Part I

‘TURNING OUTWARD’

There is no land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable.

ROBERT THORNE

 

 

One

On 6 August 1497 a fourteen-year-old boy disembarked with his father at the quayside in Bristol. Here, in front of the storehouses, cranes and residential properties which lined the harbour, crowds of excited men and women thronged the stone-paved banks. The people watching cheered and shouted as the small ship was paddled, or towed, to its mooring alongside the rebuilt church of St Stephen, where the family most closely involved had offered prayers for the success of their voyage prior to setting out. Hundreds of ordinary citizens were there, alongside emotional wives, family and friends, as well as a delegation of the town’s governors, smartly turned out in livery and attempting to remain dignified in the midst of the commotion.

Hours earlier, the Matthew had lain at anchor in the Severn Estuary. A river pilot had come on board, and with the small crew – around eighteen men – awaited the sharp turn of the tide which would lift the ship for some six miles up the narrow, winding ascent of the Avon.¹ As they did so, news from on board had sped inland on horseback.

At first dignitaries of the town exchanged urgent whispers. Soon, Bristol’s 10,000 inhabitants talked openly of how John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), the Italian mariner who some years earlier had come to live and work with them, had succeeded in his extraordinary aim. He had sailed west across the great ocean and reached the East.²

Bristol mariners before John Cabot had launched into the Atlantic west of Ireland, battling winds and currents that were predominantly hostile, in the hope of finding new lands.

They had looked for the fabled Isle of Brazil, or the Isle of the Seven Cities, governed, supposedly, by the descendants of Spanish bishops and their flocks, who had fled the first coming of the Moors. Cabot’s dream, though, had been different. Islands in the ocean might act as a convenient staging post. But his ultimate ambition, strengthened by the proclaimed success of another Genoan – the weaver’s son, Christopher Columbus – was to reach the mainland and offshore islands of Asia.³

The idea had come to him while he worked as a trader, travelling from the Mediterranean to Arabia and the Black Sea, to purchase the exotic goods brought by Muslim middlemen. At the markets of Mecca, the silks, spices, perfumes and precious stones had all travelled countless dusty miles on ancient trading roads from the rich civilisations of the East. Surely, Cabot reasoned, these luxuries could be acquired more directly, and more cheaply, by a sea route which headed not east from Europe but due west across the Atlantic, following the curvature of the earth to the easternmost promontories of Asia?

It was a powerful incentive. Since the travels of Marco Polo, Europeans had obsessed about the wealth of the East. In the thirteenth century marauding Mongol armies had swept across Asia into Europe, causing devastation but making safe, in their wake, the ancient trade routes. For a period, intrepid Europeans like Polo made epic journeys to the East and returned with tales which stirred wonder and envy – of a rich civilisation they called Cathay and of a land presided over by the ‘ Great Chan [Khan]’, on the edge of a distant ocean, whose markets overspilled with valuable goods. To try to get there, men felt, was no folly. This was not ‘Utopia’ or some similar imaginary place. On the contrary, wrote one explorer and sea captain, ‘it is a country, well known to be described and set forth by all modern Geographers’.⁴

Meanwhile, far off Asia’s eastern shore, Marco Polo had written, lay the island of ‘Cipangu’ – Japan. He had not visited it himself, but was assured that gold was to be found there ‘in measureless quantities’. Precious stones abounded, and pearls were so numerous they were buried with the dead. The palace of the ruler was of ‘incalculable richness’, roofed with gold as Europeans would use lead, the floors of its halls and chambers tiled in thick, glowing slabs of the same metal. No one, he claimed, could count the island’s riches. No wonder that covetous Europeans yearned to visit.⁵

By the fifteenth century, however, access to the East by land was closed off. The Mongol Empire had fragmented. A more nationalistic China had turned in on itself, refusing any longer to welcome foreign visitors. The rise of the Ottoman Empire had placed another great barrier between West and East. Europeans who set out on the path taken by their predecessors failed to return. Muslim middlemen again controlled the flow, as well as the profits, of exotic products, leaving merchants of Venice or Genoa – men like John Cabot – to collect them from Alexandria or from ports on the Black Sea.

For Europeans, the incentive grew for a new and easier ocean route to the East. The Portuguese responded by launching voyages down the west coast of Africa, into the face of unfavourable winds and unfavourable currents, trusting that it would bend northward.⁶ In their search for a navigable route to the Orient, they developed the technology of seafaring. A few visionaries like Columbus and Cabot, meanwhile, dreamed of getting to the East by sailing west.

The idea was not controversial in theory. Most educated men had long believed the world to be round. In ancient Greece Aristotle had noticed the fact that different stars were visible in Egypt, say, compared with further north – a phenomenon which would not occur were the earth a flat surface. During the Middle Ages, men like Bede in England, or Dante in Italy, assumed as much. The voyages by the Portuguese down the African coast from early in the fifteenth century accumulated further empirical evidence. But it was controversial in its practicability. How vast was the ocean that men would have to cross?⁷

To many it seemed too rash an enterprise. Columbus was turned away, in Lisbon, and in London too, where the cautious and tight-fisted Henry VII listened sympathetically but politely demurred, laughing in private ‘at all that Columbus had said’.⁸ Eventually, however, Columbus did persuade the Spanish monarchs to support him. And once word of his success had gripped the courts of Europe, others were bound to follow.

Working in Spain himself, John Cabot yearned to make the same attempt. He was in Valencia, in 1493, when Columbus passed through, on his triumphant return to the royal court: watching, and questioning whether Columbus had really reached Asia as he claimed. For at least a year Cabot was then in Seville, working on an ill-fated project to build a new river bridge, before coming to England. He was a poor man, pursued by Venetian creditors whom he was trying to escape, but he was helped by influential clerics among the Italian community in London.⁹

Now, all of a sudden, he found a warm welcome at the Tudor court. As an old man, John’s son Sebastian, who had travelled with his father as a teenage boy, recalled the time, ‘many years since’, when his father had moved to England ‘to follow the trade of merchandises’. There, he remembered, men talked eagerly of Columbus’ feat. ‘With great admiration’ they had ‘affirmed it to be a thing more divine than human, to sail by the West into the East where spices grow’. He still recalled his first visit to the English capital, not long after Henry Tudor had defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and established the dynasty that bore his name. My father ‘took me with him to the city of London’, he wrote, ‘while I was very young’.¹⁰ It was lost on the boy, but it was the dawn, in England then, of a new age, which men hoped would end the warfare and instability that had haunted the country for decades.

Sensing the direction of the wind, King Henry now wanted a piece of the momentous new discoveries for himself. His realm of England lay at the end of the passage of goods from the far east of Eurasia to the west, and as such it paid the most inflated prices. Offered another chance, Henry jumped at it. There was in England, the Spanish ambassador wrote urgently home, ‘a man like Columbus’, who was helping the country with ‘another undertaking like that of the Indies’.¹¹

Henry was careful to treat his Italian navigator well. He lavished praise on his ‘well-beloved John Cabot, citizen of Venice’. He granted his licence to him as well as to Cabot’s son Sebastian, his two other sons and their heirs, lending his royal blessing to this attempt to discover any islands, countries or provinces of the heathen or the infidel ‘which before this time have been unknown to all Christians’. He could not afford to support Cabot financially as the Catholic monarchs had supported Columbus. Bravely, Cabot sailed with only one small ship. But Henry did grant him the right to govern and exploit any new lands. He could trade with England duty-free, and need only pay the crown a fifth of ‘the Capital gain so gotten’.¹²

Cabot settled in Bristol, the thriving seaport on England’s west coast which had a tradition of voyaging into the Atlantic. He made one attempt which did not succeed because the spring winds blew, as they generally did, from the west. But in 1497, late in May, he tried again. He sailed ‘north and then west’, striking into open water from the south-western corner of Ireland. After tacking determinedly for another thirty-three days, early in the morning of 24 June he hit the undiscovered island off the coast of America which would bear the apt and lasting name: Newfoundland.

He sailed along the coast. He saw tall trees, rocky headlands and fields he suspected were cultivated. He was blanketed in impenetrable Newfoundland fogs. Briefly, and nervously, he went onshore, unfurling a Tudor banner to place the land rather insecurely under the aegis of England’s Christian King. But though there were some signs of human life, he met no people, and can have found little to convince him he had struck the eastern shores of Asia. Along the underwater ‘banks’, where shellfish congregated, his crew found thick and valuable seams of cod, scooped up in writhing baskets from the side of the ship. But there was no wealthy civilisation: no spices, or fine silks.

Undaunted, he skimmed back on the westerly wind to assure a grateful King that he had landed in the realm of the ‘Great Khan’. This was the land he expected to find, the land he fervently hoped to find, and so the land – pending contrary evidence – he believed he had found.

Only hours after he arrived back in Bristol, to an ecstatic welcome by local men and women crowded on the town wharf, John Cabot set off again, continuing east on the old road to London.

There, on 10 August, he had a conference with Henry VII. And though he could not on this occasion produce gold or spices, or even exotic flora and fauna, he did assure the King that he had fulfilled his ambition. He was plausible and persuasive. Brandishing the map and globe he had made himself, he showed where he had been. ‘He tells all this in such a way,’ one ambassador wrote home, ‘and makes everything so plain, that I also feel compelled to believe him.’ Mariners from Bristol who had sailed with him, moreover, ‘testified that he spoke the truth’.¹³

Rewards and annuities followed, awarded ‘to him that found the new Isle’. A pension was granted, ‘to sustain himself until the time comes when more will be known of this business’. Cabot, though, believed that much greater wealth would follow. To a poor man, bad with money, £10 was a significant sum, and he quickly squandered it on expensive clothes.¹⁴ He basked in widespread adoration. The common people, it was reported, called him the Admiral, and pursued him ‘like madmen’ through the streets. Half-drunk with the acclaim, he showered his friends with islands, and bishoprics, in this new world.

Plans for a second voyage were quickly made, and the next year Cabot set off west again. This time he went with five ships, a massive undertaking for early Tudor England. With the additional men and equipment at his disposal, he planned to establish a trading station which, he assured one ambassador, would make London ‘a more important mart for spices than Alexandria’. He imagined coasting southward, along what he took to be the Asian shore, until he reached the island of Japan, where, the same ambassador reported, ‘he thinks all the spices of the world have their origin, as well as the jewels’. His dream seemed, finally, so close. One of the five ships was forced by a storm to seek shelter in Ireland. It has been claimed that Cabot, at least, did reach America, and that he sailed south as he had anticipated, meeting Spanish explorers by the coast of modern-day Venezuela. But this time neither Cabot himself nor any of the remaining four ships returned, and nor did word of what happened to them. It was assumed, as one naturalised Englishman wryly observed, that Cabot had ‘found the new lands nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean’.¹⁵

Failing to find Cathay, or Japan, as he had hoped, he perhaps began to doubt. But probably, like Columbus, Cabot died believing he had achieved his aim: that he had sailed west across the ocean and landed in Asia.

 

 

Two

It was left to John Cabot’s son, Sebastian, who had sailed west across the Atlantic with his father and who sailed that way again late in Henry VII’s reign after his father had died, to confirm a growing suspicion. The new land was not Asia, or an island off its shore, but a new land mass. A passage through it would have to be sought, if England was to access the riches of the East.¹

Many since have criticised Sebastian. It has been argued that he tried to claim for himself what was his father’s achievement. As a young man he probably was jealous of his father’s undoubted claim to fame. But in the world map to which he later contributed, and on which rare words of his own survive, he was open. ‘This country’, the legend by Newfoundland reads, ‘was discovered by John Cabot, a Venetian, and Sebastian Cabot, his son.’ It was Sebastian himself who ensured that John’s role was remembered.²

Sebastian was prone to self-importance, and to affecting secret knowledge. Like his father, he was influenced, throughout his life, by offers of money, being perennially short of it himself. He was a cosmopolitan: willing to declare a national allegiance as circumstances, and offers, suited. His promises and declarations, more than one ambassador found, were not worth much. But he was of an optimistic and humane disposition. He was encouraging to younger sailors whose skills and aptitude he admired. And his undoubted skill was genuinely respected by important men, who fought hard to gain, or to retain, his services.

Cabot did yearn, all his life, to perform some truly memorable feat of his own, just as his father had done, by which his place in the history of seafaring would be secured: as a chapter, not a footnote. ‘There increased in my heart,’ he later professed, ‘a great flame of desire to attempt some notable thing.’³ He followed this ambition as surely as he did his financial concern. It shaped his life.

After his father’s death, when he was in his twenties, Sebastian Cabot returned to the American coast. He sailed twice, as chief navigator, first in 1504 and then again in 1508–9. He was rewarded by Henry VII for the service he had done ‘about the finding of the new found lands to our full good pleasure’.⁴ Crucially, he seems to have realised, as his father had not done, that the land he saw was not Asia, but was an entirely new continent. He probably believed that a passage through America existed, and that, sailing into the vast expanse of Hudson Bay, he had found it. But when he returned to England, he learned that the King who had backed his family’s ventures had died.

All of a sudden the focus among the English elite had changed. Where Henry VII had been captivated by global exploration, his son dreamed of military glory in Europe, and ‘cared little for such an enterprise’.⁵ Cabot’s home town of Bristol, meanwhile, had fallen on hard times. The infectious maritime activity and ambition which had existed at the turn of the century had filtered away.

Elsewhere in England there was no interest in exploring the wider world. Foreigners – ‘merchant strangers’ – dominated the country’s trade, and their power and privileges provoked resentment. In London they congregated in enclaves known as ‘liberties’, independently administered by Church authorities, as well as in the suburbs that sprouted and flourished beyond the city’s walls. Like any immigrants, they headed for areas where their co-nationals had settled, creating pockets richly coloured by the culture of a particular region. French, Spanish, Portuguese, North Germans, Genoans, Venetians: all bunched together, tightly controlling certain trades and contemptuous of the unsophisticated islanders for whose needs and appetites they catered.⁶

If travel broadens the mind, the lack of it certainly constrained those of sixteenth-century Englishmen. As the practice of overseas trade languished in early Tudor England, so too did the state of geographical knowledge. At the time when the Portuguese and Spanish in particular were sailing increasing distances across the sea, and acquiring a greater knowledge of lands outside Europe, in England as a whole (in spite of the early Bristol ventures) a medieval geography still prevailed. The world was routinely divided into three conjoined parts: Europe, Asia and Africa. Of the last two, only the nearest regions were at all familiar. Few remotely grasped the concept of a new world. The drumbeat of a later imperialism misleads us. England has not always ruled the waves, nor distinguished itself as a seafaring nation. Later in the sixteenth century, the editor, Richard Hakluyt, who made the subject the study of his life, lamented ‘our former gross ignorance in marine causes’.⁷

Henry VII had seen the problem, and the urgent need for England to shift course. When he came to power, late in the fifteenth century, an Act of Parliament deplored the ‘decay’ of English shipping and what it called the ‘idleness of the Mariners’. Attempts were made to help. Throughout Henry’s reign a policy was pursued of penalising imports not brought to the country in English ships. After him, however, this legacy lapsed.⁸

Cabot remained in England for a few years after King Henry’s death, earning what he could as a surveyor and maker of maps. His cartographic skill, learned from his father, was rare. It was still considered worthy of comment sometime later that he could ‘make cards for the sea with his own hand’.⁹ But in the country in which he had grown up it was little valued. When he was employed, the nature of his appointed task spoke eloquently of the shift in focus.

In 1512 he accepted a government commission. He was to make a chart of Gascony and Guienne, in support of an invasion of western France.¹⁰ When the English fleet which formed part of this expedition moored in Spain, Cabot slipped away. He travelled to meet a Spanish King who, by contrast with his Tudor son-in-law, was only too keen to employ a man with personal knowledge of what he called ‘the island of the Codfish’. Even when Cabot subsequently returned to Bristol to collect his family and effects, no attempt was made to persuade him to stay.

 

 

Three

Approaching thirty, Cabot now settled in Seville, living there just as he may have done with his father almost two decades earlier. The city was much changed. It seemed suddenly to have relocated: from the world’s western edge, it had moved to its centre. It had become the pulsing commercial heart of Spain’s new empire in the lands to the west they called the Indies.

As well as the countless ships which pursued the old European trades, life was now governed by the rhythm of the great fleets. In the spring, cannon fire reverberated across the city, to proclaim the imminent departure of ships laden and bound for the New World. On their return, rich cargoes were brought upriver in barges, unloaded onto ox carts in front of curious crowds, then wheeled through the city streets to the Casa de Contratación: the ‘House of Trade’. Silver in Seville, it was said, ran as freely as copper did in other parts.

