A HISTORY OF DORSET 



advance ^400 if allowed to repay themselves by levying i per cent, on all 

 goods inw^ards and outwards. This last course was adopted, but the result 

 was that the inland shippers transferred their trade to Poole.°" The mayor 

 of Lyme answered so quickly that little time could have been devoted 

 to inquiry ; "" the town, he wrote, could not provide j^450, which should 

 be raised from the merchants of Bristol and Exeter who were the principal 

 shippers through Lyme. In May, 1620, in response to further pressure 

 from the Council, the mayor of Weymouth replied that shipowners in the 

 town had lost ^3,000 at sea since April, 1619.^^^ 



Mansel sailed in October, 1620, and returned in August, 1621, having 

 done nothing. A commentary on his utility was supplied by the mayor of 

 Weymouth, who wrote in 1622 that nearly every vessel sent to the Mediter- 

 ranean from the town in 1621 had been taken by the Algerines or other 

 Moorish pirates.""' Purely English piracy, although diminished, was by no 

 means extinct. A general piracy commission had issued for all the counties 

 in 1608; several pirates are mentioned as frequenting Dorset waters, and 

 in 1623 an official expressed his opinion that the reason they flocked to 

 Weymouth was that the people there traded with them and that the Admiralty 

 Court officers connived at their presence."^ 



The plea of poverty constantly put forward by the ports, although 

 relatively true, must not be taken too literally. For the reign of James we 

 are able to measure, roughly, the amount of shipping belonging to most of 

 them, and shipping is necessarily the gauge of their prosperity. Mr. R. G. 

 Marsden has compiled a list of ships' names occurring in legal and historical 

 documents of this period, and also in various printed sources;^''* he has found 

 17 Lyme vessels mentioned, 19 of Poole, 20 of Weymouth, and one of 

 Purbeck.''" There must have been many others that sailed through an 

 uneventful career without attracting the attention of the law, the Admiralty 

 officials, or the customs. There was also a certain amount of shipbuilding. 

 A list exists of some 380 ships built between 1625 and 1638, the certificate 

 of building being necessary to obtain a licence to buy ordnance."' Four were 

 constructed at Weymouth, one, launched by Nicholas Awdney, being of 

 240 tons ; the others were of under 100 tons. Only one, of 80 tons, came 

 from Lyme. Weymouth must have had something more than a local repu- 

 tation in shipbuilding for in 1636 two officials came there to press ship- 

 wrights for the Sovereign of the Seas, then under construction at Woolwich. 

 It was necessary to conceal their purpose so they brought the shipwrights 

 together for a drinking bout, pretending to have a ship of their own in 

 hand. But the officials got drunk themselves and revealed the secret, where- 

 upon the shipwrights fled from the town, and one of the press-masters 

 knocked up the mayor at 4 a.m. for assistance while the other one roused 

 the constables an hour earlier to feed his horse. "^ 



Mansel's abortive expedition of 1 620-1 served only to encourage the 

 Algerines. Often the south-western coast was practically blockaded by them 



»"S.P. Dom. Jas. I, cix, No. 81. =™ Ibid, cv. No. 141 ; 27 Feb. 1618-19. 



"' Ibid, cxv, No. 57. "*' Ibid, cxxx, No. 22. 



"' S.P. Dom. Jas. I, cli, No. 21. '•'* Tram. Roy. Hist. Soc. xix, 311. 



-" Qy. Swanage. ™ S.P. Dom. Chas. I, xvi, xvil. 



''^^ Ibid, cccxxxvii, No. 18 ; cccxliii, No. 4 ; ctcxlviii, No. 90. The story, as told in the State Papers, 

 is amusing but rather involved. 



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