Cabot raised from his investors about £6,000, a huge sum of money that was quickly spent on the cost of the ships and their crews and everything they would take with them to the far side of Asia. Essential were food and drink, weapons and ammunition, special company liveries for the sailors and navigational equipment like astrolabes, maps and charts. There were well over a hundred men to provide for, from the captain general and pilot general of the expedition, other gentlemen, a minister of religion, merchants and ships’ masters to the crewmen, gunners, cooks, carpenters and coopers.17 Cabot insisted that no corner should be cut in preparing for an expedition he believed could change the history of a kingdom. Where Eden had written about Spain’s American riches lying in Seville, Sebastian Cabot’s hope for the voyage was nothing short of equalling in achievement Portugal’s opening up of the riches of ‘the Orient and Occidental Indies’. World history was just about to be changed.18
One thing, however, is startlingly clear. In 1553, for all of Cabot’s ambition and Eden’s self-confidence, the expedition had no proper idea of what or whom it would encounter on the way to Cathay. Like Eden, Cabot dismissed the warnings of writers who had said that a sea passage so close to the North Pole was impossible because of ‘such dangers of the seas, perils of ice, intolerable colds, and other impediments’.19 And this was one of the wonders of the new company: the adventurers knew so little about the world. They believed they had some geographical knowledge; they had their investors’ money; they had confidence. And they took such a big step, feeling as they went the shape of a world known only from maps and the pronouncements of the cosmographical authorities. Within a single reflex were contained both formidable ambition and startling ignorance.
In a calculating, pragmatic and essentially conservative world, it was a bold and imaginative leap into the unknown. And it would have huge consequences for England. The ancestry of what later became Britain’s mature mercantile empire needs to be traced back to this root – a single, ambitious and (from one perspective at least) hare-brained project that grew up in and around London in the early 1550s. So much that characterized that later empire – driven initially by trade and always by money, private and corporate – was reflected in Cabot’s venture. But what was imagined in 1552 and 1553 was not an acquisitive grab for land and people in the far reaches of the globe. The hope, in fact, was for peaceful trade between far distant parts of the world, the aspiration a noble one: contact, trade, peace and friendship. It was on every level a fantasy.
The expedition that went out from London to Cathay in 1553 carried with it a letter from King Edward VI. It was a letter of introduction, addressed ‘to the kings, princes, and other potentates, inhabiting the northeast parts of the world, toward the mighty empire of Cathay’, in which Edward spoke to his brother monarchs of peace and friendship. Here was trade as the work of God in bringing peoples together, sharing the ‘commodities’ of the world. This ‘universal amity’ – a global friendship – was brought about by commerce:
Merchants, who wandering about the world, search both the land and the sea, to carry such goods and profitable things as are found in their countries to remote regions and kingdoms, and again to bring from the same such things as they find there commodious for their own countries …
Edward promised the princes of the north and east, ‘by the God of all things that are contained in heaven, earth, and the sea’, that their subjects would be warmly welcomed into England. The letter, written out in Latin, in Greek and in other languages, reached out across the world to unfamiliar peoples and powers. It ended with an effort at finding common ground with others, being dated from London in ‘the year from the creation of the world 5515’.20
Sebastian Cabot signed and sealed the instructions for the expedition on Tuesday, 9 May 1553. They were to be read out weekly on board all three ships, the Bona Speranza, Edward Bonaventure and Bona Confidentia (hope, good fortune and confidence).21 Order, discipline and a sense of common purpose were essential.22
Cabot left nothing to chance. In charge of the fleet was its captain general, Sir Hugh Willoughby. Eleven other councillors would offer Willoughby their advice, including Richard Chancellor (who was the expedition’s pilot general), two of the London merchants and the ships’ masters and mates. The unity and agreement of this council governed everything: navigation, where to land and how to search new territory, meetings with foreign potentates, any trade with other countries. The common interest and benefit of the company outweighed any private profit. Sealed up before the journey home, goods and merchandise brought back to London would be unpacked and inspected on arrival by senior officials of the company. Here the newness of the venture, its sense of being a corporate enterprise, trumped the business interests of any single merchant: ‘the whole company … to have that which by right unto them appertaineth, and no embezzlement shall be used, but the truth of the whole voyage to be opened to the common wealth and benefit of the whole company’.
There were sure to be encounters with strange peoples. With only books to go on, Cabot prepared his crews for meetings with men in bear and lion skins carrying longbows, and for raiding parties of cannibals who might swim naked up to the ships and take their victims unawares. He wrote about dinners with foreign princes and the dangers of ambush. Caution was the watchword. The crews were to observe and listen; not to give away anything about their religious practices; to be courteous and friendly; to be careful not to be tempted by gold, silver or riches into parting with their own goods; not to stay too long in one place; and generally to exercise ‘prudent circumspection’. No violence was to be used against any stranger, but low cunning was permitted. A local could be invited on board ship, entertained, given clothes and put back on shore to attract the attention of others. Alcohol might be used ‘to learn the secrets of his heart’. On how the crews and the locals would communicate, Cabot was silent: he wrote not one word about foreign languages. A wonderful clause of the instructions for the fleet suggests a fantastical encounter that would not be out of place in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
… if people shall appear gathering of stones, gold, metal or other like on the sand, your pinnaces* may draw nigh, marking what things they gather, using or playing upon the drum or such other instruments, as may allure them to harkening to fantasy or desire to see and hear your instruments and voices; but keep you out of danger and show to them no point or sign or rigour or hostility.
