by John Butman
35 Dalton, Merchants and Explorers, 63–65, 127–28.
36 John Roche Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England, Volume II, 1547–1550 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890), 137; R. H. Brodie, ed., Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward VI (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924–1929), 1:320.
37 “May 28. Van der Delft to the Emperor,” in “Spain: May 1549,” in Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Spain, Volume 9, 1547–1549, ed. Martin A. S. Hume and Royall Tyler (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1912), 381–83; 381; “January 18, 1550. The Emperor to Van der Delft,” in Calendar of Letters, Dispatches, and State Papers, Spain, Volume 10, Edward VI, 1550–1552, ed. Royall Tyler (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914), 11–12; 12.
38 Cited in Quinn, Sebastian Cabot and Bristol Exploration, 29.
39 Legend No. 12 (massive ears); No. 14 (Bengal); No. 19 (birds/ox), transcribed in Beazley, John and Sebastian Cabot, 230.
40 Joseph Fischer, Franz von Wieser, and Charles George Herbermann, eds., Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in Facsimile Followed By The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, With Their Translation Into English; to which are added Waldseemüller’s Two World Maps of 1507 With An Introduction (New York: The United States Catholic Historical Society, 1907), 70. While convention has it that the word “America” was first applied by Martin Waldseemüller, who derived it from the Latin version of Vespucci’s first name, there has been some debate about the matter. For instance, it has been speculated that John Cabot came up with the name in recognition of one of his supporters, Richard Ameryk, Sheriff of Bristol in 1503. See E. W. Lennard, “Some Intimate Bristol Connections with the Overseas Empire,” Geography 16, no. 2 (1931): 109–21; 110–11.
41 Williamson, The Cabot Voyages, 166–70. Also Helen Wallis, “England’s Search for the Northern Passages in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (1984): 453–72; 457–59. Others suggest that the strait is named after the Portuguese Corte-Real Brothers. See William J. Mills, Exploring Polar Frontiers: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2003), 125.
3. THE MYSTERIE
1 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:240.
2 Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29–36, 184–88; Valerie Hope, Clive Birch, and Gilbert Torrey, eds., The Freedom: The Past and Present of the Livery, Guilds and City of London (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1982), 37–45.
3 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “the word may well have been influenced by or confused with ‘mastery.’” Oxford English Dictionary online, definition n.2, 2.a.
4 The map appeared in 1572 in an atlas of city plans called Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. See Peter Whitfield, London: A Life in Maps, rev. ed. (London: The British Library, 2017; original edition 2006), 34–37.
5 Loades, John Dudley, ix; Sutton, The Mercery of London, 369–73.
6 John Munro, “Tawney’s Century, 1540–1640,” in The Invention of Enterprise. Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, ed. David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 107–55; 128–32. Munro calls the company the “first (historically verifiable) joint-stock company.”
7 W. R. Scott, The Constitution of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 1:18.
8 John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (London: Phoenix Books, 2005), 18.
9 Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London, Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (London: Phoenix Books, 2004), 323.
10 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:240–41.
11 “The copie of the letters missive, which the right noble Prince Edward the sixt sent to the Kings, Princes, and other Potentates, inhabiting the Northeast partes of the world…,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:209–11; 210.
12 The date of his birth is unknown, and his age is based on the evidence of a contemporary portrait, facing the title page in vol. 2 of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.
13 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:240–41.
14 J. D. Alsop, “Sir Anthony Aucher (d. 1558), administrator and landowner,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
15 “The voyage of M. Roger Bodenham with the great Barke Aucher to Candia and Chio, in the yeere 1550,” in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 5:71–76; 76.
16 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:242.
17 For Dee’s life, see Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror of England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) and Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (London: Flamingo, 2002).
18 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:212, 214.
19 John Dee, “The Compendious Rehearsal,” in Gerald Suster (ed., comp.), John Dee: Essential Readings (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2003), 9.
20 Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1:27. Aubrey was referring in this passage to Thomas Allen, a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford.
21 Parry, The Arch-Conjurer, 12, 23. Dee gave his two Mercator globes (now lost) to Trinity College, Cambridge. Philip Gaskell, Trinity College Library: The First 150 Years. The Sandars Lectures 1978–1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 33.
22 Parry, The Arch-Conjurer, 23–24; see E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography 1485–1583 (London: Methuen & Co., 1930), 91, for a general reference to the making of navigational instruments.
