Cabot firmly ordered, however, that prayers be had every morning and every evening on board the ships. Additionally, he directed that there be no swearing, dirty stories, or “ungodly talk to be suffered in the company of any ship, neither dicing, carding, tabling nor other devilish games …” And harking back to his early North American experience with his father, Hakluyt tells us, he gravely warned of certain dangers:
[T]here are people that can swimme in the sea, havens & rivers, naked, having bows and shafts, coveting to draw nigh your ships, which if they shal finde not wel watched, or warded, they wil assault, desirous of the bodies of men, which they covet for meate; if you resist them, they dive, and do well flee, and therefore diligent watch is to be kept both day & night, in some Islands.[3]
Great excitement prevailed as the ships set out to sea from London. As the small fleet passed Greenwich Palace where Edward VI was residing at the time, “the courtiers came running out and the common people flockt together, standing very thicke upon the shoare; the Privie Conssel, they lookt out at the windows of the court, and the rest ranne upto the tops of the towers.” On board the Esperanza, in the strongbox of Willoughby’s cabin, lay letters of recommendation, which His Majesty had graciously provided, introductions to “the Kings, Princes, and other Potentates, inhabiting the Northern parts of the Worlde, towards the mighty Empire of Cathay.”[4] As the vessels passed the palace, gun salutes were exchanged, with everyone on the decks and many ashore resplendent in blue uniforms. By mid-July the ships were off the west coast of Norway, well above the Arctic Circle and in fine weather they made steady progress toward the North Cape.
On the night of August 2, a violent storm struck that the ships barely managed to ride out. In the mayhem, however, the little fleet became dispersed, never fully to reunite. The Edward Bonaventure made its way to the Danish fortress-settlement of Vardǿ at Norway’s extreme northeast tip, forty-five miles from Russia. Chancellor thought to await the hopeful reappearance of the other two vessels, but after a week of idleness and no sight of the other ships, he moved on. Rounding the Kola Peninsula, he made his way into the White Sea and eventually reached the mouth of the Dvina River, near the settlement of Arkhangelsk. Winter arrives early to those parts, and with the markedly deteriorating weather and the start of ice formation, it was decided to take up winter quarters ashore.
In the meantime, the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia sailed right by Vardǿ without stopping, and continued east, eventually coming to Novaya Zemlya (Russian: “New Land”). This vast archipelago is an extension of the Ural Mountains and it consists of two major islands and scores of lesser ones, stretching northward over a distance of 375 miles. The islands were familiar to Novgorod hunters as early as the eleventh century, but shortly after Sir Hugh’s efforts, they became known to Western Europeans. For the most part the archipelago is a mountainous place with some peaks reaching heights of 3,500 feet. Over a quarter of the thirty-five thousand square miles of territory is permanently ice-covered. In early days, the attraction of Novaya Zemlya was the abundance of walruses, seals, Arctic fox, and polar bears that inhabited the islands — particularly rich fare for hunters resolute enough to carry on their work in dismal winter days when the furs grew especially thick. The modern reader may be familiar with Novaya Zemlya for the nuclear testing ranges the islands housed during the Cold War. It was here that the Arctic suffered her most grievous incursion ever when in 1961 the Soviets detonated “Tsar Bomba” in a massive fifty-megaton atmospheric blast — the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. That detonation was followed twelve years later by an underground blast that recorded 6.97 on the Richter Scale — nearly the same strength of force that devastated San Francisco in 1906. It precipitated an avalanche of 80 million tons of rock that blocked two glacial streams, causing a vast lake to form.
With landfall denied and the Confidentia leaking badly, Willoughby decided to turn about and head back whence they had come. As they approached the shores of the Kola Peninsula, one storm after another battered the small vessels — “very evill weather, as frost, snow and haile, as though it had beene the deepe of winter.” The tired and dispirited Willoughby was simply unprepared to continue battling the hostile elements, and he set his sights on securing a safe anchorage in some sheltered harbor. This he found at Nokujeff Bay, a body of water surrounded by barren land, and here he dropped anchor.
Three scouting parties were sent in different directions to scour the area for signs of native settlements, but all to no avail; they returned “without finding of people, or any similitude of habitation.” Days shortened, bitter cold set in, and before long the thick snow of early winter blanketed the ships’ decks.
At the time the gallant little fleet had set out from London, three months earlier in the balm of England’s late summer, no thought had been given to the possibility of becoming ice-locked or of having to winter in the Arctic. Little did they know. The expedition’s chronicler drew a pathetic picture of what unfolded next:
… the days became shorter and shorter, and after 25th of November our voyagers saw no more of the sun even at mid-day. No one was aware of any means of guarding against the cold, and, indeed nothing had been brought for the purpose; for at that time they had no idea in England what a winter in Russia, or in the northern regions in general, was; moreover, the country surrounding Nokujeff Bay was quite bare of wood, so that at that spot were frozen to death, with Sir Hugh Willoughby, the strong crews of both vessels, consisting of sixty-five men. Most of them may have commenced their eternal sleep during the night of more than a month’s duration, from the 25th of November to the 29th of December. But from a signature of Willoughby, it is certain that he was still alive at the end of January, 1554.
