The Muscovy Company kept its options open, concentrating at first on the north-eastern route but holding a monopoly on the exploration of the north-western one as well. Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, argued the case for a new route to Cathay, or China, with determination in a tract of 1566 entitled A Discourse of Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia: ‘you might justly have charged mee with an unsettled head if I had at any time taken in hand, to discover Utopia, or any country fained by imagination: But Cataia is none such, it is a country, well knowen.’18 Gilbert presented his arguments to Queen Elizabeth, whose court he attended, and accompanied his tract with a map showing how the two American continents, joined to one another, were still separated by water channels from a large southern continent and from an Asian landmass that did not, this time, include Greenland. He had a vision of large spaces of open water giving access to a channel into the Pacific. No less significantly, he urged the court to think of the advantages exploration of this route would bring England, as its relations with Catholic Spain steadily deteriorated following the death of Queen Mary and Philip’s loss of recognition as king of England.19
Queen Elizabeth did not act on Gilbert’s optimistic advice for several years. Then, in 1576, Martin Frobisher set out to explore the North-West Passage, and Gilbert’s advice was printed and distributed as a sort of prospectus for Frobisher’s voyage. Frobisher had some experience of the west African trade, but he was, in essence, one of those adventurous and unscrupulous privateers who often received tacit support from the queen.20 This made him all the more suitable as a challenger to Spanish and Portuguese mastery over the spice trade. A ‘Company of Cathay’ came into being, but it only raised £875, enough to equip two thirty-ton barques and a small pinnace, total crew thirty-four men, ‘alarmingly small vessels’ engaged on a ‘madcap venture’, in the words of the leading historian of this route.21 The tiny fleet set out in summer 1576; the pinnace sank with all hands in a storm west of Greenland, and one of the barques, the Michael, headed back home.22
Frobisher steered his own ship, the Gabriel, towards the southern shores of Baffin Island, where the crew encountered their first Inuit out at sea paddling their kayaks. Having assumed that the northern shores of this stretch of water were part of Asia, and the southern shores part of North America, Frobisher knew this to be absolutely correct when he saw the Inuit at close quarters; his colleague the Master of the Gabriel reported: ‘they bee like to Tartars, with long blacke haire, broad faces, and flatte noses, and tawnie in colour.’23 This was a similar mistake to that made by observers of Columbus’s generation, who had also identified the native peoples of the Caribbean and Central America with Asia.24 At first, relations with the Inuit were quite good; the Inuit offered the crew salmon and other fresh fish. Five sailors who were taking an Inuit back to the shore to collect his kayak, after he offered to lead the Gabriel back to the open sea, disappeared from sight, though memory of them remained remarkably strong among the Inuit, for whom, after all, this was their first encounter with English explorers:
Oral history told me that five white men were captured by Innuit people at the time of the appearance of the ships a great many years ago; that these men wintered on shore (whether one, two, three, or more winters, could not say); that they lived among the Innuit, that they afterward built an oomien [large boat], and put a mast into her, and had sails; that early in the season, before much water appeared, they endeavoured to depart; that, in the effort, some froze their hands; but that finally they succeeded in getting into open water, and away they went, which was the last seen or heard of them.25
The Inuit even remembered that there were three separate visits by Frobisher’s ships. However, an English narrative of the voyage paints a less positive picture: some English clothes were found in an Inuit camp overrun by Frobisher’s sailors on his second expedition, of 1577, and they can only have been left behind, or taken from, the five sailors who disappeared. Frobisher was inclined to think that the omnivorous Inuit had eaten the men rather than looking after them, for by this time relations with the Inuit had deteriorated badly and there were frequent clashes between the Europeans and the native population; besides, the image of the cannibalistic native American was widely diffused during the sixteenth century.26
