by John Butman
Elizabeth’s campaign to reassert her sovereignty as queen of Ireland had been a resounding failure. For Sir Thomas, there was to be no third chance. His health failed, and he fell into a long and painful decline, finally dying in August 1577. His tomb in the church in Theydon Mount near Hill Hall, his Essex mansion, features a full-figure effigy, resting almost jauntily on his left elbow. It belies the reality of a man who, though he achieved much, left the world with his greatest ideas unproved.
In a dispiriting final act, Smith’s brother and nephews eventually bartered some of his land holdings in Ireland for “an annual rent of a boar and a hogshead of claret.”66
PART II
ENTERPRISE 1574–1604
6
THE LAST GREAT CHALLENGE OF THE AGE
IN DECEMBER 1574, with Calais a fond memory and Ireland a fading hope, a rough-hewn seaman from the north of England named Martin Frobisher paid a visit to Muscovy House, which served as the company’s headquarters on Seething Lane in the London parish of All Hallows Barking. A “fair and large” building, it stood near the Tower of London and close by the Old Wool Quay, the wharf where England’s greatest medieval export had traditionally been loaded onto ships for export to foreign lands.1
The purpose of Frobisher’s visit was to hand-deliver an important letter from the Privy Council. In it, the royal advisers called on the governors of the Muscovy Company to mount an expedition for “the discovery of the country of Cathay by sea.” This, they said, “would be to England a matter of great commodity”—that is, of great advantage or benefit. If, however, they chose not to mount such a venture, the privy councillors requested that the Muscovy Company grant their license to others who were “desirous now to attempt the same”—namely the deliverer of the letter, Martin Frobisher.2
Of course, this was not the first time that an advocate of the Northwest Passage to Cathay had sought support from the Privy Council and rights from the Muscovy Company. Nearly ten years earlier, Humphrey Gilbert had sought approval for essentially the same westward voyage, but the leaders of the Muscovy Company had quashed his proposal because they wished to protect their commercial rights to the territory.
Frobisher, however, enjoyed the full support of the Privy Council. So even though the Muscovy Company held the monopoly to trade in the north, secured by both a royal charter and an Act of Parliament, they could not so easily brush him aside. His letter delivered, the court, or ruling body, of the company—which comprised two governors, four “consuls,” and twenty-four assistants—met to consider his proposal. After their review, they requested a further meeting with Frobisher so that “they might determine what were mete to be done.”3
Frobisher duly made his way once again to the great house on Seething Lane. There he met with the members of a subcommittee composed of four men who possessed vast experience of financing, organizing, and leading pioneering overseas voyages: George Barne, William Towerson, Stephen Borough, and Michael Lok.4 Barne was the son of the late Sir George, who had been one of the Mysterie’s principal doers. A leading member of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, he was a hugely influential figure in London’s merchant community and would follow in his father’s footsteps as Lord Mayor of London. His marriage to Anne, the daughter of Sir William Garrard, another of the principal doers, had united two great mercantile dynasties.5 His brother-in-law was Sir Francis Walsingham, one of the leading privy councillors, which further enhanced his standing and influence.*
William Towerson, like Barne, was a merchant—a leading member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners. But unlike Barne and most London merchants, he had practical experience of the open ocean. Not only had he financed three expeditions to Africa’s Gold Coast in the 1550s, he had led them, too. His first, in 1555, was his most successful: he traded cloth and other commodities, returning to England with about fifty ivory tusks and 127 pounds of gold. Also, Towerson had the distinction of being one of the first English travel writers, carefully documenting what he saw during his voyages. He liked to jot down key words spoken by local people. “I learned some of their language,” he wrote, in a lengthy report on his first voyage to Guinea, on the Gold Coast: “Dasse, Dassee,” for example, meant “I thank you”; “foco, foco” was “cloth”; and, most important, “sheke” was the word for “gold.”6 But in 1557, after his third voyage, Towerson gave up life on the high seas and settled down, trading on his own account and importing furs—the stock in trade of Skinners—as well as silk tapestries, feathers, and carpets from the Low Countries.7
The third member of the subcommittee was Stephen Borough. He had been one of the youngest founding members of the Mysterie—in his twenties at the time. Now, at fifty, he was arguably the Muscovy Company’s most knowledgeable mariner. He had served on the first of the Cabot-inspired ventures—the training voyage of the Aucher to the Levant in 1550—and he had been master on Richard Chancellor’s ship, the Edward Bonaventure, on the 1553 voyage to Cathay. Then, in 1556, he made another attempt to navigate the Northeast Passage, and although he was forced to turn back, he nevertheless sailed well beyond the White Sea—the farthest east that any English voyager had traveled at that time.8
And, finally, there was Michael Lok.
