6

THE LAST GREAT CHALLENGE OF THE AGE

IN DECEMBER 1574, with Calais a fond memory and Ireland a fading hope, a rough-hewn seaman from the north of England named Martin Frobisher paid a visit to Muscovy House, which served as the company’s headquarters on Seething Lane in the London parish of All Hallows Barking. A “fair and large” building, it stood near the Tower of London and close by the Old Wool Quay, the wharf where England’s greatest medieval export had traditionally been loaded onto ships for export to foreign lands.¹

The purpose of Frobisher’s visit was to hand-deliver an important letter from the Privy Council. In it, the royal advisers called on the governors of the Muscovy Company to mount an expedition for “the discovery of the country of Cathay by sea.” This, they said, “would be to England a matter of great commodity”—that is, of great advantage or benefit. If, however, they chose not to mount such a venture, the privy councillors requested that the Muscovy Company grant their license to others who were “desirous now to attempt the same”—namely the deliverer of the letter, Martin Frobisher.²

Of course, this was not the first time that an advocate of the Northwest Passage to Cathay had sought support from the Privy Council and rights from the Muscovy Company. Nearly ten years earlier, Humphrey Gilbert had sought approval for essentially the same westward voyage, but the leaders of the Muscovy Company had quashed his proposal because they wished to protect their commercial rights to the territory.

Frobisher, however, enjoyed the full support of the Privy Council. So even though the Muscovy Company held the monopoly to trade in the north, secured by both a royal charter and an Act of Parliament, they could not so easily brush him aside. His letter delivered, the court, or ruling body, of the company—which comprised two governors, four “consuls,” and twenty-four assistants—met to consider his proposal. After their review, they requested a further meeting with Frobisher so that “they might determine what were mete to be done.”³

Frobisher duly made his way once again to the great house on Seething Lane. There he met with the members of a subcommittee composed of four men who possessed vast experience of financing, organizing, and leading pioneering overseas voyages: George Barne, William Towerson, Stephen Borough, and Michael Lok.⁴ Barne was the son of the late Sir George, who had been one of the Mysterie’s principal doers. A leading member of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, he was a hugely influential figure in London’s merchant community and would follow in his father’s footsteps as Lord Mayor of London. His marriage to Anne, the daughter of Sir William Garrard, another of the principal doers, had united two great mercantile dynasties.⁵ His brother-in-law was Sir Francis Walsingham, one of the leading privy councillors, which further enhanced his standing and influence.^*

William Towerson, like Barne, was a merchant—a leading member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners. But unlike Barne and most London merchants, he had practical experience of the open ocean. Not only had he financed three expeditions to Africa’s Gold Coast in the 1550s, he had led them, too. His first, in 1555, was his most successful: he traded cloth and other commodities, returning to England with about fifty ivory tusks and 127 pounds of gold. Also, Towerson had the distinction of being one of the first English travel writers, carefully documenting what he saw during his voyages. He liked to jot down key words spoken by local people. “I learned some of their language,” he wrote, in a lengthy report on his first voyage to Guinea, on the Gold Coast: “Dasse, Dassee,” for example, meant “I thank you”; “foco, foco” was “cloth”; and, most important, “sheke” was the word for “gold.”⁶ But in 1557, after his third voyage, Towerson gave up life on the high seas and settled down, trading on his own account and importing furs—the stock in trade of Skinners—as well as silk tapestries, feathers, and carpets from the Low Countries.⁷

The third member of the subcommittee was Stephen Borough. He had been one of the youngest founding members of the Mysterie—in his twenties at the time. Now, at fifty, he was arguably the Muscovy Company’s most knowledgeable mariner. He had served on the first of the Cabot-inspired ventures—the training voyage of the Aucher to the Levant in 1550—and he had been master on Richard Chancellor’s ship, the Edward Bonaventure, on the 1553 voyage to Cathay. Then, in 1556, he made another attempt to navigate the Northeast Passage, and although he was forced to turn back, he nevertheless sailed well beyond the White Sea—the farthest east that any English voyager had traveled at that time.⁸

And, finally, there was Michael Lok.

