by John Butman
In all, some eighteen people put money into the venture, including Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir William Burde, William Bonde, and Thomas Randolph, a former ambassador to Muscovy.34 Also, Anthony Jenkinson, who had long been an advocate for the northeast route to Cathay, contributed twenty-five-pounds. Among the privy councillors who invested funds were the Dudley brothers: Ambrose, who contributed fifty pounds, and Robert, Earl of Leicester. Two of the privy councillors who invested were also members of the company: William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, who clearly disagreed with the negative opinion of the venture held by his brother-in-law, George Barne.
Lok, as the leading advocate for the Frobisher venture, became its chief organizer. The plan was to dispatch the expedition in the spring of 1575. As the English had learned through years of experience in sailing to Russia, it was unwise to depart on a northerly voyage any later than June. Unfortunately, Lok missed the window “for lack of sufficient money,” and the voyage was postponed until the following year.35
THROUGHOUT THE REST of that year, 1575, and in the first few months of 1576, Lok and his business associates gathered at Crosby Hall, a palatial residence in the northeast part of the City owned by William Bonde, one of the eighteen initial investors in the venture. Bonde, an original Mysterie member, was among the most influential London merchants, having built a trading empire in Spain, the Baltic, and the Low Countries.36
Crosby Hall stood near Bishopsgate, one of the stone-arched entrances in the Roman wall that still surrounded the city. Originally built in the 1460s by Sir John Crosby, a wool merchant and mayor of London, the grand structure towered over neighboring mansions and the parish church, St. Helen’s. According to John Stow, it was a “very large and beautiful” mansion, the grandest and “the highest at that time,” constructed with sturdy oak and the same fine-grained sandstone used for Westminster Abbey, where English monarchs were crowned.37 It was, quite literally, fit for a king. Indeed, after Crosby’s death, Richard Plantagenet, who would become King Richard III, took up residence there. In 1523, a few years after publishing Utopia, Thomas More acquired the place. By the time Lok and his fellow investors met there, Bonde had enhanced the grandeur of the house by adding a mighty fortress-style turret.38
In those months, Lok, Bonde, Gresham, and William Burde, one of the royal tax collectors in the city, regularly met there to plan the voyage. Their first priority was to attract more investment. The four had committed £400—nearly half the sum pledged by the eighteen investors. But the total, £875, was a paltry amount compared to the £6,000 raised for the Mysterie’s voyage to Cathay. It is likely that they spent time speaking with prospective investors at the Royal Exchange, the magnificent bourse built by Gresham and opened four years earlier by Elizabeth I. Here, among the colonnades, merchants could go about their business and, if they so pleased, purchase goods from the luxury boutiques that adorned the upper floor and looked down over the courtyard.39
Cecil, Elizabeth’s closest adviser and the prime mover behind the Privy Council’s support for the venture, kept a watchful eye on the preparations and insisted that “a convenient person” be put in charge. The chief investors carefully considered “who should take charge of the money,” who should take care of the “provision and furniture of the ships” and who should be entrusted “with the ships at sea.”40 After some discussion, Edmund Hogan, one of Lok’s nephews, was charged with collecting subscriptions from new investors, beyond the original eighteen. He was a trusted businessman, recognized, at about this time, as one of “the wisest and best merchants in London.”41 In the 1540s, he had served in the household of Thomas Gresham, after whom he named his son, and he rose through the ranks of the Mercers, serving on its governing body in 1570.
But Hogan, despite his talents, struggled to attract further investors. Throughout 1575, as Lok observed, he “took pains” and “received such money as he could get,” but it was not enough. Lok came to the conclusion that the problem was not Hogan, but, surprisingly, Martin Frobisher himself. As Lok later recalled, the major stumbling block was who should “take charge” of the expedition. Frobisher may have proposed the idea and he may have attracted the support of the privy councillors—and through them Elizabeth herself—but there was the sensitive matter of his checkered career. As a result, he was thought to have “very little credit” in England, and this, Lok believed, was why Hogan had been unable to raise enough money to sail in 1575 and why most of the potential investors continued to hold back. The venture was risky enough; they did not want to have to worry about its leadership.
