by John Butman
The English ruling elite had long been enthusiastic consumers of exotic commodities from the East, and their appetite started to expand in the twelfth century, when crusader-soldiers returned home from the Holy Land with all kinds of luxury goods.13 Most of the exotic goods native to tropical lands were rarities. Spices, in particular, were special—the words have a common etymology—because so few of them, with the exception of saffron, could be grown at home.* These otherworldly condiments were used not only to preserve and enhance food but also to ward off disease, arouse sexual desire, and summon the gods. Their scarcity value conferred status on those who purchased and used them, and for several centuries only monarchs, noblemen, and bishops could afford them.
Yet English merchants made no effort to match the Portuguese and Spanish by trading directly with countries in the East. Indeed, it was not until the crisis of the early 1550s that the English realized they must begin the search for new markets beyond Europe. The trouble was, England did not have the oceangoing expertise of its commercial rivals. Fortunately, John Dudley, who had served as Henry VIII’s last Lord Admiral, knew someone who could help, if only he could be persuaded to come back to England.
That someone was Sebastian Cabot, the greatest seafaring expert in all of Europe.
THE NAME CABOT was hardly unknown to the English. It harked back to a time when England had made its first steps toward the New World. In 1497, Sebastian’s father, a Venetian called Giovanni or Zuan Cabota—later Anglicized as John Cabot—had initiated a voyage to the New World for the English. King Henry VII had granted him letters patent—the royal document specifying rights and permissions of discovery—“to find, discover, and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces… which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”14
Henry’s sponsorship of Cabot’s voyage represented more than a bold initiative—it was a remarkable act of defiance against the dominant powers of the day: not only the kings of Spain and Portugal, but also Pope Alexander VI, the leader of the Catholic Church. After Christopher Columbus first claimed lands in the West Indies for Spain in 1492, the Portuguese had protested. In a negotiation supervised by the Pope, a Spaniard, they struck a deal that was ratified by the Treaty of Tordesillas, named after the village in northern Spain where the deliberations took place. They drew an imaginary line through a meridian near the middle of the Atlantic, dividing the world roughly in half. Spain was granted the rights to any non-Christian territories they had discovered or might discover to the west of the line, Portugal got everything to the east of it. In effect, Spain and Portugal divided up the unexplored world among themselves—with the approval of the Pope, whom Christians believed was God’s representative on earth.
Henry’s support for John Cabot’s voyage was risky not only because of the potential reaction of the Pope, Spain, and Portugal, but also because Cabot was untested. Although he had extensive experience as a mariner in the Mediterranean—as his name, which means “the coaster,” suggests—he had no oceangoing experience.15 But the Venetian was driven and persuasive and obviously willing to take the risk, and Bristol, where he was living, had a growing reputation as a seafaring capital. It was a thriving port, made wealthy through fishing as well as direct trade with Bordeaux, Lisbon, Seville, and the Atlantic islands: Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries. But legend also held that Bristol’s sailors had a taste for Atlantic exploration. One Bristolian had supposedly sailed in search of an illusive place known as the Isle of Brasil or High Brasil (not to be confused with Brazil in South America), and two merchants were said to have been “discoverers of the New found lands”—myth, perhaps, but part of the local lore.16
It was from this dynamic English port that, in May 1497, John Cabot departed in the Matthew, a three-masted caravel, flying the flag of Henry VII.17 Sebastian Cabot claimed that he, then in his teens, was on board the ship as one of his father’s crew of eighteen men.18 In June, they made landfall, went ashore, and came upon a fire site, a stick “carved and painted with brazil,” and a trail into the woods—which suggested the place was or had been inhabited.19 Cabot and his men set up a cross, raised the banner of Henry VII and the standard of St. Mark of Venice, and took possession of the place on behalf of the English king. Cabot called it Prima Tierra Vista, or First Discovered Land. Exactly where this land was, no one knows for sure. Some say Newfoundland, others Nova Scotia.20
When Cabot returned to Bristol, he was received with wild acclaim and became something of a celebrity. “He goes dressed in silk,” wrote Lorenzo Pasqualigo, a Venetian merchant residing in London, “and these English run after him like mad.” Cabot may well have made the claim that he had reached the fabled Cathay. Pasqualigo reported that the “Venetian… who went with a small ship from Bristol to find new islands” claimed to have “discovered mainland 700 leagues away, which is the country of the Grand Khan.”21 Henry VII was so delighted that he rewarded Cabot with a royal pension and an impressive title: Great Admiral.