Lok, forty-three years old, sprang from a long and distinguished line of London merchants—members of the Worshipful Company of Mercers. In the fifteenth century, his great-grandfather had been Sheriff of London, the Lord Mayor’s deputy who was responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing the law. Lok’s father, who also became Sheriff and was one of the Gresham family’s business associates, served as Henry VIII’s personal mercer and “agent beyond the seas,” supplying the court revels with jewels, silk, and other mercery ware. In the mid-1530s, when Elizabeth was still a toddler-princess, he was commissioned to acquire velvet and satin cloth for her dresses.9
As was typical of young men of his position, Lok attended grammar school until he was thirteen years old. But his life then took a dramatically different turn. He was sent to the Low Countries and France so that he could, as he later recalled, “learn those languages” and “know the world.”10 He spent fifteen years travelling, “passing through almost all the countries of Christianity.” During this time, he captained “a great ship” of a thousand tons—larger than anything in Elizabeth’s fleet at the time—sailing her to the shores of the Levantine countries that lay at the western end of the Silk Road.11 He endeavored to learn about “all matters appertaining to the traffique of merchants” in the “commonwealths” that he visited on his travels.12 This experience abroad gave Lok an apprenticeship in international affairs—very different from the practice increasingly favored by some of the great merchants, who sent their children to Oxford or Cambridge and then expected them to attend one of the Inns of Court in London.
Lok’s extended sojourn outside England during the 1550s was almost certainly due to his religion. He was a staunch Protestant—his sister-in-law was a close associate of John Knox, the Scottish cleric and one of the leading Protestants of his day. For this reason, he had little desire to be in England during the reign of “Bloody” Mary, who earned her sobriquet after authorizing the burning of nearly three hundred Protestants as heretics. With Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, Lok returned to England and resumed his activities as a mercer, following in the footsteps of his brothers, who had remained in England and built up a business as overseas merchants. Thomas Lok, the eldest, who inherited their father’s estate in 1550, had been a founding member of the Muscovy Company.13 He was also a co-investor, along with Sir George Barne and Sir John Yorke, in an expedition to Africa’s Gold Coast that was captained by John Lok, another of the brothers.14 In 1571, Michael became the London agent of the Muscovy Company—in effect, the general manager, with responsibility for arranging the exchange of goods between Russia and England.15 As he put it, he had “the chief charge” of the company’s business.16
Despite the considerable experience and knowledge possessed by these four
men—Barne, Towerson, Borough, and Lok—Frobisher had no reason to be overawed by them. He, too, was vastly experienced and was, almost certainly, well-known to them all. Born in Altofts, a village near Wakefield in Yorkshire, in 1535 or 1536, he was sent to London to be raised in the household of his uncle, Sir John Yorke, when he was thirteen or fourteen years old.17 The move, which took place after the death of his mother, was prompted by the “lack of good schools” near his childhood home.18 But for any young, aspiring merchant, the move to Sir John’s household was a remarkable opportunity. As Sheriff of London and a senior official in the royal mint, Yorke was well-connected with the great courtiers—he was a personal friend of John Dudley—and the leading merchants.19
Yorke soon realized that his burly nephew was, as one contemporary noted, a lad “of great spirit and bold courage, and natural hardness of body,” better suited to a life of adventure than to a mercantile career.20 In 1553 he arranged for the young Frobisher, still a teenager, to join the expedition to Africa’s Gold Coast that he was cosponsoring with several investors in the Mysterie—including Sir George Barne, the elder.
