4

A NEWE AND STRANGE NAVIGATION

ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, May 20, 1553, the Mysterie’s flotilla of newly constructed ships prepared to set off from Ratcliffe, a village on the north bank of the Thames and about two miles downstream from the heart of London. The flagship, Bona Esperanza, was commanded by Hugh Willoughby, the soldier with little maritime experience. Richard Chancellor, the pilot major, commanded the largest of the vessels, the Edward Bonaventure. The ships’ names—a third vessel was called Bona Confidentia—expressed the optimism of the enterprise: Good Hope, Good Fortune, Good Confidence.¹

The ships sailed with the blessing and good wishes of King Edward, along with a letter of royal introduction. The document, translated into Greek and “diverse other languages,” was signed with a flourish and grandly addressed to “all Kings, Princes, Rulers, Judges, and Governours of the earth.”² In it, Edward announced that he, the king of England, had “licensed the right valiant and worthy Sir Hugh Willoughby” to venture to lands beyond his dominions, to conduct trade and to establish “an indissoluble and perpetuall league of friendship” with trading partners abroad.³ He promised the foreign kings that, if they allowed his merchants to conduct business in their domains, their subjects would receive reciprocity in England “if at any time they shall come to our kingdoms.”⁴

According to the sailing orders, the ships were to progress to the Thames estuary, a journey of some thirty-five miles. Once there, they were to turn north into the North Sea, the Mare Germanicus, and then head toward the Oceanus Deucale—now known as the Norwegian Sea—that lay beyond Scotland.

After clearing the Norwegian coast, they were to turn east again and continue sailing as far as the wind would take them and the seas would let them. If all went well, they would scud through the northeast seaway, skirt the territory marked on Cabot’s map as Terra Incognita—unknown land—and reach the hoped-for outlet into the China Sea. From there they would navigate, somehow, to Cathay and the markets of the East, where they would trade English cloth for spices and silks or whatever could be had—and then do it all in reverse.

This was a bold “blue ocean” strategy of the most literal kind.⁵ To execute on the plan, Willoughby and Chancellor had assembled a crew of 116 men—sailors, of course, as well as cooks, carpenters, coopers, gunners, surgeons, and a minister. Also aboard was a large contingent of merchants—eighteen of them—who were to be the first English commercial travelers to crack the new overseas markets.⁶

At Ratcliffe, to see them off, was Sebastian Cabot. Now about seventy, his luxuriant hair had gone completely white, and his beard, bifurcated into bushy tufts, extended down to his chest. He was too old to make the voyage himself, but it remained, nevertheless, the realization of his lifetime dream: to prove the existence of a northern passage to Cathay.

AS THE TIDE turned on that May day, the mariners, resplendent in their azure-blue outfits, cut from a cloth produced in the tiny fishing village of Watchet on England’s southwest coast, bade farewell to their wives and children, kinfolk, and friends who had gathered to see them off.⁷ Then the ships progressed downstream to Deptford, where they anchored for the night. On the second day, the fleet approached Greenwich, and the sumptuous riverside palace where Edward and his court were then in residence. At the sight of the approaching vessels, courtiers ran out of the palace to watch them sail by. Townsfolk swarmed to the river’s edge to wave. Members of the Privy Council peered out from the windows of their chamber. Others scurried to the tops of towers to take in the scene. The sailors shouted, scrambled up the rigging, climbed onto the poop, teetered on the spars, and fired the ships’ guns so that the “tops of the hills sounded therewith.”⁸ The procession, according to an eyewitness account, was a “very triumph.”⁹ Except in one respect. The young king was seriously ill and unable to come to the window. Those attending him feared for his life.