The celebrity did not last, however. The following year, Cabot set out on another voyage, leading a fleet of five ships, again with Henry’s support and also the backing of some Bristol merchants. There were great hopes for this enterprise. According to the Duke of Milan’s ambassador, the plan was to “form a colony” and, as he explained, “by means of this, they hope to make London a more important mart for spices than Alexandria.”22 But John Cabot and his ship never returned.23
IT HAS BEEN speculated that Sebastian sailed on this second voyage, returning to England on one of the ships that did make it home.24 At any rate, after his father’s death, the young Venetian inherited the letters patent granted by Henry VII, and a few years later, when he was in his twenties, he embarked on a voyage across the northern Atlantic. Setting off in 1508, Cabot glimpsed what he considered was a channel of water around the northern coast of America. This, he believed, was the route to Cathay—what became known as the Northwest Passage. He had probably reached what is now called Hudson Strait, more than one hundred years before its eponymous discoverer, Henry Hudson. Cabot later revealed that he would have continued through the passage—to Cathay, as he presumed—if his crew had not threatened mutiny and persuaded him to return to England.25 When Cabot arrived home, he found that Henry VII had died, and, as the Venetians reported, the new king, Henry VIII, “cared little for such an enterprise” to the New World.26
For the next three years following his voyage, Cabot worked in England as a mapmaker. Then, in 1512, he was given royal permission to go to Spain and work for King Ferdinand, Henry VIII’s father-in-law. It seems he was lured there by the prospect of “the navigation to the Indies and the Island of the Bacallaos,”* meaning Newfoundland.27 This hoped-for voyage never happened, but Cabot evidently impressed the Spanish court. In 1518, he landed a plum job as Pilot Major at La Casa de la Contratación—the House of Trade—the official body responsible for managing the practical, political, and economic matters associated with Spain’s burgeoning empire in the New World.28 The Pilot Major was essentially the country’s senior navigator, a position created in 1508 and first held by Amerigo Vespucci. Among Cabot’s responsibilities was the continual updating of the Padrón Real, the Casa’s master chart of the world’s seas.29
Even as he carried out his official duties, Cabot retained his interest in finding a northern passage to the East. In 1519, Cabot—although he was now a Spanish official—was approached by England’s Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s powerful adviser, to lead a “voyage of discovery” to the “newfound island” for Henry’s “honour” and “for the general wealth of his realm.” It is not clear what kindled Henry’s sudden interest in the New World, but he pledged to provide ships for the venture if merchants paid for supplies and sailors’ wages. In return for their support, Henry promised to grant a monopoly of trade for ten years and a fifteen-month exemption on paying customs duties.30
The merchants considered the proposal. The three Gresham brothers—William, Richard, a
nd John—agreed to invest, as did other members of the Mercers and some Bristol merchants.31 The majority of London merchants, however, were not convinced. The members of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, a powerful guild of cloth merchants, were especially dubious, arguing that it made no sense to risk the lives of men and goods on “the singular trust of one man,” namely Sebastian Cabot. They questioned his experience and doubted his claims, suggesting that he was just repeating things he had “heard his Father and other men speak in times past.”32 Although Henry tried to keep the mission alive, it eventually fell apart in 1521.