Missing the entrance to Hudson Bay, Frobisher sailed some way down a fjord on Baffin Island, which became known as Frobisher Bay, and decided that this must be the passageway he sought. But in the event he turned back before winter could set in, reaching London with not much to show for his voyage apart from a fairly small piece of black rock, which, on close examination, seemed to contain fragments of a bright metal that the London assayers optimistically thought was gold, estimated to be worth £240 per ton of rock. This raised hopes to such a pitch that Queen Elizabeth was willing to invest £1,000 in a second expedition by the same two ships, while the Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius is said to have made a jealous trip to London to see if he could steal some of the secrets of the north-western route, which would certainly have interested the Spanish masters of Flanders. Aware that the ships were venturing into lands that would never keep them supplied with the food they needed, the second expedition carried five tons of salt beef, sixteen tons of ship’s biscuit, two tons of butter (enough for half a pound per man per day) and over eighty tons of beer, which would provide eight pints (four and a half litres) per man per day – even so, the ships managed to sail in a straight line when so required.27 However, there was a subtle change in emphasis, as the Cathay Company now charged Frobisher with collecting many more samples of rock; collecting it in Arctic conditions out of what even in August was frozen ground was no light task, and the ships had to set sail before the end of the month because the Arctic summer ended early and the ice began to close in.28 Still, the queen was gratified, and, showing off her skill in Latin, she even gave the territories Frobisher had visited a new name, Meta Incognita, ‘The Unknown Limits’ – meaning that this was an unclaimed land to which neither Spain nor any other power had a prior claim.29
In a third, massive expedition, of 1578, consisting of eleven ships and 400 men, Frobisher collected still more of the rock, and happened upon the entrance to Hudson Bay. The aim was to create a permanent settlement, dedicated to the extraction of gold-bearing rock.30 He realized that this was very possibly ‘the passage which we seeke to find the rich country of Cathaya’, but everyone’s attention had turned to the pieces of black rock. Investment in Frobisher’s project boomed, as a mineral-processing plant with furnaces and mills was built at Dartford at great expense to render down the rock and extract the gold. The plant was supplied with 1,250 tons of rock when those of Frobisher’s ships that had survived the Arctic ice returned – only Frobisher’s flagship, the Michael, had been provided with a strengthened hull, and other vessels risked being crushed to pieces by the weight of the ice floes.31 Once processed, the rock mainly delivered iron pyrites, ‘fool’s gold’. Although iron pyrites tend to occur in places where real gold can be found, it remains astonishing that, in an age when alchemy was the rage, and learned figures such as John Dee gravitated around the royal court, such an elementary mistake was made. So, all too quickly, the bubble burst and the investments evaporated into thin air. Frobisher emerges with more credit than the assayers: he had not set out to find gold in North America, and he seems to have been a demanding but inspiring leader of his men; when digging up rocks became the business of the day, he somehow managed to convince them to put all their limited energy into hard physical labour; and by his third expedition he had recruited hundreds of volunteers.
Like the search for a North-East Passage, the search for the North-West Passage continued despite setbacks. After all, the saga of the false gold could be dismissed as a distraction from the real purpose all along, which had been to reach China. In the 1580s John Davis followed in the wake of Frobisher but then headed off into the strait now named after him between Greenland and Baffin Island.32 The early seventeen
th century saw the heroic endeavours of Henry Hudson (who had already explored the North-East Passage) to work out the nature of the great sea that carries his own name and the all-too-modest qualifier ‘bay’. His efforts ended in disaster in 1611 when the crew mutinied, placed him, his son and a handful of crew members in a small boat, and cut them adrift in James Bay, the southernmost part of Hudson Bay. It is unlikely that the captain and his friends survived; they were given neither food nor warm clothing.33
