New World, Inc.
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Eden’s work, dedicated to John Dudley, was more than a collection of translated tales, however. It was in effect a prospectus and brochure for investors in the Mysterie venture. Eden, who has been described as “England’s first literary imperialist,” urged his readers to see the “reward of noble and honest enterprises”—namely “worldly riches,” the glorification of God, and the enlargement of the Christian faith.33 He further reassured those who may have noticed that a northern passage to Cathay did not appear on most maps. Its absence, Eden explained, was because the cartographers had relied on the outdated calculations of Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek-Egyptian mathematician who produced a “world gazetteer” in AD 150. And, although Ptolemy was “an excellent man,” many things were “hid from his knowledge” at that distant time.34
Even aided by the information collected in Eden’s Treatyse, and armed with the knowledge imparted by Cabot and Dee, the Mysterie was still taking a grand and audacious shot in the dark. For all the Mysterie’s preparations and investigations, Willoughby and Chancellor barely knew where they were headed, what they might discover, or how they would conduct business with whosoever they might encounter there. As Clement Adams acknowledged, “it was doubtful whether there was any passage or no.”35
That is why Sebastian Cabot prepared some very precise instructions, which he called ordinances. These constituted a kind of mission statement and employee manual for Willoughby and his crew.
BASED ON HIS tenure as Pilot Major at La Casa as well as on his own extensive seagoing experience, Cabot knew that an expedition could go disastrously wrong without a clear statement of purpose and written rules and regulations. His thirty-three ordinances provided instructions for managing the fleet while at sea, guidelines for behavior when encountering new people in strange places, and advice on methods that would work best when trading in unfamiliar markets.
The first ordinance was general in nature, almost motivational in tone. Cabot entreated the ship’s company to be “knit and accorded in unity, love, conformity, and obedience.” Only if they avoided the kind of mutinous dissent that “hath overthrown many notable intended and likely enterprises and exploits” would they stand any chance of success.36 These words had their origins in Cabot’s own bitter experience. In 1508, he had faced a mutinous crew when he reached what he believed was the entrance to the Northwest Passage. Then, in 1526, he once again clashed with his crew as he navigated along the coast of South America.
Several of Cabot’s ordinances are concerned with seafaring, navigation, and fleet management. In one of them, he specified that the captain, pilot major, and masters must all agree on matters of navigation. He inserted this in order to prevent the ships’ becoming separated from one another and to avoid unilateral action on any master’s part. In another ordinance, he reinforced this point, making it clear that the “fleet shall keep together and not separate themselves asunder.”
Cabot also stressed the importance of chronicling the voyage. He recommended that the merchants “shall daily write, describe, and put in memory the Navigation of every day and night.” All the vital information was to be recorded in “a common ledger” so that the Mysterie’s leaders could learn from the experience and better prepare the next voyage. The importance of knowledge gathering was further underlined in an ordinance that directed the “steward and cook of every ship” to make weekly—or even more frequent—accounts of “the victuals, as well flesh, fish, biscuit, meat, or bread” and all else, so that “no waste or unprofitable excess be made.” The fleet was provisioned with food for eighteen months, though no one knew for sure how long they might actually be away from England.37 A detailed and accurate record-keeping of the food supplies could mean the difference between life and death.
Given that Willoughby and his crew were sure to meet new peoples, Cabot warned them not to use “violence or force”—the English, it was clear, wanted to be different from the Spanish. In particular, no woman should “be tempted,” implying there should be no dalliances, romantic liaisons, or forced sexual encounters between the English and native people. Also, the mariners were to take pains “not to provoke” any foreigners by “disdain, laughing, contempt, or such like,” regardless of how strange or unusual their manners and appearance.
If the subject of religion came up, the crew were advised to “pass it over in silence.” Even though investors had been assured that the venture would promote the enlargement of the Christian faith, the English wanted to avoid any subjects that might interrupt the peaceful, commercial aims of the voyage. To this point, Cabot added a stern reminder that the company was operating according to new rules: those of a joint-stock company. This meant, he said, that no individual was to conduct business privately, on his own behalf, for his own benefit. Each was only to do business for “the common stock of the company.”
