The Kentish CoastHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Kentish Coast
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Kent (England) -- Description and travel
The breach with Rome brought an entirely new order of names into the
Royal Navy of England, of which that of the _Mary Rose_ was for a time
typical. But the domestic prettiness of love in a bower pictured by
such as this presently gave place to others, of the robustious, defiant
kind, such as the _Revenge_. It is true that there was even another
order, of which Sir Richard Hawkins’s _Repentance_ was representative.
It marked the full swing of the religious feelings of Englishmen from
the idolatries of Rome to that sinners’ sense of abasement under
conviction of sin which was a feature of Protestantism and the Puritan
wave of thought.
It was in the year of the Armada that the _Repentance_ took the water
at Deptford. One would dearly like to know exactly why Hawkins gave
his ship that name. Was he wrestling with the spirit, or had he in his
mind some conceit of bringing repentance home to the Spaniards? The
Elizabethan age was an age of ingenious conceits, and this may well
have been one of them. But the name did not commend itself to Elizabeth
when she was rowed from her palace of Greenwich to see the new ship,
lying off Deptford beautiful in paint and gilding, and she renamed it
the _Dainty_. Perhaps the great Queen considered _Repentance_ to be a
singularly ill-chosen name for a ship about to sail on a filibustering,
piratical expedition. It is curious to consider that the expedition
was a disastrous failure, and that a cynic dispensation of affairs
thus mocked the original choice of a name; just as it did that of Sir
Richard Grenville’s _Revenge_, three years later, when the fight went
against the English, and Grenville was killed and the Spaniards had
their own revenge for much.
Seven years before her visit to Sir Richard Hawkins’s ship, Elizabeth
had made a notable journey to Deptford, when she went aboard Francis
Drake’s _Golden Hind_, in which he had returned from circumnavigating
the world, dined there, and knighted him after dinner.
Of all those ancient days and brave doings nothing remains. The
dockyard, although from time to time enlarged, and actually in
existence until 1869, is now but a memory, and the site of it is
occupied by the Foreign Cattle Market. It was the smallest of all the
dockyards, only thirty acres in extent; but it was the introduction of
ironclad ships, and the greater depth of water required that led to its
end, after a temporary closing between 1810 and 1844. The last vessel
launched was H.M.S. _Druid_, in 1869.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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