In the first half of the sixteenth century a fundamental change was taking place in western Europe. Spain and Portugal had thrown off the shackles of ancient geography. In Asia and America they had discovered new lands, unknown to the old writers, and they had reached them by uncharted routes across the ocean.
It was a time when inventions and discoveries not only rivalled those of the ancients but exceeded them. What of theirs, asked the English scholar, translator and chemist Richard Eden, could possibly be compared with printing or with the making of guns or fireworks? Ptolemy, the second-century Alexandrian who had exerted such enduring influence on geographical ideas in Europe, had undoubtedly been an ‘excellent man’, but still, Eden noted, ‘there were many things hid from his knowledge’. The ancients had not, as some still thought, comprehended all things. Ptolemy, after all, ‘knew nothing of America. Or consider St Augustine: would such a clever and learned man have doubted that the earth was round had he known how the Spaniards and Portuguese would sail around it, returning, by a straight course, more or less, to the point at which they had set off? The lesson was simple. No man, however brilliant, could know beyond what was tried and discovered by experience. What lay in the unexplored regions of the globe could not be calculated or imagined. Men must travel there to find out.
In this great project, England had lagged behind its rivals. This small, rather backward island had little maritime expertise or experience on which to draw. ‘Ignorance has been among us,’ Eden admitted, ‘touching cosmography and navigation.’ The country was ‘indigent and destitute’ of expert pilots – men who were qualified, as he put it, not only to dredge for oysters in the thick and shifting sands of the Thames estuary, but to venture out into the ocean, to ‘discover unknown lands and islands’. In the past the country had relied on the proficiency of sailors and navigators from France, Portugal or Italy, who had the maritime knowledge and training that Englishmen lacked.
By the mid-sixteenth century, however, a new spirit had begun to emerge in England. A sense of possibility had been born, and the return of Sebastian Cabot, the brilliant, enigmatic and divisive navigator, who had grown up in England before spending most of his adult life in Spain, epitomised and reinforced this atmosphere. The voyage that he organised and inspired in 1553 was the ultimate expression of a changing climate.
It was now that a few Englishmen reread, usually in the account left by Marco Polo, stories about a rich and distant country they called Cathay, and dreamed.2 They dreamed about the vast and ancient city, called ‘Khan-balik’, or ‘Cambalu’ – known now as Beijing – at the heart of which stood a magnificent palace. Its roof, they read, was ‘all ablaze with scarlet and green and blue and yellow and all the colours that are, so brilliantly varnished that it glitters like crystal and the sparkle of it can be seen from far away’. They dreamed about its seemingly endless procession of halls and chambers, each richly decorated with gold and silver and with paintings of dragons, birds, horsemen and scenes of battle. They dreamed about the many wives and concubines of the great Khan who lived together in its private apartments, and in particular about its treasure rooms, piled high with his vast wealth: with gold, silver, pearls and precious stones. They dreamed about the array of luxurious goods available at the markets of Cathay, the silks, the spices, the gemencrusted clothes. And they dreamed about the great feasts over which the Khan presided, with so much gold and silver ware on display ‘that no one who did not see it with his own eyes could well believe it’.
The Iberian explorers might have reached new and rich lands, but they had not rediscovered this world about which Polo had written. Perhaps it would be possible, some Englishmen began to believe, to get there by a new route, peculiarly convenient for their northern island, which skirted Europe and Asia’s upper coast and then descended gradually south-eastward. No one knew whether such a passage existed, but there were reasons to think that it might. It was true that ancient writers had insisted the Arctic was too cold and blocked in by ice. But they had also said that it would be impossible to pass the Equator, because of its intense heat, and they had been proved wrong. Why, a few dared ask, could they not be wrong again?
Crucially, for a brief period, this ethos permeated the government, who saw an opportunity to advance England’s cause on a wider commercial stage. Those in senior positions co-operated with the leading London merchants, who combined an interest in profit with genuine intellectual curiosity. They promoted and sponsored experts who felt the same way. They strongly supported an expedition to explore and open up new trades that was deliberately English rather than cosmopolitan. The attitude came not just from the merchants of London. It came also, for the first time, from higher up the social scale: from the ‘diverse noble men and gentlemen, as well of the council as other’, who backed the resulting venture both financially and by other means.