23 Eden, “A Treatyse of the Newe India,” in Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, 8.
24 Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe: Volume I: The Century of Discovery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 185 n171.
25 Sir Henry Yule, ed. and trans., Cathay And The Way Thither, Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1913–1916), 2:136.
26 Ibid., 2:179–80 (Censcalan); 215–22 (Cambalech); 232 (camels).
27 Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 45.
28 C. W. R. D. Moseley (trans.), The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (London: Penguin Books, 1983; paperback), 150.
29 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:243–44.
30 The word “Tartar” comes from “Tartarus”, the abyss of suffering in classical mythology. It was applied to the Mongols, whose terrifying exploits generated fear among Europeans.
31 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:244.
32 Eden, “A Treatyse of the Newe India,” in Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, 16–17 (“market town”); 24 (“Cathay”); 26 (“marvelous”); 29 (cannibals).
33 John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965), 38; Eden, “A Treatyse of the Newe India,” in Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, 3.
34 Eden, “A Treatyse of the Newe India,” in Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, 8.
35 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:241.
36 “Ordinances, instructions, and advertisements of and for the direction of the intended voyage for Cathay, compiled, made, and delivered by the right worshipfull M. Sebastian Cabota…,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:195–205.
37 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:241.
4. A NEWE AND STRANGE NAVIGATION
2 “The copie of the letters missive,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:211 (“divers languages”); 209 (“all kings”).
3 Ibid., 210.
4 Ibid., 211.
5 In 2005, two professors from INSEAD business school in France wrote an influential book on what they called “blue ocean” strategy—succeeding by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space: W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).
6 “The true copie of a note… Sir Hugh Willoughby,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:212–14.
7 The blue color was derived from local whortleberries (http://www.watchetmuseum.co.uk/social-history/).
8 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:244.
9 Ibid., 2:245.
10 Ibid., 2:245.
11 “The true copie of a note… Sir Hugh Willoughby,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:220.
12 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:247.
13 Mildred Wretts-Smith, “The English in Russia During the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1920), 72–102; 90–91, n6.
14 “The first voyage made by Master Anthonie Jenkinson, from the Citie of London toward the land of Russia, begun the twelfth of May, in the yeere 1557,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:413–26; 416.
15 Kit Mayers, North-East Passage to Muscovy: Stephen Borough and the First Tudor Explorations (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 2005), 65 (map).
16 “The true copie of a note… Sir Hugh Willoughby,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:221.
17 Ibid., 223.
18 “Ordinances… Sebastian Cabota,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:202.
19 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:243 (“home quietly”); 247 (“die the death”); 248 (“held his course”).
20 Ibid., 2:248.
21 Ibid., 2:249.
22 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:250 (“wares and commodities”); 251 (“loving manner”); 254 (“bignesse,” “London”); 255 (“cloth of gold,” “chamber of presence,” “throne,” “precious stones,” “out of countenance”).
23 Stephane Mund, “The Discovery of Muscovite Russia in Tudor England,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 86, no. 2 (2008): 351–73; 351n3.
24 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians from the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Penguin Books, rev. ed., 2012), 84, 89, 117, 120.
25 “The copie of the Duke of Moscovie and Emperour of Russia his letters, sent to King Edward the sixt, by the hands of Richard Chancelour,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:272.
26 Letters Patent for the Limitation of the Crown, 21 June 1553: Harleian MSS, 35, fol. 364, in John Gough Nichols, ed., The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat, Written by a Resident in the Tower of London (London: Camden Society, 1850), 91–100.
27 Hubert Hall, History of the Custom-Revenue in England from the Earliest Times to the Year 1827, 2 vols. (London: Elliot Stock, 1885), 1:316; Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:201; T. S. Willan, The Early History of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (1956; repr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 6–7.
28 “The Charter of the Marchants of Russia, graunted upon the discoverie of the saide Countrey, by King Philipe and Queene Marie,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:304–16; 315.
29 For the list of investors: Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Philip and Mary. Volume II, 1554–1555 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1936), 55–57. The women were Elizabeth Wilford and Katherine Lomnour. T. S. Willan notes that Wilford may have been the wife of a merchant who sailed with Willoughby and “presumably perished when the ship was frozen in the White Sea”: see his The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953; repr. 1973), 10, 110, 127.
30 H. R. Woudhuysen, “Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), author and courtier,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds. The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 214.
31 “The names of the twelve Counsellors appointed in this voyage,” Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:206.
