And so it was that with these resources – political and diplomatic support as well as intellectual firepower – the merchants and investors of Muscovy House pushed and pressed themselves to dominate Europe’s Russian trade.
John Dee was always and emphatically at the centre of his life’s narrative. Anthony Jenkinson was not. Like many merchants, he was a clear, precise and observant writer. But he wrote very little about himself, and the early years of his life especially are obscure. Born in 1529, the son of an innkeeper in rural Leicestershire, Jenkinson made his way – perhaps through London, perhaps through another English port – out to the empire of the sultan he and others called the Great Turk, where, in his early twenties, he had his own ship, men and cargo and Suleiman’s safe conduct. In the 1540s he must have served some kind of apprenticeship, just as he must have served some kind of master: but neither is documented. He really appears out of nowhere. Jenkinson’s one slip from his habitual modesty was later to allow the younger Richard Hakluyt to print the accounts of his travels in The principal navigations. Even then, Jenkinson never indulged in self-heroic hyperbole.
His talent was for the unknown, the alien and the unfamiliar. He was all at once a merchant, an adventurer and a frontiersman – tough and fearless, with a keen observer’s eye and a talent for supple diplomacy. All of these qualities would help him to pursue the Muscovy Company’s double objective in 1557: to consolidate its operations in Russia after the treaty negotiated with Nepea, and to push on to Cathay and the empire of the Great Khan. What helped with the first of these was Jenkinson’s easy relationship with Ivan the Terrible. The second was as much on his agenda as it was on the company’s.
The Primrose, John the Evangelist, Anne and Trinity, all four ships under Jenkinson’s overall command, sailed out to Russia by the now familiar route around Scandinavia. On 6 July 1557 the fleet passed by the place where Sir Hugh Willoughby and his men had perished on that first expedition to Cathay, near the River Varzina, at the latitude of 68 degrees north. They arrived safely a few weeks later at St Nicholas on the White Sea. Nepea and his entourage left Jenkinson and the company’s men to make their own way south to Moscow. It was a journey with few comforts: ‘All the way I never came in house,’ Jenkinson wrote, ‘but lodged in the wilderness, by the river’s side, and carried provision for the way.’ They foraged and camped: ‘And he that will travel those ways, must carry with him an hatchet, a tinder box, and a kettle, to make fire and seethe meat, when he hath it: for there is small succour in those parts, unless it be in towns.’3
In December they reached Vologda, one of Russia’s major cities and an established base for the Muscovy Company. From Vologda, Jenkinson and his men took post-sledges of the kind that Sigismund von Herberstein, an ambassador for the Holy Roman emperor, had used in Russia decades earlier. Herberstein’s account of his embassy, first printed in Latin in Vienna in 1549, was something of a European bestseller (it was translated early on into German, Italian and English), and for Jenkinson – if indeed he had a copy – it was the only serviceable handbook on a country that in 1557 was entirely new to him. A woodcut illustration in Herberstein’s book shows the sledges drawn by horses, their passengers wrapped up heavily in furs. This was by far the quickest way to travel during a Russian winter, and in only six days Jenkinson and his men were in Moscow.