Lok, forty-three years old, sprang from a long and distinguished line of London merchants—members of the Worshipful Company of Mercers. In the fifteenth century, his great-grandfather had been Sheriff of London, the Lord Mayor’s deputy who was responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing the law. Lok’s father, who also became Sheriff and was one of the Gresham family’s business associates, served as Henry VIII’s personal mercer and “agent beyond the seas,” supplying the court revels with jewels, silk, and other mercery ware. In the mid-1530s, when Elizabeth was still a toddler-princess, he was commissioned to acquire velvet and satin cloth for her dresses.⁹

As was typical of young men of his position, Lok attended grammar school until he was thirteen years old. But his life then took a dramatically different turn. He was sent to the Low Countries and France so that he could, as he later recalled, “learn those languages” and “know the world.”¹⁰ He spent fifteen years travelling, “passing through almost all the countries of Christianity.” During this time, he captained “a great ship” of a thousand tons—larger than anything in Elizabeth’s fleet at the time—sailing her to the shores of the Levantine countries that lay at the western end of the Silk Road.¹¹ He endeavored to learn about “all matters appertaining to the traffique of merchants” in the “commonwealths” that he visited on his travels.¹² This experience abroad gave Lok an apprenticeship in international affairs—very different from the practice increasingly favored by some of the great merchants, who sent their children to Oxford or Cambridge and then expected them to attend one of the Inns of Court in London.

Lok’s extended sojourn outside England during the 1550s was almost certainly due to his religion. He was a staunch Protestant—his sister-in-law was a close associate of John Knox, the Scottish cleric and one of the leading Protestants of his day. For this reason, he had little desire to be in England during the reign of “Bloody” Mary, who earned her sobriquet after authorizing the burning of nearly three hundred Protestants as heretics. With Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, Lok returned to England and resumed his activities as a mercer, following in the footsteps of his brothers, who had remained in England and built up a business as overseas merchants. Thomas Lok, the eldest, who inherited their father’s estate in 1550, had been a founding member of the Muscovy Company.¹³ He was also a co-investor, along with Sir George Barne and Sir John Yorke, in an expedition to Africa’s Gold Coast that was captained by John Lok, another of the brothers.¹⁴ In 1571, Michael became the London agent of the Muscovy Company—in effect, the general manager, with responsibility for arranging the exchange of goods between Russia and England.¹⁵ As he put it, he had “the chief charge” of the company’s business.¹⁶

Despite the considerable experience and knowledge possessed by these four men—Barne, Towerson, Borough, and Lok—Frobisher had no reason to be overawed by them. He, too, was vastly experienced and was, almost certainly, well-known to them all. Born in Altofts, a village near Wakefield in Yorkshire, in 1535 or 1536, he was sent to London to be raised in the household of his uncle, Sir John Yorke, when he was thirteen or fourteen years old.¹⁷ The move, which took place after the death of his mother, was prompted by the “lack of good schools” near his childhood home.¹⁸ But for any young, aspiring merchant, the move to Sir John’s household was a remarkable opportunity. As Sheriff of London and a senior official in the royal mint, Yorke was well-connected with the great courtiers—he was a personal friend of John Dudley—and the leading merchants.¹⁹

Yorke soon realized that his burly nephew was, as one contemporary noted, a lad “of great spirit and bold courage, and natural hardness of body,” better suited to a life of adventure than to a mercantile career.²⁰ In 1553 he arranged for the young Frobisher, still a teenager, to join the expedition to Africa’s Gold Coast that he was cosponsoring with several investors in the Mysterie—including Sir George Barne, the elder.

Yorke’s assessment of his nephew was spot-on. Frobisher survived his first voyage to Guinea, even though most of the crew—including the captain—perished in the African sun. The following year he joined a return trip led by John Lok. Soon after reaching the Gold Coast, Captain Lok sought to strike a commercial deal, but the local African king demanded a pledge of good faith from the English before trading could begin: namely, a member of the ship’s crew would be required to stay in their village, as security against shady dealing. Frobisher, not yet twenty, volunteered and was duly delivered into the custody of the chief. It was not long, however, before things went awry. The African traders fired off some ordnance and the English, assuming trouble was at hand, hastened away. Lok left Frobisher behind, seemingly without so much as a backward glance, for he did not return or make any effort to rescue his young charge.

The Africans eventually handed Frobisher over to the Portuguese, who transported him to the formidable fortress of São Jorge da Mina, Portugal’s commercial outpost in West Africa. There, according to Frobisher’s later testimony, he was imprisoned for nine months, although he soon proved useful to his captors. He was routinely dispatched into the forests to barter for “goats, poultry, and other victuals” with local African tribesmen, because the Portuguese “durst not, for peril of their lives, do that.”²¹ Frobisher survived that experience, and the Portuguese eventually sent him back to England, after a brief incarceration in a Lisbon jail.