On paper Cabot and his company made the first, tentative steps towards new and strange encounters.
The expedition set off from Deptford, a little way down the Thames from London, on 10 May 1553. It sailed past Greenwich Palace on the following day and fired a salute with the ships’ cannon. King Edward was too ill to watch the three ships go by: two months later he was dead. It so happened that Willoughby’s fleet became in those northern seas the last, floating outpost of Edward’s Protestant England, its men dutifully reading their prayer book services and keeping to the laws passed by Edward’s parliaments, as Cabot’s regulations had instructed them to do, insulated from the kingdom’s return – after 1553 – to the Catholic Church.
On the day Edward died – 6 July – the ships were sailing out towards Scandinavia. On the day he was buried in Westminster Abbey – 8 August – Bona Speranza, Willoughby’s flagship, beset by strong west-northwesterly winds, was adrift, having lost sight of Edward Bonaventure because of fog. Separated once and for all from the other ships, in September Bona Speranza found shelter in a haven on the northernmost coast of Scandinavia. Willoughby recorded in a logbook later recovered that at sea they saw seals ‘and other great fishes’, and on land bears, deer, foxes and ‘divers great beasts … and such other which were to us unknown and also wonderful’. But the fact was that they were trapped. They had no idea of where they were, and the weather was appalling, ‘as frost, snow and hail as though it had been the deep of winter’. Choosing to dig in, Willoughby sent out scouts to find human settlement. The final entry in the logb
ook sends a chill down the spine:
Wherefore we sent out three men south-south-west, to search if they could find people, who went three days’ journey, but could find none: after that, we sent other three westward four days’ journey, which also returned without finding any people. Then sent we three men southeast three days’ journey, who in like sort returned without finding of people, or any similitude of habitation.23
For Sir Hugh Willoughby and the crew of Bona Speranza it was almost the end of the adventure. All of them perished. Among them were six merchants of Cabot’s company: William Gittons, Charles Barret, Gabriel Willoughby, John Andrewes, Alexander Woodford and Ralfe Chatterton.
The two other ships of the expedition also endured horrible weather, but they were so much more fortunate than the men of Bona Speranza, finding shelter in the White Sea on the northwest coast of Russia. They discovered land near the end of August 1553 and some people that the survivors’ leader, Richard Chancellor, called barbarians. It was the kind of human contact that had eluded Sir Hugh and his men, but it offered some hope.
And so it was that about seventy Englishmen in search of the riches of Cathay, with really no idea of where they were, separated from their flagship, carrying the letters of a dead king and feeling the bitter cold of the far north, encountered a country they had at best read about in books of cosmography. Out of what was in so many ways a disaster, a connection was made that helped to some degree to make Elizabethan London a city of mercantile empire. When Chancellor and his men landed, they had no idea of the significance of those few steps from boat to shore. In fact they were the first Englishmen to set foot in Russia. They had reached a country new to them and their countrymen – and they had done so entirely by accident.
For Chancellor, his crew, the merchants back in London, the investors in the Cathay venture and pretty much everyone else, Russia was terra incognita. Few western Europeans knew anything about it, though the diplomats of the Holy Roman Empire had been filing reports on their encounters with Muscovy since the fifteenth century, and some northern Italian merchants had also travelled there. The acknowledged contemporary authority was an imperial diplomat called Sigismund von Herberstein, the account of whose embassy of 1517 was printed in Vienna in 1549 and became something of a bestseller: reprinted in Latin three times between 1551 and 1557 and translated into German, Polish, Italian and English (in 1555), it revolutionized European knowledge of the Russian state. But it seems highly unlikely that, when he arrived at the port of St Nicholas, Richard Chancellor was acquainted with Herberstein’s work in any great detail (though Cabot and Richard Eden may have known the book), and he and later English diplomats and merchants tended to rely upon their own observations of what they saw.24 Certainly they found Muscovy strange and alien; they recognized its vastness, felt its deep winter chill in their bones, and made their own appraisals of its tsar, Ivan IV (‘The Terrible’), who appeared to exercise absolute (even tyrannical) power.
The voyage to Cathay, 1553, and Richard Chancellor’s discovery of Russia instead.
