Ships were lost during these dark voyages, and said to have had their crews imprisoned in the hold and chained to their berths. Some other voyages, of a more reasonable tonnage, suffered a loss of life from drowning when some of the cargo caught fire and burst into flames. Such a tragedy occurred in 1609 when fire broke out in the hold of the Maria in Bristol and more than three hundred people died in the disaster. The survivors were taken back to Bristol and 'hanged by the neck, the ship's side being no room to set them on land'. To increase efficiency, the hold was refitted, with an iron grate on which combustibles were laid, and the ship set out for home laden with firewood. There was another ship, the Loyal Martyr, bound for Madagascar, which, having only four feet of headroom, was so crowded that it was impossible to enter the room through which the prisoners were led. One of the survivors, a woman, was to have the dreadful experience of seeing her husband walk by her on the deck. He had been beaten to death at Cossimbazar (Bengal), so that he could be sold at a cheaper price. Such a voyage would have been a particularly horrific one for the women, especially for those who had to bear children on board. The same voyage of the Loyal Martyr is said to have been attended by the tragedy of a mother smothering a newly born child, lest she should lose the only thing she had to cherish on this terrible voyage. The seventeenth century saw the sailing ship in its prime. The Great Expansion of trade in the period stimulated further invention and improved rigging, in which the masts grew longer, and sails bigger and deeper. This improved the ability of sailing ships to beat against the wind in long journeys. The ships acquired additional masts and the masts of the largest ships were of huge proportions, from fifty-two to sixty-six feet high, with the keel the same length as the masts were wide. (In contrast, the mast of the smallest English sailing ships in this period was nineteen feet high). As well as their size, their construction changed as well. The ships became lighter but more complex and less suited to the rough seas in which they operated. By 1700, ships of 1,000 tons were being sailed by sailors whose sole experience had been on smaller ships. Yet the size of the vessels increased, up to a maximum of ships with two 1,600-foot masts, which sailed with a crew of fifty-nine and were able to hold 1,000 tons of cargo and 2,000 passengers. The speed of such a ship could reach the phenomenal speed of twelve knots, or more than seventeen miles an hour, for two days and then slowed down, by which time it had covered more than ten miles. The great age of the sailing ship was coming to an end and the first half of the eighteenth century saw the introduction of a revolutionary new technology that would revolutionize the shape of the sailing ship and the form of the world. The first sails were set afloat by the Portuguese in 1497. They were made from heavy, woven matting soaked in fish oil and tar to prevent the cloth from shrinking, which is why they were called rope. On a calm day in March the Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus sailed out of Lisbon and found that the sails drew wind even in dead calm weather. Columbus was amazed, and with the help of the Spanish crown, took a number of ships on similar voyages. His idea that the earth was spherical, and not flat as the inhabitants of Africa had supposed, led him to make an extraordinary proposal. He estimated that the circumference of the earth was only 5,000 miles, the equivalent of his estimate that the world was no more than three times the size of Spain, and that on a voyage around the world he would find a shorter route home. The great age of the sailing ship had been a time when exploration, adventure, and the hope of becoming rich was synonymous with the sailors' profession. Columbus had promised those he took with him on his five voyages a share in any profit that might arise from the trade of the lands he might find on his way. But his claims were ridiculed. Even Columbus himself had difficulty in raising money, until the Spanish monarchs listened to the voice of his one-time friend King Ferdinand. Ferdinand had had no choice in his dealings with Columbus, except in accepting his promise of riches to Spain. Spain had just suffered under the Black Death, and the population had dropped to about one-fifth of what it had been before, leaving a desperate shortage of labour. Yet the king and the pope, who was always wary of any potential rival to Rome, had done what they could to discourage the expedition. The voyages of Columbus continued for many years until 1492 when, in another demonstration of his belief in the existence of other lands, he was murdered by the Indians. He was, in any case, unable to prove that he had found a shorter route to the East. In 1499, after many more of the voyages, the pope withdrew the papal sanction that had been granted by his predecessor, and the voyages were abandoned. Columbus was, in fact, very lucky in his discovery, but no one could have foreseen how fortunate he was or how much he would help the evolution of the sailing ship. He saw the potential of the ship. In the world in which he lived, the Portuguese had come to dominate the sea-trade with their vast fleet of sailing ships. These had sailed hundreds of miles every year from Portugal to its empire in Africa and India, to bring back commodities such as pepper, cinnamon, silks, and precious stones. The Portuguese had a great empire on the east coast of Africa and they had just begun the age-old plunder of the east. They had already made treaties with the potentates of the East, exchanging pepper for cheap slaves. The Portuguese were in a position to dominate the shipping routes. The sailing ship, and Portugal, were a new technology. Without the sailing ship, Portugal's empire in the east would never have been possible. They would not even have had the means to defend their colonies. The English, in contrast, were a nation in the grip of its most vicious civil war since the Norman Conquest. They were not interested in exploring the world and had only recently stopped trying to conquer the New World, which they had finally given up on in 1584. Christopher Columbus was in no way a visionary or dreamer. He simply adapted himself to the circumstances in which he found himself and had the nerve and determination to make the discovery which he alone of all the sailors of his time could have made. The sailing ship was such a magnificent means of transport that it had to be given to a group of explorers with the experience and the enterprise to master the seas. At that time, however, few Europeans could afford to go on a long voyage, and the shipping costs were very high. The great merchant princes, the Rothschilds, had to wait for their money until they reached their ship in a foreign port. Even so, the Spanish-American Empire grew very rich. With the wealth that came with the New World, Spain itself became much more affluent. The new merchant class developed a demand for better ships. The Spanish government looked to Amsterdam for help, but the Dutch had already abandoned its wooden ships, or used them only for local trading. The Netherlands was just recovering from the great Flanders Fury of 1348 when a series of bad harvests had resulted in the worst famine in the country's history and had led to the widespread slaughter of noblemen and clergy alike. The Black Death did not affect the Netherlands as quickly as it had England, but the terrible human suffering it caused changed the course of the Dutch economy and the course of Dutch life. The great trading cities such as Amsterdam and London had all been established on their rivers. The Flemish had been shipowners and were used to navigating their small ships in the narrow, shallow waterways of their wetlands. They were to prove crucial in the early days of the development of the sailing ship. The Flanders fluyt, a wide, shallow-keeled boat with four masts, was one of the earliest sailing ships ever built and was probably developed by local shipwrights. The city of Amsterdam was the gateway to the sea. In the seventeenth century it became the third largest centre for shipbuilding in the world, after Venice and London. The city was a great centre for the development of shipping. By the early 1600s, as much as £800,000 (equivalent to over £300 million today) was invested in the new shipbuilding industry. By the middle of the century, shipbuilding had become a major Dutch industry, with over 10,000 men employed in one area and nearly 5,000 ships afloat. There were seven thousand shipyards, with over forty thousand workers, and the shipyards' workers were organised in three categories: master shipbuilders who were master carpenters and able to work with a journeyman; journeymen who worked by contract and who in some cases were able to work with the master shipbuilders; and commoners who were just manual workers. The shipwrights were a new elite, a wealthy group of tradesmen able to buy houses, land, and other luxuries, and they soon came to dominate local and national politics, creating an entirely new class of merchant, the burgher, or city member of society, who was not obliged to work. The Netherlands, with its commercial and political freedom, provided the