In 1614 Ieyasu banned Christianity in Japan. By then hundreds of thousands of Japanese had already accepted the faith, mainly in Kyushu. The daimyo were expected to conform and to abandon Christianity for Buddhism. Over the next quarter of a century, horrific persecutions took place.71 What has been called Japan’s ‘Christian Century’ came to an end in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese found it more and more difficult to trade, and were thrown out in 1639; an embassy set out the next year from Macau, hoping to restore ties, but the uncompromising attitude of the authorities was made absolutely clear when most of the diplomats were beheaded.72 This was not simply the result of the ban on Jesuit proselytization and the withdrawal of the Jesuits from the lucrative trade in Chinese silk. Other forces were at work: the Portuguese had new European rivals in these waters who, like them, had once been under the rule of the dour King Philip II of Spain, but had been more successful in throwing off his rule: the Dutch. The English too had resisted King Philip, who had also, briefly, been their own king while he was married to Queen Mary. In England, and then in the Netherlands and Denmark, new ideas were being propagated that suggested there were previously unexplored ways around the seas patrolled by Spain and Portugal, routes that were investigated with extraordinary persistence in the late sixteenth and early century seventeenth.
36
The Fourth Ocean
I
So far this book has looked at three great oceans. Yet most atlases would show that there exist five oceans. One of them, the Southern or Antarctic Ocean, is really a southward extension of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and might or might not embrace the bottom of Australia and New Zealand, its northern limits being as arbitrary as those laid down by the Spanish and Portuguese treaty that divided the world in 1494. The other, the Arctic Ocean, has barely featured so far, because even the Norse voyages to Greenland were confined to Atlantic waters. An occasional trip northwards up the Davis Strait, or (at the other end of the Norse maritime world) voyages as far as Spitsbergen, brought Norse ships above the Arctic Circle, although the Davis Strait, separating Greenland from Baffin Island, is clearly an extension of the Atlantic. Even before the discovery of North America, the question of what lay far to the north gave rise to fanciful speculation, based on snippets of knowledge about the Sami (or Lapps). Martin Behaim’s globe, created around the time of Columbus’s first voyage, imagined that the North Pole consisted of a circular island surrounded by ocean, and betrayed the usual confusion about what Greenland was, making it an extension of Eurasia beyond Norway.1 Before 1555 the Swedish cleric and geographer Olaus Magnus reached the north of Norway and wrote about the midnight sun as well as the fur trade and Sami customs.2
The lure of the Arctic to sixteenth-century sailors consisted not of lands within the Arctic Circle but of seas that would take them across the Arctic into warmer waters studded with spice islands. Only at the start of the twenty-first century has the melting of polar ice made the passageways around the top of North America and around the top of Russia look viable. Magellan had shown that a route round the bottom of the Americas did exist; but it was almost beyond human endurance, and the opportunity to find a passageway to the north of either the Americas or Russia that would bring European merchants to Cathay and the Indies could not be passed by – not, at any rate, by the English and later on the Dutch, who hoped to avoid territories over which Spain and Portugal exercised or claimed to exercise dominion. Now and again, it is true, the English could take advantage of close relations with Spain and claim access to Spanish markets as far afield as Hispaniola. But the relationship between England and Spain was bumpy. Henry VIII’s alliance collapsed in acrimony over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and Philip II’s brief period as king of England, through his marriage to Catherine’s daughter, Mary, was followed by a Protestant succession.