For Cabot, the contrast with the apathy in England was stark. Here, he was immediately granted a post, a house and a salary.¹

There were familiar faces in his new home. Living in Seville was a substantial English émigré community made up, largely, of merchants from Bristol.

For years England’s western port had defied the country’s general failure to reach out. Long before the arrival of John Cabot and his sons, men from the town caught fish off Iceland and traded it, along with English cloth, for the fruits, wines, oils and dyes of Spain, Portugal and southern France. Riding the high Avon tides out of the walled and battlemented town, Bristol ships pushed south-west into the Atlantic, before turning east to the hot southern rim of Andalusia. They entered the marshy estuary of Spain’s only navigable river, the Guadalquivir, and transferred their goods into flat-bottomed barges for the journey upriver to Seville. When Cabot arrived, it was friends from Bristol who lent him money and gave him a hand.²

Among them was Robert Thorne. As a small boy, Thorne was probably part of the crowd that gathered on the bank of the Avon, squeezing through the well-dressed legs of city dignitaries to catch a glimpse of the Cabots – a father and his sons – returning in triumph from their epic voyage across the Atlantic. It seems likely that Robert’s father was involved in some way. Certainly the Thornes were among Bristol’s most eminent families.

As boys and young men, Robert and Sebastian knew each other well, and had much in common in spite of being a few years apart in age. Thorne, like Cabot, grew up surrounded by merchants and explorers, and by impassioned conversation about the unfolding geography of the globe. Full of natural energy and curiosity, he inherited intellectual interests as well as commercial ones: they ran in his blood. Just as some sicknesses were hereditary and were passed from father to son, he later wrote, so a burning desire to discover ‘I inherited of my father’.³

When he was a young man, Thorne had moved to Seville to take over his late father’s business, and he lived there, in his father’s old house, with his Spanish mistress and their son. As well as with traditional areas, he traded with the Spanish New World, and was enriched, as Spain was enriched, by the forging there of new trades. He was successful, and became one of the leading members of the émigré community. A visiting English ambassador called him a merchant ‘of great credence’ in Seville.⁴ Though he longed to explore, as Sebastian and his father had done, Thorne did not travel much himself. Physically, he was incapacitated in some way, and perhaps the reference to hereditary sickness was not purely metaphorical. If only he had the faculty to equal his will, he wrote, he would certainly attempt to pursue his ideas.

Cabot, meanwhile, thrived. His expertise was recognised and nurtured. Charles, the young King who inherited the thrones of the Spanish kingdoms from his grandfather in 1516, was impressed, and showed him lasting trust and loyalty.

Cabot climbed rapidly. In spite of being a foreigner, only six years after he arrived in Spain he was made the empire’s Pilot Major: its head of navigation. He had responsibility for training the pilots who crossed the wide sea to colonies in the Caribbean and southern America. From a position of little consequence in England, a country which was itself of little consequence, he now had oversight of all of the trade and exploration of a great empire.⁵

 

 

Four

While some expats became effectively Spanish, Robert Thorne always remained a patriotic Englishman. In his will he left bequests to charitable causes, and invested in his country’s commercial future, with money for loans to clothiers, for a grammar school in Bristol (which he had worked to found during the last year of his life), and to establish a scholarship at the Merchant Taylors’ school in London.

All his adult life, Thorne yearned to push England onto the path he had seen Spain travel. Like the Spanish, he believed, the English must pioneer new trade routes to flourish. Their position as an offshore island was ideal and the new wealth of the Indies lay there to be tapped.

If he could not explore in person, he would do so in his imagination. For hours he pored over the maps he was able to see which showed both recently discovered lands (with varying accuracy) and the continuing gaps in men’s knowledge of the world.¹ Gradually, during the early 1520s, an idea took root and developed. The Spanish and Portuguese had explored to the south, the west and the east, and in doing so they had established routes of trade and pillage which they considered theirs alone to exploit. In 1494 the Pope himself had blessed the division of the world between the two countries. But they had made no attempt to voyage north. The English might do so, Thorne believed, and still make for the riches of the East.

They had sailed already, of course, west across the northern Atlantic. If they were to sail more directly north, over the Pole, he became convinced that sailors could descend towards the Equator on the further side of the new-found lands. Provided this proved practicable, as he felt sure it would, England’s mariners would be in a powerful position. For by this route, as was obvious if one studied a globe, they would hit the equatorial islands of the Pacific by ‘a much shorter way than either the Spaniards or Portuguese have’.

This, surely, was a path to riches which divine providence itself had marked out for the English.

In 1526 Sebastian Cabot organised, and himself led, a Spanish attempt to retrace the pioneering course taken by a Portuguese explorer, Fernando Magellan, who had sailed (and died) in Spanish service less than a decade earlier: west across the Atlantic, beneath the Americas, and on across the Pacific to the Spice Islands in the East.

The voyage was some time in the planning, and Thorne discussed it with Cabot and became involved. As a wealthy merchant and leading member of the English community in Seville, he made a substantial investment, and secured in return the participation of two of his English friends, Roger Barlow and Henry Patmer, who shared his intellectual interests.

While the Spanish wanted an immediate financial return, Thorne sought knowledge. He charged his friends to interrogate local mariners wherever they visited, and to seek to understand the maps that they used. They should try, he told them, to become ‘expert in the navigation of those seas’. In particular his eye was on a route down into the Pacific region from the north, and he urged both men to discover what native peoples knew of the geography north of their own lands.

The voyage was not a success. After the flagship sank, the others diverted to explore a river estuary in what is now Argentina, and never made it into the Pacific. But if Thorne was disappointed, his natural optimism soon revived.

While Barlow and Patmer were away, a visit was paid to Seville by an ambassador of Henry VIII, Dr Edward Lee. Lee spent time with the leading Englishmen of the city, and the ebullient Thorne, then in his mid-thirties, made a significant impression. When Lee wrote home he mentioned in particular ‘a right toward young man as any lightly belongeth to England called Thorne’.

Thorne seized the opportunity to talk to someone with access to the heart of English government. He spoke passionately about the geography of the world beyond Europe, expounding the theories he had developed in conversation with other Bristol sailors and merchants about how England could obtain its share of the wealth which flowed into Spain and Portugal from the Indies. Lee listened with genuine interest.

When, a few months later, Lee wanted to know more about a dispute between Spain and Portugal over their division of the newly discovered world, it was Thorne he turned to for information. What, he asked, was the significance of the Spanish Emperor’s new spice trade in eastern Asia? Where did this leave English hopes for a share of the new wealth? Thorne was more than happy to oblige, and he wrote the ambassador a long letter. There was no doubt, he told Lee, that the newly discovered islands had riches in profusion. They had spices: ‘Cloves, Nutmegs, Mace and Cinnamon’. And they abounded with precious metals and stones.²

Like most geographers and merchants of his day, Thorne believed that metals and stones, like grains or spices, were influenced by the action of heat in tropical climates. As English metals were lead, tin and iron, he wrote, ‘so theirs be Gold, Silver, and Copper’. As northern conditions fostered stones like amber, crystal or jasper, so the warmth further south nurtured rubies, diamonds, sapphires ‘and other like’. As Thorne’s friend Roger Barlow later wrote, it was ‘the influence of the sun’ which ‘doth nourish and bring forth gold, spices, stones and pearls’.³

While English ships could not follow the courses pioneered and jealously guarded by the Iberians, who by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 had blithely carved up the new lands of the world between them, they did have another option. Not only did they have some claim to the lands across the northern Atlantic, which they had discovered first. They could also sail further north. Crossing the Pole and sailing down into the Pacific from above, they would not have to make for places already frequented by other Europeans. In these vast waters they would easily find new lands ‘no less rich of gold and spicery’. Since the distance around the earth was greater at the Equator than on any parallel line of latitude, there must, it stood to reason, be no lack of lands rich in those commodities which abounded under a hot sun. Natives in these distant regions attached no great value to wares which fetched high prices in Europe. Why should they? It was only natural for people to prize what they did not have over what they had in abundance: ‘I doubt not but to them should be as precious our corn and seeds, if they might have them, as to us their spices: & likewise the pieces of glass that here we have counterfeited are as precious to them, as to us their stones: which by experience is seen daily by them that have trade thither.’

Thorne’s optimism and excitement were obvious. They spoke not only of a man of natural enthusiasm but also of one who for years had lived in Seville, who had often watched as ships returned bearing news and evidence of great wealth in unknown lands, and who was used to mixing with men and women for whom dramatic discoveries had for decades been the context of their lives.

He had a vantage point, here, on the edge of the old world, before which a new world was unfolding whose possibilities seemed almost limitless.

If the English could only establish it, there would be yet another advantage to such a northern route. On their way to and from the Pole merchants would pass cold lands which, while they could not offer exotic produce or precious stones, would provide excellent markets for those English woollen cloths which were unlikely to sell well under an equatorial sun. These cold regions, he argued, should be just as profitable for England as the Spice Islands were to the Spanish and Portuguese.

There was an obvious objection, of course, and it was not one that Thorne could afford to ignore. To sail north across the polar regions of the earth would involve all the risks and obstructions associated with a bitter climate. Here Thorne was bold enough to defy conventional wisdom.

Most experts believed, he wrote, that in the extreme north ‘the sea is all ice, and the cold so great that none can suffer it’.⁴ But if the Spanish and Portuguese experience in the tropics showed anything, he argued, it was that too much store should not be set by received opinions. Ancient authorities had insisted that the heat in the south was too extreme to permit human habitation, while experience had shown otherwise. In fact, Thorne exaggerated, no land was more habitable or temperate than that in the equatorial zone.

The same, he assured Dr Lee, would prove to be the case in the north. In Thorne’s letter, the providentialism which would come to shape the mindset of the British Empire is already apparent. Nothing in nature had been made to go to waste. The world had ‘no land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable’. England, by its position, had been offered a special role in God’s plan, if it would only seize it.

To illustrate his claims, Thorne attached a rudimentary map (not one, he admitted, ‘for Pilots to sail by’). It was probably based upon a map or maps he had seen surreptitiously at the Casa de Contratación, where Spain’s accumulated geographical knowledge was kept a closely guarded secret, but where Thorne’s connection to Cabot gave him a priceless link.⁵

Certainly Thorne knew what risks he was taking. In Spain none but appointed specialists were permitted to draw maps of the world, and the sort of information he discussed was banned from public conversation. He anxiously passed on the warning to Dr Lee. ‘It would not sound well to them’, he cautioned, ‘that a stranger should know or discover the secrets: and would appear worst of all, if they understand that I write touching the short way to the spicery by our seas.’ If the Spanish authorities knew that he had written as he had, and drawn the map he had, it would be ‘a cause of pain to the maker’.

From surviving printed copies, it is clear both how much progress had been made since Columbus first hit land in the Caribbean a little over three decades earlier, and also how much remained obscure. Much that is featured on the map – eastern Asia, for instance, or the north-eastern coastline of America – is a mixture of recognisable forms and wild approximation.

Equally significant are the map’s northern and western edges, which slice through the mainland of north America before it has reached a coast. While south and central America are outlined, with a ‘Mare Australe’ or ‘southern sea’ beyond, no information indicated how far north or west the northern land mass extended, though it was certainly now considered a separate continent, for the eastern edge of Asia is clearly, if speculatively, drawn.

Thorne’s idea is plain. Alongside the eastern seaboard of America, which rises directly upwards to the north rather than bearing north-east, a wide channel of open sea seems to allow passage over the Pole. While many writers had supposed that a bridge of land or ice in the extreme north connected the new world with the old – for how else had people and animals got to America? – Spanish maps seen by Thorne tended to mark only those coastlines known to exist.⁶ So the way looked open. And once ships had descended into the Pacific, they would surely discover new spice islands in the ocean, and could make for the eastern shores of Cathay, by a route shorter and (Thorne argued) easier than that taken by the Portuguese.

Thorne was willing to take risks in passing information to Lee because it was a subject about which he cared deeply. He stressed that he was not motivated by personal interest. This was a private enthusiasm which had gripped him since youth, as it had his father before him, and in whose clutches he remained. ’I have had and still have’, he wrote, ‘no little mind of this business.’ If he were able, he assured Lee, he would attempt the exploration himself.

In subsequent years, Thorne continued to promote the idea of discovery to the north. A couple of years after he wrote to Henry VIII’s ambassador, he and his friend Roger Barlow tried a more direct approach. They composed a shorter, more formal letter and sent it this time to the King himself.⁷

They played on Henry’s known ambition and his desire for famous triumphs. Other monarchs had pressed outward, they noted, and made possible things which previously had seemed impossible. No effort would seem too much where so great honour and glory is hoped for’. In the modern age, it would be strange to find a prince happy ‘to live quiet [within] his own dominions’. No people would wish for such a risk-averse ruler. They would think he lacked the ‘noble courage and spirit’ possessed by others.

Together Thorne and Barlow reiterated the plan which Thorne had outlined to Dr Lee, for a voyage which sailed due north, over the Pole, through what they felt sure would be open sea. They did now admit what Thorne had not previously admitted, that for a short distance – two or three leagues before they reached the Pole, and as much afterwards – conditions might be difficult and dangerous. But these hazards were surmountable, and were worth braving, since in other respects the route would be both shorter and easier than those undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese. ‘From thence forth’, they assured Henry, ‘the seas and lands are as temperate as in these parts.’

There was a notable advantage, moreover, to which Thorne had not alluded in his original letter. If the expedition was undertaken in summer, as it naturally would be, any risk would be mitigated by almost perpetual daylight. Sailors would not have to ‘go in darkness groping their way’. Once they had passed through this region of sunlit nights, and descended into the warm tropical zone, ‘without doubt’, Thorne and Barlow declared, ‘they shall find there the richest lands and islands of the world’, replete with ‘gold, precious stones, balms, spices, and other things that we here esteem most’. Their timing, however, was unfortunate. By the late 1520s, Henry was absorbed in the fall-out from his determination to divorce his Spanish Queen in quest of a legitimate male heir. In Seville, as a direct consequence, the position of the English deteriorated.

England’s long-standing alliance with Spain, cemented by Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the Spanish King, was torn apart. The English heresy which unseated the Pope from his position at the head of the Church was angrily condemned by the Spanish, and pursued by the Inquisition. Merchants living in Spain faced imprisonment, interrogation and torture if they were unguarded in their speech.⁸

Thorne and Barlow, like others among the English community in southern Spain, had substantial local interests. Both owned land and invested in numerous trading concerns. Suddenly, however, there was too much to lose by remaining in Seville, and both made plans to return to England.

There is no evidence that Henry ever read the address they had written to him.

 

 

Five

Thorne did not only return to England. Soon after getting back, he left his old home in the West Country and relocated to the capital. By 1532, three years after his letter to King Henry, Thorne is described as a ‘citizen and merchant of London’. As London boomed, provincial outports like Bristol struggled to compete. For the ambitious and commercially minded, the capital, increasingly, was the only place to be.

Thorne’s enthusiasm for mounting a voyage of northern discovery remained strong. Prior to leaving for England he had bought an English ship that had been marketed for sale in Spain. The Saviour had been registered at Bristol and was, as his younger brother attested, the ‘greatest and best’ ship built in the West of England.

Too large for Bristol’s regular trades with France and Spain, Thorne thought her well suited for the expedition of which he had dreamed for so long. He wished, his brother later wrote to the King, ‘to have come into this your said realm to give your grace relation of countries to be discovered and by the same ship and others intended through your grace’s aid to discover and [seek] new countries’. Excited now that the launch of his great exploit seemed imminent, it was in the Saviour that Thorne sailed to England.¹

Thorne continued to seek support from central government. In London he spoke with Thomas Cromwell, who from undistinguished origins was rapidly becoming the most important man in England beneath the King. He talked to Cromwell, as he had talked to Dr Lee, and others he could trust, of ‘countries to be discovered’, and requested royal backing for the voyage which might allow other ships to join the Saviour in its attempt. Cromwell had lived and worked in trading circles during his youth, and had an affinity with merchants. He might well have wished to help. But he had his hands full. He was in the midst of managing what became known as the ‘Reformation Parliament’, which asserted Henry’s position as ‘the only head, sovereign lord, protector, and defender’ of the English Church.

Nevertheless, this disappointment did not put a brake on Thorne’s plans. He was a wealthy man, and could afford to fund the venture himself. His old friend from Bristol and Seville, Roger Barlow, had evidently agreed to take charge, and a window for departure seems to have been arranged, for Barlow had requested and obtained exemption from civic duties in his home town of Bristol.