Lok could not remove Frobisher from the expedition. He could, however, reassure the investors by bringing in new talent. So he enlisted William Borough, younger brother of Stephen, to recruit some reliable seamen for the voyage. This Borough did effectively, although he did not have sufficient belief in the venture to invest his own money. On Borough’s recommendation, Lok hired Christopher Hall as master and Nicholas Chancellor, the surviving son of Richard Chancellor, as “merchant & purser.” Then Lok, perhaps following the by now standard practice of the Muscovy Company, made a canny move. He drew up instructions specifying that Frobisher “should not command nor carry the ships” without the consent of the other senior officers, who were known to be “trusty men.” As Lok recalled, “This did satisfy most of the venturers.”42
But even if the expedition to Cathay was to be a modest expedition in scale, Lok and his associates were determined to take care in its preparation. They were fortunate that they could draw on a great deal of expertise. London was then on the cusp of becoming one of Europe’s preeminent centers of science, a veritable “jewel house,” with expert practitioners in a range of disciplines, including astronomy, natural history, mathematics, medicine, and shipbuilding.43 To construct the flagship, Lok commissioned none other than Matthew Baker, the queen’s own shipwright, who worked from the new royal docks at Chatham on the Medway, a tributary of the Thames. In his mid-thirties, Baker, the son of Henry VIII’s shipbuilder, was the rising star of England’s shipbuilding industry. There is a rare contemporary portrait of Baker that is quite unlike the formal portraits of the great and the good posing in an artist’s studio. It depicts the shipwright hard at work, bending over a green-topped wooden table strewn with various instruments and a large sketch of the hull of a ship. Born in 1530, he was closely linked to the search for new markets, having joined the voyage of the Aucher to the Levant in 1550 when he was about twenty years old. This trip to the eastern Mediterranean, with stops in Genoa and Venice, the home ports of Columbus and Cabot respectively, made an enduring impression on the young shipwright. Years later, when he compiled the first English treatise on ship design—Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry—his drawings manifested the influence of Italian boatbuilders, who were the pioneers of oceangoing ship design.
Lok may have piqued Baker’s interest in the job with his vision of a great merchant ship. In the end, Lok only had enough money to pay Baker to build a thirty-ton bark, the Gabriel, and a pinnace.* A second bark, the Michael, also thirty tons, was bought from two of the canny investors. But Baker and Lok did not skimp on the materials or craftsmanship, and the Gabriel was constructed to the highest specifications of the day. Baker placed great emphasis on the importance of arithmetic and geometry, which he considered to be “the two supporting pillars of every art.” He was the first English shipwright to build a vessel based on plans created on the drafting table.44
Just as Lok engaged England’s best-known shipwright, he also sought the expertise of the country’s most illustrious maker of marine instruments: Humfrey Cole. Like Baker, Cole was one of a new breed of practitioners who applied mathematical principles picked up during the course of their work—rather than at university. Gabriel Harvey, one of Sir Thomas Smith’s protégés, later argued that anyone who condemned expert artisans or industrious practitioners—such as “Humfrey Cole, a Mathematical Mechanician,” or Matthew Baker the shipwright, or any other “cunning or subt
ile Empirique”—because they were “Unlectured in Schools, or Unlettered in Books,” must be seen as foolish.45 Harvey’s point was that it was possible to be a superb practitioner without a formal university education.