Above all, Willoughby and his crew were instructed to remember that they were on a mission for king and country. They were “not to give up,” Cabot wrote, “until it shall be accomplished, so far forth as possibility and life of man may serve or extend.”
4
A NEWE AND STRANGE NAVIGATION
ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, May 20, 1553, the Mysterie’s flotilla of newly constructed ships prepared to set off from Ratcliffe, a village on the north bank of the Thames and about two miles downstream from the heart of London. The flagship, Bona Esperanza, was commanded by Hugh Willoughby, the soldier with little maritime experience. Richard Chancellor, the pilot major, commanded the largest of the vessels, the Edward Bonaventure. The ships’ names—a third vessel was called Bona Confidentia—expressed the optimism of the enterprise: Good Hope, Good Fortune, Good Confidence.1
The ships sailed with the blessing and good wishes of King Edward, along with a letter of royal introduction. The document, translated into Greek and “diverse other languages,” was signed with a flourish and grandly addressed to “all Kings, Princes, Rulers, Judges, and Governours of the earth.”2 In it, Edward announced that he, the king of England, had “licensed the right valiant and worthy Sir Hugh Willoughby” to venture to lands beyond his dominions, to conduct trade and to establish “an indissoluble and perpetuall league of friendship” with trading partners abroad.3 He promised the foreign kings that, if they allowed his merchants to conduct business in their domains, their subjects would receive reciprocity in England “if at any time they shall come to our kingdoms.”4
According to the sailing orders, the ships were to progress to the Thames estuary, a journey of some thirty-five miles. Once there, they were to turn north into the North Sea, the Mare Germanicus, and then head toward the Oceanus Deucale—now known as the Norwegian Sea—that lay beyond Scotland.
After clearing the Norwegian coast, they were to turn east again and continue sailing as far as the wind would take them and the seas would let them. If all went well, they would scud through the northeast seaway, skirt the territory marked on Cabot’s map as Terra Incognita—unknown land—and reach the hoped-for outlet into the China Sea. From there they would navigate, somehow, to Cathay and the markets of the East, where they would trade English cloth for spices and silks or whatever could be had—and then do it all in reverse.
This was a bold “blue ocean” strategy of the most literal kind.5 To execute on the plan, Willoughby and Chancellor had assembled a crew of 116 men—sailors, of course, as well as cooks, carpenters, coopers, gunners, surgeons, and a minister. Also aboard was a large contingent of merchants—eighteen of them—who were to be the first English commercial travelers to crack the new overseas markets.6
At Ratcliffe, to see them off, was Sebastian Cabot. Now about seventy, his luxuriant hair had gone completely white, and his beard, bifurcated into bushy tufts, extended down to his chest. He was too old to make the voyage himself, but it remained, nevertheless, the realization of his lifetime dream: to prove the existence of a northern passage to Cathay.
AS THE TIDE turned on that May day, the mariners, resplendent in their azur
e-blue outfits, cut from a cloth produced in the tiny fishing village of Watchet on England’s southwest coast, bade farewell to their wives and children, kinfolk, and friends who had gathered to see them off.7 Then the ships progressed downstream to Deptford, where they anchored for the night. On the second day, the fleet approached Greenwich, and the sumptuous riverside palace where Edward and his court were then in residence. At the sight of the approaching vessels, courtiers ran out of the palace to watch them sail by. Townsfolk swarmed to the river’s edge to wave. Members of the Privy Council peered out from the windows of their chamber. Others scurried to the tops of towers to take in the scene. The sailors shouted, scrambled up the rigging, climbed onto the poop, teetered on the spars, and fired the ships’ guns so that the “tops of the hills sounded therewith.”8 The procession, according to an eyewitness account, was a “very triumph.”9 Except in one respect. The young king was seriously ill and unable to come to the window. Those attending him feared for his life.