Suddenly, however, on 5 May 1532, as his great project finally neared realisation, Robert Thorne died. The instigator, financier and driving force of the expedition was only forty, relatively young even then for an affluent man who had reached adulthood. We don’t know what caused his death; perhaps it was the chronic ill health which had prevented him taking a direct part in expeditions, an ailment he had long known himself to be carrying. Whatever it was, without Thorne’s money and energy, the enterprise lost momentum and was shelved.

For Roger Barlow, his friend’s death was a massive blow. He was both intellectual and willing to be practically involved, but he was not dynamic in the way that Thorne had been. He retired to his family estate in Pembrokeshire and absorbed himself in academic pursuits.

Barlow set himself to translate from Spanish a work of world geography – the Suma de Geographia, of Martin Fernandez de Enciso – that was permeated with a revolutionary ethos which now, belatedly, began to seep into England: the conviction that what mattered was not so much ancient authority as the acquisition of knowledge based on personal experience. Appropriately enough, in sections where he knew better, when the text talked for instance of the Bristol Channel or the Pembrokeshire coast, he used his own material. And at the end, when he considered such lands as remained to be discovered, he inserted a reworked version of the address he and Thorne had composed years earlier, calling again for an English attempt to find a new northern route to the East.²

It was not published, as he had hoped, but Barlow’s book was put before the Privy Council. Now, almost a decade after Thorne’s death, the timing was good. Rumours had been picked up that the French were planning a similar venture, and this, as always, was a certain prompt for action. The argument Thorne and Barlow had made regarding a new outlet for English exports in the north was also attractive. The Spanish ambassador, who listened to reports from his secret sources, remained alert to encroachment on his country’s trades. The Councillors, he wrote, hoped that the ‘extreme cold’ in these northern regions would mean that ‘English woollen cloths would be very acceptable and sell at a good price’.

A foreign pilot was found, but in the course of negotiations over terms, he was deemed to be too demanding. English alternatives did not exist. ‘In the end’, the Spanish ambassador reported, ‘the undertaking has been abandoned.’³

One man who noticed the fatal dependence of this English expedition on a foreign pilot was the Vice-Admiral. Shortly to be promoted to Lord Admiral, John Dudley’s career had progressed slowly but suddenly took off. Over the subsequent years he came to exert a crucial influence on England’s maritime policy, and would become one of the most powerful politicians in the country.

Dudley was a man who reflected his times. He was a Protestant – eagerly embracing the new religious ideology which had torn deep divisions across Europe since a monk from Saxony, Martin Luther, first nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg castle church, more than twenty years earlier. Dudley was an energetic dealer in property, for its financial returns rather than any attempt to develop a regional power base. He also endeared himself to the King by his military skills, one Frenchman hailing him as ‘the most skilful of his generation, both on foot and on horseback’. And he shared Henry’s new-found passion for the navy. His enthusiasm for oceanic exploration was a significant boost to those like Barlow who pushed for a more forward policy.⁴

The lack of English mariners with modern seafaring skills was becoming a recognised problem. The majority of both pilots and regular sailors on Henry VIII’s ships were foreigners. As the French ambassador noted, they were a colourful mixture of Ragusans (from Dubrovnik), Venetians, Genoese, Normans or Bretons.⁵ Dudley encouraged such skilled immigrants. When the French King exposed Protestants in his realm to persecution, Dudley successfully lured hundreds more sailors, shipbuilders and craftsmen from the maritime towns of Normandy and Brittany. These were men who could man English ships and, he hoped, encourage Englishmen to acquire their skills.

There remained a need, however, for someone with long experience of navigation and exploration who could oversee England’s mercantile activity: someone senior and authoritative enough to advise the King’s Council, and to organise voyages which would encourage merchants to attempt new trades. Not long after Dudley took up his role as Vice-Admiral, one such man did express an interest in coming back to the land which had sponsored his earliest ocean ventures.

 

 

Six

Since returning in 1532 from the unsuccessful expedition on which Roger Barlow had sailed, Sebastian Cabot had been unhappy in Spanish service. There had been investigations into his conduct, both on that voyage and in the execution of his duties as Pilot Major. He retained the strong confidence of the Emperor, and a sentence of exile was never carried out. But ongoing political and professional rivalries within the Casa de Contratación blighted his working life. Many in Spain had undertaken long voyages and thought they knew the business of cartography and navigation. Entrenched schools of thought feuded bitterly over both theory and policy.¹

Cabot mused how in England, by contrast, there would be few to rival his experience or to question his authority. He was pragmatic enough to profess the national loyalty which suited the occasion and the company. But he had grown up in England, was comfortable with Englishmen, and does seem to have considered himself English. His daughter Elizabeth was the child of his first marriage to a woman called Joanna from London, while Elizabeth herself had grown up and married Henry Ostrich, an Englishman who came from another family of Bristol merchants prominent among the expat community in Spain. Cabot had made known his willingness to return to work for the English if the circumstances, and the terms, were right.

In 1538 Cabot again put out feelers regarding a possible move back to his old country. He approached an ambassador of Henry VIII’s, who eagerly sent word of his conversation home. The Pilot Major was ‘desirous’, the ambassador reported, ‘if he might not serve the [English] king, at least to see him, as his old master’. Needless to say, given Cabot’s nature, money was discussed, and the ambassador was quick to note an affordable opportunity for England to poach a key figure in Spain’s commercial empire, if prompt action was taken.²

John Dudley, who had recently taken up his post as Vice-Admiral, was sent out briefly that year to take part in the Spanish mission. He was probably introduced to Spain’s Pilot Major then; certainly, he learned a great deal more about him. He must have been impressed, for he would promote the famous navigator for the rest of his life.

Circumstances, as it turned out, were not propitious in 1538 for Cabot to jump ship.

Though the English ambassador had requested an urgent response from his own government, none seems to have been forthcoming. Henry VIII still had more interest in the damage his growing navy could inflict on French galleys off the English coast than in pushing his country’s commerce into new waters. After twenty years of peace, renewed war in the final years of his reign with the old enemies, France and Scotland, meant that the nation’s best ships were needed at home.

From Cabot’s point of view, too, compelling arguments existed against an immediate move – even if he had made the initial exploratory contact. For one thing, France and the Empire had made terms and stood united against the English, who cannot have looked like a team worth joining. For another, Cabot’s second – Spanish – wife, Catalina, was a strong-minded and overbearing woman, whose enthusiasm for relocating from Seville to a cold, wet offshore island in the north of the continent was probably slight.

Over the subsequent decade, however, the rise of Cabot’s admirer, John Dudley, continued. As he worked to build up England’s maritime capability, he may already have had in mind the recall of a man with the expertise to guide the country onto a new path. When Henry VIII died, at the end of January 1547, his son and successor Edward VI was still a young boy of nine. The Council’s influence over policy became much more decisive than it had been under the tyrannical old king. Dudley, by then, was one of its most senior and influential figures, second only to the young King’s uncle, Edward Seymour, who was appointed ‘Governor of the King’s Person’, was officially recognised as the ‘Lord Protector’, and who made himself the Duke of Somerset.

Almost immediately, a secret invitation was despatched to Spain. In September that year Catalina died, removing a significant obstacle to her husband’s relocation. Cabot was quick to respond. Within weeks the English Privy Council had authorised a payment of £100, ‘for the transporting of one Shabot a pilot to come out of Hispain to serve and inhabit in England’. Cabot was not honest with his Spanish employers about his intentions. He planned, he said, ‘to go to Germany’ for personal reasons. He obtained a five-month leave of absence from Imperial service and delegated his duties as Pilot Major. In the event it was his son-in-law, Henry Ostrich, who claimed the payment for shipping Sebastian to England.³

By the time that Cabot returned to live in England, his enthusiastic supporter, John Dudley, had been replaced at the Admiralty. His successor, the brother of the Lord Protector, had little interest in maritime expansion, and none in Cabot. Realising where matters stood, the navigator retired to his old home town of Bristol. The situation, Dudley reassured him, was unlikely to last long.

Sure enough, after Thomas Seymour’s rapid disgrace and execution, Dudley temporarily resumed charge of the Admiralty and immediately brought Cabot again to the attention of the Council, commending him as a ‘good and expert pilot’.⁴

The Emperor, meanwhile, was furious that his Pilot Major – a man he had stood by through scandal and controversy – had absconded to England without his permission. The Imperial ambassador in England, François van der Delft, was repeatedly instructed to make enquiries, while English envoys at the Imperial court in Brussels were similarly browbeaten. Not only had Charles V always displayed a high opinion of Cabot, but over some thirty years at the heart of the Casa de Contratación, his Pilot Major had acquired an intimate knowledge of the Empire’s commercial practices and secrets. It was no wonder that Charles persevered in his attempts to persuade him to return to Imperial service.

Cabot, the English were firmly told, was ‘a very necessary man for the Emperor, whose servant he is’. He had not resigned his post but had applied only for a short period of leave. The Empire had continued to pay his salary, not ceasing to do so until November 1548, after it was known that he had in fact taken up residence in England. ‘He must clearly understand’, Charles wrote to his ambassador in London early in 1550, ‘that we require his services, and claim a right to them.’

Cabot himself prolonged Imperial uncertainty by customary evasions designed to keep his options open. To van der Delft he gave the impression that he would like nothing better than to return to his work in Spain. ‘He often comes to me secretly,’ the ambassador reported, ‘to ask me to write to your Majesty so that he may be delivered from this captivity’. Unsubtly, Cabot hinted that the Emperor might want to lure him back with a financial offer he could not refuse. ‘Although they offer him high wages here,’ noted van der Delft (for Cabot, clearly, had told him so), ‘his only wish is to die in your Majesty’s service.’ This, though, was merely his accustomed gamesmanship. Cabot always made himself open to better offers. He tried, as a more cynical, and more astute, Imperial ambassador in England would note, ‘to make his profit out of both sides’.⁵

In truth, barring exceptional reward for returning to Spain, Cabot was happy to remain in England. Whenever necessary he soon found someone in the English government ready to obstruct any move, or to declare him, if he did not declare himself, too weakened by ill health and old age to travel abroad.

It was an exaggeration for Cabot to claim that the English were paying him high wages, but it was true that the English Council had done their best, at Dudley’s bidding, to induce him to remain. Early in January 1549 he was granted a generous annuity of more than £166 – equivalent to around £35,000 today.⁶ It was backdated to be paid from the previous September when, presumably, the revered navigator and orchestrator of the naval enterprise of a great empire had arrived back in the country of his childhood, tasked with launching it on a global commercial stage.

 

 

Seven

A part from a brief visit twenty-five years earlier, it was more than thirty-five years since Cabot had collected his family from Bristol and sailed south to work in a country more appreciative of his skills. Now, in 1548, in his mid-sixties at least, he had finally returned, and he found the place much changed.¹

Shortly before he had left, a young and confident King had assumed the English throne. His Queen, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon, had recently given birth to a son – Henry, Duke of Cornwall – which had prompted widespread rejoicing. The heavens, it seemed, were smiling on the Tudor dynasty. Sadly, the boy died when he was six weeks old, but there was no reason not to anticipate many more children for the young and enamoured royal pair.

Now, though, Henry VIII had lived out his long and notorious reign, transforming England for ever in his desperate quest for a wife who could both provide a male heir and satisfy his increasingly unbalanced sense of self-worth. In the process, a country that was part of Catholic Europe had defied the authority of Rome. The self-interest of the King (and often of others too) had coincided with intellectual currents of reform. To the horror of Spain, Henry’s one-time ally, England now sat on the other side of a deep religious divide which had riven the Continent.

Soon after his return to England Cabot came to live in his old home of Bristol. He must have had fond memories of the crowds who had turned out all those years ago to welcome him back, with his father, from new lands across the western ocean.

In general the 1490s and early 1500s had been a good time in Bristol. The town’s ancient trade with Bordeaux, which had collapsed when that town was lost to the French, had been replaced by lucrative relationships with Spain and Portugal. English cloth was exchanged for the products of the south. Affluent families like the Thornes had revelled in what they called their ‘feats of merchandises’.

Now, fifty years later, it was a shock to find a dilapidated shadow of the vibrant place he remembered. The local cloth trade on which Bristol depended had for decades been in a deep slump. Average exports were scarcely a third of what they had been. The artisans who worked to manufacture the cloth – the shearmen, carders, dyers and others – now congregated in London, and this was where great merchants like Robert Thorne had felt impelled to make their base. ‘[Many] tenements’, the Mayor of Bristol had recently complained, ‘are fallen into decay for want of timber and stones, and the quay and town walls are in like ruin.’²

Since Cabot was last there, moreover, a significant slice of English society – the black, grey, brown and white habits which had brushed the streets of all major towns – had disappeared. Government inspectors had visited the religious houses, looking for reasons to enforce closure. Monks and nuns vanished from the scene, taking with them a distinctive piece of the medieval world.

The achievements of Cabot and his family did remain a source of civic pride. But most of the men and women who might have remembered Cabot personally had died. With a few old men of the town he could sit and recall a time when great ships sailed from the Avon on two or three voyages every year. Now, the old residents told him sadly, they could at best make only one.³ Ageing as he was, though, Cabot was not a man to live in the past. When he moved to London, his mind was full of ambitious plans. For all his notable achievements, he had not himself led or organised a truly momentous voyage, and the decision to leave his post in Seville was motivated in part by this desire.

Now in England, under a new and similarly ambitious government, he had another chance – probably his last – to make his mark.

 

 

Eight

Even in the English capital, in terms of the maritime world that he knew, Cabot must have felt that he had travelled back in time, to a world barely touched by the great ocean trades which in Seville had been his daily life. Merchants and seamen he spoke to in England were quite unversed in scientific navigation on the open sea. There was a growing demand for Eastern luxuries, but commerce was still substantially controlled by foreigners, who lived in self-governing enclaves, in London and other cities, and who dominated ancient routes through the Baltic and the North Sea.

English merchants in London might call themselves ‘Merchant Adventurers’. They ventured some money in joining what was effectively a guild. But the route they employed, overwhelmingly, was the short sea crossing to Antwerp. They were certainly not adventurers in any modern sense. Nevertheless, coming to London now, Cabot could sense a change of spirit.

In recent decades the capital had thrived and expanded, often at the expense of provincial ports like Bristol. Since Antwerp (part of the Spanish Habsburg sphere) had become the trading and banking centre of northern Europe, London had expanded alongside it. In the mid-fifteenth century the capital had been responsible for around half of England’s cloth exports. A century later, when Cabot returned there, the figure was 90 per cent, and for other goods the story was the same. London was becoming the place that the local historian John Stow would call ‘the principal store house, and Staple of all commodities within this Realm’.¹

The country Cabot experienced during the first summer after his return was a febrile and unsettled place. The year 1549 saw unsurpassed turbulence in Tudor England. In July the scattered rural unrest of the previous year resurfaced across wide swathes of the south and Midlands. The young King Edward, only eleven that summer, recorded the alarming spread of the disturbances in his diary. ‘The people began to rise in Wiltshire,’ he wrote; ‘they rose in Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Gloucestershire, Suffolk, Warwickshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, a piece of Leicestershire, Worcestershire, and Rutlandshire’; ‘after that they rose in Oxfordshire, Devonshire, Norfolk, and Yorkshire.’²

These were nervous times for both the court and the city of London. Artillery was positioned at the gates, while martial law was proclaimed within the walls.³ It was only in the country’s lateral extremities – in the south-west and Norfolk – that things really got out of control. And it was Cabot’s chief patron, John Dudley, who gathered a force to march against the vast rebel camp near Norwich. After storming the city and executing the ringleaders, Dudley returned to London in September, feted by the capital’s relieved political hierarchy.

By October he felt strong enough to mount a coup against Edward Seymour, the ‘Lord Protector’, which passed off without bloodshed but which was another anxious time for all who frequented the court. When Seymour agreed to stand down, it was Dudley who inherited the mantle, though not the title, of Regent for the young King. For Cabot, if the violence and uncertainty had been unsettling, they had a positive outcome. His most powerful patron and ally had become the dominant political force in the country. As the Imperial ambassador observed, Dudley was ‘absolute master’ of the Council, and he was able more than ever to sponsor the promotion of men with new ideas.⁴

Ideologically, too, it was a time of passion and uncertainty. It was in 1549 that a new Prayer Book was introduced, less radical than its authors might have wished, but steering a more Protestant direction since the death of the old king. Those who hoped Dudley’s coup would mark a conservative revival were disappointed. A proclamation disavowed any intention to restore the ‘old Latin service’ with its ‘conjured bread and water [and] such like vain and superstitious ceremonies’.⁵ Not only was Dudley a reformer at heart, but he knew his power depended on being close to the young King, who was growing, under the tutelage provided for him, into an ardent Protestant.