This was a time of cultural change that extended even to the language men wrote and spoke. Then, as since, Englishmen were not natural polyglots: most did not grow up with a mastery of multiple languages, or any sense of the importance of doing so. But the many who only read English were empowered by the increasing number of translations available from Latin and contemporary languages.3 As a side effect, the mother tongue itself was aggrandised. English, Eden noticed, was ‘enriched and amplified by sundry books’. In the past it had been a mere peasant tongue. It had been ‘indigent and barbarous’, he observed, ‘much more than it now is’.4 One of the last acts of the young King Edward VI, on 27 June, nine days before he died, was to issue a charter to the school in Stratford at which the young William Shakespeare would learn to read and write.
It was no coincidence that a belief in careful written records was integral to the new ethos of intellectual curiosity. This, after all, was how experience could best be passed on. What was learning, Eden asked, but the ‘gathering of many men’s wits into one man’s head, and the experience of many years, and many men’s lives, to the life of one’?5 Knowledge, no less than money, was a form of capital, to be pooled and invested. And like money, knowledge now flowed in England more freely than it had ever done before. Both could be harnessed and directed towards an important end.
From the beginning, some of those involved with Sebastian Cabot’s venture were not sailors or merchants but scholars, who understood the importance of written records better than anyone. There was the brilliant young polymath John Dee, who met and developed a close friendship and a profound respect for the young sailor and instrument-maker Richard Chancellor, helping him to prepare for the voyage. There was Clement Adams, a scholar, tutor to the friends and fellow pupils of young King Edward, and a skilled cartographer, who both worked with Cabot to reissue his world map and who interviewed Richard Chancellor on his return. There was Richard Eden, who knew the protagonists well, and who translated important works by Continental scholars into English – a prolific father-figure in both the intellectual and the literal sense (with twelve children who survived to adulthood).
And there was the lawyer and scholar Richard Hakluyt, deeply knowledgeable about trade and world geography. Not only did Hakluyt directly advise the company over which Cabot presided, he also inspired his younger cousin of the same name, then a pupil at Westminster School. He talked to him with animation in his rooms at the Inns of Court about a world map that he possessed, and directed him to Psalm 107, ‘where I read’, the younger Hakluyt remembered, ‘that they which go down to the sea in ships ... they see the works of the Lord’. The younger Richard Hakluyt resolved there and then that he would, if he had the chance, ‘prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature’. Born around the time that Sebastian Cabot was planning his great venture, the principal protagonists of 1553 had all died by the time he began his mission ‘to collect in orderly fashion the maritime records of our own countrymen, now lying scattered and neglected’.6 Nevertheless, as a young man, Hakluyt spoke with many who had been involved, and he gathered together an array of such written records as had been kept, though they had not been methodically brought together. Wisely, he heeded the ancient stricture of Ptolemy: that it was first-hand travel accounts that mattered, not the bundles of speculation and hearsay which made up so many geographies, or ‘cosmographies’ – those ‘weary volumes’, as he called them, drafted by desk-bound academics.7
In his great work on the Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, Hakluyt showed that England, after a slow start, had been at the forefront of European trade and exploration. He showed that the growth of a genuine maritime culture, founded on the scientific understanding of maps and astronomy, had laid the basis for the flowering of English enterprise under Queen Elizabeth in his own day. He showed, too, that a pioneering voyage of 1553 was where it all truly began. And it was thanks to him that this story became, for a time, a staple of British imperial history.
Hakluyt was right. The voyage in search of a north-east passage to Asia in 1553, organised by Sebastian Cabot, and led by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, was one of the boldest in English history. It is an extraordinary story, with its divided outcome, and with the surviving logs and interviews that allow it to be retold in detail. While some of the participants brought English commerce to an imperial court with which the country had not previously traded, others became fatally lost and stranded within the Arctic ice.
It is a story that is remarkable too for what it reveals about the position of England at the time: in the midst of profound social and political upheaval, and in the early stages of an intellectual revolution. For the first time attitudes appeared which seem ‘enlightened’, scientific and almost modern. Within a seething conflict of ideas about religion and the country’s political direction, a recognisably empirical way of thinking and behaving emerged.
Richard Eden, who worked for promoters of the expedition, dismissed with contempt those ’superstitious Horoscopers (Astrologers, I mean, and not Astronomers)’ whose readings had been pored over in the recent past, and indeed which still were. It is impossible to read the instructions which Sebastian Cabot wrote for those who sailed in 1553, or the account of the voyage drafted by Richard Chancellor on his return, without being struck that the voice, for almost the first time, sounds familiar to modern ears.
