New World, Inc.

by John Butman

  The City and Westminster, the merchants and the courtiers, had long enjoyed a close, symbiotic relationship—the business people filled the royal coffers in return for commercial privileges. But this was transformed in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries, when, as favored beneficiaries of the crown, they gained substantial wealth and property. Dudley, for example, claimed Durham House, the mansion on the Strand formerly owned by the bishops of Durham. The merchants, too, took advantage of the dissolution. The Mercers, for example, laid claim to the magnificent church, mansion, and associated lands that belonged to the order of Thomas Becket, a former archbishop of Canterbury, right in the heart of the City.5

  As the merchants from the City and the courtiers from Westminster increased in wealth and enjoyed royal favors, they began to share power, and the Mysterie was one of the first ventures in which they worked together with a new unity of purpose. But what also distinguished the Mysterie was its corporate structure. It was established with what has been called “a revolutionary new form of business organization”—arguably the world’s first joint-stock company and certainly the first in England.6 Until then, English trading voyages—to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Seville, even the eastern Mediterranean—had been funded by individual merchants or small syndicates. Typically, the business was conducted on credit and exchange, requiring relatively little up-front capital. But the Mysterie’s proposed voyage to Cathay promised to be altogether more capital-intensive and risky. No one merchant or courtier had the liquid assets to finance it alone, and given the parlous state of Edward VI’s finances, none could count on funding from the crown.

  It was to solve this problem that the Mysterie leaders chose the joint-stock form, which overcame these difficulties. This may have been at Sebastian Cabot’s suggestion, since the joint-stock approach, like so much about business organization, had been pioneered by Italian merchants, and he was deeply familiar with their business practices.7 Italian merchants devised the fundamental idea of a company, a compagnia—which comes from the conjunction of the Latin words cum and panis and means “breaking bread together.” It enabled individuals, usually relatives, to come together for their mutual benefit, devoting their time and money to a single, simple partnership or family firm.8 The joint-stock form took the company idea a step further. It provided a governance structure and had perpetual corporate status, so that a large number of individual investors—not just family members and not all of them directly involved in company operations—could pool their assets and share the risk over extended periods of time. This made investment highly attractive to courtiers because they could invest and potentially reap profits without having to get involved in the tedious business of management themselves. It also enabled investors to bequeath or sell their shares to other people, ideally at a higher price than they had originally paid.

  The Mysterie offered membership in the company to anyone prepared to invest twenty-five pounds, which, in effect, bought them a single share of stock. Although this sum may sound small today, it was far beyond the reach of most people, amounting to between two and three times the average annual salary of a journeyman.* For the richest citizens, however, who might spend twenty-five pounds on a suit of fine armor, the share price was reasonable and even attractive.9 Where else could you transmute such an amount into such a grand undertaking? As a result, the Mysterie was able to raise a total of six thousand pounds. By way of comparison, when Henry VII invested in John Cabot’s second voyage to the newfound land, albeit six decades earlier, he spent just fifty pounds. The names of the investors in the Mysterie have been lost to history, but if every subscriber purchased just one share, it means that 240 people were sufficiently excited or convinced to invest a sizeable amount—in a venture that might easily result in a complete loss.

  WITH THE ORGANIZATION established and funding secured, the Mysterie members—particularly George Barne, William Garrard, and Andrew Judde—set about organizing the voyage. These three constituted a formidable team. Supremely wealthy, they also possessed substantial administrative experience. Barne and Garrard ruled London, as mayor and sheriff respectively, while Judde, as Mayor of the Staple, oversaw the economy of Calais. Thomas Gresham probably also remained influential, although by this time he had been appointed the king’s factor, or merchant, responsible for handling the crown’s business affairs in Antwerp.