In matters of religion Cabot remained typically wily and reserved. He made professions of belief to please a current or prospective employer – like his statements of national allegiance. From long service in Catholic Spain, policed ruthlessly by the Inquisition, he moved to an increasingly Protestant England with no sign of compunction. He later advised merchants exploring in foreign climes to pass over their religious beliefs in silence. It was certainly a practice he himself had always followed.

More important to Cabot was that the bubbling of new religious ideas in England was accompanied by a zeal for new thinking in other areas.

 

 

Nine

In 1542 a young student of only fifteen years of age arrived at St John’s College in Cambridge. He was, as a later admirer put it, a ‘tall, slight youth, looking wise beyond his years, with fair skin, good looks and a bright colour’.¹ Over the next few years he worked, he later said, Vehemently’, for as much as eighteen hours a day. In addition to the core subjects of grammar, logic and rhetoric, he already showed a brilliant ability at mathematics, and this was allied to a technical ingenuity, displayed, for instance, in his love of creating astonishing effects for the plays he put on. While some were delighted, conservatives muttered darkly that he must be dabbling in magic. Mathematics itself, at which the young John Dee so excelled, was often considered one of the ‘black arts’. It was a contentious issue: the year he came to Cambridge, an Act against Sorcery was passed by Parliament and not repealed until five years later.²

Dee had come to the right place. St John’s College, and Cambridge in general, were renowned bastions of reformed thought. His tutor, Sir John Cheke, who marvelled at Dee’s ability, was a Professor of Greek who was also a forthright advocate of what in England were only now becoming respectable branches of learning. In accordance with the syllabus which had been extensively revised by Cheke, Dee spent his first seven months at St John’s studying geometry and arithmetic.³

From Cambridge Dee travelled to Europe in search of a scientific education which, to his frustration, was not available in England. He studied, during the early part of Edward VI’s reign, at the University of Louvain, which he later called ‘the fountain-head of learning’. There he befriended and was taught by the greatest minds of his day: the Portuguese mathematician Pedro Nunes and the brilliant geographer, cartographer and instrument-maker Gerard Mercator. When he returned to Cambridge Dee brought books, globes and instruments which had never been seen in England before and which helped to sow the seeds of an interest in astronomy and map-making.

In the summer of 1550, Dee left Louvain and travelled to Paris. Already famous, at only twenty-three he was invited to lecture on Euclid, the ancient ‘father of geometry’, which he did in a hall so packed that students thronged outside the windows to catch his words. To an audience mostly older than himself, he invoked the unique power of mathematics to straddle worlds – from the pure world of the intellect, where it seemed to offer access to the divine, to the elemental world of physical reality. The effect was electrifying.⁴

In the audience was a substantial group of Dee’s English admirers, all connected in some way both to John Dudley and to Dee’s Cambridge tutor, John Cheke, who had retired from his university job to mentor the young King, and who exerted a vast influence in spreading new ideas at court. When Dee returned to England, Cheke was among those who recommended him strongly to Edward. Nobody’s opinion carried greater weight with the passionate young King, and he was instrumental in securing for Dee the generous annual pension he promptly received – evidence, as with the payments to Cabot, of a new determination to cling to talent that might be commercially useful.

John Dudley, meanwhile, was so impressed by Dee that he offered him a position in his household, as a tutor to his younger sons. Over the next couple of years Dee became intimate with Dudley and his circle, forming a warm relationship with his eldest son in particular. He saw much, too, of Henry Sidney, who had been in the audience at Dee’s lecture in Paris, and who had recently married Dudley’s daughter Mary.

It is not recorded when Sebastian Cabot first heard about or met John Dee. He could not have remained unaware of this intellectual star who was prompting so much talk among educated circles on the Continent, and who then returned to England, to the same group, presided over by John Dudley, in which Cabot moved. The two men shared what was an unusual appreciation of the importance of geometry and arithmetic in the art of making and interpreting charts. Both shared an intense interest in cartography, and the effort to discover what seas or lands lay in the unexplored spaces on world maps.

Maps were something with which Cabot had grown up. He had learned to represent reality on paper charts from his father, who was obsessed, as his son would be, by early attempts to map the globe. Sebastian’s was a rare skill in Tudor England. It was partly because cartography was so little valued that he had departed for Spain, where the subject formed a major part of his specialist work. He must have found it hard to imagine a nation developing a seagoing commerce without these essential tools.

Maritime culture in England, however, had always managed without. At the end of Henry VIII’s reign, men referred to ‘the want and lack of expert learned men in that faculty of making cards or maps, and the scarcity ... of such cards within this realm of England’. Merchants clung to Europe’s coasts and to short, familiar routes. Pilots relied on experience, and became acquainted over long years with particular seas, coasts and harbours. ‘Rutters’, as they were known, were written guides passed between seamen, or at least between those who could read. They recorded the information – compass bearings, landmarks, tide times, water depths, or the make-up of the seabed – that pilots used to follow familiar coastlines or to avoid rocky shoals in the estuary mouths of major rivers. On the rare occasions when experience of new regions was required, foreign pilots were employed.⁵

Cabot saw, however, that if England was to develop a culture of long-distance trade a major change was required. The country would need to produce not pilots but navigators: men who relied not on the familiarity born of long years on the same short routes, but who could find their way on the open ocean using maps, instruments and the stars.

Towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign England had begun, at least, to appreciate the value of maps. Here again Cabot was fortunate to have returned to a country in transition. Within the realm, officials had begun to realise, geographical knowledge enhanced central power. Taxes could be better imposed and order more effectively maintained if the country was accurately mapped. Nevertheless, it must have been a shock to Cabot to find, still, a dearth of the sort of world maps he was used to creating and updating as Pilot Major in Spain. It was no wonder that English seamen and merchants did not aspire to sail to distant lands, without the maps to fire their imaginations and their ambitions. Cabot saw what must be his first task. He must show the English how the expanded world could be represented on paper.

Cabot no longer had access to the Imperial world map that he had been accustomed to using in his office in Seville. A few years earlier, however – in 1544 – he had contributed to a world map based on French cartography, for which he had written some of the ‘legends’ annotating far-flung regions of the world. It was this which he now reissued, as a means of remedying England’s lack. An assistant was recommended to him: a smart young academic from Cambridge called Clement Adams. Like Dee, Adams had been taught as a student by Cheke, and had become fascinated by the new science of geography. He leapt at the chance to work with Sebastian Cabot and remained close to Cabot and his circle for some years.

With Adams doing the engraving, the 1544 map was updated and reprinted. In a country where few had seen anything like it, it caused a sensation. For years afterwards it remained popular both in high government and in trading circles. Later in the century, people spoke of ‘the map of Sebastian Cabot, cut by Clement Adams ... which is to be seen in her majesty’s privy gallery at Westminster, and in many other ancient merchants’ houses’. One such copy of ‘Cabot’s table’ was seen in the 1570s, at the house of the Earl of Bedford, who had been an important member of the Privy Council under Edward.⁶

The slight alterations Cabot now made to the map were designed to appeal to English curiosity about a northern route to the Indies. To the north-west the depiction of America fomented interest in a passage through the continent. Men like the young Humphrey Gilbert, who would later devote (and give) his life to exploring this region, were transfixed. ‘Sebastian Cabot’, Gilbert wrote in the 1560s, ‘hath ... described this passage, in his Charts’, which were still to be seen, he noted, in the Queen’s gallery at Whitehall. ‘Any man of our country, that will give the attempt,’ he later chided his compatriots, ‘may with small danger pass to Cathay.’⁷

To the north-east, meanwhile, though Asia is not complete, it does appear that once Scandinavia has been rounded, the coastline descends. In the accompanying legend there is a quotation from Pliny. In ancient times, it suggests, ‘the whole west’ and most of ‘the northern sea’ had been sailed over. The reason to attempt the journey is emphasised once again. In Japan, the map notes, there is, as Marco Polo had related, ‘much virgin gold, which is never taken away from the said island, because ships never touch there’.⁸

 

 

Ten

The period of Edward VI’s minority was one of curious flux in English affairs: a time of uncertainty and unease in the life of the nation, a time of ideological division and animosity, a time of economic hardship and complaint, but also – for those of more optimistic bent – a fertile time of new ideas and possibilities.

None focused on these, or embraced them, more enthusiastically than Sebastian Cabot. This ‘most learned of all men in knowledge of the stars and the art of navigation’ had overseen the reprinting of a world map to which he had contributed five years earlier.¹ Now he turned his attention to the practical business of navigation. Early in 1551, with Cabot’s encouragement, a trading voyage was organised to the eastern Mediterranean.

English vessels had once sailed into this great inland sea, but with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and the decline in English shipping, in recent years the practice had ended. A commercial voyage now would provide an opportunity for young English seamen to gain experience of sailing, and navigating, in what were unknown and often hostile waters.

The voyage was captained by a young Bristol merchant known to Cabot from Seville. Years later, Roger Bodenham was proud of the role it had played in educating the talented young men he had in his charge. Besides boys, he remembered, there had been some seventy young mariners, in addition to merchants. ‘For the most part’, he said, within five or six years of the voyage they were ‘able to take charge of ships, and did’. Even among this large and gifted group, however, there was one mariner who stood out. Many years later, it was Richard Chancellor whom Bodenham remembered.²

Chancellor had been born in Bristol. He grew up in a seafaring environment, a port town. As a boy he listened to the local men who still talked of the achievements of John Cabot with his son Sebastian, who had lived in, and sailed from, the quay in central Bristol.

Chancellor became accustomed to life at sea. But he was also unusually well educated, and quickly attracted notice for remarkable intellectual gifts. In both arenas, on board ship and in the school room, he was conscientious and showed a fierce determination to succeed. He wasn’t fearless, because he knew the value of human relationships. He understood what his loss, or that of others with or under him, would mean to those left behind. When he felt a cause to be worthwhile, however, he committed to it and was willing to pay the ultimate price. He was thoughtful and reflective, and sometimes the burden of expectation which he bore from a young age was a heavy weight.

When he moved to London, as men from Bristol increasingly did if they hoped to advance, he was recommended to the Sidney family. He was close in age to the young Henry Sidney, whose intimate relationship with the King looked set to secure the family’s rise to prominence.³ Whether in Bristol or in London, though, seamen of the old school were grudging. They declared themselves unimpressed by Chancellor’s aptitude for mathematics, by his skill at making and tinkering with new-fangled instruments which required detailed knowledge of the stars, or by his interest in maps. ‘Them that were ancient masters of ships’, one writer later noted, ‘derided and mocked them’ that busied themselves with charts.⁴ How dare this new breed, speaking the arcane language of mathematics, presume to tell them, who had been at sea all their lives, how to conduct their business?

Sometimes the charge of impracticality was fair. It was of course true, as was later protested, that ‘art and reason’ depended ‘upon experience’.⁵ Some men of academic bent did abstain from the hard life of seafaring and missed, as a result, the knowledge accrued by dealing with currents or changing winds. Sebastian Cabot had himself, as Pilot Major in Spain, stood up for seasoned pilots against unworldly and unpractised ‘cosmographers’.⁶ Richard Chancellor, though, was no dreamy scholar. He had travelled, and been to sea. Like few others of his generation in England, he combined the practical and intellectual gifts for which Cabot was looking.

What Chancellor did in the period immediately after the voyage to the Mediterranean under Bodenham is not known. He may have travelled to the Continent. Many well-connected young men did, and the Sidneys would have been able to sponsor him. Certainly at some point in his youth he spent time in France, and he must have had an introduction to the French court, since he later wrote of having seen the ceremonial ‘pavilions’ of the King of France.

It seems likely that he was out of the country, since in spite of bringing himself to Cabot’s attention there is no sign that he was involved in the plans for voyages of exploration with which Cabot busied himself over the subsequent couple of years, and which were eagerly discussed by Dudley’s circle within the Privy Council.⁷

 

 

Eleven

Only snippets of information cast light on Cabot’s work as an unofficial adviser on nautical commerce after his return to England in the late 1540s. Many derive from foreign diplomats and spies, who were anxiously trying to work out what it was that was keeping Cabot, a figure of Continental renown, in London. After all, he held no formal position in England like the office of Pilot Major he had held in Spain, and there was no department of state responsible for maritime exploration.

The lucrative trades and still-unknown opportunities in the new worlds were fiercely guarded and contested by the maritime powers of the Atlantic: by Spain and Portugal in particular, but increasingly by France as well. Any activity by a rival was keenly watched. Imperial officials also had an added incentive. They wanted to get to the bottom of Cabot’s disappearance from his post, not least since the Emperor had made repeated requests for his return. One Imperial agent, known as ‘Scipperus’ or ‘Monsieur d’Eecke’, had picked up rumours that the English under John Dudley were ambitious to push outward. That summer he wrote letters to the Imperial ambassador in London, Jehan Scheyfve. Was it true, he asked, that England was ‘seeking the road to the Indies’?¹

Scheyfve could not discover anything for certain. His predecessor had recently retired due to ill health. He was new to the post, and less attuned to whispered snatches of intelligence than an established ambassador would have been. Nevertheless, he assured Scipperus, rumours certainly abounded. On the one hand it was sometimes said that the King – a figurehead for Dudley and his ministers at this stage – wanted ‘to send two of his great ships to the East’, perhaps by the southern route pioneered and claimed by the Portuguese. Others talked of a royal plan ‘to send a few ships towards Iceland by the northern route, to discover some island which is said to be rich in gold’.²

This last proposal sounds like that advanced by Thorne and Barlow, for a voyage across the North Pole which would descend towards rich, undiscovered islands in the Pacific. Although it had been discussed before in England, it surprised the new ambassador, who had evidently not heard of the idea. ‘This’, he commented, ‘seems strange.’ But it was not to be dismissed out of hand. For one thing, as he had been assured, ‘the rumour has been current for six months or so’.³

It certainly seemed to diplomats that the English were up to something. Not only did the widespread rumours suggest as much, but there was no other explanation for the fact that they were clinging jealously to Cabot in the face of repeated requests for his return.

Another piece of information pointed in the same direction. The young French Protestant, Jean Ribault, brought to England by Dudley and subsequently imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of spying, had been released and set to work. The Council had asked him to make a new marine chart, ‘and with him’, Scheyfve noted, ‘works the pilot Cabot’. The ambassador could not be sure of the detail. But the rumour that had reached him was that Ribault was to sail ‘to discover some islands or seek a road to the Indies, taking the way of the Arctic Pole’ – further evidence, in other words, that the English were again contemplating the proposal Thorne and Barlow had made more than two decades earlier, though they still felt the need for help from foreign expertise.⁴

Robert Thorne was then long dead, but Roger Barlow was still alive, and though he had lived for some time on estates he had acquired in Pembrokeshire after the monastic dissolution, he had remained in touch with developments in geography and maritime affairs. He was a fervent Protestant, which would have appealed to those who led Edward VI’s regime. And John Dudley must have been aware of his history and talents, because in November 1549 he appointed Barlow as Vice-Admiral of the Pembrokeshire coast.⁵

Now, it seems, Barlow had travelled to London in hope of taking part, at: last, in the project he had espoused for so long. Ribault was to be accompanied in the northern voyage, Scheyfve wrote, ‘by certain Englishmen experienced in navigation, who have been [i.e. sailed] with Cabot’. Only Barlow and Henry Patmer, who had both voyaged with Cabot in the expedition of 1526 at Thorne’s instigation, are known to have met this description.

The English plans, Scheyfve thought, were far advanced. ‘Five or six ships are being fitted out,’ he reported in January 1551, ‘and two of them are nearly ready.’ Both Cabot himself and the English Council seem to have felt confident that a historic venture was in the offing. During the previous summer, Cabot had applied to the English government for a copy – his own being lost – of the patent for discovery granted more than fifty years earlier by Henry VII to his father, his brothers and himself. Clearly, with discoveries beckoning, he wanted his rights to any discovered wealth reaffirmed. At the same time, the government made him a substantial grant of £200 (around £40,000 today), ‘by way of the King’s award’, on top of his existing pension. The last thing they wanted at this critical stage was for their prized naval expert to abandon the country for foreign employment once more because he felt undervalued.⁶

The voyage was to depart, it seems, in company with a fishing fleet bound for Iceland, where it would continue northward while the fishermen paused to drop their nets. The fishing boats were instructed to wait until the expedition ships were ready to join them. Exactly what happened at this point is unclear, but something seems to have arisen which forced a postponement.