The Willoughby fleet navigated the traffic and currents of the Thames for six days, bumping along from Blackwall to Woolwich to Gravesend, until they reached the outlet to the North Sea. They then sailed up the east coast of England, putting in at the port of Harwich, about fifty miles north of the Thames estuary, where they waited for a favorable wind. At last, in late June, the wind blew up fair from the southwest, and the Bona Esperanza, Bona Confidentia, and Edward Bonaventure “committed themselves to the sea, giving their last adieu to their native Country, which they knew not whether they should ever return to see again.” Uncertain of “what hazards they were to fall” or “what uncertainties of the sea they were to make trial of,” the mariners were reported to have “looked oftentimes back, and could not refrain from tears.” Even Richard Chancellor, courageous as he was, appeared “somewhat troubled” because “he left behind him his two little sons” who would be “orphans if he speed not well.”¹⁰

THE WILLOUGHBY FLEET followed Cabot’s instructions as faithfully as they could and managed to sail “in company”—together, as he had specified. In late July, after more than a month at sea, a massive storm blew up off the coast of Norway. “By violence of wind, and thickness of mists,” Willoughby noted in his logbook, “we were not able to keep together within sight.”¹¹ Chancellor feared his comrades were not only lost to him, but to the world: “If the rage and fury of the sea have devoured those good men, or if as yet they live, and wander up and down in strange countries, I must needs say they were men worthy of better fortune.”¹²

The next day the crew of Willoughby’s Bona Esperanza spotted the Bona Confidentia on the horizon. Chancellor’s Edward Bonaventure, however, was nowhere to be seen. Separated from his pilot major, Willoughby decided to proceed to one of the known places on the charts prepared with the help of John Dee—the Wardhouse, the present-day area of Vardø, off the north coast of Norway.¹³ It was there that they had agreed to meet should the ships become separated.

But no sooner had Willoughby settled on this plan than he ran into trouble. He was no seafarer, and he lacked the mariner’s instincts about weather and the experience of keeping his two ships aright and on course through violent storms. The Wardhouse, as described by a visitor a few years later, was a “castle standing in an island” two miles from the mainland and subject to the king of Denmark. Its isolated inhabitants “live[d] only by fishing.”¹⁴ But it was in vain that Willoughby scanned the horizon, and his ships, tacking and wallowing through the sea, sailed far to the northeast until mid-August, then headed southeast before eventually turning back at the end of the month and proceeding west until the middle of September. The path they took, as recorded in Willoughby’s logbook, was a desperate zigzagging course.¹⁵ Without Chancellor, Willoughby was unable to make effective use of his flagship’s nautical instruments. “The land,” he observed ominously, “lay not as the Globe made mention.”¹⁶

Eventually, in mid-September, four months after leaving London, the Bona Esperanza and Bona Confidentia put in at a harbor. It was not the Wardhouse, but the sea ran deep into the mainland and provided a safe haven, shelter from the winds, and a secure anchorage. The water teemed with seals and fish, while the land seemed “strange and wonderful.” The crew caught sight of bears, deer, foxes, and some “strange beasts.” After a week, they “thought best to winter there.” The “year [was] far spent” and they feared the onset of “evil weather.”¹⁷

While Willoughby hunkered down for the winter, Chancellor, having survived the storm, sailed the Edward Bonaventure on a smooth course to the Wardhouse. He waited there for seven days, keeping watch for any sign of Willoughby’s two ships. When none came, he had to make a decision. This time, he could not turn to Cabot’s instructions. As Cabot had rightly noted in one of his ordinances, “Of things uncertain, no certain rules may or can be given.”¹⁸

Chancellor decided to follow Cabot’s more general exhortation—to “not give up” and “to bring that to pass which was intended.” As his sponsor, Sir Henry Sidney, had noted, Chancellor was a supremely brave sailor. Unlike the merchant-investors who stayed at “home quietly with our friends,” he had chosen to “hazard his life amongst the monstrous and terrible beasts of the sea,” declaring that if he did not succeed, he would “die the death.” Sailing on, he “held on his course toward that unknown part of the world, and sailed so far that he came at last to the place where he found no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the Sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty Sea.”¹⁹