Jenkinson’s first audience with Ivan the Terrible was on Christmas Day. Received into the emperor’s presence, he kissed Ivan’s hand. He would have found in the tsar reflections of the magnificence of the Ottoman sultan. Ivan sat on a great throne, wearing a crown and holding a staff of gold in his hand; he was covered all over in gold and precious stones. It was all much as Richard Chancellor had experienced a few years earlier. And like Chancellor, Jenkinson was invited as a special guest to a feast of epic proportions: 600 guests, with Jenkinson placed at a small table directly in front of the emperor. In a mark of great favour, Ivan himself sent Jenkinson cups of wine and mead and dishes of meat. The tableware was staggeringly expensive: out of all the silver, gold and precious stones, Jenkinson estimated a single cup to be worth £400. Indeed, he appraised everything he saw with a sharp eye. He described Moscow and its Kremlin, where 2,000 Tatar warriors had gathered to offer their service to Ivan. Jenkinson recognized at once the unquestioned authority of the emperor: ‘He keepeth his people in great subjection: all matters pass his judgement, be they never so small. The law is sharp for all offenders.’4
For four months Jenkinson successfully consolidated relations between the Muscovy Company and the emperor and his officials. He was in favour; it was indeed the high point of Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But Jenkinson knew that his task was to press on into Asia, and so, with Ivan’s safe conduct, in April 1558 he set off from Moscow with Richard and Robert Johnson of the Muscovy Company, their Tatar translator (and presumably other servants too) and a consignment of English cloths. If they took with them a European map, it was most likely Herberstein’s, which showed in rough detail the countries, provinces, peoples, rivers, forests and mountains of Russia, extending as far as Astrakhan and the northernmost waters of the Caspian Sea. It was at best the vaguest of guides.5
They saw within weeks the savage realities of the tsar’s wars against the nomadic tribes of the east. In May they reached Kazan on the river Volga, a month later encountering the Nogai Tatars in a country ravaged by war and disease. In his description of the nomadic Nogai, Jenkinson was a precise and compelling observer, making sense of words far from familiar to English ears. He described, for example, the ‘hordes’ of the Nogai, a word doubtless used by his translator, though it had appeared in English in the works of Richard Eden. A few years earlier Eden had written: ‘The Tatars are divided by companies which they call hordes, which word in their tongue signifieth a consenting company of people gathered together in form of a city.’6 We might imagine Jenkinson before his voyage to Russia doing his homework at Muscovy House with books like Eden’s.
Jenkinson missed nothing. He saw fishing for sturgeon on the Volga, and his professional interest was engaged by the kinds of cloths and silks brought by the Tatars out of Persia. In Astrakhan he saw the bodies of thousands of the Nogai who had starved to death, ‘which lay all the island through in heaps dead, and like to beasts, unburied, very pitiful to behold’.7
All this time Jenkinson and his party kept moving with their packs of London cloth, negotiating raids by bandits and a particularly ferocious storm on the Caspian Sea. They joined a caravan of a thousand camels. In October they met the local potentate, Hadjim Khan, who gave them a feast of wild horse and mare’s milk. Jenkinson produced his safe conduct from Ivan the Terrible and presented a gift to the prince. The next day Hadjim Khan sent for Jenkinson. He ‘asked of me divers questions,’ Jenkinson later wrote, ‘as well touching the affairs of the emperor of Russia, as of our country and laws, to which I answered as I thought good’. Thanks to his tact and supple diplomacy, Jenkinson was given further letters of safe conduct. Nevertheless it was a dangerous journey and the caravan had to fight off bandits all the way to Bukhara. It was there, surely with sighs of relief, that Jenkinson and his men arrived on 23 December.8
This was as far as they could go. It was in Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan, that Anthony Jenkinson found himself well on the silk road to Cathay, which, by his calculations, it would take a further hundred days’ journey to reach. But the route was blocked, he was told, cut off by war for the last three years. So Jenkinson and his party stayed in Bukhara, trying to sell the Muscovy Company’s cloths to merchants who had travelled from India with their spun silks, red hides, slaves and horses. Jenkinson wrote that these merchants ‘made little account’ of the English kerseys they had been carrying with them across seas, through forests and over mountains for twenty months.9
Bukhara was a very long way from London; but of course for Jenkinson it was not as far as he had wanted to go. Doubtless he had imagined himself in
the palace of the Great Khan, a prince by reputation more magnificent even than the Great Turk or the emperor of Russia. Instead, setting out from Bukhara in the spring of 1559, Jenkinson returned to Moscow, still optimistic about the mercantile possibilities of opening up Asia to the Muscovy Company’s monopoly. He wrote to the company’s agent in Vologda:
And although our journey hath been so miserable, dangerous, and chargeable with losses, charges and expenses, as my pen is not able to express the same: yet shall we be able to satisfy the worshipful company’s minds, as touching the discovery of the Caspian Sea, with the trade of merchandise to be had in such lands and countries as be thereabout adjacent, and have brought of the wares and commodities of those countries able to answer the principal with profit.10
He was convinced that they were close to a mercantile coup in Asia that only a decade before would have seemed fantastically remote.