On 24 March the Lord Admiral received an order from the Privy Council to license the fishing fleet to depart, ‘and not to stay them any longer’.⁷ No northern voyage of exploration left that year. Had it done so it would certainly have set out by May, to take advantage of the Arctic summer.

 

 

Twelve

In spite of the anxious interest of foreign ambassadors and their spies, details of the plans being put together by Cabot and the English Council remained a well-guarded secret. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, they were genuinely changeable and uncertain.

Influential men in England seem to have accepted that Robert Thorne had been right when he said that there remained only ‘one way to discover, which is into the North’. New trading ventures were organised, under the Edwardian regime, to regions like west Africa, but these sailed through crowded waters. Since the Spanish, French and Portuguese did not wish to admit interlopers, they had an inevitable privateering element. English captains who were often military men with recent experience fighting in Scotland discovered, to their satisfaction, that looting foreign ships could be more profitable than trade.

The north parts, however, were largely unexplored. Here England, by her position, was at an advantage. The difficulty only arose when it came to being more precise. Was an expedition to go north-west, along the path taken by Cabot himself many years earlier? Was it to head due north, as Robert Thorne had advised, past Iceland and Greenland, over the Arctic Pole? Or was it to forge another, little-tried and little-discussed route to the north-east – heading into a part of the world whose geography was little known, as Cabot’s own surviving map clearly shows?¹

Anxious discussions took place involving Cabot, Dudley, the members of the Privy Council and other advisers. They were long and fraught. Plans for voyages were made, debated and discarded. These were picked up and reported, in vague terms, by the foreign missions in London. Cabot himself, no doubt, confided in Continental informers who came to talk with him – but only, it seems, to mislead them. Word reached the Continent that well-equipped ships were on the point of departure. But for three years, from 1550 to 1552, nothing actually happened.

The truth seems to be that Cabot himself was undecided as to what the exact ambition of a northern voyage ought to be, as were those who employed him. At some point, though, late in 1552, a decision was made.

One influence was the collapse of England’s cloth trade to Antwerp. In a short space of time, economic conditions had worsened dramatically. The export of basic ‘short-cloths’, as they were known, plummeted: from over 130,000 in 1550 to under 85,000 two years later.² And the downturn showed no sign of easing. While men like Dudley had long shared Cabot’s enthusiasm for voyages of mercantile exploration, suddenly new voices were making themselves heard.

For some time the sale of cloth from London to Antwerp had been the central pillar of England’s economy. While that trade thrived, no negative impact of an unwise specialisation was felt. But wars against Scotland and France during the 1540s had been funded on credit: by loans and by repeated debasement of the currency. When attempts were made to restore the coinage, exchange rates shot up and the demand for English cloth collapsed.³

The slump in demand at the traditional market caused soul-searching among the merchant elite. Anxious conferences took place. ‘Certain grave Citizens of London’, Clement Adams reported, met to discuss ‘how this mischief might be remedied’.

In response English merchants demanded an end to the privileges enjoyed by their German rivals, and Dudley’s government was happy to react to their complaints. The Hanseatic traders in London were accused of abusing their position. Their privileges, it was now claimed, had ‘grown so prejudicial to the state that they may no longer ... be endured’. In February 1552 they were abolished. Work which had begun on rebuilding in fine stone the city’s Bishopsgate – placed in the charge of these foreign merchants – came to a halt.⁴

At the same time, alarmed for their traditional business, the capital’s English merchant princes abandoned their conservative instincts and threw their weight behind Cabot’s plans. Suddenly the risks involved seemed worthwhile. A number of them had traded to Spain and Portugal. They didn’t need reminding by Cabot how the wealth of the Spaniards and Portuguese had been ‘marvellously increased’ by the discovery of new trades. They had seen it for themselves.⁵

Adams tactfully praised the great merchants as ‘careful for the good of their country’, but then, as ever, it was their own benefit which probably came first. When routes were discussed, the merchants could not forget that their core business lay in exporting cloth, and with Antwerp in seizure they were anxious to find new markets.

It might be true, as Cabot believed, that a passage to the north-west offered access to rich lands in the Pacific; but these were scarcely ideal places to sell woollen cloth. And from all known experience, the route through the American continent was not promising either. It was cold enough, but the Indians encountered there were primitive people. The route advocated by Robert Thorne, meanwhile, would descend, if it were viable at all, through the thinly populated Arctic to the warm waters of the central Pacific.

A passage to the north-east, on the other hand, would be a different matter. It was known that along the northern rim of Asia lay a land called ‘Tartary’, described by Marco Polo as a region ‘of vast plains and high mountains’, where nomads lived ‘on the flesh and milk’ of their herds. In a bitterly cold climate, men trapped animals for their fur: sable, ermine, black fox ‘and many other precious animals’.⁶ If the expedition could find a route through to Cathay, this should be both a market for desirable goods and also – since it was not hot – a highly promising territory for the cloth trade.

‘Our chief desire,’ Richard Hakluyt later wrote, ‘is to find out ample vent of our woollen cloth, the natural commodity of this our realm.’ The best places, he concluded, would be ‘the manifold islands of Japan and the northern parts of China and the regions of the Tartars next adjoining’.⁷ Did a viable passage exist that way? If they were honest, nobody knew. It remained ‘doubtful’, as Clement Adams admitted afterwards, ‘whether there were any passage yea or no’.

Many geographers had considered the way closed off. Some postulated an Arctic land bridge linking Asia with northern Greenland, blocking any sea route to the north-east. Others had guessed at a land connection between the north-east of Asia and north-western America, rendering impossible any of the proposed northern passages to the equatorial Pacific.⁸ Crucially, though, leading geographers seem around this time to have become more positive about the route’s existence.

In 1541 Gerard Mercator, the great cartographer and scientist who would become a close friend of John Dee, had produced a globe larger and more detailed than any made previously. Only three years earlier he had made a map on which the land mass of northern Asia had extended upwards to the Pole, denying any passage that way. On his globe, however, he made a significant alteration. This time the polar land mass was connected to America, but not to Asia.

Some distance along the north Asian shore the land, according to Mercator’s globe, did rear up. This promontory, known as ‘Tabin’ and endorsed by classical writers, reached towards the Pole. It would force would-be navigators to a high latitude. But it did not close off the route. Now, in other words, a passage was open, not to the north-west but to the north-east.⁹ Before the Tabin headland, moreover, entry could be gained to the mouths of mighty Asian rivers which emptied into the northern sea and which would bear travellers south-east. Getting to Cathay this way, Mercator later declared, would be ‘very easy and short’.¹⁰

Shortly afterwards, in 1544, Sebastian Cabot had helped to produce a world map of his own. When he arrived back in England he worked with Clement Adams to reissue it. On Cabot’s map, the north coast of Asia becomes indistinct as it moves east: a sign of the uncertainty that existed. It seems, however, that after Scandinavia has been rounded, the coastline descends gradually into warmer waters to the south-east. He repeated, moreover, the ancient story which gripped later geographers, of the party of Indians shipwrecked on the ‘coast of Germania’. How else could they have got there but through a north-eastern passage?

If any doubt remained, the return of John Dee from the Continent was decisive. To a city and a country starved of geographical expertise came someone whose learning in such matters now surpassed even that of Cabot himself.

Dee had worked closely with Mercator, the great map-maker. Though still young, Dee was already revered by influential people in England for his understanding of mathematics and its applications. Few were in a position to speak before the Council and the leading merchants with comparable authority. And he too, like Cabot, was haunted by the tale of the shipwrecked Indians. He too now supported the radical proposal to venture north-east.

In the geography of a thirteenth-century Arab from Syria, Abu al-Fida, Dee would shortly glean vital support for his theory. This suggested that once the northern cape of Scandinavia was rounded, the upper coastline of Asia descended gradually south-east. Here was apparent confirmation of what Dee already believed. Al-Fida’s words, Dee thought, were ‘worthy to be written in letters of gold’.

The Council, and the merchants, were persuaded. Together a group of leading London merchants resolved that they would mount a major expedition to the north-east, in search of ‘a way and passage to our men for travel to new and unknown kingdoms’.¹¹ But the details of the plan were shared with as few as possible. Until after the voyage’s departure, its destination was kept a closely guarded secret, anxiously but vainly probed by foreign diplomats and spies in London.

 

 

Thirteen

With Cabot’s help, the merchants put together a new body for the purpose. It was a ‘company’ of men, and they called it also a ‘mystery’, which could refer in the sixteenth century to a trade guild. They labelled themselves, rather long-windedly, the ‘Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown’. They were to sail off the map that was familiar to Europeans. They were to be pioneers.

The phrase ‘merchant adventurers’, of course, was already employed by the English cloth merchants. ‘Adventure’ was a term for a commercial venture or speculation. Some of the same merchants were involved, driven to riskier undertakings by the collapse of their regular business. Any seafaring at the time was dangerous, but the old Antwerp trade scarcely seems now to merit the term. The quest for a new trading passage through the Arctic, on the other hand, was a different matter. Those involved were under no illusion. They knew that what they were attempting would be, as they called it, a ‘hard and difficult matter’. To undertake the thorough planning required they set up a committee, which they called a ‘senate’. On this sat those later described as the ‘principal doers’ of the enterprise: Cabot himself, along with men like Sir George Barne and Sir William Garrard, the commercial magnates who were close to Cabot and to the Council under John Dudley.¹ These were the leading figures of London: merchants and loyal city men. Barne was the Lord Mayor, and within a couple of years Garrard would succeed him. They, like others involved, had made money in traditional trades, particularly the old Antwerp cloth trade, before the economic downturn encouraged them to seek new investments.

The first concern was to raise the substantial sum of money required. No private undertaking in Tudor England needed capital on the same scale as a major voyage of exploration.

In England, unlike in Spain, there was no tradition of the state funding and managing such mercantile ventures. Kings did occasionally contribute, as Henry VII had done to the voyages made by Cabot’s father, but private investment had always been central.² Now, with the state struggling to reduce its massive debts, there was little question of significant subsidy. For investors, this was a high-risk enterprise. The discovery of new trades might secure wealth on a colossal scale. It could also, easily, lose everything.

The London merchants were men of the world. The most skilled geographers of the time, they knew, relied on indirect knowledge or even on outright speculation. The fact remained that no one had successfully sailed this way. No one really knew whether there was a viable passage to the north-east. Seafaring in the sixteenth century was hazardous at the best of times, and in the freezing conditions of the far north, without prior experience or knowledge, particularly so. None of the great merchants, individually, would underwrite the venture at such odds, for fear of finding themselves ‘too much oppressed and charged’.³

Few, for the same reasons, fancied a place on board. And it did not make sense for them each to send factors to trade on their behalf, as was common on commercial voyages. A long-distance expedition required larger ships than were routinely used around the coasts of Europe, and to fill the hold with the goods of numerous individual merchants, each accompanied by a factor, would cause chaos.

Instead, a radical idea was tabled, possibly at Cabot’s suggestion, for he knew how major ventures were organised in the Italian states. The merchants should operate as a body, raising capital and pooling it to create ‘one common stock of the company’. They should hire and pay representatives – employees – who would buy and sell on behalf of the group. Trading individually was forbidden. Masters of the ships would swear a solemn oath to prevent anyone from buying, selling or bartering goods for private gain. Nor would the company be a temporary collaboration for the purpose of a single voyage, after which the spoils would be shared out. It would be an enduring entity, or ‘fellowship’.⁴ A corporate identity would be established independent of the individuals involved. Those who advanced capital would own a piece of the business: a shareholding.

It was a small step, but a decisive one. This ‘joint stock’ operation meant people could invest in the venture without needing to be personally involved in the trading that was carried on. They could stand at arm’s length, keeping an eye, as shareholders, on the running and profitability of the company, but remaining aloof from its day-to-day management. What now seems an obvious way to raise capital, and to share risk and potential rewards, was then a revolutionary idea. No company like it had existed in England before. Only in Italy had its like been seen in Europe.⁵

Old ‘regulated’ companies, like the Staplers or the Merchant Adventurers, accepted members and gave them, essentially, a licence to trade for themselves in certain goods and over certain routes provided they observed general rules. These company members worked together in the sense that they shared carriage space in ships which sailed in convoy as a defence against pirates. And they enjoyed privileges and permissions granted by governments to the company (often in return for loans it could make with the entry fees it charged). But they traded as individuals and anyone wishing to be involved had to be very actively involved, as a ship-owner or a merchant.⁶

Now, a sum of money could be advanced without risk to livelihood or to life. And, not coincidentally, the initiative was well timed. In mid-Tudor England there were plenty of men with capital. The dissolution of the monasteries had released vast wealth previously tied up in Church property, and it prompted one of the great speculative property booms in English history. Much new wealth was squandered on show, and the soaring demand for luxury goods only fed the desire of merchants to find a new source. Much was reinvested in property, which guaranteed social weight and remained the standard route up the ladder. But some was invested with an eye to higher returns, and as the tendrils of the Church were slashed away from the nation’s economic life, strictures against usury – profit from loans – were increasingly ignored.

The committee fixed the price of a share in the venture at £25.⁷ And, in London at least, the unprecedented offer created huge interest. In no time 240 shares had been sold, raising the substantial sum of £6,000 to spend on buying and fitting out ships as well as purchasing merchandise.

Most of the investors were merchants of London. Among what was a close-knit community, word rapidly spread. They knew each other. They traded together. They belonged to the same livery companies, often in senior positions. They served together in the city government. They collaborated on business deals or property investments. They were connected by bonds of family and friendship. The fact that Sir George Barne’s son married Sir William Garrard’s daughter is merely one example of the tight nature of London’s business community. Numerous city aldermen, including past and future mayors, hastened to pay up.⁸

What was unusual, however, besides the investment’s financial nature – indeed largely because of its financial nature – was that it was not only merchants who got involved. Although it was not a royal undertaking, important men at court rushed to take part: testimony to the active role that Dudley and his fellow Councillors played in instigating the venture, and to the buzz which the poaching of Cabot and the plans and rumours emanating from his lively circle had created.

Dudley himself, as Cabot’s chief patron, played an important role. Eden wrote (in an admittedly flattering preface) that he had heard Dudley to have been ‘a great furtherer of this voyage’.⁹ His son-in-law, the close friend of the King, Sir Henry Sidney, certainly took part. He recorded his payment of £25 in his account book.¹⁰ So did other key allies: men like William Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, Lord High Treasurer and the most senior Councillor after Dudley; or old John Russell, the Earl of Bedford, who was the keeper of the King’s personal (privy) seal.¹¹ The young King himself, fascinated by ships and by daring voyages at sea, took a keen interest.

Even with Dudley’s backing, though, financial support for the enterprise was no formality. Times were hard, but for that reason many were averse to risk. As Cabot knew, the city was historically conservative in its ventures, and hostile to big-talking outsiders. The announcement that a major voyage would sail where none had sailed before aroused scepticism as well as excitement. Cabot might have been widely revered, but some resented or were suspicious of his renown. There was grumbling behind closed doors. Why were men so impressed by this showy foreigner, who sometimes seemed to trade on the achievements of his father? What did he know of the north that so much should be gambled? What, indeed, did anyone?

Cabot wrote bitterly of the ‘sundry authors & writers’ who claimed, often anonymously, that the voyage could not succeed. They talked, these doubters, of the impossible extremity of the north, the ‘perils of ice, intolerable colds, and other impediments’, and denied there was a passage. Cabot derided these sceptics as dinosaurs. Echoing Robert Thorne’s earlier argument, he compared them to the men who had denied there could be habitable lands beneath the Equator. The discovery of rich and temperate realms in the southern hemisphere had shown once more that experience, not ancient tradition, was ‘the certain Master of all worldly knowledge’. But scepticism was a powerful and contagious force. The ‘wavering minds, and doubtful heads’, Cabot lamented, had not only abstained from the venture; they had also dissuaded others from taking part.¹²

Nevertheless, the lure of great wealth was too powerful, and the desire to be involved carried the day. The company raised the money it needed and quickly set to work.

 

 

Fourteen

In general those planning a trading voyage included, or at least knew, owners willing to hire out their ships. But Cabot was perturbed by the English vessels he saw.

Ships were often worked for short-term returns, and were rarely well maintained. To owners there always seemed scope for one more voyage before an expensive overhaul would be necessary. In Spain, Cabot had grown used to regulation which policed the upkeep of vessels; it was a shock to be reminded that in England there was no similar intervention.¹ Hulls became encrusted with barnacles and other marine growth, which dramatically reduced the ships’ speed. More fundamentally, the basic soundness of the wooden planks, and of the caulking between them, was uncertain, meaning a crew was always at risk of a leak.