The constant daylight of the Arctic proved a navigational boon. Even with precise charts and reasonable knowledge of the waters, neither of which Chancellor had, sailing at night is a precarious undertaking. There were no buoys or channel markers, no lights ashore to indicate where a landmass might be. But at last, while Willoughby was still languishing in the North Sea, Chancellor was able to bring his ship into a great bay, perhaps a hundred miles across, with the help of the midnight sun.²⁰

Chancellor did not know where he was, but he anchored the Edward Bonaventure and soon saw a fishing boat in the distance. With a few of his men, he approached the fishermen, but they hastened away, “amazed with the strange greatness” of the English ship. Sometime later, and mindful of Cabot’s instructions to deal courteously with local people, he managed to tempt them back, inviting them on board his ship. He learned that the “country was called Russia, or Moscovie, and that Ivan Vasilivich of Russia (which was at that time their King’s name) ruled and governed far and wide in those places.”

The “Russes,” in return, asked Chancellor and his men “whence they were, and what they came for.” They replied that they were Englishmen “sent into those coasts, from the most excellent King Edward the sixth.” They assured the fishermen that they sought nothing from Ivan but “traffic,” meaning trade, with his people. If such trade could begin, they said, then “they doubted not but that great commodity and profit would grow to the subjects of both kingdoms.”²¹

Chancellor—having demonstrated his worth as a pilot—now displayed his skills as a diplomat and negotiator. The Russians told him they could not trade without permission from the tsar, Ivan Vasilyevich. To get instructions from him, they sent a letter by a “sledman” messenger to Moscow and, while waiting for a reply, hemmed and hawed about what they could or could not supply to Chancellor’s party. At last, Chancellor, growing impatient, threatened to depart and ditch plans to travel to Moscow. This alarmed the Russians, who had seen some of Chancellor’s “wares and commodities as they greatly desired.” So, without waiting for word from the tsar, they decided to organize a team of sledmen to transport the Englishmen to Moscow—a journey of some fifteen hundred miles across icy, snow-bound land. En route, they met the sledman messenger coming toward them with a letter of welcome from Ivan written in the “most loving manner.” When Chancellor finally arrived in Moscow, he was impressed by what he found: a city “that in bignesse” was “as great as the City of London” with many large buildings, although none as beautiful as those in London.

The emperor, Tsar Ivan IV (who would only later earn the sobriquet “The Terrible”), kept the English party waiting for twelve days before granting them an audience. At last, they were escorted to his residence and through the gates of the court, where they found a hundred courtiers “all appareled in cloth of gold.” Then they went into the “chamber of presence” where the tsar sat “aloft, in a very royal throne,” wearing a golden crown and robe and holding a “scepter garnished and beset with precious stones.” Ivan was attended by his chief secretary and 150 counselors. This display so amazed the English travelers that they might have been thrown “out of countenance,” but Chancellor remained calm, presented the letter from Edward VI, and engaged in conversation with the tsar, answering his many questions with few words. Apparently satisfied with their comments, the tsar invited the Englishmen to dinner with him that evening. It proved to be another stunning scene, with gold service and gold tablecloths, and 140 servants, also dressed in gold, seeing to the needs of a hundred guests. After dinner, the tsar impressed the Englishmen by greeting each of his guests by name and conversing with them.²²

The reception of the English by the tsar was truly a momentous event. Not since the days of King Harold II—who was vanquished by William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066—had there been official contact between England and Russia. Back then, Harold’s daughter had been married off to the Grand Prince of Kiev.²³ But Chancellor had arrived in Muscovy at an opportune moment of change. The Russians were expanding their empire by opening the trade route along the Volga River—which flowed from Moscow to the Caspian Sea—and tapping into the riches of Persia and the Silk Road to China. It had been thirty years since an ambassador from western Europe, representing the Habsburgs, had been seen at the Russian court. Now Ivan was looking for new trading partners. Chancellor’s unexpected arrival provided him with an opportunity to reestablish relations with the governments and traders of western Europe—and he seized it.²⁴