When Jenkinson returned to London, he was feted by the Mercers’ Company, which, in recognition of the fact that he had ‘been as far … in all parts as ever any Englishman’, gave him its freedom.11 In that same year – 1561 – Richard Eden was just as effusive, praising Jenkinson to the skies for the ‘travails, pains, and dangers he hath sustained, and hardly escaped, and what diligence and art he hath used in the searching of strange countries, and in the description of those his voyages’. Eden celebrated the Muscovy Company’s employment of Jenkinson, ‘more like an ambassador sent from any prince or emperor, than from a company of merchant men’.12 And Eden was right. Jenkinson’s skills were those of an accomplished diplomat, vital when the operation of a chartered company of merchants was becoming more or less a branch of government. Muscovy men were quick to point out to Elizabeth I’s advisers how important the company was to England’s prestige in Europe (Denmark and Sweden, for example, were furious that the Muscovy merchants had a monopoly on Europe’s trade with Russia) and in the kingdom’s defence: great quantities of cordage – the ropes used for rigging the ships of Elizabeth’s navy – came to the port of London from Russia, as well as necessary supplies of pitch and tar and the materials to make sails, masts and cables.13
As soon as he returned home, Jenkinson’s report of what he had seen and experienced on the long journeys to and from Bukhara was being read in London. The governors of the Muscovy Company, experts like Eden and the mercantile community more broadly would have been gripped by Jenkinson’s account of his travels, especially his estimate of the potential for trade with Asia.
But Jenkinson’s greatest achievement was visual, not literary. It was a map, which was printed in London in 1562 and which he dedicated to Sir Henry Sidney, a courtier and Muscovy investor. On one level, Jenkinson’s map was a bravura piece of cartography, put together from his own notes and measurements and the work of others in the Muscovy Company. On another, it did more than this: in pictures and cartouches it told the story of Jenkinson’s journey into Russia and on to Asia. The scenes shown on the map are wonderful. Amongst the rivers and forests of northern Russia, sledges make their way through the snow. There are caravans of camels pulling carts loaded high with wares. Cossack and Tatar warriors fire their short bows, and the hordes of the Nogai make camp near their resting camels, horses and covered wagons. Potentates sit cross-legged, most strikingly Hadjim Khan and his advisers. The map is full of activity and busyness. Only at its edges are there sensations of the violence and brutality Jenkinson saw on his journey. But stability wins over everything. In one scene, even heavy waves do not disturb a beautifully detailed if unlikely Elizabethan galleon under full sail on the Caspian. And so the map brings to life the east as Anthony Jenkinson was keen to communicate it: it populates it and makes it real, showing places and people and landscapes; and it points the way to the glories of Cathay.
In London, thanks to the cartographer and engraver Nicholas Reynolds and the naturalized stranger printer Reyner Wolfe, Jenkinson offered an account of his fantastic journey and a prospectus for future mercantile endeavour. Londoners who went to Wolfe’s shop at the sign of the brazen serpent in Paul’s Churchyard could begin to make sense of Russia and Asia for themselves, stripped of the medieval fantasy of Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, but exotic nevertheless, and leaps and bounds beyond Herberstein. Not surprisingly, the significance of Jenkinson’s map was understood straight away. Abraham Ortelius, the greatest European cartographer of his day, was in communication about it with Nicholas Reynolds in 1562, and less than a decade later it was the template Ortelius used for Russia in his revolutionary world atlas – the most important volume of maps of the age, and one that Sir William Cecil, the powerful Muscovy investor, himself owned and annotated.14
If the expedition out to Bukhara had been the last of Anthony Jenkinson’s great adventures, it would have been by itself groundbreaking. But between 1562 and 1564 he went once again to Russia and on to Persia, with the ambition of putting down the foundations for reliable Anglo-Persian trade. The Swallow, a Muscovy Company ship, was packed with 400 kerseys that Jenkinson would take with him to Moscow and Persia. He travelled to the Persian court at Quazvin by way of Shemakha, where he was received by the ruler of Shirvan, Abdul-khan. Jenkinson carried with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth I to the Shah of Persia, the ‘Great Sophy’. On 20 November 1562, Jenkinson and his interpreter were admitted to the shah’s presence:
