Hawkins knew what he was about.  ‘Master Hore’ did not.  Hore was a well-meaning, plausible fellow, good at taking up new-fangled ideas, bad at carrying them out, and the very cut of a wildcat company-promoter, except for his honesty.  He persuaded ’divers young lawyers of the Innes of Court and Chancerie’ to go to Newfoundland.  A hundred and twenty men set off in this modern ship of fools, which ran into Newfoundland at night and was wrecked.  There were no provisions; and none of the ’divers lawyers’ seems to have known how to catch a fish.  After trying to live on wild fruit they took to eating each other, in spite of Master Hore, who stood up boldly and warned them of the ‘Fire to Come.’  Just then a French fishing smack came in; whereupon the lawyers seized her, put her wretched crew ashore, and sailed away with all the food she had.  The outraged Frenchmen found another vessel, chased the lawyers back to England, and laid their case before the King, who ’out of his Royall Bountie’ reimbursed the Frenchmen and let the ‘divers lawyers’ go scot free.

Hawkins and Hore, and others like them, were the heroes of travellers’ tales.  But what was the ordinary life of the sailor who went down to the sea in the ships of the Tudor age?  There are very few quite authentic descriptions of life afloat before the end of the sixteenth century; and even then we rarely see the ship and crew about their ordinary work.  Everybody was all agog for marvellous discoveries.  Nobody, least of all a seaman, bothered his head about describing the daily routine on board.  We know, however, that it was a lot of almost incredible hardship.  Only the fittest could survive.  Elizabethan landsmen may have been quite as prone to mistake comfort for civilization as most of the world is said to be now.  Elizabethan sailors, when afloat, most certainly were not; and for the simple reason that there was no such thing as real comfort in a ship.

Here are a few verses from the oldest genuine English sea-song known.  They were written down in the fifteenth century, before the discovery of America, and were probably touched up a little by the scribe.  The original manuscript is now in Trinity College, Cambridge.  It is a true nautical composition—­a very rare thing indeed; for genuine sea-songs didn’t often get into print and weren’t enjoyed by landsmen when they did.  The setting is that of a merchantman carrying passengers whose discomforts rather amuse the ‘schippemenne.’

Anon the master commandeth fast
To his ship-men in all the hast[e],
To dresse them [line up] soon about the mast

            Their takeling to make.

With Howe!  Hissa! then they cry,
’What howe! mate thou standest too nigh,
Thy fellow may not haul thee by:’ 

            Thus they begin to crake [shout].

A boy or twain anon up-steyn [go aloft]
And overthwart the sayle-yerde leyn [lie]
Y-how! taylia! the remnant cryen [cry]

            And pull with all their might.