After several weeks in Moscow, Chancellor was granted what he had come for: a trade agreement from the tsar for King Edward. A letter granted permission to the English merchants to “have their free mart with all free liberties through my whole dominions with all kinds of wares to come and go at their pleasure, without any let, damage or impediment.” The tsar, in presenting Chancellor with these commercial rights, had opened the door to what the English hoped could be a significant new market for cloth and other products.²⁵

Satisfied with this success, Chancellor decided to return to England, even though he had not achieved the overarching goal of the expedition—to find the passage to Cathay. But perhaps Willoughby had somehow navigated his way through the ice floes and was even now trading with the Great Khan.

BY THE TIME Chancellor guided the Edward Bonaventure back along the Thames—about a year after setting off from Ratcliffe—the situation in England had changed. The letter that Chancellor carried from the tsar was addressed to Edward VI, but the young king had been dead for nearly a year, having taken his last breath in the arms of Henry Sidney, not long after the Mysterie ships departed Greenwich.

Also dead was John Dudley, the man who had brought Sebastian Cabot to England. He had been executed for his role in a succession plot to put Lady Jane Grey, his teenaged daughter-in-law, on the throne after Edward’s death. For nine days, Lady Jane had reigned as queen, and Dudley hoped she would buttress the cause of Protestantism and bolster his own power. But Mary Tudor, the thirty-seven-year-old Catholic daughter of Henry VIII, seized the throne with an armed force, compelled Dudley to surrender, and condemned him to death.

Many of the merchants who had founded the Mysterie had sided with Dudley, signing the so-called “device” that transferred the throne to Lady Jane Grey. They included Sir George Barne, who was mayor at the time, William Garrard, Sir Andrew Judde, Sir John Gresham, and twelve other Staplers and Merchant Adventurers.²⁶ But their support for Dudley melted away as Mary exerted her royal authority and they became her willing supporters. Yet these were perilous times, and the merchants had to tread carefully. In January 1554, Mary faced a Protestant rebellion, when a Kentish landowner, Sir Thomas Wyatt, led a force of three thousand to London in a bid to secure the throne for Elizabeth, Mary’s younger half-sister. This was effectively quashed. Then, six months later, Mary married Philip, ten years her junior and, as Charles V’s son, heir to the Spanish throne. This horrified English Protestants who feared persecution by the Catholic monarch and alarmed English merchants who worried that their trade monopolies might be overturned by the Spanish at court.

These complications thrust the merchants of the Mysterie into an awkward situation. If they were going to capitalize on their investment in Chancellor’s voyage, they realized that they needed a royal charter, or an Act of Parliament, to formally establish a company to pursue the privileges of the Muscovy trade monopoly. Letters patent had been duly prepared in 1553, before the ships had departed, but Edward had not signed the document—possibly because he was too ill, possibly because Dudley was too distracted by the succession plot to follow through on the paperwork.²⁷

Now the Mysterie organizers had to petition Mary and Philip in order to finalize the charter. It was far from certain that the monarchs would agree to a new charter, given Philip’s likely interest in defending the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas. But, in a sign that Spain was not particularly interested in northern territories, Mary and Philip gave their assent. Accordingly, on February 26, 1555, a charter was granted for a new company: the Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown. By dropping the word “mysterie,” which harked back to the days of the medieval guilds, the merchants could present themselves as a forward-looking commercial enterprise. Also, by commissioning a seal featuring a ship whose prow pointed to the east—very definitely not to the west—they could make it abundantly clear that they did not seek to challenge Spain.

