Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/260

258 (and author of the well-known Diary), Queen Elizabeth in 1588 had at sea 150 sail of ships, of which only 40 were the property of the crown. Besides the 110 hired vessels, however, the mercantile shipping of the kingdom amounted to 150 sail, measuring on an average 150 tons, and carrying 40 seamen each. Each of the queen's own ships carried about 300 men, and each of those hired by her about 110. It is added that, by the end of the reign, both the quantity of the shipping and the number of the seamen belonging to the kingdom had increased about a third. According to an account presented by the Navy Office in 1791, in obedience to an order of the House of Commons, the royal navy amounted in 1547, at the end of the reign of Henry VIII., to 12,455 tons; in 1553, at the end of the reign of Edward VI., to 11,065; in 1558, at the end of the reign of Mary, to 7110; and in 1603, at the end of the reign of Elizabeth, to 17,110. The largest of Queen Elizabeth's ships at her death is said to have measured 1000 tons, and to have carried 340 seamen, and 40 cannon.

A new species of maritime adventure in which the English began to engage in the reign of Elizabeth was the whale-fishery. Hakluyt, under the year 1575, reports the "request of an honest merchant, by letter to a friend of his, to be advised and directed in the course of killing the whale;" with the friend's answer, stating that there ought to be provided a ship of 200 tons burthen, with proper utensils and instruments, and that all the necessary hands were to be obtained from Biscay, the people of which country appear to have been, with the exception perhaps of the inhabitants of some of the most northern regions, the earliest whale-fishers in Europe.