  The first task for the Mysterie organizers was to commission the construction of a fleet of three ships, purpose-built for a long voyage into potentially hostile waters. In doing so, they sought out the latest thinking on maritime design and building. No doubt, they were aided by John Dudley, who had gained a great deal of relevant knowledge during his years as Lord Admiral. The ships were designed to accommodate a large company of merchants and crew, with sufficient storage space for an eighteen-month supply of victuals and equipment, and ample cargo space to hold cloth and other export merchandise as well as the commodities they hoped to bring home.

  The merchants took great care in their preparations, making sure to purchase the best materials available, including “very strong and well-seasoned planks.” The diligent shipwrights worked “with daily travail, and their greatest skill” to build ships “staunch and firm” that could endure the hardships that certainly awaited them. Together, they tried to prepare for all eventualities. For example, the merchants had learned that the ships might encounter a type of worm known as the teredo navalis that could bore through even the staunchest oak planking. To prevent this, the shipbuilders sheathed the keels with thin sheets of lead.10

  With the ships under construction, the Mysterie began the critical task of recruiting men to lead the expedition, command the ships, and serve as crew and specialists. Unlike their Spanish rivals, the merchants of the Mysterie had no plans to build forts or conquer territories in distant lands. Their goal was to establish friendly relations with the leaders in foreign markets or, in Edward’s words, “an indissoluble and perpetual league of friendship.”11 They wanted to establish mercantile headquarters abroad and promote profitable trading relations. To this end, the captain would play a critical role. He might need to deal with hostile people and foreign armies along the way, and he might eventually be required to consort with the fabled king of Cathay, the Great Khan himself. So the captain would ideally be a diplomat, soldier, navigator, and merchant.

  There was no obvious English candidate available with such a range of skills. So, the Mysterie decided that the wisest choice for supreme commander and admiral of the fleet would be a gentleman-soldier—a person with a sound family lineage, unimpeachable personal character, and exceptional vitality. Accordingly, they appointed Sir Hugh Willoughby, who was “of goodly personage”—from the right kind of family—and suitably young, probably in his thirties.12 He had military experience, having been knighted on the battlefield after distinguishing himself in battle against the Scottish. What’s more, he keenly wanted the job. As Clement Adams noted, the young knight “earnestly requested” to be given command of the voyage.13

  Willoughby ticked many of the boxes, but he lacked one important qualification: maritime experience. So the Mysterie agreed to appoint a pilot major, or chief navigator, for the entire fleet. They chose a young man whom Cabot probably endorsed: Richard Chancellor. In 1550, Chancellor had taken part in a training voyage organized by Cabot. The ship Aucher, financed by Sir William Aucher, a courtier close to Dudley’s family, sailed to the Levant, manned by a cohort of talented young sailors that included Chancellor, the Borough brothers—Stephen and William—as well as Matthew Baker, an aspiring shipwright.14 The captain, Roger Bodenham, later reported that all the mariners on his ship had distinguished themselves and were ready to take charge of their own vessels and expeditions.15

  Chancellor had the eloquent support of the aristocrat Henry Sidney, Dudley’s son-in-law and longtime friend of the king, Edward VI. Still in his early twenties, and distinguished by hooded eyes and a delicate mouth, Sidney was a fine orator, and he
made a compelling case for Chancellor, who had been raised in his household. “You know the man by report,” Sidney told his fellow Mysterie investors, “I by experience; you by words, I by deeds; you by speech and company, but I, by the daily trial of his life, have a full and perfect knowledge of him.”

  But it was Chancellor’s formidable knowledge of the seas, rather than Sidney’s rhetorical flourishes, that ultimately persuaded the unsentimental merchants to put their faith in him. They even came to the conclusion that the “great hope for the performance of the business” rested almost entirely on the shoulders of the young navigator.16

  AS MUCH AS they trusted Chancellor, the Mysterie members wanted to prepare him as thoroughly as possible for his responsibility. To that end, they sent him to work with the foremost cosmographer of the age, Dr. John Dee. Just twenty-five, and well-known to John Dudley as tutor to his children, Dee was charged with helping Chancellor to develop the charts he would need to sail through unfamiliar waters and plot a route to Cathay.