The Company of Merchant Adventurers (not to be confused with the Merchant Adventurers that still held the exclusive rights for cloth exports to Antwerp) was given a monopoly of trade with Muscovy and with all lands “northwards, north-eastwards or northwestwards”—a vast expanse of the world. The monopoly meant that only members of the company could trade in the designated regions. Any interlopers—people who dared to enter those regions without the company’s “licence, agreement, and consent”—would risk the forfeiture of their ships and goods.²⁸

On a daily basis, the company, empowered as “one body and perpetual fellowship,” was to be administered by one or two governors, four “consuls” or deputy governors, and twenty-four “assistants” or directors. Sebastian Cabot was granted the honorary title of governor-for-life, and he continued to serve as a kind of father figure to the emerging generation of overseas venturers until his death in 1557.

Investors flocked to buy shares. In all, 201 people invested in the new company—199 men and two women, widows who probably inherited their stake from their merchant husbands.²⁹ The merchants were dominant, and they included not only the principal doers—Sir George Barne and William Garrard—but also Sir Andrew Judde and his son-in-law, Thomas Smythe; Thomas Gresham and his uncle, Sir John; Lionel Duckett, Gresham’s business partner, and Thomas Lok, a Gresham family associate; and Sir John Yorke, who had helped conduct the revaluation of the coinage just a few years earlier.

Among the noblemen on the list of investors were Henry FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel, who was lord steward of the royal household; John Russell, Earl of Bedford, who was lord keeper of the privy seal; William Howard, baron Howard of Effingham, who was lord high admiral; and William Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, who was lord high treasurer. Henry Sidney and William Cecil were also investors. Although they had been close to John Dudley and supported Lady Jane Grey’s succession, they had saved themselves and their positions through political cunning. Sidney won Philip’s affection to such a degree that the future Spanish king agreed to become godfather to his son, who was dutifully named Philip. Cecil had chosen to stay in England and try to win favor, rather than follow many other committed Protestants and flee the country. He even took Spanish lessons.³⁰

With the charter in hand, the Company of Merchant Adventurers began preparations for the next venture—a return visit to Muscovy. In Willoughby’s absence, Richard Chancellor, who had proved himself as navigator, captain, merchant, and diplomat, was named pilot general of the fleet.³¹ Queen Mary and King Philip supplied a letter—in Greek, Polish, and Italian versions—to the tsar.³² Richard Eden prepared another dossier, with information translated from a variety of sources, including Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New World, the first history of Spain and Portugal’s exploits in the New World. Eden’s was a seminal work, introducing several words into the English language, including “China”—although “Cathay” continued to be the preferred word for several years.³³ For the merchants’ benefit, it featured a section on the duchy of Muscovy, although some of this information was unreliable and even fanciful. One story tells of a Muscovite who fell into an eight-foot pool of honey and rescued himself by grabbing hold of the loins of a passing bear.³⁴

The Company of Merchant Adventurers, by now often known more simply as the Muscovy or Russia Company, prepared a new set of articles of instructions.³⁵ Hoping to develop a long-term, sustainable commercial enterprise in Russia, the company sent a number of young merchants to serve as “Agents, Factors and Attorneys general.” These commercial representatives were invested with substantial authority to operate on the company’s behalf. In particular, they were to establish factories—that is, offices and warehouses where the factors and agents would operate, not facilities for the manufacture of goods.

If the company focused on new business in Russia, it was careful to remind Richard Chancellor that the goal of finding a northern route to the East was not to be abandoned. He and his men were to confer with any “learned or well travailed persons” they might encounter to determine if there really was a passage from Russia to Cathay, either overland or by sea. Neither should Willoughby be forgotten. If Chancellor and his crew gained any credible information of the whereabouts of Willoughby and his crew, they were to go there and “refresh and relieve” their compatriots.