Over the next twenty years, Frobisher continued—with great gusto—on the path his uncle had determined for him. He took part in countless voyages, even committing acts of piracy for which he spent more time in jail.²² No imprisonment lasted long, however, and he seems to have earned the endorsement of a number of England’s most influential figures, including William Cecil. As Michael Lok noted, Frobisher had “the good liking” not only of Cecil but also “others of her Majesty’s honorable Privy Council.”²³ Almost certainly, this approval was associated with his work as a government spy and privateer—a kind of licensed pirate. In a classic case of poacher-turned-gamekeeper, he was hired to seek out pirates and smugglers of prohibited goods in the English Channel.

But it was during the days Frobisher spent in the jail in Lisbon that he first dreamed of reaching Cathay via the Northwest Passage. Apparently, one of his fellow prisoners, a Portuguese sailor, revealed that he had “passed” through the icy seaway and shared with Frobisher the secrets of the route.²⁴ For the next few years, as he later told one of his officers, he discussed the idea with “his private friends” and he had made “many offers” to “sundry merchants of our country” to make the northwest attempt.²⁵ Despite his persistence, however, Frobisher failed to spark much interest among London’s business elite. As a result, as George Best, the son of the Muscovy Company’s translator and the official chronicler of the voyages, noted, Frobisher grew weary of merchants, who demanded “sure, certain, and present gains.” They were careful and conservative, willing to take a risk—but not recklessly so. Given the failure of the attempts to reach Cathay by the northeast route, this is not surprising.

Frobisher did not give up, however. Navigating the Northwest Passage was seen—especially for the English—as the last great challenge of the age. Frobisher understood it as “the only thing of the world that was left yet undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate.” So, in late 1574, tired of being spurned by merchants, he at last turned “to the court (from whence, as from the foundation of our commonwealth, all good causes have their chief increase and maintenance).” There, he “laid open to many great estates and learned men, the plot and sum of his devise.”

He could not have picked a better time to make his pitch. There was growing alarm at the scale of the Iberian trade with China. This commercial activity had grown significantly since 1565, when the Spanish established a base in the Philippines, named for Philip II. Now, they were regularly transporting silver across the Pacific from mines in South America and trading the precious metal for silks, spices, and other luxury goods from Chinese merchants.

Yet the privy councillors, respectful of Elizabeth’s wishes, had no desire to undermine England’s political or mercantile relations with the Spanish. Only a few months before Frobisher presented his proposal, they had rejected a petition by a group led by Sir Richard Grenville, which they believed might have caused just such a diplomatic rift with Spain. Grenville, supported by his cousin Sir Humphrey Gilbert, proposed to sail into Spanish waters and through the southwest passage—the Magellan Straits—to the Spice Islands, which would have certainly riled Spain. Frobisher’s route through the Northwest Passage was less likely to raise objections from either the Spanish or the Portuguese, since neither had shown much commercial interest in northern lands or northern routes to the East. This evidently appealed to Cecil and his fellow councillors, and so they had dispatched Frobisher to the grand mansion on Seething Lane to seek the formal approval of the Muscovy Company.

The Muscovy Company’s committee did not share the Privy Council’s enthusiasm for Frobisher’s project. As one of the members reported, they heard “no good evidence” for a Northwest Passage. And given that “they themselves with their very great charges already had discovered more than half the way to Cathay by the north-eastward”—a reference to overland explorations of Persia made by their associate, Anthony Jenkinson, in the late 1550s and early 1560s—and given that they “purposed to do the rest so soon as they might have good advice,” they rejected Frobisher’s petition.²⁶

Sir Rowland Heyward, one of the two governors of the Muscovy Company, was charged with relaying the news to Cecil. Eight years earlier, he had been one of the merchants who informed Cecil that the company would not approve Gilbert’s petition to seek the Northwest Passage. In that instance, the privy councillors had chosen not to take a confrontational approach and contest the company’s decisions. This time, however, they refused to accept the verdict of the recalcitrant merchants. They issued an ultimatum, demanding that the Muscovy Company do one of two things: either they should press ahead with their own mission or permit someone else to make the attempt. Under intense political pressure, the Muscovy Company had little choice but to back down. In early February 1575, as a result of “diverse considerations,” they granted Frobisher a license to pursue his venture.²⁷

