To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World by Arthur Herman

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From its uncertain beginnings under Henry VIII, the British Royal Navy developed into a force that enabled Great Britain to become a global power without precedent in history. Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves shows how the Royal Navy toppled Spain and Portugal's world economic system and replaced it with another, far more powerful and resilient. This popular narrative about England's epic the journey from the age of tall ships to the age of computer warfare is penned by the author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

From the Publisher

To Rule the Waves tells the extraordinary story of how Britain's Royal Navy allowed one nation to rise to power unprecedented in history. From its beginnings under Henry VIII and adventurers like John Hawkins and Francis Drake, the Royal Navy toppled one world eco-nomic system, built by Spain and Portugal after Christopher Columbus, and ushered in another — the one in which we still live today.

In the sixteenth century, such men as Hawkins, Drake, and Martin Frobisher were all seekers after their own fortunes as well as servants of their nation. But at the moment of crisis in 1588, they were able to come together to thwart Philip II of Spain and his supposedly invincible Armada. In the seventeenth century, the navy became the key to victory in the English Civil War and played a leading role on the world stage in the years of the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate. The navy's dominance allowed England's trade to boom and prosper. It sustained its colonies, reshaped its politics, and drew England, Scotland, and Ireland together into a single United Kingdom.

It was this system that Napoleon had to break in order to make himself absolute master of Europe. And it was the Royal Navy, led by men like Horatio Nelson, that stopped him in his tracks and preserved the liberty of Europe and the rest of the world. That global order would survive the convulsions of the twentieth century and the downfall of the British Empire itself, as Britain passed its essential elements on to its successors, the United States and its navy.

Illuminating and engrossing, To Rule the Waves is an epic journey from the age of the Reformation to the age ofcomputer warfare and special ops. Arthur Herman tells the spellbinding tale of great battles at sea; of heroic sailors, admirals, and aviators; of violent conflict and personal tragedy; of the way one mighty institution forged a nation, an empire, and a new world.

The New York Times - William Grimes

[Mr. Herman] is particularly adept at explaining the changes in technology and battle tactics that kept the British Navy a step ahead of the competition. Even more impressive, he describes the evolution of the navy's bureaucracy in such dramatic fashion that Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, becomes as stirring a figure as Horatio Nelson. The British Navy scored its greatest victories largely because it was better organized, better financed and better equipped than its enemies. For this, Pepys gets much of the credit.

Publishers Weekly

The author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World returns with this quite splendid history of the British Royal Navy. Probably to no one's surprise, his thesis is that the British Empire was the foundation of the modern world and the Royal Navy the foundation of that empire. By and large, he sustains that thesis in a fluent narrative that stretches from the Elizabethan Age to the Falklands War. Although definitely Anglocentric and navalist, the author has done his research on a scale that such a large topic (to say nothing of a large book) requires. The Royal Navy's discipline and food in the age of sail may not deserve quite as much rehabilitation as he gives them, but on the other hand, he is frank about the limitations of British warship design, poor Victorian gunnery and lack of preparations for antisubmarine warfare between the world wars. He also writes extremely well, whether dealing with the role of the Royal Navy in founding the British iron and steel industries (it was a major customer) or grand battles, such as Quiberon Bay (1759) or Trafalgar (1805). Good one-volume histories of one of the modern world's most vital fighting forces appear rarely; this one should rule for a while to come. Agent, Glen Hartley. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The contributions of the British fleet extend beyond the inventive use of rum, sodomy, and the lash. The British Empire, argues Herman (How the Scots Invented the Modern World, 2001, etc.), would scarcely have been possible without it, and "half the world's independent nations would not exist today." The inhabitants of the British Isles, by mere virtue of the fact that they live on islands, have been going down to the sea in ships for millennia. But Herman credits Henry VIII with taking lessons from his fellow rulers in more ambitious lands and rethinking the whole business of the ocean as more than an inconvenient obstacle between England and its holdings in Ireland and France; a "skilled copycat," he built up a modern fleet for his time and, stealing a page from Scotland, mounted its ships with heavy, bronze siege cannons. Its descendant, the navy of Elizabeth's age, sailed the world, mostly in order to chase the Spanish; as Herman notes, the Spanish crown replied by launching three successive armadas in 1596, 1597, and 1598, the last of which set off a national panic, "with citizens of London closing off streets and rushing to Tilbury with 30,000 militiamen to repel the imagined attackers." England's swabbies found worthy opponents in Napoleon's fleet, too, which dogged them around the globe and made heroes of Lord Nelson and his lieutenants; in the fleets of the Germany in WWI and WWII; and even in the Argentine navy, which gave England's ships a hard fight in the Falklands War of 1982. The last conflict, the author notes, forced a rethinking of the fleet's increasing reliance on high-tech gizmos and put it back in touch with the old traditions: "If the British navy was going to winthis war, it was going to have to rely on the human factor, the courage and endurance of its officers and men." There's plenty of courage and endurance here. Herman's thesis is less than groundbreaking, but his narrative ought to please fans of Aubrey and Hornblower-and even the Tudor kings.