  If anyone could help Chancellor in this regard, it was Dee. Praised as a brilliant polymath, Dee was another one of the generation of Cambridge scholars that had come to prominence under the patronage of William Cecil.17 A merchant’s son—his Welsh father was a Mercer—Dee was reportedly “a very handsome man,” who was “tall and slender” and had a “very fair, clear complexion.” He thrived at Cambridge, where he studied at St. John’s, Cecil’s beloved college. There, no doubt wearing what would become his trademark attire—a flowing garment “like an Artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves”—he developed the intense study habits that he continued throughout his life.18 He typically worked eighteen hours a day, breaking only “to allow [for] meat and drink (and some refreshing after) two hours every day” and “to sleep four hours every night.”19

  In 1546, when still a teenager, Dee was appointed to a founding fellowship at Trinity College, which was newly established by Henry VIII. Officially, he held his post in the study of Greek, although mathematics was his true calling and greatest strength. The college that would later boast Sir Isaac Newton among its professors did not yet have a lecturer in mathematics. As John Aubrey, the contemporary biographer, put it, “Astrologer, Mathematician and Conjurer were accounted the same things.”20

  In 1547, Dee crossed the English Channel to study civil law at the University of Louvain, in modern-day Belgium, after Cambridge had lost its star law professor with Sir Thomas Smith’s move to court. While there, however, he developed a fascination with cosmography. The cosmographers’ goal was to describe the overarching principles governing the formation of the universe—not the precise geographic features of the earth or the other planets. Dee took up his study at a time of enormous change in the understanding of the universe. In 1543, a few years before Dee arrived on the European mainland, a book called De Revolutionibus had been published. Written by Mikolaj Kopernik, an obscure Polish priest better known as Copernicus, its then heretical theory—that the sun, not the earth, occupied the center of the universe—was starting to be hotly debated in learned circles.

  At Louvain, Dee encountered some of the leading lights in the field of cosmography. He befriended Gemma Frisius—the scholar who had incorporated the information about Sebastian Cabot’s voyage to the Northwest Passage in one of his globes—as well as Frisius’s pupil, Gerard Mercator. During his time with them, Dee copied their maps and came into possession of a pair of Mercator’s globes.21 Returning to England in 1551, as the cloth industry spiraled downward and the country plunged into economic crisis, Dee was soon tutoring not only Dudley’s children but also young Edward, a job he landed by proposing a novel way to teach mathematics that required “measuring the size of the universe”—a cosmographical pursuit if ever there was one.

  With Richard Chancellor, Dee was not so much teaching as collaborating, although he called the young navigator an “incomparable” student. Together, they tackled the particularly tricky problems of sailing in the far northerly latitudes. The magnetic pull of the North Pole affects the compass, making it difficult to hold a true course. Moreover, the meridians of longitude become compressed the closer ships get to the Pole, so that when following a fixed-compass bearing the sailor may spiral off course. To aid their studies, Dee and Chancellor referred to the Mercator globes Dee had brought from Louvain. Also, they used Dee’s own invention, which he called a “paradoxical compass,” designed to help mariners correct for longitudinal compression.22

  During their consultations, Dee and Chancellor must have focused their attention on the various possible routes to Cathay. They were probably able to consult Cabot’s revised map of the world, completed in 1549, which showed the Northwest Passage. Given Cabot’s lifelong interest in that route, the likelihood is that Dee and Chancellor plotted a course along the margin of North America. Yet, by the time the two men had completed their work, it seems that the Mysterie had agreed that its fleet would take a very different route: the Northeast Passage. Investors were informed that Willoughby and Chancellor would attempt “to sail into the East parts, by the coasts of Norway, Lappia, and Finmarchia, and so by the narrow tract of the sea by the coasts of Groueland, into the frozen sea, called Mare Congelatum, and so forth to Cathay.”23

  FOR ALL THEIR fascination with Cathay, the Mysterie merchants had very little practical information about the people, lands, and seas to the northeast of the British Isles. This was largely because the merchants of the Hanseatic League, from Germany’s Baltic coast, held a firm grip on the trade to those markets—not for nothing was the North Sea then known as the Mare Germanicus, or German Sea. It was only after Thomas Gresham’s assault on the Hanse merchants’ privileges in 1552—an action that paved the way for an opening of the sea lanes to English commercial traffic—that the Mysterie merchants could contemplate voyages to the northeast and beyond.