What were these “diverse considerations”? Frobisher later credited the influence of Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, and a member of the Privy Council since 1573, who had always been interested in developing new markets.²⁸ Dudley’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Anne, the Countess of Warwick, may also have put in a good word for Frobisher. As one of Elizabeth’s favorite ladies-in-waiting, whom one contemporary characterized as “more beloved and in greater favour with the Queen than any other woman in the kingdom,” she was a trusted conduit to Elizabeth for those with petitions and requests for royal patronage.²⁹ Richard Willes, an Oxford geographer, would later dedicate a section about the Northwest Passage in his book History of Travayle to the countess.³⁰

Another influence on the Muscovy Company was Michael Lok. He had initially rejected Frobisher’s proposal, but after reflecting on his “duty towards my country” and “the great benefit” that might arise from an English northwest trade route, he changed his mind. He “did so entirely join with” Frobisher that he proceeded to persuade other Muscovy merchants to think again. “Through my friendship with the company,” Lok wrote, “I obtained of them a privilege and license” for Frobisher to make his attempt.³¹

What changed Lok’s mind? The most obvious factor, he admitted, was “the great hope” of finding that the “English seas open into the seas of East India.” Also, he realized that, even if ships did not reach China, they might encounter “new found lands” along the way that could be “full of people and full of such commodities and merchandise,” just as Richard Chancellor had found in Muscovy.³² Finally, Lok had faith in Frobisher. He had enjoyed a “former acquaintance with him” and knew of his “courage,” a very necessary trait for making an attempt on the Northwest Passage.³³

Lok’s change of heart had opened a fissure at the top of the Muscovy Company. One governor, Rowland Heyward, remained skeptical of the arguments for a Northwest Passage, but the other governor, Lionel Duckett, was more receptive to different perspectives. Sir Thomas Gresham’s business partner, and a long-standing investor in maritime ventures, Duckett became one of the first merchants to support the Frobisher venture, with a twenty-five-pound pledge.

In all, some eighteen people put money into the venture, including Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir William Burde, William Bonde, and Thomas Randolph, a former ambassador to Muscovy.³⁴ Also, Anthony Jenkinson, who had long been an advocate for the northeast route to Cathay, contributed twenty-five-pounds. Among the privy councillors who invested funds were the Dudley brothers: Ambrose, who contributed fifty pounds, and Robert, Earl of Leicester. Two of the privy councillors who invested were also members of the company: William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, who clearly disagreed with the negative opinion of the venture held by his brother-in-law, George Barne.

Lok, as the leading advocate for the Frobisher venture, became its chief organizer. The plan was to dispatch the expedition in the spring of 1575. As the English had learned through years of experience in sailing to Russia, it was unwise to depart on a northerly voyage any later than June. Unfortunately, Lok missed the window “for lack of sufficient money,” and the voyage was postponed until the following year.³⁵

THROUGHOUT THE REST of that year, 1575, and in the first few months of 1576, Lok and his business associates gathered at Crosby Hall, a palatial residence in the northeast part of the City owned by William Bonde, one of the eighteen initial investors in the venture. Bonde, an original Mysterie member, was among the most influential London merchants, having built a trading empire in Spain, the Baltic, and the Low Countries.³⁶

Crosby Hall stood near Bishopsgate, one of the stone-arched entrances in the Roman wall that still surrounded the city. Originally built in the 1460s by Sir John Crosby, a wool merchant and mayor of London, the grand structure towered over neighboring mansions and the parish church, St. Helen’s. According to John Stow, it was a “very large and beautiful” mansion, the grandest and “the highest at that time,” constructed with sturdy oak and the same fine-grained sandstone used for Westminster Abbey, where English monarchs were crowned.³⁷ It was, quite literally, fit for a king. Indeed, after Crosby’s death, Richard Plantagenet, who would become King Richard III, took up residence there. In 1523, a few years after publishing Utopia, Thomas More acquired the place. By the time Lok and his fellow investors met there, Bonde had enhanced the grandeur of the house by adding a mighty fortress-style turret.³⁸

In those months, Lok, Bonde, Gresham, and William Burde, one of the royal tax collectors in the city, regularly met there to plan the voyage. Their first priority was to attract more investment. The four had committed £400—nearly half the sum pledged by the eighteen investors. But the total, £875, was a paltry amount compared to the £6,000 raised for the Mysterie’s voyage to Cathay. It is likely that they spent time speaking with prospective investors at the Royal Exchange, the magnificent bourse built by Gresham and opened four years earlier by Elizabeth I. Here, among the colonnades, merchants could go about their business and, if they so pleased, purchase goods from the luxury boutiques that adorned the upper floor and looked down over the courtyard.³⁹

