Chapter 10
May 1634
Stockholm
At the Stockholm Mint, Marcus Koch, the mint master of Stockholm, and Captain Hamilton of the Groen Feniks watched as silver bars and coins were counted out and placed in iron-bound wooden boxes, each weighing perhaps five hundred pounds when fully loaded with eight thousand or so coins. The size of the box was deliberate; the Mint didn’t want a box to be easy for a lone thief to carry off. Once the box was locked shut, the captain and the mint master affixed their seals to it. The boxes and keys were numbered and a code book indicated which keys opened which boxes.
The silver was not of Swedish origin, since Sweden was not a major silver producer. But German and Spanish silver had been paid for with Swedish copper and iron, or extorted by Swedish warships collecting ship-tolls at Baltic harbors.
Captain Hamilton’s Groen Feniks was capable of carrying about one hundred eighty tons cargo. It had been built by the Dutch in 1625, so it had already seen almost a decade of service at sea, but never in that decade had it been called upon to carry so valuable a cargo.
Fortunately for Captain Hamilton’s peace of mind, he would carry the silver only as far as Göteborg. There it would be transferred temporarily to the great fortress of Älvsborg, and then to an East Indiaman, the Rode Draak, that was anchored there. The pair would journey together to China.
The Groen Feniks was what the Dutch called a pinas. These could be used either as merchantmen or as warships, depending on the choice of guns, the size of the crew, and the absence or presence of marines. In 1629, the cities of Kalmar and Jönköping purchased it and donated it to the Swedish Navy, naming it the Kalmar Nyckel, the Key of Kalmar. The purchase was part of a program in which Swedish cities purchased dual-purpose ships which could be used for both home defense and for commercial voyages. Although a mission to China was more ambitious than the norm.
Thanks to up-time technology, the news of the Danish surrender at Copenhagen in June 1634 had reached Stockholm the very day on which it occurred. The SEAC director in residence in Stockholm heard about it the following morning, and by that afternoon and the evening had met with the Lord High Treasurer Gabriel Bengtsson, Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna and Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm. All three of whom, not incidentally, were stockholders.
He pointed out to them that the mainstay of any trading mission to China would be exchanging silver for silk. And that they had a ship which had been designed for the Europe–China route, the Rode Draak, in Göteborg, but it couldn’t leave until they could stock its hold with silver. Moving the silver by land would have been expensive, and sending it by sea impossible as long as the Danish were blockading the Kattegat. But now that the war was over, it could go by sea…but time was of the essence.
“Why?” Oxenstierna had asked.
“Because right now the prevailing wind on the sea-route through the Baltic is from the east,” the admiral explained. “But come June, it will switch to the west, and will stay that way all summer.”
“Waiting until the summer will increase the passage time from Stockholm to Göteborg by anywhere from one to three months,” the SEAC director added.
“I will speak to the Master of the Mint,” said the chancellor.
* * *
Two days later, the entire silver shipment was ready to be transported to the Groen Feniks. There were a dozen silver chests in all.
Before the procession began, the Myntgatan and the streets leading from it to the dock nearest the Royal Mint were closed to ordinary traffic; a crier walked down their length warning that anyone who stepped out of one of the buildings on that street before the “all clear” was given would be shot, and the side streets were barricaded off and guards posted.
The escort assembled in the square outside the Royal Mint. A squadron of cavalry headed the procession, the hooves of their horses striking sparks from the cobblestones. Then came the carriage of Marcus Koch, and a series of sealed wagons, each with a driver and two soldiers. Last came a second squadron of cavalry, which could quickly ride forward if there were any disturbance. There was none.
In due course, they arrived at the dock, which itself was under heavy guard. As each wagon was unloaded, the boxes were counted off and the seals checked for tampering. Some boxes were carried by the crew up the gangway, and others were hoisted over by the ship’s heaviest tackles. Of course, before hoisting, a buoy rope was attached; if the hoist gave way and the box fell into the water, the buoy would mark its position.
Once the silver was safely on board, the cavalry commander ceremoniously delivered the key codebook to Captain Hamilton. On the ship, the boxes were counted and checked once again by the first mate, before being taken down by the most trusted men. A portion of the hold was barricaded off, and there would be armed guards around the clock by the access hatch until the silver was safely transferred to the custody of the warden of the Älvsborg.
* * *
Using the Groen Feniks for the China mission wasn’t a last-minute decision. Early in 1634, the Swedish Navy agreed that it could be chartered by the Swedish East Asia Company as soon as the Danes were defeated. The influential promoters of the SEAC then made sure that the Groen Feniks was one of the first Swedish warships to get carronades, cast in Sweden based on USE instructions.