The expedition had a human cost which is impossible to ignore. Some of the men were certainly, as it was said, ‘worthy of better fortune’. At sea, perhaps more even than on land, fortune did not always favour the deserving. Few seamen, as Richard Hakluyt later wrote, lived to ‘grey hairs’. Skills and ability could improve one’s chances of survival, but they did not rule out misfortune. For many of the men in 1553, some with dependent family, some young themselves and in the early stage of their careers, it was a matter of luck to which ship, and to which captain, they were assigned. At the same time, it was more than simply the whim of fortune which led one of the expedition ships to return home safely while its sisters were not seen in England again.
The voyage of Willoughby and Chancellor deserves to be well known – as well known, say, as Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world or as Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated attempt to navigate a northwest passage. Indeed, in many ways it is more deserving. Certainly it is an episode which England has more reason to remember with pride. Where Franklin’s 1845 voyage is notorious for its unmitigated horror, the one Cabot had much earlier overseen, looking for a similar passage to the north-east, mixed disaster with triumph. What Drake achieved meanwhile was undoubtedly remarkable. He returned with a hold packed with spices and gold, the commodities which Willoughby and Chancellor before him had vainly hoped to obtain. But stolen treasure, while it temporarily enriched both individuals and the nation, stirred up problems for the future, and had little to offer in the way of lasting wealth.
That, as Cabot and a few others saw, was to be found in trade: in the exchange, and promotion, of England’s exports, in new markets beyond the traditional networks of Europe. Where Drake’s first thought was to rob, Cabot and his men looked to explore new realms in peace, offering only the ‘affection’ which would lead to enduring commerce. The letter they carried, signed by the young but ailing King Edward VI, acclaimed the peaceful but intrepid merchant, who wandered the world, searching land and sea, ‘to carry such good and profitable things, as are found in their Countries, to remote regions and kingdoms, and again to bring from the same, such things as they find there commodious for their own Countries’. By this means, he declared, ‘friendship might be established among all men, and every one seek to gratify all’. These Englishmen, he assured foreign kings, ‘shall not touch any thing of yours unwilling unto you’.8
Dramatic and important as it is, though, Willoughby and Chancellor’s story is not well known today. It features in general surveys of British maritime history. Scholarly studies exist of the trading company which resulted, and which stood as an example and inspiration to more famous successors, of which the East India Company became the most celebrated. No book has been written, however, which concentrates on the 1553 voyage, or which seeks to place this expedition in particular in the context of its time. Yet it is this context which makes the story truly remarkable. By itself it is a captivating tale: of adventure and of sharply opposed background and fortune. But it is also more than that. The voyage of 1553 marks a significant turning point in English economic and cultural history.
It is desperately hard, in the twenty-first century, to grasp the magnitude of what these men attempted. They sailed away from family and friends, into waters that were wholly unknown. They ventured into an area of the world that was widely believed to be so cold and dangerous that they could not hope to survive. Observers at the time were struck by the ‘greatness of the dangers’ to which the crews would be exposed: a savage climate, unknown monsters, aggressive nations. There is no modern parallel. Even astronauts on the first missions to the moon had a good idea what to expect, and remained in radio contact with their base.
It is true that these men dreamed of filling their ships with gold, pearls and spices, as the Spanish and Portuguese had been able to do, and that visions of astonishing wealth and national renown helped to allay their fears. But from the beginning these ambitions rubbed up alongside more modest ones. The leaders of the expedition sought also, from the outset, to find new outlets for basic English goods, and they hoped to find new sources of supplies, which would allow England to free herself, at last, from the suffocating grip of foreign merchants.
The fact that, as it turned out, tallow and oil from seals rather than gold were discovered, served to reinforce the central point. Lasting wealth and political power could be built on regular trade in useful low-cost articles. Cathay did prove beyond these men’s reach. Even had they got there, of course, they would have found a place rather different to the one visited and eulogised by Marco Polo some two and a half centuries previously. China, and the world, had changed. None of this detracts from what these men did achieve.
Since the beginning of time, a partial but suitably impressed Richard Eden proclaimed, no enterprise deserved greater praise than ‘that which our nation have attempted by the north seas to discover the mighty and rich empire of Cathay’.