This was not simply a matter of commercial and political alliances. English merchants trading in Andalusia had established a base at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, an outport of Seville, under the patronage of the dukes of Medina Sidonia, who were something of a law unto themselves and had all sorts of creative ideas about promoting prosperity (including the settlement of Gibraltar with converted Jews in 1474). Now the English claimed that they had become the target of the Spanish Inquisition, which had extended its persecutions beyond crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims to embrace those who rejected papal supremacy: ‘many of our nacion be secretly accused and know not therof so that all the hole company daylly dotth live in great feare and daunger.’3 Yet the English craved access to the products of the Indies, all the more so as the economy began to expand. One possibility was to create warm ties with the rulers of Morocco, which, it was hoped, would satisfy English hunger for sugar, while an alliance with its rulers would box in the king of Spain close to home and would maintain pressure on the Portuguese, who still controlled several Moroccan ports. So, from the 1550s onwards, a ‘Barbary trade’ developed, and from the 1580s it was managed by a Barbary Company licensed by Queen Elizabeth and based in London.4
Sugar was one thing; but there was a whole pharmacopoeia of drugs and a larder of spices that the English wanted to acquire. Here the twin notions of a North-West and a North-East Passage around either the top of North America or the top of Russia came into play. It is no surprise that the initiative lay with Bristol merchants who had already been heavily involved with first John and then Sebastian Cabot, particularly the Thorne family, wealthy merchants and benefactors (the school founded by Robert Thorne the Elder still survives, as Bristol Grammar School). In 1530 his son, also Robert, wrote at length to King Henry VIII, arguing that the king should seize the opportunity to increase his power and influence by sending expeditions to ‘divers New lands and kingdoms, in the which without doubt your Grace shall winne perpetuall glory, and your subjectes infinite profite’. The younger Thorne was now based in London, but had lived for a while in Seville with, it is said, his Spanish mistress; and the advantage he placed second – ‘infinite profite’ – was the one that mattered more to him. Thorne underplayed the dangers from ice and cold, and emphasized instead the fact that one could keep sailing during the perpetual daylight of an Arctic summer, ‘which thing is a great commoditie for the navigants, to see at all times round about them’. He seems to have assumed that the best route would take ships close to the North Pole itself, right over the top of the world. All this led Robert Thorne to an extravagant account of how English ships could then choose to return by way of the Magellan Strait or the Cape of Good Hope, having in the meantime visited ‘the richest lands and Islands of the world of golde, precious stones, balmes, spices, and other thinges that we here esteem most’.5
These plans were not followed through, and by 1569, when Gerard Mercator published a new version of his very influential world map, the view began to spread that a direct polar route was probably impossible, because the North Pole was supposedly surrounded by four closely packed islands; however, that still left the passages to the north-west and the north-east open, assuming they were not blocked by ice. ‘No other map in the Atlas proved to be so erroneous,’ it has been remarked, all the more so as Mercator credulously included information from a bogus account of the travels of a late medieval Venetian named Zeno, who was supposed to have been washed up on the shores of the mythical Frisland and Estotiland, said to be well-populated mid-Atlantic islands. However, this map did assume the existence of what is now known as the Bering Strait, opening up the route to China around the top of Eurasia.6
Thorne’s friend Sebastian Cabot was an even more enthusiastic supporter of the idea of an Arctic route, patiently awaiting the day when it would become obvious that this was an opportunity not to be missed. He was still arguing the case half a century after his father had discovered Newfoundland but had failed to open up the promised route to Cathay. Sebastian had explored waters off Canada (and had possibly entered Hudson Bay) while in English service in 1509, and he had returned to the English court by 154