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Chapter One

Incident at San Juan de Ulloa

A Sea-man hath a valiant heart,
And bears a noble minde,
He scorneth once to shrink or start
For any stormy wind.
-- Anonymous Ballad

For three days the ships had struggled to hold their own against the hurricane. The wind out of the southeast had howled through the masts and rigging, tearing at their battered sails and smashing waves across their decks. There were five of them, sailing blind into the storm, in hour after hour of blackness. All they knew was that they were somewhere west of Cuba, and that they had to keep their ships pointed into the wind or else they could end up being thrown onto the coast of Spanish Florida. Their only guide through the perpetual darkness was the wildly tossing stern lantern of the Jesus, the flagship of their leader and commander, John Hawkins.

Storm-tossed ships: five tiny flyspecks in the midst of an empty hostile sea, and in the heart of a hostile empire. Yet without knowing it, they were about to alter history. A crucial moment had arrived in the struggle for global power. A new antagonist was about to enter the fray: England. John Hawkins's experiences over the next twelve days in September 1568 would mark the start of a century-long struggle with Spain for dominion over the New World, and also the start of the modern British navy.

No one would have been more surprised by this than John Hawkins. Thirty-five years old, small and spare, he was not a visionary but a man of action, a tough experienced mariner and the kind of man others naturally followed -- even into a three-day hurricane. He had spent every moment of those three days on deck. Rain streamed from his hair and beard as he ordered men aloft to take in sail so that the hurricane wind did not snap off a weakened mast or spar like a matchstick. At one desperate point, he had even been forced to cut away the top section of his mainmast to reduce the strain.

The Jesus was an old ship, a leaky tub with sprung timbers and a rotten hull. Now, after days of battering, she* was ready to give way completely. The carpenter came up from below and bellowed in his ear that the timbers around the stern post were about to burst. The gaps between them were so wide that fish were able to swim through into the hold, the carpenter said; if those timbers opened any wider, they would founder and sink.

This was John Hawkins's third trip into the Caribbean. His father, William Hawkins of Plymouth, was the first English merchant to gatecrash the trade monopoly Portugal and Spain enjoyed with their colonies in the New World. William Hawkins had made a fortune running goods from the Guinea coast -- the two thousand miles of African coastline from the Senegal River to the mouth of the Niger -- to Portuguese Brazil. His sons William and John had joined him on those dangerous transatlantic voyages when they were barely teenagers. But unlike his father, John Hawkins wanted more than just the occasional smuggling raid. He envisioned a regular trading network from Africa to America, with English ships offering the one commodity of which Spanish settlers could not get enough: slaves.

Slavery was a fact of life in the sixteenth century. The African slave trade was already the largest form of commerce in the world. No one had the least qualms about it, least of all Africa's own tribal rulers. It was also vital for running Spain's empire in America. Hawkins figured he could offer Spanish settlers slaves in greater quantities and at a lower price than they could get from their own merchants. Then they would pay him with the product from the New World everyone craved but which Spanish law forbade to all outsiders: gold and silver from the mines of Peru and Mexico. Once the trade got going, the Spanish colonies would flourish, England would prosper, and Hawkins would be a rich man -- the uncrowned king of the New World.

In 1562 Hawkins sought permission for his first slaving voyage from Queen Elizabeth. "The voyage I pretend," he wrote, "is to load negroes in Guinea and sell them in the West Indies in truck of gold, pearls, and emeralds." He got her tacit approval, as well as backing of a large syndicate of London merchants. In October he set out from Plymouth for Tenerife, the central island of the Canaries and gateway to Africa and America. After stopping several Portuguese slave ships off Guinea and buying or hijacking their cargo (it is unclear which), Hawkins made his way across the Atlantic to Hispaniola, the island where Christopher Columbus had landed seventy years earlier and which was now a thriving Spanish colony.

Hawkins did a brisk business with the local planters. They liked being able to buy their black labor at a fraction of the official price of one hundred ducats per head. Hawkins returned triumphantly home in August of 1563, in ships laden with gold, silver, pearls, sugar, and hides -- so much sugar and hides, in fact, that he had to hire two extra ships to carry it all. Everyone was happy, except of course the slaves (although Hawkins took better care of his expensive cargo, even outfitting them with shirts and shoes, than did slavers in later centuries), and the Spanish authorities, who had just seen their monopoly broken and their laws flouted.

Hawkins had done everything to try to accommodate and placate them even though the Spanish were Catholics and Hawkins a God-fearing Protestant. He appealed to the traditional alliance between England and Spain; he pointed out how the trade would benefit Spaniards, not just the English and himself. He had even shipped some of his goods on to Seville, so that he could pay customs just like any regular Spanish merchant (instead, the authorities seized the lot and threw Hawkins's men in prison) ...