THE PARADOXAL COMPASS
Drake’s Dilemma
–
Horatio Morpurgo
For Ioana, Hazel & Conrad
But keep in mind the waters where fish
See sceptres descending with no wish
To touch them; sit regal and erect,
But imagine the sands where a crown
Has the status of a broken-down
Sofa or mutilated statue:
Remember as bells and cannon boom
The cold deep that does not envy you …
– W. H. Auden
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat.
It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
– Carl Sandberg
If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye.
– Herman Melville, on dolphins
Contents
– Title Page –
– Dedication –
– Epigraph –
– Maps –
– Preface –
PART ONE
– Beginnings –
PART TWO
– Questions Emerge –
PART THREE
– Fetching the Future Home –
– Epilogue –
– Further Reading –
– Acknowledgements –
– About the Publisher –
– Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –
– Copyright –
– Preface –
A family of eccentrics bought the folly in the 1930s and lived there for more than half a century. On a hill just outside Exeter, the tower and its crenellations overlooked half of Devon and Lyme Bay beyond but had never been intended for domestic use. Built as a memorial to the founder of the British Army in India, it was without running water or cooking facilities. Undeterred, its new owners carried water from a well, roasted squirrels on open fires and used the surrounding woodland as a latrine. They seem to have got by without a car. When restoration of the site finally began in the 1990s, an abandoned quarry, found a little way off in the woods, was completely overgrown with laurel and rhododendron and had evidently been used as a tip. It contained the frame of an old car, the remains of a summer house, several large lumps of granite and a statue in plaster.
This last was about 10 feet tall, pedestal included, and had been left standing upright in the bottom of the quarry. It was immediately recognised as the sculptor’s model for the statue of Sir Francis Drake on Plymouth Hoe. Once the surrounding detritus had been cleared, it was found to be in reasonable condition. According to one source, it had arrived there before the Second World War as a loan from the County Museum, which then never asked for it back. But inquiries were made and the museum had no record of ever having owned or loaned it.
This mysterious rediscovery was at first little publicised, but photographs from the time reveal an astonishing scene. Surrounded by foliage, the giant figure is ghostly pale, stained with algae, grown brittle here and there. Its bronze casting on the Hoe, a familiar landmark in Plymouth, had acquired a mysterious double. While the finished public statue had watched over great events, while it saw off the Blitz, while the Cold War came and went, its plaster original had become slowly lost in the understorey. The rhododendron and the laurel had crowded round every year a little closer. Forgotten in its hill-top hideaway, it became a kind of portrait in the national attic.
But who wanted it now? Where to store this fragile old negative, this perishable other, this chronically unfashionable image? The logistics alone were a headache nobody needed. Made in several sections, the legs to the waist were solid, so it was very heavy. The steel frame had to be specially designed, in which it could be winched onto the back of a lorry and taken away for restoration. It is now housed in Drake’s old home at Buckland Abbey.
But its emergence from the undergrowth raised other questions than the logistic ones. Drake on the Hoe stands as the emblem of a certain unsinkable England. There is the gold standard of national pride. Maybe we admire it, maybe we don’t, but we leave it there. This great white idol pulled from its thicket on Haldon Hill, meanwhile, blemishes and all, is a different matter. He is unmistakably a companion piece to the other, but what are we to do with him?
This split in our response to the Age of Exploration is clearly visible in the way Drake is represented by TV historians. David Starkey, for his documentary about Queen Elizabeth, stands on the deck of a replica of the Golden Hinde and describes the circumnavigation as ‘a pirate expedition to the Pacific … Drake’s target was the Spanish treasure ships.’ He explains what a very profitable business trip it was and it is plain, as we are told this, that we are to consider the matter closed. When another historian, Neil Hanson, tells us in a BBC interview that Drake made his fortune in the slave trade, and that this is what he was knighted for, his intentions are clearly the opposite of Starkey’s. He is condemning. But there is, again, no hint of a doubt.
By and large, these two narratives, the champions and decriers, talk straight past each other. My case in this essay is that they do not need to. The purpose of Drake’s circumnavigation remains contested and the evidence is far from conclusive either way. Drake did not make his fortune in and was not knighted for services to the slave trade. We can piece together something more truthful than either of these narratives and it is vital that we do so because ‘history is precedent and permission’, as Marilynne Robinson has memorably written about the 16th century. ‘In this important instance,’ she goes on, ‘we have lost plain accuracy, not to speak of complexity, substance and human inflexion.’
Environmentalists routinely urge us, and with reason, to see our world a new way. We face a historic rupture, they say, unlike any that has gone before. I will argue here that at our own tipping-point we have much to learn from that turning-point four centuries ago. When the explorers first mapped the Arctic, when their instrument-makers supplied them with quadrants and compasses, this was courtesy of what they called natural philosophy and what we call science. The same inquiring outlook, partly derived from the ancients, partly a fresh invention, was turned also upon the creatures and plants being encountered for the first time by Europeans on those voyages. The stories they came home with would, in time, bring about a thoroughgoing reappraisal of our place in the world, and indeed the universe.