Yorke’s assessment of his nephew was spot-on. Frobisher survived his first voyage to Guinea, even though most of the crew—including the captain—perished in the African sun. The following year he joined a return trip led by John Lok. Soon after reaching the Gold Coast, Captain Lok sought to strike a commercial deal, but the local African king demanded a pledge of good faith from the English before trading could begin: namely, a member of the ship’s crew would be required to stay in their village, as security against shady dealing. Frobisher, not yet twenty, volunteered and was duly delivered into the custody of the chief. It was not long, however, before things went awry. The African traders fired off some ordnance and the English, assuming trouble was at hand, hastened away. Lok left Frobisher behind, seemingly without so much as a backward glance, for he did not return or make any effort to rescue his young charge.
The Africans eventually handed Frobisher over to the Portuguese, who transported him to the formidable fortress of São Jorge da Mina, Portugal’s commercial outpost in West Africa. There, according to Frobisher’s later testimony, he was imprisoned for nine months, although he soon proved useful to his captors. He was routinely dispatched into the forests to barter for “goats, poultry, and other victuals” with local African tribesmen, because the Portuguese “durst not, for peril of their lives, do that.”21 Frobisher survived that experience, and the Portuguese eventually sent him back to England, after a brief incarceration in a Lisbon jail.
Over the next twenty years, Frobisher continued—with great gusto—on the path his uncle had determined for him. He took part in countless voyages, even committing acts of piracy for which he spent more time in jail.22 No imprisonment lasted long, however, and he seems to have earned the endorsement of a number of England’s most influential figures, including William Cecil. As Michael Lok noted, Frobisher had “the good liking” not only of Cecil but also “others of her Majesty’s honorable Privy Council.”23 Almost certainly, this approval was associated with his work as a government spy and privateer—a kind of licensed pirate. In a classic case of poacher-turned-gamekeeper, he was hired to seek out pirates and smugglers of prohibited goods in the English Channel.
But it was during the days Frobisher spent in the jail in Lisbon that he first dreamed of reaching Cathay via the Northwest Passage. Apparently, one of his fellow prisoners, a Portuguese sailor, revealed that he had “passed” through the icy seaway and shared with Frobisher the secrets of the route.24 For the next few years, as he later told one of his officers, he discussed the idea with “his private friends” and he had made “many offers” to “sundry merchants of our country” to make the northwest attempt.25 Despite his persistence, however, Frobisher failed to spark much interest among London’s business elite. As a result, as George Best, the son of the Muscovy Company’s translator and the official chronicler of the voyages, noted, Frobisher grew weary of merchants, who demanded “sure, certain, and present gains.” They were careful and conservative, willing to take a risk—but not recklessly so. Given the failure of the attempts to reach Cathay by the northeast route, this is not surprising.
Frobisher did not give up, however. Navigating the Northwest Passage was seen—especially for the English—as the last great challenge of the age. Frobisher understood it as “the only thing of the world that was left yet undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate.” So, in late 1574, tired of being spurned by merchants, he at last turned “to the court (from whence, as from the foundation of our commonwealth, all good causes have their chief increase and maintenance).” There, he “laid open to many great estates and learned men, the plot and sum of his devise.”
He could not have picked a better time to make his pitch. There was growing alarm at the scale of the Iberian trade with China. This commercial activity had grown significantly since 1565, when the Spanish established a base in the Philippines, named for Philip II. Now, they were regularly transporting silver across the Pacific from mines in South America and trading the precious metal for silks, spices, and other luxury goods from Chinese merchants.