Ship design had moved on in the decades since Cabot crossed the Atlantic with his father. The strong winds and strong currents of the southern oceans had demanded innovations which were vital to the discoveries and trades of the Spanish and Portuguese.

In Henry VIII’s England, though, large ships had acted usually as troop platforms. Their towering fore and stern castles, a name which reflected their design, discouraged boarders and advertised Henry’s power. But on the open ocean they were top-heavy and unsafe.²

Smaller merchant ships also bore the mark of a people who rarely strayed far from their coast. The merchantmen drawn by Hans Holbein in the 1530s, or by John Thompson off the coast of Dover in 1538, had moved on from medieval ‘cogs’, as they were known, with their one central trunk. They had three masts, plus a bowsprit for another sail reaching forward at an angle from the prow. The lower aggregate sail area produced less heeling in strong winds, and less risk of capsize. But they still teetered unstably high above the waterline.

There was change afoot, however. In the mid-1540s all the ships of Henry’s navy were painted on three rolls of vellum. Their military intent is evident. Cannon bristle from gun-ports. Flags and pennants of England and the Tudors decorate the decks and snake in coiling lengths from the masts. But the basic design was no different to merchantmen, and the illustrations show the direction in which nautical architecture was moving. Older ‘carracks’, with their rearing castles, sit alongside hybrids called ‘galleasses’ which were lower in the water (allowing them to be rowed if necessary), must have sailed faster, been safer in bad weather and easier to manoeuvre.³

It is not surprising, then, that Cabot and his board chose to fund new vessels. With the money they had raised they could afford to provide three – well manned and well provisioned.

There was the Edward Bonaventure – the largest, at 160 tons.⁴ ‘Edward’ referred of course to the young King, while ‘Bonaventure’ meant ‘good luck’, a commodity which all owners wished on their ships. Next in size, at 120 tons, was the Bona Esperanza, a name which also invoked good luck, while the smallest, at 90 tons, the Bona Confidentia, seemed to invite the discovery of a wonderful secret. The Edward was perhaps a little over sixty feet long and twenty-five feet wide at its broadest point, the Confidentia fifty by twenty-one and the Esperanza in between.⁵ The names are a mixture of Italian and Spanish, with which one assumes Cabot was involved. They testify to the anticipation and nervousness surrounding a voyage for which so much was hoped.

Elm was often used for the keels, since the wood was hard and durable in water.⁶ For the bodies of the ships the merchants went to some trouble, according to Clement Adams, to obtain strong and well-seasoned planks, probably of oak from the Weald. The straight-growing conifer trunks used for the masts had to be imported from Scandinavia. The shipwrights worked fast, under pressure from the dignitaries who backed the expedition, to build the ships, to caulk them (hammering hemp fibres as a seal into the gaps between the planks), and then to waterproof them using the dark resin known as pitch.

Most of these marine supplies had to be imported, often by Hanseatic merchants from the Baltic. When the London historian John Stow listed commodities brought to England by Germans, many of them were primarily naval: ‘Cables, Ropes, Masts, Pitch, Tar, Flax, Hemp’. Ropes, made usually from hemp, were an expensive but indispensable product for maritime activity, used for everything from attaching sails to lowering anchors, from ‘breeching’ – that is, securing guns as they recoiled – to ‘wolying’ or ‘woolding’ – winding ropes tightly round masts or beams to strengthen a joint or split. Traditionally, they were obtained from the Dorset town of Bridport, which had built up a virtual monopoly of domestic manufacture since medieval times. But by the sixteenth century the town’s prices were uncompetitive, attempts to promote rope production elsewhere in England do not seem to have thrived, and London shipbuilders preferred to buy in bulk from abroad.⁷

With sail canvas, the story was similar. It too was a product vital to the country’s maritime affairs. Under Dudley, the first attempts were made to stimulate domestic manufacture as the most reliable source. The links he established with Protestant seafaring communities in Brittany meant that in 1552 he was able to bring to London two craftsmen who could train local artisans to make the durable sheets of canvas known in England as ‘poldavies’, after the Breton village of Pouldavid. In later years Ipswich would become the hub of a national industry. But in the 1550s most canvas still had to be imported, from France or, again, from the Baltic.⁸

On one ship an innovative technique was tried in England for the first time. The idea was probably Cabot’s. In Spain, measures were taken against the teredo ‘shipworm’ – a mollusc which eats unseen into the hull of a wooden ship and which damaged Spanish ships in the Caribbean. The problem did not arise in the cold waters of the Arctic, but it was hoped, of course, to sail through these to the warmth of the mid-Pacific. Cabot unnerved the merchants with stories of these ‘worms’ which ‘pearceth and eateth through the strongest oak’. A technique was copied therefore from the Spanish. The ship’s keel, its central spine, was lined with thin sheets of lead.⁹ This added to the ship’s weight, and was an expensive measure. But it illustrated the lengths to which organisers went to maximise the venture’s chances.

 

 

Fifteen

As important as the soundness of the ships was the choice of men to lead ‘so great an enterprise’. The appointment of captains was left until late in the day, but not because there was any lack of willing applicants for the role.

As the foreign ambassadors noticed, London hummed with talk of an English venture to rival those of the Spanish and Portuguese. In those difficult times, numerous men put themselves forward, attracted by rumours of adventure and rich reward. But this was new territory for England, and men with suitable backgrounds were barely to be found. Most of those in line, as Adams observed, were ‘void of experience’.¹ It was paramount that the captain be a man of authority.

The morale and discipline of the crew would waver during the trials ahead, as Cabot knew from personal experience. More than once, while exploring the New World, he had been frustrated by crew members who refused to venture further through strange waters and an unforgiving climate. He was prone to vanity, but perhaps admitted to himself in old age that leading men in adversity was not what he was best at. As he surveyed those who volunteered for the post now, his principal consideration was that the captain of the fleet should be a man who commanded respect and obedience.

One man stood, literally, head and shoulders above the competition. His ‘tall stature’ was particularly remarked upon. And there is no doubting the presence of the man who stares out of the huge portrait still in the possession of his family: his dark beard and thick hair swept back, his resolute gaze and impressive physique. Though not wearing military attire, Sir Hugh Willoughby looks every inch the career soldier knighted for valiant conduct during years spent campaigning against the Scots – an honour he received in the service of Henry VIII just as his father, Sir Henry Willoughby, had done in the service of the King’s father. Hugh had arisen as Sir Hugh on Scottish soil in May 1544, with more than fifty other English soldiers, having distinguished himself in violence ‘at the burning of Edinburgh, Leith and others’. He marked the occasion by adorning his coat of arms with a dragon, a symbol of his family’s service to the Tudor dynasty.

Willoughby was ‘well born’, a gentleman, with the natural authority bequeathed by his social status as well as by his military record and commanding personality. He might have lived a relaxed life of inherited privilege, but since the family seat at Middleton passed to the son of his older half-brother, he had to rely on connections to make his way. His family were linked by marriage to the powerful Grey family, and such patronage secured him some significant roles at court, not least being one of those appointed to receive Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, when she arrived in England in 1539. With the return of sporadic warfare in the 1540s, he turned to the military career that suited his temperament. Only when peace was restored by a cash-strapped government a decade later did he cast around for alternative employment, and jumped at the chance to lead Cabot’s great expedition (though in doing so he left behind a son, a daughter and possibly a wife).²

Willoughby’s appointment now was another sign that this was no ordinary commercial voyage. Trading runs were not generally led by members of the gentry. Even successful ship-owning merchants preferred to appoint someone well experienced at sea to captain a vessel on their behalf. As an exploration deemed vital to the national interest, however, Cabot’s plan enjoyed the high-level attention given to an important naval undertaking. And in the navy, newly esteemed after the attention lavished on it by Henry VIII, it had become customary for men of standing to command ships-of-war, regardless of their previous experience at sea.³ It seemed natural, if not for Cabot then certainly for his fellow organisers, to give ‘greatest account’ to Willoughby’s distinguished family as well as to his ‘singular skill in the services of war’.

It was still not an easy decision, however, or one quickly reached. ‘At the last’, Clement Adams wrote, the committee chose him as the voyage’s general, though he had in reality little naval experience. Like others of his class, he had commanded a privateer in Scotland. He had, the Imperial ambassador noted, ‘served the King of England at sea during the last war with the Scots’.⁴ His mettle was undoubted, as was his stature and his dignity of birth and bearing. But that was it: one maritime role which had revolved more around marshalling men and fighting than sailing a ship, which would have been left to the master and crew. He was, we must assume, entirely ignorant of those new sciences, of navigation and shipcraft, which had enabled Europeans to undertake long voyages on the open sea, and so to present themselves before a wider world.

On the one hand this is no surprise, since naval or privateering expeditions were accustomed to scavenging along the coasts of France and Spain, but not to venturing into waters that would be unfamiliar to the crew. The voyage planned now, however, was a deliberate departure, not simply in its projected route but for the English as a seafaring nation. The bad old days of pilots with little navigational expertise beyond that born of long familiarity with a particular patch, and of captains whose military experience barely extended to time at sea, were supposed to be over.

As so often, though, an abrupt break proved impossible. Qualified Englishmen simply did not exist. The decision to appoint Willoughby speaks eloquently of a lack of more suitable candidates.

Some of the merchants involved did not appreciate the demands of long-distance exploration. Cabot, however, certainly did, and he knew the sort of man he was looking for to lead not only this voyage, but also a more general blossoming in England of oceanic trade and exploration: a man who could link the academic world of mathematicians and geographers with the practical world of the sea.

Fortunately, for Cabot and for England, he had met just such a man. And it was not only Cabot who was impressed. Old-school sea pilots might have been dismissive, but educated men recognised a man of enormous potential. A practical merchant like Roger Bodenham could vouch, after the voyage he had captained to the Mediterranean of 1551, that Richard Chancellor might like gazing at the stars, but he was certainly not starry-eyed.

Chancellor had never held a position of such responsibility. But he was travelled and ambitious, and determined to acquire the skills of the best modern sea captains. There was none of the doubt or delay with his appointment that there was with that of Willoughby. There was no dispute among the committee about nominating him as Pilot Major of the voyage, and entrusting him with the captaincy of the Edward Bonaventure, the largest ship of the three. Once again, there were numerous applications for the role. ‘Diverse men’, Adams wrote, put themselves forward. But it was by ‘common consent’ that Chancellor was given the position.

With the job of Pilot Major came recognition that the task of seamanship, of navigating the flotilla to the limits of known geography and beyond, would be his. Here was a man who personified the new world of the sea as surely as Willoughby did the old. He was ‘a man of great estimation for many good parts of wit in him’. In Chancellor, Cabot saw the pre-eminent example of those young and lusty pilots and mariners of good experience’ whose ambition and presence in England he found so heartening.⁵

Dreams of great success for the expedition rested largely on his shoulders. In him alone, Clement Adams wrote, ‘great hope for the performance of this business rested’.

 

 

Sixteen

From the moment of his appointment, Chancellor prepared conscientiously for the voyage. He had evidently been talking to Cabot and other leading figures for some time, and expected to be involved.

Through his patron, Sir Henry Sidney, he was introduced to the remarkable young scholar who had blazed such an astonishing trail on the Continent: John Dee. Since the legendary lectures he gave in Paris, Dee had returned to England and taken up a post as tutor in the household of John Dudley. Dee came to know Dudley and his family well, including his son-in-law Sir Henry Sidney. Through Sidney, Dee and Chancellor were introduced.

The two men hit it off from the beginning. They were both still young – Dee only twenty-five, and Chancellor not much different – though Dee’s unparalleled intellectual brilliance and remarkable early career must have rendered the sailor from Bristol somewhat in awe. Both had a passionate interest in the new geography (‘cosmography’, as it was known) which used mathematical as well as empirical methods to chart the globe with unprecedented accuracy.

As a friend and collaborator of the great Continental geographers, Dee’s knowledge and insights must have seemed extraordinary to Chancellor. Nevertheless, Chancellor’s great natural gift for mathematics, combined with his practical ingenuity in the construction and adaptation of instruments, meant that as time went on theirs became a partnership of equals. Dee, certainly, was impressed. Years later, he would look back nostalgically on the time he had spent working with a man he called ‘the incomparable Richard Chancellor’.¹

The two shared a fascination with astronomy, which is difficult to differentiate, in this period, from astrology. It was generally believed that there was a close relationship between events in the heavens and events on earth. Anything unusual in the sky was certain to have its corollary in the human world.² Men like Dee were much in demand for their astrological readings, which seemed to offer an insight into mundane prospects. And Chancellor, too, after initial studies of the humanities, wrote the bibliographer John Bale, ‘focused his concern purely on the study of the stars, and is said to have delved into almost all areas of astrology’.³

For men who closely watched the sky, this was a time of upheaval and excitement. In the traditional view, the earth lay stationary at the centre of creation, surrounded by invisible concentric spheres, wrapped around each other like the layers of an onion. Attached to successive spheres were the moon, the sun and each of the planets. Then, fixed like studs on the outermost, crystal sphere, rotating in unison around the earth, were the stars. Beyond them lay the heavens.

Now, however, it was ten years since a Polish canon, Nicolaus Copernicus, had argued – in a work he finally dared to publish a day before he died – that the sun, not the earth, was at the centre. The earth was catapulted into a spinning orbit. For hours Dee had discussed these ideas with friends like Gerard Mercator, and he endorsed the Copernican model. He discussed them too, no doubt, with Richard Chancellor, as the two men studied the sky, their eyes gleaming with intellectual excitement.

As much to the point, though, the study of the stars was integral to the science of navigation on the open sea. It was a subject that Dee had written about, and whose practical methods were unchanged. However little the knowledge had been used by English sailors, it had long been known that by accurate measurement of the angle above the horizon of either the sun or of certain fixed stars, a reading for one’s latitude on the earth could be obtained. One needed to know in advance, though, the expected positions of these heavenly bodies at particular times of the day – of the sun at noon, for instance – and on particular dates in the year. What Chancellor needed were carefully compiled tables, known as ‘Ephemerides’, which recorded the positions of the sun and of notable stars on particular dates.

He asked Dee to assist him. Dee, since his time in Louvain, had become absorbed by astronomy. He recalled how, in 1547, he had begun to make observations of the heavenly bodies, making ‘some thousands in the years then following’.⁴ Now back in England, Dee duly produced a work which offered Chancellor the help he needed. Though no copy survives, it was later published, under the wordy but useful title: Astronomical and logistical rules and Canons, to calculate the Ephemerides by, and other necessary accounts of heavenly motions: written at the request, and for the use of that excellent Mechanician Master Richard Chancellor ...

Chancellors reputation with Dee as a ‘mechanician’ derived from instruments he had made in order to take astronomical measurements, in preparation for this major voyage. Years later, Dee remembered ‘certain rare and exquisitely made instruments mathematical’ which he had preserved in his library. Among them was a quadrant: the brass quarter-circle used to measure the altitude of a star. It had been adapted since, he wrote, but it was ‘first made by that famous Richard Chancellor’. It was ‘excellent, strong, and fair’, Dee remembered, and also unusually large, ‘of five foot semi-diameter’, which was critical given that the accuracy of which the instrument was capable was directly proportionate to its size. Ever innovative, Chancellor was also credited by men who knew him with inventing what were known as ‘transversals’ – parallel lines inscribed on the scale which allowed more accurate, fractional readings of the angles measured.⁵

Having a second person to assist was a considerable advantage. This was not so much with holding the instrument (since presumably, as with the ten-foot-long cross-staff also in Dee’s collection, the quadrant had some sort of frame to allow a man to use it easily) but with measurement. It was difficult, with even a smaller quadrant, to sight the sun or star in question along one radial edge of the quarter-circle while simultaneously reading off the angle from the plumb-line which fell vertically downwards.

Chancellor did have someone, of course. Together he and Dee noted figures carefully, for the position of the sun and a few major stars. Often the two men remained long into the night after others had retired, taking advantage of the deep, pre-electric darkness to record the positions of heavenly bodies in detailed tables.⁶ They also knew that, heading as Chancellor was into the far north, the hours of light would be long and the stars would for much of the time be invisible. The sun, as a result, was more dependable as a reference point. At midday too, therefore, Dee recalled, with Chancellor’s magnificent quadrant, ‘he and I made sundry observations meridian of the sun’s height’.⁷ They carefully recorded the results as they did so, in Ephemerides which Chancellor could take with him on board.