The final instruction (number twenty-three) echoed and elaborated on one of Cabot’s original ordinances: “It is not possible to write and indict such prescribed orders, rules and commissions” for all situations because conditions “change or shift.” The company, therefore, put its faith in its people, trusting them to work on its behalf, taking whatever actions and decisions they deemed to be “good and beneficial.” They were not only to keep the “honor, good name, fame, credit and estimation” of the company but also to consider the “public benefit of this realm” of England.³⁶

IN MAY 1555, Chancellor set sail once more, this time with two ships, the Edward Bonaventure and a newly constructed vessel, the Philip and Mary. The ships arrived safely at Wardhouse, and there the Philip and Mary ended the outbound leg of its journey, as intended. Its goods were exchanged and some merchants were dropped off to take up residence in the growing port, with the goal of establishing a commercial presence for the trading of English cloth for fish, fur, timber, and other goods.³⁷ Chancellor’s ship, the Edward Bonaventure, continued east through the White Sea and then south to the mouth of the Dvina River, where the crew set up a warehouse on a small island across from a monastery of St. Nicholas.³⁸ They named it Rose Island, a place fragrant with “roses damaske and red, of violets and wild rosemarie,” as a later visitor described it.³⁹

Not long after arriving there, Chancellor received—it is not clear exactly when or how—some disturbing news: Willoughby’s ships had been discovered by Russian fishermen at a location they had certainly passed on their voyage. The vessels lay at the mouth of a river the Russians knew as the Arzina, probably today’s Varzina River, which flows through the Kola Peninsula of northwestern Russia and empties into the Barents Sea some two hundred miles east of the Wardhouse. All the men had perished.⁴⁰

The news of Willoughby’s fate reached England, possibly from the crew members of the Edward Bonaventure, which had also briefly returned home in the fall of 1555.⁴¹ Before long, word spread throughout Europe. Giovanni Michiel, the Venetian ambassador to England, supplied some gruesome details, reporting that the English mariners told strange stories about the “mode” in which Willoughby’s crew had been discovered. They had, it seems, been frozen alive. Some were “seated in the act of writing, pen still in hand and the paper before them; others at table, platters in hand and spoon in mouth; others opening a locker, and others in various postures, like statues, as if they had been adjusted and placed in those attitudes.” Dogs, too, were found frozen, rock solid.⁴² When Chancellor learned the tragic news, he sent one of his men to inspect the ships, confirm the findings, and retrieve the valuable merchandise and Willoughby’s precious logbook.^*

The story of this first English business foray into Russia was told by George Killingworth, who was one of the factors named in the royal charter. From Rose Island, Chancellor, Killingworth, and the rest of the English commercial party were soon exposed to the realities of doing business in an environment very different from one they knew in western Europe. To begin with, it was not like Antwerp, a trading city with a commercial infrastructure that enabled an expeditious exchange of goods to and from ships and waterfront warehouses. Their goods had to be off-loaded from the English ships and onto local barges for transport—sailing when there was wind, towed when there wasn’t—to the upriver trading centers, the first of which was Colmogro, now Kholmogori, a journey of some seventy miles. This was a busy commercial outpost, with wooden houses and plenty of drinking, where Russians, Tatars, and other regional merchants came to trade in such commodities as fish and fur. From there, the English party traveled another seven hundred miles farther upriver on to Vologda, a major trading town in western Russia that they reached in mid-September.⁴³

At Vologda, Killingworth and his fellow merchants did what salesmen have always done in trade fairs and marketplaces—they “laid their wares” out for all to see. One local Muscovite made an offer to buy all of Killingworth’s supply of broadcloths at twelve rubles each. But the Englishman was reluctant to jump at the first deal, not least because he had no basis for evaluating the bid. What was a ruble worth in exchange for an English pound? What—and how much—would other merchants be willing to trade for the prized English cloth? Sebastian Cabot had supplied no ordinance to cover pricing and sales techniques. As a result, Killingworth and his fellow merchants chose to bide their time and “sold very little” in this first sales session.⁴⁴

Foreigners were not unknown in the trading cities of Russia.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, Killingworth struck a particularly memorable figure. As Henry Lane, his friend and fellow factor reported, Killingworth sported a thick, “yellow-colored” beard, “in length five foot and two inches.”⁴⁶

