1527 ‘Pleasing your Honourable Grace’, the letter to Henry VIII began, ‘to heare of your servant John Rut with all his company here in good health thanks be to God.’ Very little is known about John Rut, and nothing further was heard from him after he returned to England. But he emerges briefly on the world stage as author of the first known letter to be sent to Europe from North America.
A seasoned mariner, Rut was recruited by Henry VIII to look for a north-west passage, a search that would motivate voyages of exploration and settlement for the next century. Even as far south as Virginia in 1608, Captain John Smith, shortly after landing with the first permanent English settlement in America, was ordered to sail up the Chickahominy River to find the fabled route over the top of what is now Canada through to the Pacific.
The search eluded both men – Smith because the Chickahominy soon became too shallow to explore further, and Rut and his crew because they kept running into icebergs:
We ran in our coarse to the Northward, till we came to 53 degrees; there we found many great Islands of ice and deepe water; we found no sounding, and then we durst not go no further to the Northward for feare of more ice.
But they did find St John’s Harbour in Newfoundland, which provided both a welcome shelter and also (to the modern reader) a surprise, since ‘there we found Eleuen Saile of Normans and one Brittaine and two Portugal barks all a fishing’. In fact, though we popularly date the discovery of America with Columbus landing in 1492, mariners from Portugal, France and even the west of England had been fishing the Grand Banks of Newfoundland since at least the second half of the 15th century, and had certainly gone ashore for supplies and provisions.
Rut and his men had gone ashore too, where they found
… wilderness and mountains and woodes and no naturall ground but all mosse and no inhabitation nor no people in those parts; and in the woods we found footing of divers great beasts but we saw none not in ten leagues.
Failing the north-west passage they could at least fill their ship with salt cod, and sail southwards. And so to home, via the east coast of Florida, the first English ship to follow that route.