Cecil, Elizabeth’s closest adviser and the prime mover behind the Privy Council’s support for the venture, kept a watchful eye on the preparations and insisted that “a convenient person” be put in charge. The chief investors carefully considered “who should take charge of the money,” who should take care of the “provision and furniture of the ships” and who should be entrusted “with the ships at sea.”⁴⁰ After some discussion, Edmund Hogan, one of Lok’s nephews, was charged with collecting subscriptions from new investors, beyond the original eighteen. He was a trusted businessman, recognized, at about this time, as one of “the wisest and best merchants in London.”⁴¹ In the 1540s, he had served in the household of Thomas Gresham, after whom he named his son, and he rose through the ranks of the Mercers, serving on its governing body in 1570.

But Hogan, despite his talents, struggled to attract further investors. Throughout 1575, as Lok observed, he “took pains” and “received such money as he could get,” but it was not enough. Lok came to the conclusion that the problem was not Hogan, but, surprisingly, Martin Frobisher himself. As Lok later recalled, the major stumbling block was who should “take charge” of the expedition. Frobisher may have proposed the idea and he may have attracted the support of the privy councillors—and through them Elizabeth herself—but there was the sensitive matter of his checkered career. As a result, he was thought to have “very little credit” in England, and this, Lok believed, was why Hogan had been unable to raise enough money to sail in 1575 and why most of the potential investors continued to hold back. The venture was risky enough; they did not want to have to worry about its leadership.

Lok could not remove Frobisher from the expedition. He could, however, reassure the investors by bringing in new talent. So he enlisted William Borough, younger brother of Stephen, to recruit some reliable seamen for the voyage. This Borough did effectively, although he did not have sufficient belief in the venture to invest his own money. On Borough’s recommendation, Lok hired Christopher Hall as master and Nicholas Chancellor, the surviving son of Richard Chancellor, as “merchant & purser.” Then Lok, perhaps following the by now standard practice of the Muscovy Company, made a canny move. He drew up instructions specifying that Frobisher “should not command nor carry the ships” without the consent of the other senior officers, who were known to be “trusty men.” As Lok recalled, “This did satisfy most of the venturers.”⁴²

But even if the expedition to Cathay was to be a modest expedition in scale, Lok and his associates were determined to take care in its preparation. They were fortunate that they could draw on a great deal of expertise. London was then on the cusp of becoming one of Europe’s preeminent centers of science, a veritable “jewel house,” with expert practitioners in a range of disciplines, including astronomy, natural history, mathematics, medicine, and shipbuilding.⁴³ To construct the flagship, Lok commissioned none other than Matthew Baker, the queen’s own shipwright, who worked from the new royal docks at Chatham on the Medway, a tributary of the Thames. In his mid-thirties, Baker, the son of Henry VIII’s shipbuilder, was the rising star of England’s shipbuilding industry. There is a rare contemporary portrait of Baker that is quite unlike the formal portraits of the great and the good posing in an artist’s studio. It depicts the shipwright hard at work, bending over a green-topped wooden table strewn with various instruments and a large sketch of the hull of a ship. Born in 1530, he was closely linked to the search for new markets, having joined the voyage of the Aucher to the Levant in 1550 when he was about twenty years old. This trip to the eastern Mediterranean, with stops in Genoa and Venice, the home ports of Columbus and Cabot respectively, made an enduring impression on the young shipwright. Years later, when he compiled the first English treatise on ship design—Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry—his drawings manifested the influence of Italian boatbuilders, who were the pioneers of oceangoing ship design.

Lok may have piqued Baker’s interest in the job with his vision of a great merchant ship. In the end, Lok only had enough money to pay Baker to build a thirty-ton bark, the Gabriel, and a pinnace.^* A second bark, the Michael, also thirty tons, was bought from two of the canny investors. But Baker and Lok did not skimp on the materials or craftsmanship, and the Gabriel was constructed to the highest specifications of the day. Baker placed great emphasis on the importance of arithmetic and geometry, which he considered to be “the two supporting pillars of every art.” He was the first English shipwright to build a vessel based on plans created on the drafting table.⁴⁴

Just as Lok engaged England’s best-known shipwright, he also sought the expertise of the country’s most illustrious maker of marine instruments: Humfrey Cole. