英国进军
此时距英国大败西班牙无敌舰队正好100年
但是这次的胜利却是兵不血刃的
在威廉旗舰的主桅杆上挂着一个标语
上面写着他的家族箴言我将坚守
但是他又以3英尺高的字母加上了
英国人民和新教教派的自由
这一标语如此的清晰当威廉登陆的时候
在英国南部海岸登陆时迎接他的是人民的欢呼
在接下来的几周时间里
事情变得很明朗英国人民根本不会为詹姆斯二世打仗
所以他逃走了威廉取代詹姆斯二世成为国王
詹姆斯二世跟他的哥哥和父亲一样
证明了他与新型的英国风格互不相容
这种风格在大败无敌舰队之后就已经形成
这种风格反对专制和天主救
以议会和自由为荣
以英国海军出海攻打英国传统敌人为傲
1688年威廉的入侵标志着这些价值观的最后胜利
这是无敌舰队的神话成为了现实
在不到100年的时间里
西雨部各郡的平民航海家和一些皇家船舰
已经成为一种家喻尸晓的现代机构
它有着工作人员和制度来管理数 巨大能力出众的海军
这就是英国勇敢坚定的中流砥柱
一个位于国家计划和国家未来中心位置的海军
下周海军是如何在各个领域引发了一系列的革命
在财政领域工业和农业领域
如何聚敛了难以想象的财富
如何推动英国进入现代社会