With his hopes dashed, Cabot, now approaching forty, continued his work in Spain as Pilot Major for La Casa. Then, in 1524, another opportunity arose, this time courtesy of Charles V, ruler of the Spanish empire. A consortium of merchants, including Robert Thorne, an English merchant based in Seville whose father had sponsored John Cabot, agreed to fund a voyage to the East with Sebastian as leader. Charles charged Cabot with filling his ships “with all the gold, silver, pearls, precious stones, drugs and spices” that could be found in “eastern China, Tarshish, Ophir, Japan, the islands of the Molluccas, and other lands and islands.”33
In April 1526, Cabot’s fleet set off across the Atlantic. He had been instructed to pass through the Magellan Strait, named for the Portuguese nobleman, Ferdinand Magellan, who had discovered the passage round the southern tip of South America when leading the first circumnavigation of the world five years earlier. But Cabot failed to reach the strait, and when he returned to Spain he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to exile in Oran, a Spanish-controlled trading city on the north coast of Africa, now Algeria.
In the end, however, he was reprieved and restored to his post as Pilot Major.
HOW MUCH JOHN DUDLEY knew about the details of this turbulent episode in Sebastian Cabot’s past in Spain is not clear—but he believed that, whatever his faults, the Venetian was a man of exceptional experience, expertise, and tenacity.
There was no guarantee that Cabot would consider a return to England. He had built a life in Spain, and despite the lingering stain on his reputation Charles V still held him in high regard. But all was not rosy at work. At La Casa, Cabot got caught up in a game of power politics, as an intense debate raged between the advocates of the practical and theoretical aspects of navigation. Cabot was a practical man, suspicious of academic theorists, but he was losing the debate and, with it, his stature as a leader of La Casa.34
By now in his late sixties, he might have soldiered on, settling for a distinguished retirement. But in 1547 his beloved Spanish wife died, and suddenly he had no filial ties to keep him in Spain.35 He soon requested a six-month leave of absence from his duties at La Casa, saying that he intended to visit Brussels, where he needed to attend to some business affairs. It was then that Dudley, knowing that Cabot faced an uncertain future and was leaving Spain, took his opportunity. He and his fellow privy councillors earmarked one hundred pounds “for transporting of one Cabot, a pilot, to come out of Hispania to serve and inhabit in England.” By the following year, Cabot was in England, and his reward was an annuity of £166.36
Charles was livid at Cabot’s departure. In April 1549, he instructed his ambassador to demand Cabot’s return, later explaining that the Venetian “must clearly understand that we require his services, and claim a right to them.”37 But Cabot successfully evaded these demands, soon proving that Charles was right to be angry. After his arrival in England, Cabot got involved in the planning of more than one daring overseas project, probably at Dudley’s behest. One was an attack on Peru, the source of much of Spain’s silver wealth, but this did not materialize. The second was the voyage to Cathay that the English merchants had been considering. As Spain’s ambassador noted, “The people of London set a great value on the captain’s services, and believe him to be possessed of secrets concerning English navigation.”38
Cabot may indeed have carried a secret to England, embedded in a map of the world that he brought with him from Spain. He had first created a world map in 1544 as a way of demonstrating his extensive knowledge of the earth’s lands and oceans. Like many maps of the day, it combined cartography based on detailed information collected from mariners and merchants along with fanciful illustrations and marginal legends containing large segments of text. There were drawings of ships, strange and wonderful people, animals, buildings, and legends describing monsters with massive ears, birds that could lift an ox, and the funeral practices of the inhabitants of Bengal.39
Also, the map presented some information that Cabot did not actually believe. Emblazoned across the entire northern region of the earth are the Latin words Mare congelatum per totum—meaning “the entire sea is frozen” and, therefore, presumably impassable. Cabot believed, however, that the sea was perfectly navigable and that there was some kind of northern passage along the northern coast of America. He was not alone in thinking this. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer, had published an atlas with a wholly new depiction of the world, called the Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii alioru[m]que lustrationes, simply known as the Cosmographia. Drawing on the writings of Amerigo Vespucci, who coined the phrase “New World,” Waldseemüller rejected the hallowed view of ancient cosmographers who believed the world comprised three continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia. He added a fourth continent: a narrow, scraggly island surrounded by water at the western margin of the world. He gave the continent a name, arguing that since a “fourth part”—adding to Europe, Asia and Africa—had been “discovered by Amerigo Vespucci,” there was “no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part… America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.”40