How did this feel at the time to those directly involved? The river valleys around Plymouth, with Dartmoor’s outline to the north, together formed one of the first landscapes anywhere to absorb the gaze of people who had, literally, seen the world a new way. Those who returned with Drake from his Famous Voyage knew, from lived experience, that even their longed-for home port was just one more point on the surface of a globe. We may never know whether they or those who welcomed them back appreciated the scale of this change, but there is evidence that somebody did.
Entering St Andrew’s Plymouth you feel at once that the place is much restored. After it was left a burnt-out shell in 1942, it was turned into a garden at first, with flower beds in the nave and side aisles and roses trained up the pillars. But its full restoration was never in doubt. That it once emptied, in the middle of a sermon, at the news that Drake was home from the Americas, is part of the city’s folklore. All his journeys done, Martin Frobisher’s heart was buried there. But it was only as the post-war repairs got underway that a long-concealed, riddling message from the Age of Exploration could finally be read.
Carved into the stone sill of one of the south-facing windows, a diagram was found under the plasterwork. On a roughly drawn globe, the Equator and the two Tropics are energetically scored, c
riss-crossed with a couple of lines of longitude. From between the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer there emerge words in some jumbled and totally illegible script. Or is it some scratched out earlier version of the design? Below and to the right sits the figure of a ship, sail hoisted and topmast pennon streaming: from its prow extends a rope that swerves up and around the world, as if it has only just been thrown. A smaller boat floats free from the rest of the design, as if drawn to a different scale.
Known as ‘the Drake Graffiti’, its closeness to certain elements in the great sea captain’s coat of arms was quickly remarked. Otherwise the half-century and more since its discovery has added little to our understanding of it. The travel guides all summarise it more or less thus: the local boy made good was home from sailing his ship around the world, the first sea captain ever to do so. In the ensuing Drake-mania this was a workman’s doodle, done with the point of his trowel perhaps, before the plaster went on. This was an anonymous tribute to, or even consecration of, the staggering news that the Golden Hinde had made it back.
But for me at least there is also, in this rock-carving, in this 16th-century street art, a silent reproach to all the ways in which we still seek to tidy up this story. What was being celebrated as that figure was etched into medieval stonework? If this glyph is a witness statement from the original global moment, then what it suggests is that this was a much stranger event than we are accustomed to imagine. The very resistance of these markings to easy interpretation is precisely why we should cherish them. They remind us that we do not know. My case here is that this is a story we ignore because we think we know it. But we don’t really know the story. There are other ways to tell it.
PART ONE
– Beginnings –
ALL APPARELLED IN WATCHET OR SKIE COLOURED CLOTH
Long before it became Stephen Borough’s birthplace, Northam lived by its maritime connections. Its tall church tower was for centuries white-washed to serve as a landmark for ships entering the Torridge estuary. The village is surrounded on three sides by water, with the Bristol Channel to the west and the Taw and Torridge estuaries to the north and east.
Very little is known about Borough’s early life. Certainly he was born in Northam in 1525 and grew up on a small farm just outside the village. A long stone building on the main square, now divided into flats, was once Church House and is probably where he learned to read and write. He would become one of the four ‘principall masters’ of Elizabeth’s navy and was among Europe’s best known navigators when he died in 1584.
The absence of any memorial to him in his first home is unsurprising in a way. His childhood surroundings lay far behind him by the time he made his first mark. That he had an uncle in shipping probably explains a good deal, though exactly how much we may never learn. We do know that, in May 1553, aged just twenty-eight, he was Master of one of three ships which sailed down the Thames past Greenwich. It was not an occasion he would ever have forgotten. An onlooker recorded the scene:
the Courtiers came out, and the common people flockt together, standing very thicke upon the shoare: the privie Counsel [the King’s closest advisors] they lookt out at the windowes of the Court, and the rest ranne up to the toppes of the towers.
On board, the mariners were ‘all apparelled in Watchet or skie coloured cloth.’ They ‘shouted in such sort that the skie rang againe with the noyse thereof.’ The expedition carried letters from Edward VI written in English, ‘Greeke, and divers other languages’, addressed to any ‘Kings, Princes and Potentates’ they might encounter on the way to China.
For this was the first English expedition to Asia. The chosen route was by the north-east and the experts of the day confidently predicted that this route was wide open to anyone with the courage to risk it. From Norway’s North Cape it was an easy run all the way to the Far East. These ships, accordingly, were ‘prepared and furnished out, for the search and discoverie of the Northerne part of the world.’ Their very names give a sense of the spirit in which this voyage was undertaken: the Bona Esperanza, the Bona Confidentia and the largest ship, of which Stephen was Master, the Edward Bonaventura.