Carronades combined several old ideas. They had shorter barrels than long guns of equal caliber, like the “drakes” and “cutts” that were in some seventeenth-century armories. They also had narrower powder chambers, just as mortars always had. Because they took smaller powder charges relative to the shot weight than a long gun, the barrel thickness and the “windage” (the difference between the shot and bore diameters) could be reduced.
Of course, they also had a lower muzzle velocity, and thus a shorter maximum range, than the long gun of equal caliber. But maximum range usually wasn’t all that important in naval warfare, and the range discrepancy was less when compared with long guns of equal gun weight.
In the old time line, carronades were first manufactured in 1778, and used on merchant ships and privateers. Indeed, they were considered ideal merchantman guns because they required a smaller crew but provided a heavy broadside to a ship in danger of being boarded. Within a year, they were also secondary armament on some naval vessels.
In the Baltic War, all of the USE ironclads and timberclads carried eight-inch carronades. They normally fired explosive shells, but if they were loaded with solid shot, the latter would have weighed about sixty-eight pounds.
Of course, since it wasn’t a full-time warship, the Groen Feniks had to settle for replacing its twelve conventional six-pounders with thirty-two-pound carronades, rather than the heavier models used to outfit the USE timberclads. But its “smashers,” as the supplier called them, weighed no more than the shortest conventional six-pounder.
Even though the Groen Feniks was an armed vessel, and the Baltic was now at peace, in view of the value of its cargo, it would have two escorts until it reached Göteborg: the seventy-four-gun Kronan, built in 1633, and the thirty-gun Scepter, built in 1616. The Kronan itself had some full-size carronades recently installed on its quarterdeck.
The Scepter led the way out of Stockholm Harbor, followed by the Groen Feniks, with the Kronan lumbering along in its wake. Captain Hamilton was happy enough to have a local skipper in the lead; the Stockholm archipelago was a maze of waterways. He was even more relieved when, after about eight hours, they reached the open waters of the Baltic.
Over the next few days, the three ships hugged the Swedish coast, where the winds were most favorable. They curved around to enter the Great Belt, between the islands of Funen and Zealand. The senior captain, on the Kronan, would have preferred to take the Øresund, and sail by Copenhagen—reminding Christian the Fourth that the Swedes had won the war—but the damn Danes had mined those waters near Helsingør back in April, and hadn’t cleaned up their mess yet.
The detour also lengthened what would probably have been a ten-day cruise up to fourteen days. But that was good enough; Captain Hamilton had been told that the powers that be in the SEAC had decided upon a September departure.
June 1634
Göteborg
Entering Göteborg harbor, the Groen Feniks exchanged salutes, first with Älvsborg Fortress, and then with the Rode Draak. Captain Hamilton studied the East Indiaman carefully; it seemed to be of conventional construction, and well maintained. Of course the last was no surprise, given that it was nigh on brand-new.
According to his briefing, the Rode Draak, the “Red Dragon,” was an East Indiaman built at the Amsterdam shipyard. It had just been completed in September 1633 when the news of the Dutch defeat at the Battle of Dunkirk arrived. Even as the Amsterdam chamber of the Dutch East India Company debated what to do, news had come of the fall of Rotterdam and Haarlem. And then the Catholic provinces of the north had rebelled against the House of Orange. The chamber had considered sending the new ship to New Netherlands, or to the East Indies, but with Amsterdam expected to be placed under siege and blockade they couldn’t spare the sailors or soldiers to man it for so long a voyage. As there was no refuge anywhere in the little stretch of coastline still under the Prince of Orange’s control, it had been sent instead with a skeleton crew to Gothenburg, a Swedish port founded in 1621, and with a large Dutch population. Ultimately, Gustav Adolf was persuaded that Sweden should have its own Asian trading company, and the Rode Draak was chartered (at a bargain price) for this endeavor.
Since it was the larger ship, it was certain that Captain Hamilton would be under the orders of Captain Lyell, the Rode Draak’s skipper. He had never met the man, but they had some friends in common. Lyell was considered to be a man who thought before he acted.
Hamilton was under the impression that Lyell had made at least one voyage previously to Asia, under the VOC flag, but whether as captain or mate, he didn’t know. Hamilton himself had never sailed beyond Bordeaux. For both their sakes, he hoped that the SEAC had lined up an expert on Asian waters to accompany them. As the proverb said, “There’s many a slip between cup and lip.”
* * *
Göteborg in 1634 was only a little more than a decade old, its predecessor having been burnt by the Danes, and its main industry was fishing not trade. During the Baltic War, it had increased strategic importance because of the closing of the Øresund to the Swedes, and shipbuilding materials and armaments had been transported there by roads and inland waterways from Örebro and Stockholm.