Eventually, the Englishmen realized that if they were to establish themselves as traders in Muscovy, they would have to develop a regular presence in the capital city of Moscow, the seat of government, which lay another 550 miles inland from Vologda. Accordingly, Chancellor, Killingworth, and three others left their associates—notably Richard Judde, Sir Andrew’s son—and set off on the journey to Moscow with commodities for sale and a gift of sugar for the tsar. The snow soon became so deep that they had to turn back, abandon their carts, leave behind the sugar, and take to horseback. Continuing on, they passed through market towns along the route to Moscow and got a sense of the products available for trade: plenty of furs—including sable, mink, beaver, and fox—and a variety of other valuable commodities, such as salmon, seal oil, sea salt, feathers, flax, tallow, and hemp.⁴⁷

Chancellor’s delegation reached Moscow in early October 1555. Once again, the English were cordially received: the tsar ensured that they were housed near the Kremlin and took the time to dine with them.⁴⁸ When Killingworth stepped forward to drink a toast, his five-foot beard fell across the tsar’s table. Intrigued, Ivan took the beard in his hand and displayed it to the man sitting with him—Macarius, the Metropolitan of Moscow, the leading figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, considered to be “God’s spiritual officer.”⁴⁹ Macarius, who himself possessed a fine beard, proclaimed that Killingworth’s was “God’s gift.”⁵⁰

During their time in Moscow, the English merchants negotiated trading terms with imperial officials and eventually hammered out a trade agreement. They also came to understand that the capital city, while important for nurturing high-level political relationships, was not a commercial center. Prices were high and few goods were available for trade. So Chancellor and Killingworth determined that Colmogro would be the best place to set up the first English factory. There, goods were plentiful, prices were lower, and Moscow was still within reach.

In July 1556, Chancellor set sail for England, leaving Killingworth to nurture this embryonic Muscovy trade. His ships, the Philip and Mary, which had returned to Russia once again, and the Edward Bonaventure, were laden with a rich supply of valuable commodities—including wax and tallow, furs and felt—that were reckoned to be worth some £20,000.⁵¹ Also, they carried a special Russian guest: Osep Napea, the first Russian ambassador to England, who bore gifts of sable to present to the English monarchs.

The expedition that had begun with so much promise ended in disaster. On the way home, Chancellor picked up the two long-lost Willoughby ships—the Bona Esperanza and Bona Confidentia. These, however, were soon shipwrecked in treacherous seas. Then, as Chancellor approached home, he suffered a final blow. Putting into Pitsligo Bay, near Aberdeen on the northeast coast of Scotland, the Edward Bonaventure was beset by “outrageous tempests, and extreme storms.” The flagship was ripped from her moorings and driven onto the rocks “where she broke and split in pieces.”⁵² In a final act of bravery, Chancellor saved the Ambassador Napea from the roiling waters, but sacrificed his own life in the rescue. One of his sons perished, too. The Edward Bonaventure was wrecked and all the goods lost—most of them not to the sea but to plunder “by the rude and ravenous people of the Country.” Virtually everything of value—including Chancellor’s notes, records, and accounts—was “rifled, spoiled and carried away.”⁵³

Chancellor had been, as Clement Adams put it, the “great hope” for the company, and he had accomplished much of what they had asked of him—even if he had not found the passage to Cathay. But he lost everything in doing so. Great reward, it seemed, could not be attained without great risk, and success seemed often to arrive riddled with failure.

For the merchants, however, the shipwreck, though unquestionably a setback, was one from which they could recover. The good news was that Osep Napea was alive, and they dispatched some Muscovy Company officials, including the translator Robert Best, to escort him to London. There the Russian ambassador was feted by the merchants, who dressed up for the occasion, “riding in velvet coats and chains of gold.”⁵⁴ They paid all his costs during his stay in England.

Yet, even for the merchants, there was some sadness amid the joy. Muscovy may have come closer to home, but Cathay and the East remained strangely, frustratingly, beyond reach.