8, after spending thirty-four years working for the king of Spain.7 This time, though, the target of his expeditions was left vague: he took charge of a newly formed ‘Companie of the Marchants Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknowen’. In Richard Hakluyt’s remarkable collection of sixteenth-century travel narratives the planned voyage is aptly described as ‘a newe and strange Navigation’. Funds were raised by inviting subscriptions of £25, which brought in £6,000, enough to buy and fit out three ships. Given the choice between a north-eastern and a north-western route, the consortium decided in 1553 that the best prospects lay in the direction of Russia; after all, several expeditions already sent towards the American north-west had found no passageway. Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor were to lead the expedition, armed with letters from the young King Edward VI addressed, in time-honoured fashion, to sundry ‘Kings, Princes and other Potentates’; the ships attracted enormous attention when they sailed downriver and passed the royal palace at Greenwich: ‘the Courtiers came running out, and the common people flockt together, standing very thicke upon the shoare: the Privie Counsel, they lookt out at the windows of the Court, and the rest ranne up to the toppes of the towers.’8
The optimism that had led to the creation of the consortium was certainly misplaced. Off the coast of northern Finland, storms dispersed the ships and Willoughby’s ship along with one other pressed on into the Barents Sea, which lies between Spitsbergen and the long and desolate pair of islands simply known as Novaya Zemlya, ‘New Land’, before icy conditions forced the ships back to the Kola Peninsula at the very top of Scandinavia. Forced to spend the winter there, all sixty-three sailors and merchants were in no condition to survive the freezing conditions. A couple of years later the Venetian ambassador in London told how the crews had been found by Russian fishermen, literally frozen to death and still sitting at dinner, or writing a letter, or opening a locker.9 No doubt these details were embellishments; but the challenge of the north-east route became much clearer, and the Venetian ambassador must have combined satisfaction with horror, aware that his native city already faced quite enough competition in the spice trade from the Portuguese. Better news came from the third vessel. Chancellor’s ship ended up on the coasts of the White Sea, from where Chancellor set out on an ambitious but successful overland journey to Moscow, laying the foundations for a successful fur trade between England and Russia which came to be handled by a licensed Muscovy Company. Quite apart from the fascination English reports show at the customs and beliefs of the Russians, and quite apart from the friendly relations that developed between Ivan the Terrible in Moscow and Elizabeth I in London (even extending to a marriage proposal from the psychopathic tsar), the Muscovy trade opened up other possibilities: the road was now open to Persia, but overland, and a trickle of exotic eastern goods reached England by this long and roundabout route. Unexpected success in Muscovy deflected attention from the North-East Passage, and the sense that the north-eastern route was not viable was strengthened when a second expedition, in 1555, was guided some of the way by Russian sailors and reached Novaya Zemlya. However, the ship, a small pinnace, had to turn back because of the frightful conditions at 70°N – not just the ice floes but the unwelcome attention of a massive Right Whale that ‘made a terrific noyse in the water’ and swam within a few feet of the ship.10
The Muscovy Company continued to raise money for expeditions; these reverses did nothing to dampen enthusiasm for voyages across the Arctic, and the Muscovy Company was fortunate in its choice of commander: Anthony Jenkinson, who set out in 1557, proved to be an indomitable explorer of central Asia, reaching Persia and Bukhara, and acting as Queen Elizabeth’s representative at the court of the highly temperamental tsar. What Ivan really sought was a military rather than a trading alliance, in the hope of extending his power in the Baltic and keeping the Swedes at bay. Although the privileges to the English also included trading rights along those parts of the Baltic that lay under Russian control, it is hard to see what real benefit a military alliance would have brought England, apart from the opportunity to sell armaments. In 1572 Jenkinson managed to negotiate the restoration of English trading rights when Ivan the Terrible, in one of his all-too-frequent spasms of rage, had abolished them, and he worked his charm on the tsar so successfully that he was sent back to England bearing ‘our hearty commendations to our loving sister, Queene Elizabeth’.11 The English merchants established a base at Kholmogory, about fifty miles upriver from the White Sea: ‘in this town the English men have lands of their own, given them by the Emperour, and fair houses, with offices for their commodity, very many.’12