Sebastian Cabot would have known the pair well, and taken a keen interest in their studies. Few others in England could advise from experience on the use of astronomy for the purposes of navigation. And there is no doubt that Cabot was increasingly taken with Chancellor in particular as the Englishman the country had lacked for so long, who could be a true ocean navigator of the modern kind.

 

 

Seventeen

At some point in the spring of 1553, the merchants and others with a stake in the venture held a rowdy meeting to discuss their plans. Clement Adams was there, perhaps as an assistant of Cabot’s, and he later wrote a rather stylised account of what took place.

Top of the agenda was affirmation of the choice of individuals to act as Captain and Pilot Major. Richard Chancellor was much discussed, because he was young and not widely known. Those like Cabot who knew him had sung his praises. A decision had probably been made by the inner committee to approve his appointment. But Cabot was aware of a vein of distrust among the London merchants towards himself personally, with his foreign blood and long service in Spain, and wished to reassure them. So Sir Henry Sidney, who knew Chancellor better than anyone, was asked to attend the meeting, to provide what amounted to a character reference.

Sidney certainly had significant influence with the assembled merchants. Not only was he a member of the King’s intimate circle, but he was close to the head of Edward’s Council, John Dudley. Not only had Richard Chancellor lived for some time in his household, but the two men were close in age. In spite of Sidney’s social superiority, they had formed a bond. As he rose the merchants hushed respectfully, and with anticipation, to hear him speak.

Tactfully enough, Sidney began by flattering his audience. He praised the merchants for an undertaking which he hoped would prove ‘profitable for this nation, and honourable to this our land’. He spoke on behalf of the nobility, he said, who were willing to do whatever they could – to give up anything – in order to advance so worthy a cause. He could speak as someone making a considerable sacrifice himself. He gave up Richard Chancellor to lead the voyage, he told the merchants, not because he found him a financial burden, because he did not value him, or because he would not miss him. Quite the contrary. He parted with Chancellor without complaint to show support for a venture he backed, and because he believed that by doing so he would boost its chances of success. He was pleased, too, to see such a gifted young man given the opportunity to make his mark.

No one, Sidney assured the merchants, was in a better position to recommend Chancellor. The merchants had had the chance to learn of him through reports made by others, and through his own words when they met him. They were practical men of business, though: they knew how some men could talk a good game in an interview. He knew Chancellor through his deeds as well as his words. By the ‘daily trial of his life’ over a long period, he said, he had acquired a ‘full and perfect knowledge of him’. And he was delighted now to see him accorded the authority and respect that he deserved. All the same, he hoped the merchants would not forget the risks Chancellor was running on their behalf:

We commit a little money to the chance and hazard of Fortune: He commits his life (a thing to a man of all things most dear) to the raging Sea, and the uncertainties of many dangers. We shall here live and rest at home quietly with our friends, and acquaintances: but he in the mean time labouring to keep the ignorant and unruly Mariners in good order and obedience, with how many cares shall he trouble and vex himself? ... We shall keep [to] our own coasts and country: He shall seek strange and unknown kingdoms. He shall commit his safety to barbarous and cruel people, and shall hazard his life amongst the monstrous and terrible beasts of the Sea.

If Chancellor returned safely from such dangers, Sidney told the merchants, it was their duty to reward him liberally.

His speech made the impact that he, and the leaders of the enterprise, had hoped for. Meaningful looks were exchanged among the assembled merchants. A hubbub broke and grew in the room as whispered conversations increased in volume and excitement. Those who knew Chancellor congratulated themselves. Perhaps this man really would justify the hype and, as Adams said, ‘his virtues already appearing and shining to the world would grow to the great honour and advancement of this kingdom’.¹

Perhaps, less loftily but more to the point, he would make them rich?

As the chatter subsided, the leading men focused the group’s attention on the business in hand. There was much else to be discussed. For one thing, as those of ‘greatest gravity’ present insisted, every attempt should be made to learn in advance of the ‘Easterly part or tract of the world’ where the ships would be heading, of which so little was currently known. Someone mentioned that two Tartars who had travelled to England were working in the King’s stables. Perhaps, he suggested, they could provide useful information? The idea was welcomed, and the two men were sent for, along with someone capable of interpreting.

After a delay, the men arrived. They were subjected immediately to a barrage of questions. What was their country like? What were its manners and customs, its wealth and commodities? What could they tell the group about its northern coast? How easy was passage by sea from there to Cathay or to the offshore islands further east?

It was soon obvious, however, that the merchants were wasting their time. Quite probably the men came from nowhere near the northern seas. In any case, they were barely coherent and could answer ‘nothing to the purpose’. Someone present loudly quipped that the men seemed to be more acquainted with ‘toss pots’ – that is, with drink – than with ‘the states and dispositions of people’, and at this, mounting frustration among the organisers and investors gave way to laughter.

The two Tartar men may have been angered at being made the object of ridicule. Certainly a commotion seems to have ensued. As Adams discreetly noted, there was then ‘much ado’, and ‘many things passed about this matter’. Eventually, though, calm was restored and the meeting moved on, none the wiser about the state of the East.

Attention was directed once more to a practical matter of great urgency. Spring was already far advanced, and still no departure date had been fixed. Many were well aware of the importance of utilising the summer months for an expedition into the north. Several voiced their concern that if the matter were delayed much longer, the intended exploration would be impossible that year: ‘the way would be stopped and barred by the force of the Ice, and the cold climate’. It was an argument that spoke keenly to the pockets as well as the minds of the prime movers and investors. So a deadline was agreed. ‘By the twentieth day of May’, it was settled, ‘the Captains and Mariners should take shipping, and depart from Ratcliffe upon the ebb, if’, of course, ‘it pleased God.’²

 

 

Eighteen

The fixing of a deadline for departure added to the pressure on those who were assembling the crews.

The Captain General, Sir Hugh Willoughby, and the Pilot Major, Richard Chancellor, had been appointed. Others, probably, had been found to fill the most important remaining posts on the voyage. William Gefferson, an old hand at sea, was master of Willoughby’s ship – with full responsibility for sailing it, given Willoughby’s own lack of experience. On Chancellor’s ship, the Edward, the post of master was given to a man from Devon called Stephen Borough. Chancellor, of course, certainly did know what he was doing, so it was a less responsible job. But Borough was twenty-seven years old, had been sailing for over a decade and was another, like Chancellor, who took an unusual interest in the intellectual side of seafaring. His younger brother William, only sixteen, was taken on as one of the regular mariners to gain experience, as boys his age often were. Command of the third and smallest ship was allotted to Cornelius Durforth, a man who sounds Dutch in origin, and who also had a brother or other relative among the mariners. (Then, as now, contacts were a vital way to get on.) Each of the three masters had a mate. On the Edward it was John Buckland.

Some of the men on board took little part in sailing the ships. On the Bona Esperanza there were six merchants, on the smaller Bona Confidentia three. On the Edward Bonaventure, the largest, there were merchants, like John Hasse and the ‘Cape’ or head merchant, George Burton, but also men like James Dallaber who were described simply as gentlemen: present to add dignity when visiting foreign courts, and a sign of the increasing interaction, and intermarriage, between merchants and gentry. Unusually, of course, merchants on board were not there to operate independently, but were employed by the company. Together they were responsible for selling company goods and for buying or bartering for stock with which to return to England. Their trades were overseen by the company purser, Robert Gwinne, who travelled with Willoughby, and whose role it was to supervise the expedition’s commercial activity and to deal with foreign governments over such matters as customs and trading rights. Numerate as well as literate, he handled company money and issued salaries to the crew.

Also on the Edward was John Stafford, a minister of religion.¹ Twice daily, in the morning and in the evening, he was expected to take prayers, as well as ‘other common services’ prescribed for particular days by the King or the laws of England. On two of the ships there was no minister. This was common enough on a trading ship, but instructions offer a glimpse of the Protestant ideology then increasingly dominant in England. For Protestants, readings from Scripture in the vernacular were what mattered; less importance was attached to an ordained ministry, to liaise between men and God. Services were not to go unsaid. Rather a merchant, ‘or some other person learned’, was to take them. The Bible, in English of course, was ‘to be read devoutly and Christianly to God’s honour’, while His grace was to be obtained ‘by humble and hearty prayer of the Navigants’.

Cabot’s instructions imply that Stafford was to have sailed on the admiral: that is to say, on Willoughby’s ship, the Esperanza. In fact, for whatever reason – a last-minute practical matter of space or numbers, or so that he could minister to the largest number, or to the gentlemen – he sailed, according to Hakluyt’s list, with Chancellor on the Edward.

The regular crew proved harder to assemble. A voyage into the northern seas offered additional risks without the high returns anticipated by investors and company merchants. By May 1553, with the date fixed for departure impending, pressure was mounting and anxious enquiries were made by the company’s most senior men.

Merchants, particularly those who had been ship-owners themselves, were familiar with the problem. In recent years securing reliable crew had become an increasingly difficult matter. The long-term decline of English merchant shipping had forced many, especially in the provincial ports, to abandon seafaring for an inland trade. There simply weren’t enough jobs at sea to go round. More recently, the growth of the navy, the country’s wars with France and Scotland and the parallel rise of a semi-official privateering industry had created the opposite problem: more jobs, now with fewer people to fill them. Good seamen, as a result, were often already engaged.

The early 1550s was a time of peace, but still it was hard to find qualified men willing to crew three ships for a dangerous venture heading into an entirely unknown part of the world.² Senior government figures became worried. After urgent discussion, measures were taken which were generally associated with military service, by land or sea, rather than with a privately funded commercial voyage, and which illustrate the extent of government interest. The Lord High Admiral despatched a letter to the Clerk of the Admiralty. If necessary, he wrote, men to work on the ships, and to serve on the ‘voyage to seek the land unknown’ – ‘ship masters, mariners, shipwrights, gunners, and other such persons’ – could be seized and forcibly ‘impressed’.³ It is not known whether the strategy – which was to have a long and ignoble history in the British Navy – was used. No further reference to it is made, and the official authorisation may have come too late. The disadvantages of a begrudging and potentially under-skilled crew are obvious. Men who were impressed, it was said, were ‘the scum and dregs of the country’.⁴ In any case, men were found.

Merchantmen were at least much less heavily manned than naval ships. In spite of the development of cannon, the business of fighting at sea still revolved primarily around grappling, boarding and hand-to-hand fighting, placing a premium on sheer numbers of armed soldiers. Where commerce was the aim, financial considerations kept the crew down. The combined total carried by the three ships in 1553 was fewer than 120. A single naval vessel of comparable size would have carried more.⁵ Even this, though, meant that the ratio of men to tons served (370) was approximately one to three, a level of manning that would have been considered extravagant for most ordinary commercial ventures.⁶

The fact is of course that this voyage was anything but ordinary. It was heading into dangerous, uncharted waters. The ships needed to be able to defend themselves, not only against pirates but also against the sea-power of unfriendly states along their route. And they wished to discourage hostility by making an imposing appearance wherever they arrived. No less significantly, the organisers knew the other dangers to human life, from accident as well as disease. The simple fact that the voyage was likely to last much longer than most substantially increased the risks. Both in the far north during winter, and in the tropics if they made it that far, the mortal threats were known to be severe. It was natural, therefore, to crew ships with extensive fatalities in mind, and for promoters to wish to be confident that even a much-depleted crew could sail home.

There were thirty-seven men on the Edward who belonged to the ‘mariners and officers, according to the custom and use of the Seas’, a category which did not include the captain, the master and his mate. There were twenty-one ordinary mariners, among whom were Miles Butter and the young Arthur Pet. On the Esperanza, on which there were more men in other positions, there were ten ordinary mariners, including Thomas Allen and George Blake. On the Confidentia there were eleven, among whom was John Durforth: probably, given the unusual name, a relation of the captain.

As the lowest level of sailor, many would have been young and some, like William Borough, were only boys. It was normal for well-connected youths to begin their maritime careers as apprentices at eleven or twelve years old. In his strictures about on-board hygiene, Cabot required the men to show their juniors a good example: ‘the gromals & pages’, he wrote (‘gromal’ being a term for an adolescent boy on a ship), ‘to be brought up according to the laudable order and use of the Sea’.⁷ If lasting life was to be breathed into English commerce, moreover, it was stressed that attention be paid to their ‘learning of Navigation’ as well as to the performance of the menial tasks which were their lot.

The sailors’ names sound English, by and large, a fact which might occasion surprise given the cosmopolitan nature of the maritime community.⁸ This, however, was a peculiarly English venture. The national interest was kept firmly in mind, and unusual effort may have been made to give experience to an English crew. Though recruited in London, they would have originated from all over the country. Young men in many lines of work travelled in search of employment – journeymen in the literal sense – and sixteenth-century London exerted a strong draw. As a major port, it was the destination of ships from around the coast of England as well as from abroad. Crews often passed time in the capital, spending their wages and waiting for the next opportunity.

Such men had a bad reputation: for drunkenness, for fighting and for being difficult to govern. As Pilot Major and a leader of the voyage, Richard Chancellor, it was said, would have a battle on his hands ‘to keep the ignorant and unruly Mariners in good order and obedience’.⁹ Certainly in part, and at times, the reputation was earned. But these men covered a wide spectrum: from the rough and trouble-making ne’er-do-wells who could find no other employment, to well-connected and often capable boys and men marked out for rapid promotion. Many, of course, were neither. They were not born to the sea but were willing to take wages wherever and however they were offered. They were hard-edged, by experience if not by nature, inured to violence, but willing to toil and to accept the rigours of what was dangerous and punishing work because nothing else was available – and certainly nothing that was not equally tough.

Sixteen men on the Edward held more specialised positions. They helped to sail the ship, but also had additional tasks, with proportionately higher pay.

This was a merchant vessel, not looking for trouble; but the state had taken a keen interest in the venture and security was a concern. Four men, therefore, were responsible for artillery, including Robert Stanton, the Master Gunner.¹⁰ On the smaller Esperanza there were two gunners and on the Confidentia only one. The expedition ships, Hakluyt wrote, were well appointed with all manner of artillery’, and Adams noted that they were provided with ‘armour and munition of all sorts’.¹¹ There would have been brass cannon – minions perhaps – with smaller, wrought-iron guns which could be operated by one person, as well as handguns.

All of the ships would have carried barrels of gunpowder: either primitive black ‘serpentine’, rather unreliable and dangerous to use, or powder that was ‘corned’, that is to say set using liquid and broken into granules to prevent the separation of constituent parts. Iron shot was used by the larger guns, stone or lead shot by the smaller. There would also have been conventional items of weaponry. As well as the artillery, it was said that the ships carried ‘other things necessary for their defence’: pikes to fend off boarders, and bows made of yew, with plenty of arrows and spare strings.

Other men had particular skills. Each ship had a carpenter; on the Edward it was Griffin Wagham. On a wooden vessel, he was an important man. He would have been formally trained, and his salary reflected his status. He was expected to keep a careful eye on the sides of the ship, on the masts, the rudder, the decks and the ship’s boats, to spot any damage before it caused a problem. Emergency repairs would be his responsibility. The cooper, meanwhile – William Every on the Edward – also worked with wood. He specialised in the construction and maintenance of casks of all shapes and sizes, holding liquids, foodstuffs, trade goods and commodities like gunpowder which it was essential to keep dry. Since water quickly became ridden with algae and undrinkable, weak wine or beer were vital resources and wastage could not be afforded. With the money raised, the merchants decided to supply the ships with food for eighteen months: allowing six months for the outward voyage, six to see out the winter if the weather prevented an immediate return, and another six to sail back the following year. Inevitably, there would be protracted intervals between opportunities to restock.

The cooks had a limited array of ingredients with which to work. On the Edward this was Austen Jacks.¹² The instructions refer to fish and ‘meate’ (bacon or beef, well salted to last), as well as to biscuit, bread, beer, wine, oil, vinegar and ‘other kind of victualling’. In the latter category, cheese, butter and ‘pease’ were common supplies, while beans, wheat or oatmeal might bulk out this protein-rich diet and help to provide the calories needed by a crew working for long days in the extended daylight of a northern summer. Fresh fruit and vegetables were not on the menu unless they happened to be picked up at a port en route, and there was no understanding yet in any case of their preventive role where diseases like scurvy were concerned. On small merchant ships, cooking was often done on a metal stove kept on deck. On larger naval vessels, and probably on those of the expedition too given the cold conditions expected, a stove was constructed on bricks deep in the hold among the ballast – often a dirty, smelly and unhygienic place to be, though less so on a new-built ship – with a metal flue to carry smoke and sparks clear of the wooden decks. A steward was responsible for the potentially inflammatory task of dishing out rations, and it was he, with the cook, who accounted, weekly, for the food consumed.