Cole was a northerner—like Frobisher—who had trained as a goldsmith and then secured a job at the Royal Mint. By the 1570s, he was developing a reputation as a maker of precision instruments, which he produced at his workshop near St. Paul’s Cathedral. For Lok, he made, or supplied, an Armilla Tolomaei, a celestial globe that was left blank for plotting the constellations, and a blank terrestrial globe for plotting new lands or geographical features that might be discovered. Two other instruments, a Sphera Nautica and a Compassum Meridianum, enabled the navigator to determine the variation between true and magnetic North, and a Holometrum Geometrum was a device for charting the features of a coastline.46
The mission’s account books—meticulously kept by Lok—show the amounts the investors spent on the essential items for the voyage. Although a goodly sum, just over fifty pounds, went toward the purchase of marine instruments, the largest amount by far was spent on victuals—£387, fourteen shillings, and ten pence. At this time, the practice of victualling was well developed, thanks to the work of Edward Baeshe, a naval administrator. During his tenure as the surveyor-general of victuals for the Royal Navy—he was the first to hold this office, created in 1550, as England began its search for new markets—Baeshe established the process for supplying the navy with food and equipment. In particular, he formalized standards for rations: a gallon of beer and a pound of biscuit (or bread, when in port) every day, two pounds of beef on “flesh” days, and a quarter portion of stockfish (or four herrings), a quarter pound of butter, and half a pound of cheese on “fish” days.47
Lok would have been familiar with the allocation of victuals because as agent of the Muscovy Company he regularly sent sailors on long voyages. But it was Nicholas Chancellor, as purser, who was in day-to-day charge of procuring and preparing the provisions—and for this role he had served a long apprenticeship. He had grown up with the Muscovy Company, and after his father’s untimely death in 1556 he was “kept at writing school long” and acquired an understanding of algorithms and the “keeping of books of reckonings.”48
The accounts of the voyage show there was a significant outlay on beer: five tons came from the queen’s own stocks. Chancellor also purchased three hogsheads—about 160 gallons—of aqua vitae, a distilled wine. The record is sketchy on what foodstuffs were bought for the expedition, but they would have included enough beef or pork for four days per week, stockfish for three days, as well as ship’s biscuit (every day), peas (four days), and cheese and butter (three days)—amounts that were typical on later expeditions.49
Also, Lok and company invested in the general welfare of the sailors. Although the basic living conditions were spartan—only Frobisher had his own cabin and well-upholstered bed—the company hired a French surgeon to look after the crew’s health, providing him with a large chest filled with some exotic medicines supplied by a London apothecary. There was ambra grisi oriental, which, according to one modern expert, was “a wax-like substance from the sperm whale’s intestine found floating in the Indian ocean” and used as a stimulant. There were several laxatives—such as myrobboralia chebue bellerichi—and a remedy for diarrhea—boli oriental. For the treatment of venereal disease, there was argenti viti—quicksilver or mercury, administered as an ointment. Another strange drug was castorum, which was taken from the anal glands of beavers and used to counter the rancorous odor from gangrenous limbs.50
As Edmund Hogan wooed investors and Nicholas Chancellor gathered the victuals, Lok considered the navigational requirements of the voyage itself. He realized that Frobisher and Hall, the second-in-command, did not have sufficient understanding of the latest navigational thinking. For all of Frobisher’s conviction and persuasive bluster, it had been obvious during his meeting with the Muscovy Company that he did not have a clear understanding of the route his ships would take. This would need to be addressed, and Lok knew just the man to help.
In May 1576, with about two weeks to go before the planned departure, John Dee, the queen’s astrologer and longtime cosmographer for the Muscovy Company, had approached Lok, “desiring to know of the reasons” for their enterprise. When he learned what was planned, Dee offered his services. Lok accepted the offer and invited him to his house, along with Frobisher, Hall, and William Borough.51 There, as Lok recalled, “I laid before [them] my books and authors, my cards [charts] and instruments, and my notes thereof made in writing.” These he had assembled over a period of twenty years, spending around five hundred pounds—a significant financial commitment.52
In the days before departure, Dee met with Frobisher and Hall at Muscovy House and put them through a crash course “on geometry and cosmography” and the Northwest Passage. During his tutorials, he referred his pupils to a “great map universal,” which had been purchased for the expedition’s library of books and charts for one pound, six shillings, and eight pence: this was the world map of his old friend Gerard Mercator, published seven years earlier. Also, he provided them with Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or “The Theatre of the Lands of the World,” the world’s first recognizably modern atlas, which had been published in 1570.*
With this intense tutoring from Dee, as well as the benefit of pioneering marine technology, boatbuilding, and medical knowledge, Frobisher was the best prepared captain that England had ever put to sea—despite the budgetary constraints. Yet for all their preparation and planning, Frobisher and his crew of thirty-four were still venturing into the unknown as they weighed anchor from Ratcliffe, in a protected loop of the Thames, on June 7, 1576.