The possibility of a northern route had already for some time been concentrating the best minds in the kingdom. The best minds were, all the same, wrong about it. What those buoyantly named vessels encountered on the way was nothing like what they had been led to expect. The ships became separated during a storm off Norway. For six weeks, two of them wandered disoriented in what we now call the Barents Sea. The crews eventually went ashore and built themselves a shelter for the winter. Russian fishermen found them the following spring, frozen to death. A journal found with them is in the British Library.
Stephen Borough’s ship, staying closer to shore, rounded the North Cape and took shelter in a Danish settlement, the last one along this coast. They waited there for a week, ‘troubled with cogitations and perturbations of mind’, then steeled themselves to ‘make proofe and triall of all adventures’ and put to sea once more, holding their ‘course for that unknowen part of the world.’ Travelling along the coast they met with more Russian fishermen and overwintered just west of where the modern city of Archangel stands. The exact site, which they called St Nicholas, after a nearby convent, is now called Severovdinsk and is occupied by a gigantic facility which builds and re-fits submarines.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this voyage is that Russia appears to have come as a complete surprise. Invited to Moscow, the Englishmen were welcomed to the court of Ivan the Terrible, no less, and returned northwards with letters offering favourable terms for future trade. It was as much by chance as by design that England’s first formally constituted foreign trading company, the Royal Muscovy Company, came to be.
The Edward Bonaventura returned safely home and his part in this ‘first worthy enterprise’ set Borough on course to become the company’s senior pilot. In the 1560s he was spoken of as ‘Cheyffe Pylott of this our Realm’. His memorial in Chatham credits him with the ‘discouerie of Roosia and ye Coastes there to adjoininge’.
‘Discovery’ may seem to put it rather strongly, when there were so many friendly fishermen on hand to help the explorers as and when they got into trouble. This was hardly an un-peopled wilderness awaiting its colonial master. Before we smile too broadly at this use of the word, however, we should remind ourselves that these English strangers and their arrival from the north did indeed portend change.
Tsar Ivan knew strong magic when he saw it. Russia at the time was in conflict with Sweden, Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire. It could definitely use a technically competent ally to the west of its immediate neighbours. The rumour has persisted that Ivan made a marriage offer to Elizabeth, which was rejected. He abruptly suspended the Muscovy Company’s rights in his empire. They were quietly restored once the imperial tantrum had passed and business as usual resumed. Ivan’s son Feodor also sought stronger ties. The chief advisor to England’s navigators, John Dee, an instructor to Borough as to many others, was offered a handsome fee to go and work in Moscow. He too would decline the invitation.
On his second voyage, in 1556–7, Borough’s ship carried a kind of research vessel, around 40 feet long and with a draft of no more than 5 feet. It was in this, the Searchthrift, that Stephen Borough sailed on from Wardhouse in Norway with a crew of just ten. In not much more than a fly-boat, then, they proceeded carefully eastwards, realising that only by keeping close to the shore could they avoid the disaster which had befallen the first expedition.
The popular account of this period still associates small English ships with the defeat of the Armada. In fact, thirty years earlier, English explorers had already learnt the hard way that larger ships can put you at a disadvantage. Smaller, lighter vessels allowed you to manoeuvre round floating ice or to go closer inshore, though the shallow draft also made them vulnerable to storms. The technical means available to these earliest explorers were extremely modest: they ‘made for that unknowen part of the world’,
seeking guidance and asking permission as they went, with astonishingly delicate instruments.
Other kinds of danger than storms might also arise. Borough’s logbook described the following close encounter:
On S. James his day [22nd July] … at a Southwest sunne, there was a monstrous Whale aboord of us, so neere to our side that we might have thrust a sworde or any other weapon in him, which we durst not doe for feare hee should have over-throwen our shippe: and then I called my company together, and all of us shouted, & with the crie that we made he parted from us: there was as much above water of his backe as the bredth of our pinnesse, and at his falling downe, he made such a terrible noyse in the water, that a man would greatly have marvelled, except hee had knowen the cause of it: but God be thanked, we were quietly delivered of him.
This would probably have been a Northern Right or Bowhead whale, plentiful then in the high latitudes. And it was an ominous encounter, freighted with implications for both parties. This fearsome creature is plainly still as much the biblical Leviathan as it is any kind of actual whale. ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?’ asks the Book of Job. ‘Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?’
For a little while, the answer to that in these waters at least was still no.
It is not easy to visit Stephen Borough’s childhood home because a Captain Yeo demolished it and built his mansion directly on top of it in the 1860s. But you can still walk part of the footpath Borough took from that vanished farmstead down to the ships at Appledore. The street you’ll need is right at the edge of Northam, lined with bungalows and signed as a deadend. But where the bungalows and the tarmac stop, a farm track and then the footpath take you down to the estuary.
The Paradoxal Compass Page 1