Probably before his decease he was even several times rejoiced by a sight of the sun at mid-day; but what a sense of horror it shone upon! Two frozen-up vessels full of stiffened corpses, and only partly discernable through the snow which had drifted over them, towards which the looks of the remaining unhappy voyagers, now but half live, were involuntarily turned, as, hopeless, and deprived even of the comforts of religion, there were despairingly awaiting the same fate.[5]
In the early summer, Russian fishermen came across the two ghostly vessels, and they reported finding Sir Hugh “congealed and frozen to death,” sitting in his cabin making an entry into his journal. Others of the crew, seemingly like a tableau in a wax museum, were described as being frozen with plates in hand or spoons to the mouth, with one man standing opening his locker and “others in various postures like statues.”
Willoughby had elected to winter on board the frozen-in ships; Chancellor chose to establish quarters ashore. It is argued that had Willoughby wintered in snow houses within a protected space he might have survived, whereas others contend that Sir Hugh and his sixty-five companions were doomed from the start, whatever the shelter. As one historian has it, the expedition’s leader suffered from “want of skill and inconstancy of purpose that had led him into difficulties; want of adaptability made the difficulties fatal.” Chancellor’s chronicler concludes, with characteristic British understatement, “One must say they were men worth of a better fate.”[6]
Chancellor and the crew of the Edward Bonaventure fared better than their ill-fated companions on the sister ships. Archangelsk at the time had grown into a substantial Russian settlement, and on his arrival to the area the inhabitants, who were awed by the great size of the English ship, met him with curiosity, warmth, and above all, with reverence. Chancellor seized the moment and in a lordly fashion greeted the awed visitors warmly — taking “them up in all loving sort from the ground.” When news of the Englishman’s landing eventually reached Moscow, the exotic visitor was invited to visit the capital as an honoured guest, so great an impression he had created. Within a few weeks of coming ashore, Chancellor had subtly morphed from an unlucky mariner into a figure of highest consequence — His Majesty’s unofficial envoy to the court of Tsar Ivan IV
, “The Terrible.”
On November 23, accompanied by two of the merchants voyaging with him, Chancellor set off by sleigh to Moscow, a distance of 625 miles. Twelve days later, he arrived at the capital and the small party was received by the tsar, who gave them a warm reception and graciously accepted the open letter — credentials, as it were — that Edward VI had supplied to each of the three ships, a message written in many languages:
We have permitted the honourable and brave Hugh Willoughby, and others of our faithful and dear servants who accompany him, to proceed to regions previously unknown, in order to seek such things as We stand in need of, as well as to take to them from our country such things as they require.[7]
Ivan was delighted with the Englishmen and with their opportune visit to his capital. Russia at the time had not yet extended its empire to the shores of the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea was firmly closed to Russian shipping for that “window to the West” was under the disputed control of two hostile powers: the Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Swedish Empire. The very presence in Moscow of the tsar’s distinguished and genial English guest, however, demonstrated that an open sea route to the west was available to Russia through the Arctic. Furthermore, the Muscovy Company gave every indication of being an ideal trading partner. Ivan was well pleased and he sent Chancellor back to England with promised trade privileges. Thus rooted a long history of Anglo–Russian trade and friendship.
Chancellor, alas, did not survive long enough to enjoy the fruits of his initiatives. In 1556, as a follow-up to his initial trip to Russia, he undertook a second such voyage, and accompanying him on the return home was the tsar’s first ambassador to England. It was a rough passage and as they neared the Scottish coast, an “outrageous tempest” struck the ship. The vessel was driven ashore and Chancellor, hauling the Russian onto a lifeboat, barely managed to escape the condemned ship. He successfully got the envoy ashore, but in the process the boat was swamped and he perished along with much of the crew.
Chancellor’s groundwork in Russia resulted in a period of intense activity for the Muscovy Trading Company and notable successes were achieved, particularly in the Arctic fur trade. These developments did not escape the covetous eyes of the Dutch, who within the decade formed the Dutch White Sea Trading Company, the purpose of which, as the name indicates, was to do business in that region. In 1565, the firm charged Oliver Brunel to establish a trading post at Archangelsk, and to develop his country’s presence in the Arctic. This resourceful and quick-witted individual wasted little time in getting on with it. Within months he had charmed his way into the local society and in the process mastered its language, thus enabling him to deal directly and more advantageously with the hunters. No small-time apparatchik was he — now a growing threat to the hitherto virtual trade monopoly enjoyed by the Muscovy Company. The enraged English managed craftily to persuade Archangelsk officials that the Dutchman was a spy, and the authorities reacted by arresting and imprisoning him. Brunel eventually gained parole, and exiting from jail he fell into the waiting arms of the enterprising Strogonoff family, a Russian merchant clique that eventually came to control Siberia’s entire fur industry — the country’s nineteenth-century Astors. Brunel mustered all his persuasive skills and convinced his benefactors to bypass the British by directing the fur trade of the greater White Sea area through the Dutch. A coup of no small significance.