  Nevertheless, plenty of information about Cathay and sea routes to the East did exist. In the first fifty years of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese amassed some six thousand documents relating to trade in the East. Most of this material, however, was unpublished, undistributed, or held in secret.24 A good deal of the published work, if it was not held close by governments or trade organizations, was either too general to be of much use, out of date, or unavailable in English or Latin. The Decades of the New World, by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian scholar in the Spanish court, chronicled the history of Spain and Portugal’s discoveries—but it had first been published in 1516. Another Italian, Giovanni Batista Ramusio, who was based in Venice, published the first volume of his Navigations & Voyages, a collection of travelers’ tales, in 1550—but it was not readily available to English readers.

  Filling the knowledge gap was a library of popular travel narratives, chief among them Marco Polo’s Travels. Another popular title was The Eastern Parts of the World Described, by Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan monk who journeyed from Italy into Iran, India, China, and Russia in the 1300s. Friar Odoric marveled at the abundance of pepper available on India’s southwestern Malabar coast and wrote that the spice “groweth on plants which have leaves like ivy.”25 He described several Chinese cities, including Censcalan, now the massive industrial city of Guangzhou, which, even in his day, was a sprawling metropolis “as big as three Venices.” Here he found a shipping industry “so great and vast in amount that to some it would seem well nigh incredible.” Odoric spent three years in the “noble city Cambalech”—present-day Beijing—where the Great Khan, the Chinese ruler, kept a splendid palace. He reported on how the ruler’s court worked, provided information for travelers, and explained how news was disseminated—by a form of pony express, but employing camels when the news was particularly urgent.26

  Even more popular was the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, purportedly written by an English knight, describing his experiences in India and China starting in 1322 and continuing for some thirty years. Almost certainly, Mandeville was the nom de plume of a French armchair traveler who derived most of hi
s tales from Odoric’s work.27 Nevertheless, his Travels served to engender interest in the Great Khan. Apparently, the emperor and his barons valued woolen cloths more than their “cloth of gold and silken camlet”—which must have perked up the ears of a purveyor of English broadcloth.28

  To improve their knowledge, the Mysterie organizers started “to inquire, search and seek” for information “concerning the Easterly part or tract of the world.”29 Their inquiry included, quite bizarrely, an interview with two men who worked in King Edward’s stable. Adams called them “Tartarians,” meaning they came from the land of Tartary, or central Asia, and a term used by Mandeville.30 The stable hands proved to be useless interviewees. They ultimately admitted they knew little about their homeland, preferring to “toss pots”—that is, drink—than “learn the states and dispositions of people”31

  To bring them more reliable information, the merchants commissioned Richard Eden, another of Cecil’s acolytes and his secretary at the time, to prepare a dossier on “new found lands.” The result was A Treatyse of the Newe India, which was largely a translation of parts of the Universal Cosmographie, a book by Sebastian Munster, a German professor at Basel University in Switzerland. Originally published in 1544, the Cosmographie offered information on a variety of foreign lands. But, in a sign that the Mysterie was focused on reaching Cathay, Eden picked out stories about the countries of the East: Calicut, a city on the Malabar Coast and “the most famous market town of India,” the “great empire of Cathay,” and the “marvelous cities” of Mangi, or southern China. He painted them in a glorious light, contrasting them with the lands conquered by the Spanish in America, which he described in derogatory terms as places with “anthropophagi” (cannibals) and limited commercial opportunities.32