Not deterred, the Muscovy Company tried yet again in 1580, even though the ships the company sent were apparently tiny – a crew of ten on one barque of forty tons and a mere six on the other, perhaps in recognition that passage through the ice would be even more difficult with large vessels of the sort that had been used by Willoughby and Chancellor. The real interest of this voyage lies in its manifest: confident of reaching China, the cargo included a ‘large Mappe of London to make shew of your Citie’; plenty of English clothes, including hats, gloves and pantophles, or slippers, not to mention glassware from both England and Venice and a great assortment of ironmongery, which makes one think that among the investors were manufacturers of locks, hinges and bolts. In return the explorers were expected to obtain not just plenty of seeds, in the hope that Chinese herbs could be cultivated in Europe, but a map of China. They were also supposed to spy on the Chinese, carefully noting fortifications and naval activity in the places they visited. Needless to say, they did not reach China, although they did penetrate a little way beyond Novaya Zemlya before the ice of the Kara Sea forced them back. Yet Russian sailors already knew how to navigate further along the northern coast of Eurasia right up to the great River Ob.13
The English were frozen out of the Arctic; but others were not discouraged. At the end of the sixteenth century Dutch navigators also saw a route across the top of the world as a way to keep their trade in exotic goods alive while immersed in conflict with Spain. They had the support of Prince Maurits, the Stadhouder, who occupied a sort of presidential role in the United Provinces of the Netherlands and who in 1593 ensured that money was invested in this route. Here was an opportunity to strike sharp blows against Catholic Spain that appealed to Calvinist ministers of religion such as Petrus Plancius, a forceful hardliner who took an especial interest in geography and navigation, lecturing and publishing on the subject, including maps that outlined a route through the Arctic Ocean.14 Mapmakers, though, could only go so far, which was not very far at all. What was needed was an expedition. Doing it the hard way, the great Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz sailed into Arctic waters and mapped out parts of the sea that now bears his name, as well as the islands of Novaya Zemlya on its eastern edge; but even he confused Spitsbergen with Greenland, and in 1596–7 he and his crew had to endure a harsh winter immured in a wooden house built from driftwood and parts of their ship. The ship itself was completely trapped in ice, so they were forced to travel in open boats all the way from Novaya Zemlya to the Kola Peninsula. Barentsz died en route; how anyone survived is the real surprise, although Russian sailors occasionally came to their aid. A bestselling account of this dramatic voyage was in the bookshops as early as 1598. Normally one expects these narratives to be embellished, but, when in 1871 a Norwegian skipper chanced upon the remains of a wooden hut in this remote corner of the Arctic, it became obvious that the basic facts at least were true: the hut was still stocked with all the paraphernalia of the voyage, from spoons and knives to an iron chest with an elaborate lock, to pewter candlesticks, to a ‘pitcher of Etruscan shape, beautifully engraved’, to small weapons, to Dutch books and engravings (so many of these that they were clearly taken to be put on sale in China), and much else.15 Nor did Dutch expeditions end at this point; the lesson of the attempts to find a North-East Passage was that failure only increased the appetite. The r
ealization that Arctic waters teemed with whales, including the enormous Arctic Right Whale, attracted the Dutch ‘North Company’ into the seas to the north of Russia. A Right Whale could be as much as sixty or seventy feet long, and at least 2,000 pounds of baleen plates could be extracted from the carcass, as well as a mountain of blubber.16
II
If, as Mercator’s atlas and other maps showed, North America was physically separate from Asia, then the North-West Passage was also worth considering. Maybe the world was constructed in such a way that the route did not actually pass through the Arctic: after all, when the French king sent Giovanni da Verrazano on the journey that took him past what became New England, in 1524, Francis I hoped he would find a way through to the Pacific somewhere in those latitudes, and the same idea motivated his support for Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the St Lawrence River in Canada.17 A woodcut of around 1530, made in Nuremberg, seems to reflect Sebastian Cabot’s assumption that a long, reasonably wide and accessible Fretum Arcticum, or Arctic Passage, passed between Greenland and northern China – on the woodcut Greenland was shown as a peninsula sticking out of Asia, so that Asia was made to reach right across the top of a stunted and much-reduced North America. Some maps and globes of this period followed this model and attributed the discovery of a North-West Passage to the Corte Real brothers from the Azores, who had rediscovered Greenland and Labrador around 1500. The assumption that the route existed became more and more widespread, especially since the idea had the imprimatur of Sebastian Cabot: ‘one Sebastian Cabota hath bin the chiefest setter forth of this journey or voyage.’
The Boundless Sea Page 86