Successful as he was in matters of trade, Brunel was driven by the burning ambition of laying bare the Northeast Passage, a cause that shaped his life for the following two decades. In those years under a succession of sponsors — the Strogonoffs, Dutch merchants, the Danish King, English fur barons — he undertook five expeditions into the Russian Arctic, one of which was by land to the Ob River in central Siberia, the first European to reach those parts. And then, on his final journey in 1584, he and his ship vanished mysteriously without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again — victim of the Arctic’s beguiling song.
Brunel’s early success on the White Sea, however, and his subsequent thrusts into the frozen east served to enflame further Dutch interest in the elusive eastern passage. The most renowned of the country’s ensuing explorers was “the prudent, skillful, brave and experienced [Willem] Barents — the most distinguished martyr to Arctic investigation,” who, at the close of the sixteenth century, undertook three successive journeys into the northeast. The first two expeditions returned home with nothing more than colourful tales of adventures in the frozen North, but the report of the third journey stands high in the literature of Arctic survival. As one nineteenth-century historian put it, Barents was the first European “to winter amid the horrors of the Polar cold; deprived of every comfort which could have ameliorated the sojourn; dependent even for vital warmth on the fires which are kindled in indomitable heart; and uncheered from the beginning to the end by the sight of, or intercourse with, any human visitors …”[8] It’s a tale that is vividly recorded by Gerrit de Veer, one of the seventeen-man crew who survived the ordeal.
The first of Barents’s journeys took place in 1594. Four ships put out to sea from Zealand on Denmark’s shores, he on board the Mercury and his partner, Corneilius Nai, on board the Swan. After a month’s sail they reached the west coast of Novaya Zemlya, where the group split up. Nai set course with two ships for the archipelago’s southern tip with the goal of securing the passage to Cathay from that direction, while Barents moved north to do the same on the opposite end. Nai successfully navigated through the southern strait and after working his way through the ice packs he reached a vast expanse of open water. “We met with no more ice, nor any sign of it,” the record for August 9 tells us, “… only a spacious open sea with a swell such as oceans have everywhere, and a great depth, for which we could not touch ground with the lead …”[9] There was no doubting it: they had at long last pried open the coveted northern door to Cathay — success at last. One can imagine the euphoria that must have descended on the ships’ crews … and the foaming tankards that no doubt were raised to celebrate their victory. With mission accomplished and the season rapidly advancing, Nai found no need for continuing farther east, and he ordered a turnabout and a course for home. Little did the poor man know that the “spacious open sea” with swells and depths were in no way a key to any doorway; it was an illusion, a mirage of sorts. Had he sailed east a few more days into the Kara Sea, he would have encountered the same irresolute ice barrier that would stymie more than one future traveller.
In the meantime, Barents was making his way up the coast, pressing ever more north. One highlight of that passage seems to have been their stumbling upon a herd of walrus — some two hundred of them. Knowledge of these “wonderfull strong sea monsters”[10] was already had, but now they came face to face with these “sea-horses … with two teeth sticking out of their mouths, one on each side, each being about halfe an elle long [fourteen inches].” We are told of a close encounter with one such animal, which, having “cast her young ones before her into the water,” attacked their ship’s boat … “the sea-horse almost stricken her teeth into the sterne of the boate, thinking to overthrow it.” The crew barely managed to ward it off with oars and “the great cry that the men made.”
Barents’s expedition proved inconclusive and on the whole uneventful. The vessels completed the passage to the most northerly point of Novaya Zemlya, where they were battered by a strong gale and where their progess was barred by thick ice packs. Unable to proceed farther and with the exhausted crews in a mutinous mood, there was no alternative but to return home. Whatever disappointment Barents may have suffered for his part of the venture, certain satisfaction was taken in the charting of much of the archipelago’s coastlines. All in all, he regarded the expedition as a glorious success — his partner travelling in the south, after all, had uncovered the elusive passage to the Far East, in the words of one contemporary, “a very broad claim.”
In the earlier part of the voyage, as the ships followed the Siberian coastline
eastward, they made first European contact with “the strange people called ‘Samoyeds.’” Word of the existence of these primitive “wilde men” had already filtered to Europeans. Their culture was based entirely on reindeer — draught animals were reindeer; boats were of reindeer hide; their semi-underground homes were covered by reindeer hides; parkas were of reindeer (with the skin on the outside); their gloves and hoods also of reindeer, and their crudely carved idols were of reindeer skulls and bones. The other news of these people was not good: it was said that they engaged in cannibalism. One staggering Russian report of 1560 tells of a feast offered a visiting merchant in which a roasted child was the centrepiece. The same report asserted that should the merchant have died among them his body would also have been eaten — small wonder that the literal translation of Samoyed is “self-eater.” Barents’s chronicler makes only passing comment on the exchanges that took place between the Dutch and these singular natives. Today the descendents of the Samoyeds are called Nenets. In the 1870s the Russian government forcibly relocated some of them to Novaya Zemlya in a successful effort to wrest claim of the land from Norway.
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