But Waldseemüller’s map of North America was largely inspired guesswork, while Cabot’s belief in the northern passage was rooted in the voyage he began in 1508, when he claimed to have found the entrance to the sea route. In his early days in Spain, he tried to generate sufficient interest to mount another expedition. But he failed, and despite his best efforts to keep his discovery secret, others picked up on his claim. In 1537, Gemma Frisius, a renowned Dutch cosmographer serving as royal cartographer at the Spanish court, produced a globe that showed an open northern channel trending west and then southwest toward the Pacific Ocean. He labeled it the Strait of the Three Brothers—which may have referred to Cabot and his two brothers, who were all listed on the original royal patent granted to their father. Also, as if to underscore the point, he labeled the southern shore “the land found by the Britons.”41
Significantly, Cabot had not drawn this northern passage on his map of 1544. But when he came to London in 1547, he set about updating and revising the map, working with Clement Adams, who was an engraver as well as a writer. The revised version (now lost) depicted the northern passageway and quickly became one of the key documents for John Dudley and the London merchant’s bold new endeavor to reach Cathay.
3
THE MYSTERIE
SOMETIME IN LATE 1552, a group of merchants, courtiers, and intellectuals, in consultation with Sebastian Cabot, drew up plans for a new commercial venture and gave it a rather glorious name: “The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown.” Its purpose was to enable them to “lay their heads together” to “give their judgments” and to “provide things requisite and profitable” for the venture.1
The Mysterie was hardly the first English company. Many of London’s medieval guilds—which were associations of merchants who came together to protect and promote their particular trade—had gradually evolved into livery companies. These enjoyed significant privileges granted by the crown and, as their name suggests, they were distinguished by, among other things, their ceremonial dress. The twelve richest of these companies—known as the “Great Twelve” and led by the Worshipful Company of Mercers—were among the most powerful institutions in the country. Th
rough their apprenticeship systems, they determined who could enter their trade. They set standards for quality: the goldsmiths, for example, operated from a hall where they stamped gold they deemed to be of good quality, hence the term “hallmark.” Above all, the livery companies conferred upon their members the “freedom” of the city—in other words, citizenship. And without this designation, no person was permitted to trade in London. Anyone who dared to defy the system—by trading without a company’s approval—faced being ostracized as an “interloper.”2
The Mysterie had some characteristics of these traditional livery companies. The word “mysterie”—from the Latin ministerium and the Anglo-Norman mestier, meaning “art” or “calling”—signified an occupational group, an organization of professionals in a certain discipline or trade.3 But the term was becoming an anachronism even at this time and obscures the truly transformational character of the new company. Unlike the Great Twelve, the Mysterie was not so focused on a single, homogeneous group. In fact, it brought together in a new way two pillars of England’s ruling elite: merchants and courtiers.
To understand the two groups in the commerce-court dynamic, take a look at the geography of London. A map published in 1572 but representing London of the 1550s shows a vibrant place, the Thames busy with high-masted ships and rowing boats.4 To the east is the City of London, which lay in the shadow of the Tower of London. It is still surrounded by the wall that the Romans built when they first chose Londinium as the site for crossing the river. This was the commercial center, and here the merchants held sway. To the west is Westminster, which was gathered around the precincts of the medieval abbey, where the king resided and the courtiers were dominant. The two conurbations were linked by a long thoroughfare, the Strand, which was fronted by the riverside mansions of the great nobles.