Given all this, two things are especially striking about what Elizabethans were not embarrassed to describe as their ‘discovery’ of Russia. The first is that it was so very unexpected and accidental, though not of course beyond the imaginative possibilities of Edward VI’s polyglot letter to any or all of the kings, princes and potentates ‘inhabiting the northeast parts of the world’. The second is that Cabot’s merchant-investors in London were so brilliantly effective at taking full advantage of an instance of navigational happenstance. The cumbersome ‘Mystery and company of the merchants adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown’ was, on Chancellor’s return, now simply the Muscovy Company, with its headquarters in the parish of St Dunstan in the East, close to the quays and wharves of the port of London. There was already an enviable dynamism to the venture. In February 1555 the company received a founding royal charter from Queen Mary I and her husband King Philip, the result of two or three months of hard lobbying by London’s Muscovy investors.25
It was Chancellor and the merchants with him who had done the really tough work a few months earlier. They were kept for a long time at St Nicholas, but at last, when permission arrived for them to travel on to Moscow, they set off on an extraordinary journey ‘which was very long and most troublesome, wherein he [Chancellor] had the use of certain sleds, which in that country are very common … the cause whereof is the exceeding hardness of the ground, congealed in the winter time by the force of the cold, which in those places is very extreme and horrible’.26
In the Kremlin, Chancellor and his men met the tsar, who entertained them lavishly with a show of gold and grandeur and feasts of quite epic proportions. While Chancellor’s party wanted to trade, Ivan, fighting wars to expand his territories, was after support and weapons from the West. How they communicated is impossible to say for sure: probably they, their hosts and translators muddled through in Polish, Italian or even Greek.27 They came pragmatically and quickly to an understanding that gave exclusive trading privileges to Cabot’s company. At first the agreement was broadly defined: the tsar permitted them to come and go to Russia and to move freely, ‘to frequent free marts, with all sorts of merchandizes, and upon the same to have wares for their return’. Really precise agreements would take another few years to perfect. But this was enough of a beginning to make viable Anglo-Russian trade with and through London.28
For the moment Cathay, the merchants’ fantasy, was put to one side. Once Chancellor was back in London, it was clear that there were valuable raw materials to import from Russia: furs, train oil from seals (used for heat and light), tallow, wax, cordage (the ropes for rigging a ship) and ‘ickary’ or ‘cavery’ – caviar – which, if Elizabethans themselves seem to have had no great taste for it, the food markets of France and Italy later did.29 In 1557 the mathematician Robert Recorde promised the Muscovy Company’s governors a clear route of navigation to what he called ‘the northeast Indies’, though he suggested that this journey to Cathay was as yet some way off.30 With the company in London beginning to build up Anglo-Russian trade, there now seemed to be no great hurry.
The Muscovy Company was a venture with huge possibilities. It offered a powerful model for international mercantile endeavour. A company with a royal charter, it had investors (many of whom were powerful men in the queen’s government), its own staff and bureaucracy and its own common seal, showing a merchant ship flying the flag of St George. From the beginning it was woven into the already complex mercantile fabric of London. Sebastian Cabot was its governor, assisted by four consuls (of whom two were city aldermen) and twenty-four other charter assistants. The first named of these assistants was Thomas Gresham’s uncle Sir John, then an alderman and a former sheriff and only a few years earlier London’s lord mayor. Thomas himself was a charter member and investor in the company.
To look at the names of the other company members is to see straight away the density of connection and financial and family interest within the city establishment. A single example of the relationships between four families suggests a common pattern. The two alderman consuls of the company in 1555 were the London grandees Sir George Barne and Sir William Garrard; Garrard indeed was elected lord mayor in 1555. Two other original charter members were Alexander Carleill, a London importer of wine, and John Rivers, a generation younger than Barne and Garrard, and a member of the Grocers’ Company. Barne’s son George married Garrard’s daughter Anne, while Barne’s daughter Elizabeth married John Rivers. Alexander Carleill married Barne’s other daughter Anne who, after Carleill died, married Francis Walsingham, a young man from a political family with London mercantile connections, and later an ambassador and powerful adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. For the Carleills and the Garrards, a second generation inherited their families’ Russian interests. Here was the tight weave of the threads of elite city life.
The Muscovy Company was a corporate entity, formally independent of th
e English Crown. But the Crown had given the company its charter and the company’s agents had the privilege of flying royal banners and ensigns over any city, town, village, castle, island or piece of land they discovered and claimed. Here was the promise of a kind of mercantile operation that was driven by aggressive trading, funded by investors’ money and backed up by the political clout of government. This was the method and the mentality that fifty years later was taken out to America by the colonists of the Virginia Company of London, and eventually to Asia by the London East India Company.
Edward VI’s letter had spoken to foreign princes of universal friendship and the necessity of trade to humanity, evoking a happy picture of merchants bravely travelling the globe in search of reciprocal and mutual benefit between peoples. But the opportunity of Anglo-Russian trade was seized so decisively and completely by the Muscovy Company that its charter left no space at all for the openness of a free and competitive market. Carefully and deliberately, the charter closed out all other claims on its discovery. It meant, for example, that no merchant outside the company could trade with Russia. The company even claimed exclusive charter rights over any navigation and discovery made by ‘sailing [from England] northwards, northeastwards, and northwestwards, or any parts thereof’, and it defended those rights vigorously.31
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