A footnote to these expeditions is provided by the circumnavigation of the world led by Sir Francis Drake in 1577 to 1580 aboard the Pelican (later renamed the Golden Hind).34 He decided to follow the Pacific coast of not just South but North America a long way northwards, beyond the trajectory of the Manila galleons operated by Spain upon which he planned to prey. He also captured and rifled a number of Spanish ships whose route took them up and down the coasts of South America and Mexico, for the Spaniards were building towns along the shoreline, and the ‘wine of Chili’ was a fond target of Drake’s men.35 One explanation that has been offered for his insistence on sailing northwards into cooler climes is that he too was looking for a channel linking the Pacific to the Atlantic.36 Apart from anything else, the discovery of this legendary passage would offer a quick way back to England – his aim was not actually to circumnavigate the globe, but to harass the Spaniards in their own waters, first in the Caribbean and then in the Pacific; once in the Pacific, there was a good chance of capturing Spanish treasure ships where they least expected to face any challenges. Finally, when Drake realized that he could not return by way of the stormy Magellan Strait, he aimed for the Cape of Good Hope instead.37
More than ten years later, having been defeated by the Arctic, John Davis led an expedition into the Pacific by way of the Magellan Strait in 1591–2, hoping to resolve the problem of the North-West Passage ‘on the backe syde’ by following Drake’s route up the American coast until he found the way through. Disagreements with the joint leader of the expedition, combined with foul weather, forced Davis back to England before he had reached far beyond the southern tip of the Americas.38 Had he reached Alaska from Tierra del Fuego his expedition would surely be ranked as one of the greatest sixteenth-century voyages. As it was, Davis may have been the first to land in the Falkland Islands, where his crew were forced to live off penguin meat, on their way home. Inevitably, those mapping the shores of unknown seas kept an eye out for the express routes across continents that had first been postulated as a way to cross Africa and now were being postulated as a way to cross North America.
III
England and the Netherlands were not alone in eyeing these Arctic routes with interest. The Danes were well aware of the long history of Norse involvement in far northern waters, and at the start of the sixteenth century they were already operating a customs station on the northern tip of Scandinavia, at the place they called Vardø and the English called Wardhouse, ‘a haven or castel of some name in the kingdome of Norway’; it had been chosen as the meeting point for the ships of Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor on their ill-fated expedition into the Arctic Ocean.39 Shipping bound for the White Sea stopped there and dues were paid to the Danish king, who was ruler of Norway as well; meanwhile the Danish kings laid down plans to gain control over Greenland: King Frederick II hoped to persuade Martin Frobisher to lead an expedition there, and King Christian IV hired Scottish and English captains to assert Danish rule over the vast icy island. Once he thought he had achieved his aims in the north-west Atlantic, he turned his attention to the North-East Passage. He sent an enterprising and experienced seaman, Jens Munk, as far as the ice would permit. Once this route proved to be impassable, Munk was reassigned to the North-West Passage instead, dreaming, as had the English, of opening a route to China. In 1619 Munk set off with a frigate and a sloop in the direction of Baffin Island and Hudson Bay. Described as ‘one of the most vivid and poignant works in the literature of the Arctic’, Munk’s diary of his voyage still exists, only because he, with two other members of the crew of sixty-four, survived the terrible conditions of a long winter on an inadequate diet which created an epidemic of scurvy: ‘the stomach was ready enough,’ Munk wrote, ‘and had appetite for food, but the teeth would not allow it.’40 Much of the time, the ground was too hard even to bury their dead companions – in 1717 an English expedition arrived at the same spot and found it littered with the skeletons of unburied Danish sailors. The ships had arrived in Hudson Bay in late August, not realizing that this was actually the time to leave before the ice set in. In the end, Munk and two of his companions steered their sloop back to Denmark, where the king showed his immense gratitude by ordering him to set out again, find the frigate that had been left behind, and map the rest of Hudson Bay. No doubt Munk was very relieved that no one could be persuaded to join the crew for this journey into a frozen hell.41
Danish ambitions in Arctic waters were arrested, although these were also the years in which a Danish East India Company came into being, eventually followed by a Danish West India Company, a reminder that the battle for control of maritime trade was not confined to Spain, Portugal, Holland, England and France, not to mention the Ottoman Turks in the Indian Ocean. Among all these powers and nations, however, the Dutch proved to be the most determined and ruthless challengers of the Spanish and Portuguese supremacy over the ocean routes.