Four quartermasters oversaw a designated area, or quarter, of the ship. Meanwhile the boatswain or ‘bosun’ – Peter Palmer on the Edward – was the link between the captain or master and his crew. He worked with the men, but spoke regularly to the captain, ensuring that orders were transmitted and carried out, often possessing a whistle by which if necessary he could communicate with the crew. He was responsible for checking the ship was well maintained, and took particular charge, often, of the sails, the rigging and the ship’s boats. It was also his job to supervise the packing of cargo, an important task on a merchantman, in which heavy commodities would be stowed low and centrally to act as a counterweight to the tipping moment of wind-filled sails. In the event that there was too little cargo, or too little that was heavy, ballast of sand or stones would be used. Reporting to the voyage’s purser, the bosun logged all cargo on board, in his bosun’s book, and registered its unloading at its destination, to try to prevent the theft and private trading rife among seamen alive to any chance to enhance their meagre earnings. It was an important position, accorded to a man who was on the way to taking overall command of a ship himself.¹³

Also on the Edward was a surgeon: Thomas Walter. If there was no intention, on this voyage, to engage deliberately in violence, nevertheless it could not be ruled out. Accidents, moreover, were an ever-present cause of injury at sea. Medical attention, in the sixteenth century, could be as dangerous as the wound or illness that required it. Some naval surgeons, however, had made worthwhile advances in the treatment of common injuries, like the wounds and burns from artillery, or substantial splinters from wooden planks. Methods for extracting foreign bodies, for debriding (that is, removing dead tissue), for stitching open wounds and for amputating limbs using tight tourniquets to reduce pain and blood loss, had improved, and could be better than nothing. Fastidious surgeons made some attempt at cleanliness, which was known to be healthier and to improve the chances of recovery in spite of the absence of any bacterial explanation.¹⁴ Everything depended on the knowledge and skill of the man involved, and the best that can be said is that again, given the nature of the voyage, Thomas Walter was probably more qualified than most.¹⁵

He was the only surgeon to set sail with the expedition, a sign that the role was not yet considered indispensable, and that the intention was for the ships to stay together so that a surgeon could tend, at a convenient moment, to any man on the voyage. In other respects, too, regular contact was assumed.

 

 

Nineteen

At the top level, a council was selected from the leading men which would meet to discuss progress and to make important decisions. The council had twelve members, since twelve, or a multiple thereof, was considered the prudent biblical number. With Willoughby and Chancellor, its members included the masters of the three ships – Cornelius Durforth, William Gefferson and Stephen Borough – and their three mates, along with George Burton and Thomas Langlie for the merchants, James Dallaber as a ‘gentleman’ and the minister, John Stafford. The operation of such a council, of course, required that ‘the fleet shall keep together, and not separate themselves asunder, as much as by wind & weather may be done or permitted’.

For all that Willoughby’s authority with the mariners was vital, life on an English ship in Tudor times was less autocratic than it later became. A ship, or a fleet of ships, was no democracy. But it was often an oligarchy rather than a dictatorship.

Significant decisions were voted on by the council, who were expected to gather on board the admiral whenever Willoughby wished to consult them ‘concerning the affairs of the fleet and the voyage’. Willoughby’s pre-eminence at these meetings was affirmed only by the fact that he received a ‘double voice’, two votes to the one of his fellow members, to ensure there could be no split decisions. Twelve plus one, of course, also had a biblical ring. For the community of more than one hundred men who would be living on board the three ships for the coming months, the council were effectively the government. All would be bound by their orders and regulations, duly written down in a hefty, leather-bound book provided for the purpose, most of whose pages were blank.

As the crew assembled early in May on the bank-side at Ratcliffe, the book was brought by Sebastian Cabot and presented to Willoughby and the other leading men. Already neatly inscribed in the first part of the book was a list of thirty-three general rules which Cabot had drawn up, with the help of his fellow board members, to govern the conduct of all those taking part in the expedition. He described them as ‘ordinances, instructions, and advertisements’. These were to be read aloud regularly, every week, to the men: ‘to the intent that every man may better remember his oath, conscience, duty and charge’. They were a sort of constitution by which the enterprise should be regulated.¹ It is a list full of the practical wisdom accrued by an old man who had taken part in, led, or organised such expeditions for most of his life.

Much is shrewd common sense. There are articles, for instance, about ship management. Cabot advised that careful records should be kept of food and drink consumed, while waste or unprofitable excess’ should be avoided. Tabs should be kept too on other equipment and supplies. Guns and powder, for instance, should not be wasted or misused, but ‘preserved for the necessary defence of the fleet and voyage’. Navigational instruments should be scrupulously maintained. Order and cleanliness were to be ensured. ‘No liquor,’ he instructed, ‘to be spilt on the ballast, nor filthiness to be left within board: the cook room, and all other places to be kept clean for the better health of the company’ – a directive which shows surprising wisdom in an age often assumed to be ignorant of the link between hygiene and health. Anyone who did become sick was to be carefully tended, and others were to cover his work without complaint. The clothes and belongings of any who died should be kept for his wife and children (or other beneficiary specified in his will) along with whatever salary the man was owed until the day of his death.

Some articles invoke the lessons of Cabot’s own prior misfortune or miscalculation. Great emphasis, for instance, is given to the need for unity among the leadership. The Captain General, the Pilot Major, the masters, merchants and other officers should be ‘so knit and accorded in unity, love, conformity, and obedience’ that no damaging differences should emerge, to be exploited by the mariners. This sort of dissent, Cabot wrote, had ‘overthrown many notable intended and likely enterprises and exploits’, and he was certainly including his own. When he returned to the theme in the last article, he passed on the wisdom of bitter personal experience. ‘Item’, he wrote, ‘no conspiracies, partakings, factions, false tales, untrue reports, which be the very seeds, and fruits of contention, discord, & confusion, by evil tongues to be suffered.’

Articles regarding encounters with natives drew on his own with Indians in America. ‘If you shall see them wear Lions or Bears skins, having long bows, and arrows,’ he advised, ‘be not afraid of that sight: for such be worn oftentimes more to fear strangers, than for any other cause.’ Nevertheless, crew should remain alert when anchored close to inhabited land, and keep ‘diligent watch’ both day and night. ‘There are people’, he warned, ‘that can swim in the sea, havens, & rivers, naked’, who might attempt to assault an unguarded ship and – since Europeans had a perennial fear of and fascination with cannibalism – might attempt to kidnap men whose bodies ‘they covet for meat’.² He didn’t anticipate such threats in the freezing waters of the Arctic, though even here the map legends of 1544 had warned that ‘no ship dares to ride at anchor near the coast’ for fear of what it called the ‘night people’ who lived through months of darkness and who killed and robbed any visitors.³ And the intention, of course, was to return to the Equator, where it was hot.

Four articles reminded the party of the oaths they had taken, of obedience to the King and his realm, as well as to the leadership of the voyage. They had promised, he wrote, to uphold all the orders ‘contained in this book’, including any added by the ship’s council. They had bound themselves to pursue their aim with determination, and not to give up until they had succeeded: ‘so far forth’, at least, ‘as possibility and life of man may serve or extend’. Again, the memory of expeditions of his own on which sailors refused to go further came flooding back as Cabot wrote. The whole crew had sworn obedience to the Captain General and his council. Both had the authority to punish negligent or dishonest behaviour, ‘after the laws and common customs of the sea’. A guilty man might be demoted, or even unshipped, with the proportion of his salary to which he was entitled. But justice, Cabot stressed, should be even-handed, and so less likely to provoke hostility. Punishment should be ministered ‘moderately, according to the fault or desert of his offence’.

Symptomatic of the new spirit of the enterprise, and critical to the business of exploration, was the emphasis Cabot placed on the keeping of written records. In this his articles were revolutionary. Nowhere in the history of ocean-going navigation had anything comparable been seen.

Records of earlier voyages, if they existed at all, had been haphazard, incomplete and often retrospective, written sometimes by the captain in the form of a letter to his ruler.⁴ But the clear aim now was to forge trade routes, which by definition would be repeated, and not necessarily by the same men. So they needed to be meticulously mapped. ‘Item,’ required article seven, ‘that the merchants, and other skilful persons in writing, shall daily write, describe, and put in memory the Navigation of every day and night, with the points, and observation of the lands, tides, elements, altitude of the sun, course of the moon and stars.’

For centuries coastal pilots had relied on rutters, containing basic landmarks, drawings and information about water depths and tides. All this was useful, but Cabot wanted more. He wanted a scrupulous record of astronomical observations which could help to provide a definite location on the earth’s surface. This was another reason for the members of the council to meet regularly on board Willoughby’s ship, to ensure their instruments were similarly adjusted and to compare observations. ‘Once every week (if wind and weather shall serve)’, Cabot proposed, the three masters should pool their notes, examining points of agreement or disagreement. In the process they should create ‘a common ledger, to remain of record for the company’. The fact that this now seems a rather obvious suggestion belies its radicalism.

For all that human agency – the right preparation and the right skills – would help, no one doubted that God’s support would ultimately decide the success of the venture and the safety of the crews. None were more conscious than sailors of the precariousness of their existence. Under God’s merciful hand, Cabot wrote, ‘navigants above all other creatures naturally be most nigh’. And as such, religious observance was fundamental. Regular prayers and services were to be conducted and the Bible read aloud. Just as importantly, all behaviour was barred which might jeopardise His support. There was, Cabot urged, to be ‘no blaspheming of God, or detestable swearing’, no ‘ribaldry, filthy tales, or ungodly talk’. There should also be no gambling from which quarrels might ensue: ‘neither dicing, carding, tabling, nor other devilish games’. These wouldn’t only cause ‘poverty to the players’; they could also lead to ‘strife, variance, brawling, fighting, and oftentimes murder’. The outcome would not only be the ‘utter destruction’ of the parties concerned, but would also affect them all, by ‘provoking of God’s most just wrath, and sword of vengeance’.

Here, of course, God’s taste in shipboard conduct matched that of a judicious captain (even were the captain not anxious to placate Him). We know from Cabot’s own flexibility when it came to the articles of religious belief, that it was their impact in the material world that concerned him. As he admitted, religious observance and godly behaviour served a dual purpose: they were important for ‘duty and conscience sake towards God’ but also ‘for prudent and worldly policy’. Certainly the captain’s ‘just wrath’ would be provoked as surely as God’s by a significant lapse in standards. After fair warning – ‘the offenders once monished, and not reforming’ – all such ‘pestilences’ were to be punished.

In another way, too, the practice of religion was to be pragmatic. This was a commercial venture. Little benefit was to be expected from the sort of aggressive proselytising carried out by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Rather the opposite. Far better, Cabot advised, ‘not to disclose to any nation the state of our religion, but to pass it over in silence’. Instead, the crews should conform with the traditions of their hosts, religious and otherwise. (God, surely, would understand.) They should avoid provoking a foreign people ‘by any disdain, laughing, contempt, or such like’. Every nation and region was to be approached ‘with prudent circumspection, with all gentleness, and courtesy’. This was not, needless to say, a template for imperial conduct which the English would always honour. But it stands, nevertheless, at the outset of English expansion, as a proclamation of the better side of the impulse.

The merchants involved, and Cabot too, hoped to find markets where transactions could be conducted that were immediately profitable. More important in the long run, though, as Cabot saw, was the acquisition of knowledge which might promote lasting trade. What was required was an inquisitive commercial eye. ‘The names of the people of every Island’, he instructed, ‘are to be taken in writing, with the commodities, and incommodities of the same, their natures, qualities, and dispositions.’ Detailed records should be kept, listing for each people ‘what things they are most desirous of, & what commodities they will most willingly depart with, & what metals they have in hills, mountains, streams, or rivers, in, or under the earth’.

Information was better obtained, he advised, by politeness, discretion and if necessary by guile than by aggression. If, for instance, people were spotted on the shoreline, ‘gathering of stones, gold, metal, or other like’, the crew should approach cautiously in their smaller boats to observe what it was they were collecting. No hint of menace should be displayed, ‘no ... sign of rigour and hostility’. On the contrary, men who knew how to use them should reach for the instruments which had been provided, as was common at sea. The crew should sing, and together they should make soothing, captivating music, to send the natives into a reverie or to make them want to come closer, ‘to see, and hear your instruments and voices’.⁵ If possible, an individual should be lured or persuaded on board, so that as much as possible could be learned of these people. Violence, Cabot stressed, was unacceptable, and would only prove counter-productive. If it was a woman, strictly no advantage was to be taken. She was not ‘to be tempted, or entreated to incontinency, or dishonesty’.

One well-trusted strategy which he did recommend, though, was alcohol. ‘If the person taken may be made drunk with your beer, or wine’, he advised, you shall know the secrets of his heart’.

At all times Cabot urged caution and a cool distrust. He had heard, if not credited, fantastic rumours from Roger Barlow of people like the Scythians, who lived in northern Asia and who received strangers ‘lovingly’ before killing them, eating them and drinking their blood mixed with milk.⁶

He had come across tribes in southern America who genuinely were cannibals, albeit of a sparing and ritualistic kind, and the legends of the 1544 map cautioned of the ‘very wicked people’ who lived in these lands, deserted by the sun for months on end, who killed and robbed all who visited.⁷ At any rate, he now urged the English not to ‘credit the fair words of the strange people, which be many times tried subtle, and false’. They should not venture too far inland, for fear they might be unable to get back to their pinnaces or ships. If invited to the house of a local lord or ruler, they should go, but only armed and in numbers.

Cabot knew what effect the lust for precious things could have on men. Great caution should be taken that a desire for gold, silver and other riches did not lure them into peril. In any case, good commercial strategy was to mask enthusiasm for any goods on offer: advice that stemmed, perhaps, from one of the experienced merchants on the company board. It was much better to feign lack of interest. ‘Esteem your own commodities above all other’, article 25 recommended, ‘and in countenance show not much to desire the foreign commodities.’ The men should take them, of course; but only as if ‘for friendship’.

Not surprisingly, Cabot wrote articles which reminded the merchants in particular of the unprecedented nature of the enterprise. As never before, he reminded them, they were trading not individually but as a company. And as such, the ‘common stock of the company’ was to be given priority over any private trading. No person was ‘to hinder the common benefit’. If it should happen, as men dared to hope, that jewels, pearls, precious stones or metals became available, it must be the company’s transactions which came first, and guidelines then issued by the Captain and his council should be strictly followed.

In trading on behalf of the company, merchants should obtain consent from the Captain General, the Pilot Major and the Cape Merchant prior to any deal, whether it involved buying, selling or trucking (as bartering was known). Goods acquired were to be stored in one place, well ordered, packed, and conserved’, until they could be presented in due course to the governor, consuls and assistants in London. Meticulous records were to be kept, so that all business was transparent. On return, ‘the truth of the whole voyage’ was ‘to be opened, to the common wealth and benefit of the whole company.’

If possible, the company hoped to receive word of progress during the expedition. Cabot’s natural optimism is obvious. Urgent information might include, he suggested, the ‘likely success of the voyage’, the finding of a passage or the advancement of a fruitful new trade. In this case the on-board council should send a messenger or two, if it seemed possible, by land or sea, so that the company could begin to make appropriate plans. The men would know how many back home, from the top down, were anxious for positive news: ‘the king’s Majesty, the Lords of his honourable Counsel, this whole company, as also your wives, children, kinsfolk, allies, friends and familiars’. All would be desperate to know how things went, to be reassured that their loved ones were well, and to learn how likely it was that they could achieve ‘this notable enterprise’, which it was hoped would be as rewarding as the East and West Indies had proved to the rulers of Spain and Portugal.

Cabot pleaded for good conduct. The men should remember, always, to what lengths the company board and subscribers had gone to furnish and equip the ships with ‘plenty of all necessaries’, the like of which, he said, had never been known in any realm for such an exploit. As ever in Tudor England, when social mobility, and disorder, was everywhere apparent, the key to stability and success seemed to be for men to stick dutifully to their stations. ‘It behoveth every person in his degree’, Cabot wrote, ‘to remember his said charge, and the accomplishment thereof.’ And on a voyage, no doubt, if not in life, this was true enough. Beyond that, the men could only pray to ‘the living God’ that He ‘prosper your voyage, and preserve you from all dangers’.

‘In witness whereof,’ he concluded, ‘I Sebastian Cabot, Governor aforesaid, to these present ordinances, have subscribed my name, and put my seal, the day and year above written.’