Thus coming before his majesty with such reverence as I thought meet to be used, I delivered the queen’s majesty’s letters with my present, which he accepted, demanded of me of what country of Franks I was, and what affairs I had there to do: unto whom I answered that I was of the famous city of London within the noble realm of England, and that I was sent thither from the most excellent and gracious sovereign lady Elizabeth, queen of the said realm, for to treat of friendship, and free passage of our merchants and people, to repair and traffic within his dominions, for to bring in our commodities, and to carry away theirs, to the honour of both princes, the mutual commodity of both realms, and wealth of the subjects.15
It was an ambitious pitch and, given the shah’s hostility at Jenkinson’s profession of Christianity, it looked unlikely to get very far. But Jenkinson’s skills of patient negotiation and his careful diplomacy helped in fact to pull off just the kind of mercantile coup he was hoping for. On his return journey to Moscow he was able to negotiate exclusive trading privileges for the Muscovy Company in the territories ruled by the king of Shirvan and Hircan, helped (against all the indications) by a letter of support from the shah himself.16 ‘The silks of the Medes to come by way of Muscovia into England is a strange hearing’: so wrote Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s ambassador to the French court and many years earlier Richard Eden’s tutor in Cambridge, hoping that this breakthrough into Asia would put England on an equal footing with Spain and Portugal.17
Yet, in spite of his success in Persia, Jenkinson’s ambitions for Cathay were undimmed: its wealth and potential as a market for English cloth were as clear to him as they had been in 1558. And so, when he was back in England in 1564, he put his mind to a petition to the queen for Cathay’s discovery. Knowing from his journey to Bukhara that the land route was impassable because of war and banditry, he wanted to go by sea. In this, like Sebastian Cabot and Richard Eden before him, he made the two typical assumptions of his age: first, that there was an easily navigable sea route from England to Cathay; and secondly, that this northern voyage was shorter than the route the Portuguese used to get to the eastern seas of Asia.18 Even the tireless Anthony Jenkinson had now leapt a number of steps beyond what was possible.
The response to Jenkinson’s petition at Elizabeth’s court was a resounding silence. And by 1566 he had a competitor just as keen to unlock the riches of Asian trade. This was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a Devonshire gentleman whose later military posting to Ireland gave him a deserved reputation for brutality. Where Jenkinson favoured a passage to Cathay by sailing around Scandinavia and northern Russia, Gilbert suggested instead a route by the northwest, past and beyond t
he continent of America. Sir Humphrey went full tilt at the project, petitioning the queen that in return for discovering Cathay ‘and all the other east parts of the world’ – at his own cost – he and his heirs might be given exclusive rights of navigation to get there and back, and a portion of what he imagined would be very healthy customs revenue.19
Both men wildly overestimated their chances of getting what they wanted. At first competitors, making cases for their separate projects, they fairly quickly joined forces. Still there was silence at court. Sir William Cecil, as the queen’s secretary, simply sat on his hands and did nothing. The Muscovy Company was up in arms at Gilbert’s proposal in particular, which they saw as a flagrant challenge to their own inviolable charter rights over any navigation of the northern seas. Sir Humphrey had further annoyed its grandees by suggesting that he was a Muscovy Company man, when plainly he was not. The company’s governors appealed, successfully, to Cecil.20 When by 1568 there was the germ of an idea at Muscovy House for an expedition to find a north-western passage to Cathay, it was most likely touted to emphasize and protect the company’s monopoly.21
Here, beautifully encapsulated in a single episode, were all the possibilities and problems of mercantile London in Elizabeth’s reign: energy, enterprise, tenacity and talent, all counterbalanced by a determination to protect hard-won charter rights. Even Anthony Jenkinson, who had ridden, sailed and fought his way to Bukhara and carried himself with poise and dignity in Persia, could do nothing to shake the masterly inactivity of the queen’s secretary or the conservatism of the city’s establishment. Their interests had to be protected. But, as we will see, men like Sir Humphrey Gilbert did not go away. More projects and proposals appeared, setting out to claim portions of an always expanding world. And so a powerful mercantile and political establishment – merchants and royal government broadly working together for profit and policy – adapted and reinvented themselves to changing circumstances.
London’s Triumph Page 17