37
The Rise of the Dutch
I
Before looking at the history of the Dutch presence across the oceans, something needs to be said about the emergence of the Dutch merchant fleets. Their success in supplanting the Portuguese was one of several extraordinary triumphs over the old order – over the Hansards in the Baltic and over Antwerp in their own neighbourhood. All these victories were intertwined. Antwerp played a vital role in the Asiatic trading system created by the Portuguese, funnelling silver into the Portuguese network in return for prodigious quantities of eastern spices. But Dutch maritime history begins with herrings rather than spices. It has been seen that the Hansa began to lose its grip on the trade of the Baltic and the North Sea as competition from both the Dutch and the English became more lively. Meanwhile German princes were attempting to re-establish their much-weakened territorial power and to rebuild their finances, and were often reluctant to permit subject-towns to participate in the German Hansa, all the more so when the Hansa developed its own foreign policy and sent its fleets into battle against the Danes or the English.
These conflicts, and political struggles taking place within Flanders, had serious effects on Bruges, which lost its position as the great clearing house of maritime and terrestrial trade in the late fifteenth century. The citizens of Bruges stood up to the centralizing policies of the Habsburg regent, Maximilian of Austria, and Maximilian riposted with the instruction that all foreign merchants evacuate the city, issued in 1484 and 1488. Although he made peace with Bruges before long, the expulsion of the foreign merchants prompted many of them, including wealthy Italians, to move their business to Antwerp, which was better situated for access to the sea – the channels linking Bruges to the open sea had been silting up. Moreover, Maximilian encouraged the merchants to choose Antwerp because the city had stood by him during his conflict with the Flemish towns.1 When Maximilian permitted the foreign business houses to return to Bruges, they demurred.
The Portuguese established an agency in Antwerp as early as 1498, even before they knew the outcome of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India. They aimed to sell the goods they had acquired along the Guinea Coast, including Malagueta pepper; in the event they were laying the foundations for the ‘golden age’ of Antwerp. Another Portuguese product was sugar, brought over from Madeira and later from São Tomé in vast quantities; some of this came to be processed in refineries close to Antwerp. In 1560 Portuguese sugar imports into the Low Countries were worth 250,000 guilders, though this accounted for only 1.4 per cent of all imports (other Portuguese spices were worth 2,000,000 guilders, nearly 11 p
er cent).2 Unlike the other foreign communities in Bruges and Antwerp, which were mostly branches of banks or private trading companies, the Portuguese feitoria, or ‘factory’, in Antwerp was set up by the Crown, which continued to appoint agents there. By 1510 the city had officially recognized the Portuguese community – indeed, by that date other nations, including the Genoese, the Catalans and the Florentines, watched the peppercorns flowing through Antwerp and established their own agencies. Immigration boosted the population, which reached about 100,000 at its peak in the mid-sixteenth century.3
The English Merchant Adventurers were very visible on the streets of Antwerp, as a result of generous privileges enshrined in the treaty grandly entitled the Magnus Intercursus, an agreement between the English Crown and the Habsburg rulers of Flanders. They had been active in Antwerp since 1421, when they established a staple there; in other words, all their textiles were to pass through this port alone.4 The canny Henry VII obtained excellent terms for his subjects, who channelled English cloth into Europe just as England was expanding its cloth production and Flemish cloth production was faltering.5 The Merchant Adventurers included a large number of Mercers, members of the elite cloth-trading guild, and one of the most prominent English dealers in Antwerp was Sir Thomas Gresham, himself the son of a Mercer, who combined a first-class education at St Paul’s School and Gonville Hall, Cambridge, with outstanding business talent. It has been said that he also combined ‘political influence and diplomacy with a grasp of finance and a lack of scruple almost equally breath-taking’.6 His experience of the Antwerp Bourse led him to found the Royal Exchange in London, and he also founded Gresham College, where lectures on the practical skills a merchant or navigator might need were encouraged.
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