Soon after the Groen Feniks docked at Göteborg, Captain Hamilton learned that plans had changed…again. While Göteborg had been valuable to Sweden because ships could sail from there without encountering the navigational difficulties of the Danish archipelago, or passing the gauntlet of the Danish straits fortifications, it still was inferior to the Netherlands, or even Hamburg, as the jump-off point for an Asia voyage. Ships at Göteborg would have to cross the fickle North Sea, and it could take weeks or even months to reach the English Channel.
As long as Amsterdam was enduring a Spanish siege and Spanish warships lurking off the Dutch coast, Göteborg was an acceptable fallback. But now…
Not only had the Danes surrendered and been bridled into the new Union of Kalmar, the arrival of the timberclad Achates and its escorts in the Zuiderzee had forced Don Fernando to declare an immediate cease-fire. While the siege of Amsterdam had not formally been lifted, the Dutch investors in the SEAC were sure that the combination of political pressure and judicious bribery would ensure that the Groen Feniks and the Rode Draak would be allowed to enter and leave Amsterdam. Especially since the latest radio report said that there were now six timberclads swanning about the Zuiderzee, each armed with a dozen sixty-eight-pound carronades loaded with explosive shells. Under the circumstances, Admiral Don Antonio de Oquendo probably didn’t blow his nose without first getting permission from USE Commodore Henderson.
By radio transmission to Göteborg, probably relayed by the new station in Copenhagen, Captain Hamilton of the Groen Feniks and Captain Lyell of the Rode Draak had received orders to sail by the end of June for Harlingen, a town on the Zuiderzee about sixty miles north-northwest of Amsterdam. The USE Navy had essentially appropriated it as a naval base supporting the squadron in the Zuiderzee, and strictly speaking, it was outside the Spanish siege lines.
“There,” Captain Lyell told Captain Hamilton, “we are to verify that there has been no further change in circumstances before proceeding further. And at our discretion, we may proceed to Texel, where the SEAC is renting facilities.” Texel was the island north of Amsterdam, and the VOC’s Amsterdam chamber used it as its home port.
“Since we’re leaving as soon as we can, what do you want to do about the silver?” Hamilton asked. “Leave it on the Groen Feniks, take it on board the Rode Draak now, or store it in Älvsborg until you’re ready to depart?”
Captain Lyell stroked his chin. “It will be safer in the fortress, and more importantly, someone else’s responsibility. I think that more than justifies having to make two transfers instead of one.”
The silver was also on the mind of the captains of the Kronan and the Scepter. They insisted on waiting at Göteborg and escorting the SEAC ships to the Netherlands.
And that resolution came despite the substantial armament on board the Rode Draak. It was customary for an East Indiaman to be heavily armed; the East Indiamen carried silver to Asia, and silk, spices and sugar home; these were valuable commodities. Its crew had to be prepared to fend off both pirates and enemy naval units.
The Rode Draak had a closed gun deck with ten gunports on each side, and two gunports facing aft. There were another four gunports on each side of the quarterdeck, for a total of thirty gunports. However, it also carried two bow chasers that just jutted over the bow, on either side of the bowsprit. As originally outfitted by the Dutch, the guns were in a variety of different calibers, firing twenty-four-, eighteen-, twelve-, nine- and six-pound shot. There were also ten breechloading swivel guns, firing one or half-pound shot, which didn’t count toward the rating of the ship.
While waiting patiently at Göteborg, the Rode Draak’s armament had been modified. It kept its original two 24-pounder bronze stern chasers and two extra-long 12-pounder bow chasers. On the gun deck, it kept its long twelves but exchanged its 24-, 18- and nine-pounders for 12-pounders from other ships, so as to leave it with ten 12-pounders, of which the pair closest to the compass were of bronze. There were still ten gunports left there, and at these the crew installed eight new 32-pounder carronades, and a pair of experimental “short” thirty-twos. These had barrels that were a little over six feet long, and thus weighed the same as a 9.5-foot-“long” twelve—about four thousand pounds. Finally, it replaced the six-pounders on the quarterdeck with eight new 32-pounder carronades. Thus, it had a total of eighteen carronades and fourteen long guns. The Rode Draak carried just solid shot for the 24- and 12-pounders, and both solid shot and shells for the 32-pounder carronades. The total gun weight had decreased, improving the handling of the ship and reducing its draft.
Now she could take on anything she was likely to encounter in Asian waters.
* * *
The Groen Feniks and the Rode Draak had a rough but thankfully rapid crossing of the North Sea from Göteborg to Harlingen, and a couple days later proceeded through the Zuiderzee to Texel.
Texel, as the main point of departure for the VOC ships heading to Asia, had a shipyard far superior to that of Göteborg in both size and sophistication. And that shipyard was underutilized, thanks to the Spanish blockade. Under the terms of the ceasefire, food and medicine were allowed into the city, but trade had not been normalized. Captains Lyell and Hamilton were thankful that they were being handled with kid gloves.