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 of computer 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.

To Rule the Waves

HarperCollins Publishers

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 ownagainst the hurricane. The wind out of the southeast had howledthrough the masts and rigging, tearing at their battered sails andsmashing waves across their decks. There were five of them, sailing blindinto the storm, in hour after hour of blackness. All they knew was thatthey were somewhere west of Cuba, and that they had to keep their shipspointed into the wind or else they could end up being thrown onto thecoast of Spanish Florida. Their only guide through the perpetual darknesswas the wildly tossing stern lantern of the Jesus, the flagship of theirleader and commander, John Hawkins.

Storm-tossed ships: five tiny flyspecks in the midst of an empty hostilesea, and in the heart of a hostile empire. Yet without knowing it, theywere about to alter history. A crucial moment had arrived in the strugglefor global power. A new antagonist was about to enter the fray: England.John Hawkins's experiences over the next twelve days in September 1568would mark the start of a century-long struggle with Spain for dominionover 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 ofaction, a tough experienced mariner and the kind of man others naturallyfollowed -- even into a three-day hurricane. He had spent every momentof those three days on deck. Rain streamed from his hair and beard as heordered men aloft to take in sail so that the hurricane wind did not snapoff 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 toreduce the strain.

The Jesus was an old ship, a leaky tub with sprung timbers and a rottenhull. 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 timbersaround the stern post were about to burst. The gaps between themwere so wide that fish were able to swim through into the hold, the carpentersaid; if those timbers opened any wider, they would founder andsink.

This was John Hawkins's third trip into the Caribbean. His father,William Hawkins of Plymouth, was the first English merchant to gatecrashthe trade monopoly Portugal and Spain enjoyed with their coloniesin the New World. William Hawkins had made a fortune running goodsfrom the Guinea coast -- the two thousand miles of African coastlinefrom the Senegal River to the mouth of the Niger -- to Portuguese Brazil.His sons William and John had joined him on those dangerous transatlanticvoyages 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, withEnglish ships offering the one commodity of which Spanish settlers couldnot get enough: slaves.

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

In 1562 Hawkins sought permission for his first slaving voyage fromQueen 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, andemeralds." He got her tacit approval, as well as backing of a large syndicateof London merchants. In October he set out from Plymouth forTenerife, the central island of the Canaries and gateway to Africa andAmerica. After stopping several Portuguese slave ships off Guinea andbuying or hijacking their cargo (it is unclear which), Hawkins made hisway across the Atlantic to Hispaniola, the island where ChristopherColumbus had landed seventy years earlier and which was now a thrivingSpanish colony.

Hawkins did a brisk business with the local planters. They liked beingable to buy their black labor at a fraction of the official price of one hundredducats per head. Hawkins returned triumphantly home in August of1563, in ships laden with gold, silver, pearls, sugar, and hides -- so muchsugar 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 tookbetter care of his expensive cargo, even outfitting them with shirts andshoes, 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 themeven though the Spanish were Catholics and Hawkins a God-fearingProtestant. He appealed to the traditional alliance between England andSpain; he pointed out how the trade would benefit Spaniards, not just theEnglish and himself. He had even shipped some of his goods on to Seville, sothat he could pay customs just like any regular Spanish merchant (instead,the authorities seized the lot and threw Hawkins's men in prison) ...

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