Yet the privy councillors, respectful of Elizabeth’s wishes, had no desire to undermine England’s political or mercantile relations with the Spanish. Only a few months before Frobisher presented his proposal, they had rejected a petition by a group led by Sir Richard Grenville, which they believed might have caused just such a diplomatic rift with Spain. Grenville, supported by his cousin Sir Humphrey Gilbert, proposed to sail into Spanish waters and through the southwest passage—the Magellan Straits—to the Spice Islands, which would have certainly riled Spain. Frobisher’s route through the Northwest Passage was less likely to raise objections from either the Spanish or the Portuguese, since neither had shown much commercial interest in northern lands or northern routes to the East. This evidently appealed to Cecil and his fellow councillors, and so they had dispatched Frobisher to the grand mansion on Seething Lane to seek the formal approval of the Muscovy Company.
The Muscovy Company’s committee did not share the Privy Council’s enthusiasm for Frobisher’s project. As one of the members reported, they heard “no good evidence” for a Northwest Passage. And given that “they themselves with their very great charges already had discovered more than half the way to Cathay by the north-eastward”—a reference to overland explorations of Persia made by their associate, Anthony Jenkinson, in the late 1550s and early 1560s—and given that they “purposed to do the rest so soon as they might have good advice,” they rejected Frobisher’s petition.26
Sir Rowland Heyward, one of the two governors of the Muscovy Company, was charged with relaying the news to Cecil. Eight years earlier, he had been one of the merchants who informed Cecil that the company would not approve Gilbert’s petition to seek the Northwest Passage. In that instance, the privy councillors had chosen not to take a confrontational approach and contest the company’s decisions. This time, however, they refused to accept the verdict of the recalcitrant merchants. They issued an ultimatum, demanding that the Muscovy Company do one of two things: either they should press ahead with their own mission or permit someone else to make the attempt. Under intense political pressure, the Muscovy Company had little choice but to back down. In early February 1575, as a result of “diverse considerations,” they granted Frobisher a license to pursue his venture.27
What were these “diverse considerations”? Frobisher later credited the influence of Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, and a member of the Privy Council since 1573, who had always been interested in developing new markets.28 Dudley’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Anne, the Countess of Warwick, may also have put in a good word for Frobisher. As one of Elizabeth’s favorite ladies-in-waiting, whom one contemporary characterized as “more beloved and in greater favour with the Queen than any other woman in the kingdom,” she was a trusted conduit to Elizabeth for those with petitions and req
uests for royal patronage.29 Richard Willes, an Oxford geographer, would later dedicate a section about the Northwest Passage in his book History of Travayle to the countess.30
Another influence on the Muscovy Company was Michael Lok. He had initially rejected Frobisher’s proposal, but after reflecting on his “duty towards my country” and “the great benefit” that might arise from an English northwest trade route, he changed his mind. He “did so entirely join with” Frobisher that he proceeded to persuade other Muscovy merchants to think again. “Through my friendship with the company,” Lok wrote, “I obtained of them a privilege and license” for Frobisher to make his attempt.31
What changed Lok’s mind? The most obvious factor, he admitted, was “the great hope” of finding that the “English seas open into the seas of East India.” Also, he realized that, even if ships did not reach China, they might encounter “new found lands” along the way that could be “full of people and full of such commodities and merchandise,” just as Richard Chancellor had found in Muscovy.32 Finally, Lok had faith in Frobisher. He had enjoyed a “former acquaintance with him” and knew of his “courage,” a very necessary trait for making an attempt on the Northwest Passage.33
Lok’s change of heart had opened a fissure at the top of the Muscovy Company. One governor, Rowland Heyward, remained skeptical of the arguments for a Northwest Passage, but the other governor, Lionel Duckett, was more receptive to different perspectives. Sir Thomas Gresham’s business partner, and a long-standing investor in maritime ventures, Duckett became one of the first merchants to support the Frobisher venture, with a twenty-five-pound pledge.