The Earl of Nottingham interposed his influence; and the King himself, accompanied by the young Prince, went down to Woolwich, and made a personal examination.A great many witnesses were again examined, twenty-four on one side, and twenty-seven on the other. The King then carefully examined the ship himself: "the planks, the tree-nails, the workmanship, and the cross-grained timber." "The cross-grain," he concluded, "was in the men and not in the timber." After all the measurements had been made and found correct, "his Majesty," says Pett, "with a loud voice commanded the measurers to declare publicly the very truth; which when they had delivered clearly on our side, all the whole multitude heaved up their hats, and gave a great and loud shout and acclamation. And then the Prince, his Highness, called with a high voice in these words: 'Where be now these perjured fellows that dare thus abuse his Majesty with these false accusations? Do they not worthily deserve hanging?"'
Thus Pett triumphed over all his enemies, and was allowed to finish the great ship in his own way. By the middle of September 1610, the vessel was ready to be "strucken down upon her ways";and a dozen of the choice master carpenters of his Majesty's navy came from Chatham to assist in launching her. The ship was decorated, gilded, draped, and garlanded; and on the 24th the King, the Queen, and the Royal family came from the palace at Theobald's to witness the great sight. Unfortunately, the day proved very rough; and it was little better than a neap tide.
The ship started very well, but the wind "overblew the tide"; she caught in the dock-gates, and settled hard upon the ground, so that there was no possibility of launching her that day.
This was a great disappointment. The King retired to the palace at Greenwich, though the Prince lingered behind. When he left, he promised to return by midnight, after which it was proposed to make another effort to set the ship afloat. When the time arrived, the Prince again made his appearance, and joined the Lord High Admiral, and the principal naval officials. It was bright moonshine. After midnight the rain began to fall, and the wind to blow from the southwest. But about two o'clock, an hour before high water, the word was given to set all taut, and the ship went away without any straining of screws and tackles, till she came clear afloat into the midst of the Thames. The Prince was aboard, and amidst the blast of trumpets and expressions of joy, he performed the ceremony of drinking from the great standing cup, and throwing the rest of the wine towards the half-deck, and christening the ship by the name of the Prince Royal.and received 500L.
from him on account. The King, through the interposition of the Lord Admiral, allowed Pett to lay her keel on the galley dock at Woolwich. In the same year he was commissioned by the Lord Zouche, now Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, to construct a pinnace of 40 tons, in respect of which Pett remarks, "towards the whole of the hull of the pinnace, and all her rigging, Ireceived only 100L. from the Lord Zouche, the rest Sir Henry Mainwaring (half-brother to Raleigh) cunningly received on my behalf, without my knowledge, which I never got from him but by piecemeal, so that by the bargain I was loser 100L. at least."Pett fared much worse at the hands of Raleigh himself. His great ship, the Destiny, was finished and launched in December, 1616.
"I delivered her to him," says Pett, "on float, in good order and fashion; by which business I lost 700L., and could never get any recompense at all for it; Sir Walter going to sea and leaving me unsatisfied."Nor was this the only loss that Pett met with this year. The King, he states, "bestowed upon me for the supply of my present relief the making of a knight-baronet," which authority Pett passed to a recusant, one Francis Ratcliffe, for 700L.; but that worthy defrauded him, so that he lost 30L. by the bargain.
Next year, Pett was despatched by the Government to the New Forest in Hampshire, "where," he says, "one Sir Giles Mompessonhad made a vast waste in the spoil of his Majesty's timber, to redress which I was employed thither, to make choice out of the number of trees he had felled of all such timber as was useful for shipping, in which business I spent a great deal of time, and brought myself into a great deal of trouble." About this period, poor Pett's wife and two of his children lay for some time at death's door. Then more enquiries took place into the abuses of the dockyards, in which it was sought to implicate Pett. During the next three years (1618-20) he worked under the immediate orders of the Commissioners in the New Dock at Chatham.
In 1620, Pett's friend Sir Robert Mansell was appointed General of the Fleet destined to chastise the Algerine pirates, who still continued their depredations on the shipping in the Channel, and the King thereupon commissioned Pett to build with all dispatch two pinnaces, of 120 and 80 tons respectively. "I was myself,"he says, "to serve as Captain in the voyage"--being glad, no doubt, to escape from his tormentors. The two pinnaces were built at Ratcliffe, and were launched on the 16th and l8th of October, 1620. On the 30th, Pett sailed with the fleet, and after driving the pirates out of the Channel, he returned to port after an absence of eleven months.
His enemies had taken advantage of his absence from England to get an order for the survey of the Prince Royal, his masterpiece;the result of which was, he says, that "they maliciously certified the ship to be unserviceable, and not fit to continue--that what charges should be bestowed upon her would be lost." Nevertheless, the Prince Royal was docked, and fitted for a voyage to Spain. She was sent thither with Charles Prince of Wales and the Duke of Buckingham, the former going in search of a Spanish wife. Pett, the builder of the ship, was commanded to accompany the young Prince and the Duke.