32 “The letters of king Philip and Queene Marie to Ivan Vasilivich the Emperour of Russia written the first of April 1555 and in the second voyage,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:278–80; 282 (“Greek”).
33 See the Oxford English Dictionary for “China,” definition 1a.
34 Richard Eden, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, in Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, 292.
35 “Articles conceived and determined for the Commission of the Merchants of this company resiant in Russia, and at the Wardhouse, for the second voyage, 1555. The first of May, as followeth,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:281–89.
36 Ibid., 2:281 (“agents”); 285 (“learned”); 289 (“honor,” “public benefit”).
37 James Evans, Merchant Adventurers. The voyage of discovery that transformed Tudor England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013; paperback, Phoenix, 2014), 260–64.
38 Wretts-Smith, “The English in Russia,” 76n4. The port of Arkhangelsk was established at the mouth of the Dvina in 1584 and continued to be a trading center for the English.
39 Arthur Edwards, “Another letter of Arthur Edwards written in Astracan the 16. Of June, 1567, at his return in his first voiage out of Persia, to the right worshipfull Companie trading into Russia, Persia, and other the North and Northeast partes,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 3:64–72; 72.
40 Eleanora C. Gordon, “The Fate of Sir Hugh Willoughby and His Companions: A New Conjecture,” The Geographical Journal 152, no. 2 (1986): 243–47; 244.
41 Evans, Merchant Adventurers, 265.
42 “Giovanni Michiel, Venetian Ambassador in England, to the Doge and Senate,” November 4, 1555, in Rawdon Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, Volume VI, Part I, 1555–1556 (London: Longman & Co., 1877), no. 269: 238–40; 240.
43 Wretts-Smith, “The English in Russia,” 79.
44 “The letter of M. George Killingworth,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:291 (“wares” and “sold very little”).
45 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:261 (Flemings); “A letter of M. Henrie Lane to M. Richard Hakluit, concerning the first ambassage to our most gracious Queene Elizabeth from the Russian Emperour anno 1567, and other notable matters incident to those places and times,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 3:100; R. H. Major, trans. and ed., Notes upon Russia: Being a translation of the Earliest Account of that Country entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii by the Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1851). 2:24.
46 “A letter of M. Henrie Lane to the worshipfull M. William Sanderson, conteining a briefe discourse of that which passed in the Northeast discovery for the space of three and thirtie years,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 3:330–36; 333.
47 “The coines, weights and measures used in Russia, written by John Hasse, in the yere, 1554,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:273–78.
48 The word “Kremlin”—literally “citadel”—refers to the walled complex of buildings and facilities of the tsar and his court in Moscow. Although the word was not often used at the time of the English visits, it had been common for decades before and is still, of course, in use today.
See Arthur Voyce, The Moscow Kremlin: Its History, Architecture and Art Treasures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).
49 “The voyage, wherein Osep Napea the Moscovite Ambassadour returned home into his country, with his entertainement at his arrivall, at Colmogro: and a large description of the maners of the Countrey,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:425–49; 439.
50 “A letter of M. Henrie Lane to… William Sanderson,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 3:333.
51 E. Delmar Morgan and C. H. Coote, eds., Early Voyages and Travels into Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and other Englishmen, with Some Account of the First Intercourse of the English with Russia and Central Asia by way of the Caspian Sea, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1886), 1:iv.
52 An archaeological survey of the supposed shipwreck site was conducted in 2000, but nothing was found. Aberdeen Council, https://online.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/smrpub/master/detail.aspx?tab=main&refno=NJ96NW0073.
53 “A discourse of the honorable receiving into England of the first Ambassador from the Emperor of Russia, in the yeere of Christ 1556, and in the third yeere of the raigne of Queene Marie, serving for the third voyage to Moscovie. Registred by Master John Incent Protonotarie,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:350–62; 352. (The year is 1556 in Principal Navigations but the narrative continues into 1557.)
54 Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 4:86.
5. AN ELUSIVE REALM
1 Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 146–172; James M. Osborn, ed., The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before her Coronation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 28.
2 The words come from Psalm 118. See: A. N. Wilson, The Elizabethans (London: Hutchinson, 2011; paperback edition, Arrow Books, 2012), 28.
3 Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds, 219.
4 Diogo Homem, Queen Mary Atlas, Facsimile edition with commentary by Peter Barber (London: Folio Society, 2005), 65–66. Barber notes that Elizabeth “would have been the only person with the authority to perpetrate vandalism on a precious object that had been commissioned by her royal predecessor.”