The Willoughby fleet navigated the traffic and currents of the Thames for six days, bumping along from Blackwall to Woolwich to Gravesend, until they reached the outlet to the North Sea. They then sailed up the east coast of England, putting in at the port of Harwich, about fifty miles north of the Thames estuary, where they waited for a favorable wind. At last, in late June, the wind blew up fair from the southwest, and the Bona Esperanza, Bona Confidentia, and Edward Bonaventure “committed themselves to the sea, giving their last adieu to their native Country, which they knew not whether they should ever return to see again.” Uncertain of “what hazards they were to fall” or “what uncertainties of the sea they were to make trial of,” the mariners were reported to have “looked oftentimes back, and could not refrain from tears.” Even Richard Chancellor, courageous as he was, appeared “somewhat troubled” because “he left behind him his two little sons” who would be “orphans if he speed not well.”10
THE WILLOUGHBY FLEET followed Cabot’s instructions as faithfully as they could and managed to sail “in company”—together, as he had specified. In late July, after more than a month at sea, a massive storm blew up off the coast of Norway. “By violence of wind, and thickness of mists,” Willoughby noted in his logbook, “we were not able to keep together within sight.”11 Chancellor feared his comrades were not only lost to him, but to the world: “If the rage and fury of the sea have devoured those good men, or if as yet they live, and wander up and down in strange countries, I must needs say they were men worthy of better fortune.”12
The next day the crew of Willoughby’s Bona Esperanza spotted the Bona Confidentia on the horizon. Chancellor’s Edward Bonaventure, however, was nowhere to be seen. Separated from his pilot major, Willoughby decided to proceed to one of the known places on the charts prepared with the help of John Dee—the Wardhouse, the present-day area of Vardø, off the north coast of Norway.13 It was there that they had agreed to meet should the ships become separated.
But no sooner had Willoughby settled on this plan than he ran into trouble. He was no seafarer, and he lacked the mariner’s instincts about weather and the experience of keeping his two ships aright and on course through violent storms. The Wardhouse, as described by a visitor a few years later, was a “castle standing in an island” two miles from the mainland and subject to the king of Denmark. Its isolated inhabitants “live[d] only by fishing.”14 But it was in vain that Willoughby scanned the horizon, and his ships, tacking and wallowing through the sea, sailed far to the northeast until mid-August, then headed southeast before eventually turning back at the end of the month and proceeding west until the middle of September. The path they took, as recorded in Willoughby’s logbook, was a desperate zigzagging course.15 Without Chancellor, Willoughby was unable to make effective use of his flagship’s nautical instruments. “The land,” he observed ominously, “lay not as the Globe made mention.”16
Eventually, in mid-September, four months after leaving London, the Bona Esperanza and Bona Confidentia put in at a harbor. It was not the Wardhouse, but the sea ran deep into the mainland and provided a safe haven, shelter from the winds, and a secure anchorage. The water teemed with seals and fish, while the land seemed “strange and wonderful.” The crew caught sight of bears, deer, foxes, and some “strange beasts.” After a week, they “thought best to winter there.” The “year [was] far spent” and they feared the onset of “evil weather.”17
While Willoughby hunkered down for the winter, Chancellor, having survived the storm, sailed the Edward Bonaventure on a smooth course to the Wardhouse. He waited there for seven days, keeping watch for any sign of Willoughby’s two ships. When none came, he had to make a decision. This time, he could not turn to Cabot’s instructions. As Cabot had rightly noted in one of his ordinances, “Of things uncertain, no certain rules may or can be given.”18
Chancellor decided to follow Cabot’s more general exhortation—to “not give up” and “to bring that to pass which was intended.” As his sponsor, Sir Henry Sidney, had noted, Chancellor was a supremely brave sailor. Unlike the merchant-investors who stayed at “home quietly with our friends,” he had chosen to “hazard his life amongst the monstrous and terrible beasts of the sea,” declaring that if he did not succeed, he would “die the death.” Sailing on, he “held on his course toward that unknown part of the world, and sailed so far that he came at last to the place where he found no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the Sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty Sea.”19
The constant daylight of the Arctic proved a navigational boon. Even with precise charts and reasonable knowledge of the waters, neither of which Chancellor had, sailing at night is a precarious undertaking. There were no buoys or channel markers, no lights ashore to indicate where a landmass might be. But at last, while Willoughby was still languishing in the North Sea, Chancellor was able to bring his ship into a great bay, perhaps a hundred miles across, with the help of the midnight sun.20
Chancellor did not know where he was, but he anchored the Edward Bonaventure and soon saw a fishing boat in the distance. With a few of his men, he approached the fishermen, but they hastened away, “amazed with the strange greatness” of the English ship. Sometime later, and mindful of Cabot’s instructions to deal courteously with local people, he managed to tempt them back, inviting them on board his ship. He learned that the “country was called Russia, or Moscovie, and that Ivan Vasilivich of Russia (which was at that time their King’s name) ruled and governed far and wide in those places.”