7
THE SUPPOSED STRAIT
THE NEXT DAY, after anchoring overnight at Deptford, Frobisher and his fleet sailed on down the Thames. After a few hours, they reached Greenwich, where Elizabeth was holding court. Although she had not personally invested in the voyage, she took an active interest, allowed the involvement of William Cecil, Francis Walsingham, and other privy councillors in the venture, and even expressed her encouragement to the ships as they passed by. “We shot off our ordnance and made the best show we could,” recorded Christopher Hall, the master of the Gabriel. The queen “commended it, and bade us farewell, shaking her hand at us out of the window.”1
Frobisher’s fleet made its way up the east coast of England, reaching the Shetland Islands two weeks after leaving Greenwich. There, one hundred and fifty miles off the northeast coast of Scotland, they tarried for “one tide to refresh their water” and to stop a leak in the Michael.2 Also, Frobisher took the time to write a letter to the man who had so feverishly tutored him in the weeks before sailing, John Dee. He gratefully referenced Dee’s “friendly Instructions: which when we use we do remember you, and hold ourselves bound to you as your poor disciples, not able to be Scholars.”3 This was a humble admission for an experienced mariner who had successfully sailed down the African coast and throughout the waters of the Narrow Seas. But as he left the coast of Scotland, he knew he needed all the help he could get. He was not the first European to venture west through the North Atlantic. But he might as well have been. Although Viking warriors had first rowed their way across the ocean five hundred years earlier, establishing colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland—which they called Vinland—they left no detailed charts of their voyages.
In mid-July, after sailing west from the Shetland Islands for two weeks, a lookout caught sight of a jagged, glinting mass on the horizon. “We had sight of the land of Friseland,” Christopher Hall noted in his logbook. It rose “like pinnacles of steeples, and all covered with snow.” Frobisher ordered a landing craft to be prepared, and with four men he “rowed to the shore to get on land, but the land lying full of ice, they could not get on land, and so they came aboard again.”4
This was a crushing disappointment. Just a month into the voyage, Frobisher belie
ved he had found the island of Friseland, which was shown on the maps of Mercator and Ortelius. This would have made a fantastic acquisition for England, if only he could have reached the shore to make the claim. As it turned out, however, Friseland was nothing more than a figment of a Venetian mapmaker’s imagination. Even the greatest mapmakers relied on a rich concoction of hearsay, dubious hydrography, and cartographical hunches when it came to the northern Atlantic. But Nicolò Zeno was not a great mapmaker. He was a fraudster. The map he published in 1558, which showed a group of islands that he claimed had been discovered by his ancestors, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, in the 1390s, was a hoax. It was intended to provide Venice with a claim to all of North America—just as England had made a claim for Newfoundland, based on John Cabot’s voyage of 1497. It certainly hoodwinked the greatest cartographers of the day. Although he never realized this, what Frobisher had actually sighted was the southern tip of Greenland—which had been populated by Arctic peoples for thousands of years.5
The fleet sailed onward and soon encountered heavy weather. As the storm raged, the ships of the fleet became separated from one another. The smallest vessel, the pinnace, with four crewmen, was “swallowed up” by the sea and sank to the bottom of the icy waters. One of the two barks, the Michael, came through the storm, apparently unscathed. Matthew Kindersley, the ship’s captain and also one of the original eighteen investors, sought the advice of his “mariners and comrades” about the best course of action. It seemed that they were the only survivors, and so Kindersley’s men, fearing for their lives, demanded that they turn back for England. He acceded to their wishes and the Michael returned home, reaching London at the beginning of September. Lok was told that Frobisher and the flagship had been “cast away.”6 The news must have been devastating for him. After all that expense and effort, he faced the prospect of losing a substantial part of his fortune and achieving nothing—no route to Cathay, no gold or silver, not even any trade of the kind found in Muscovy.