The “Russes,” in return, asked Chancellor and his men “whence they were, and what they came for.” They replied that they were Englishmen “sent into those coasts, from the most excellent King Edward the sixth.” They assured the fishermen that they sought nothing from Ivan but “traffic,” meaning trade, with his people. If such trade could begin, they said, then “they doubted not but that great commodity and profit would grow to the subjects of both kingdoms.”21
Chancellor—having demonstrated his worth as a pilot—now displayed his skills as a diplomat and negotiator. The Russians told him they could not trade without permission from the tsar, Ivan Vasilyevich. To get instructions from him, they sent a letter by a “sledman” messenger to Moscow and, while waiting for a reply, hemmed and hawed about what they could or could not supply to Chancellor’s party. At last, Chancellor, growing impatient, threatened to depart and ditch plans to travel to Moscow. This alarmed the Russians, who had seen some of Chancellor’s “wares and commodities as they greatly desired.” So, without waiting for word from the tsar, they decided to organize a team of sledmen to transport the Englishmen to Moscow—a journey of some fifteen hundred miles across icy, snow-bound land. En route, they met the sledman messenger coming toward them with a letter of welcome from Ivan written in the “most loving manner.” When Chancellor finally arrived in Moscow, he was impressed by what he found: a city “that in bignesse” was “as great as the City of London” with many large buildings, although none as be
autiful as those in London.
The emperor, Tsar Ivan IV (who would only later earn the sobriquet “The Terrible”), kept the English party waiting for twelve days before granting them an audience. At last, they were escorted to his residence and through the gates of the court, where they found a hundred courtiers “all appareled in cloth of gold.” Then they went into the “chamber of presence” where the tsar sat “aloft, in a very royal throne,” wearing a golden crown and robe and holding a “scepter garnished and beset with precious stones.” Ivan was attended by his chief secretary and 150 counselors. This display so amazed the English travelers that they might have been thrown “out of countenance,” but Chancellor remained calm, presented the letter from Edward VI, and engaged in conversation with the tsar, answering his many questions with few words. Apparently satisfied with their comments, the tsar invited the Englishmen to dinner with him that evening. It proved to be another stunning scene, with gold service and gold tablecloths, and 140 servants, also dressed in gold, seeing to the needs of a hundred guests. After dinner, the tsar impressed the Englishmen by greeting each of his guests by name and conversing with them.22
The reception of the English by the tsar was truly a momentous event. Not since the days of King Harold II—who was vanquished by William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066—had there been official contact between England and Russia. Back then, Harold’s daughter had been married off to the Grand Prince of Kiev.23 But Chancellor had arrived in Muscovy at an opportune moment of change. The Russians were expanding their empire by opening the trade route along the Volga River—which flowed from Moscow to the Caspian Sea—and tapping into the riches of Persia and the Silk Road to China. It had been thirty years since an ambassador from western Europe, representing the Habsburgs, had been seen at the Russian court. Now Ivan was looking for new trading partners. Chancellor’s unexpected arrival provided him with an opportunity to reestablish relations with the governments and traders of western Europe—and he seized it.24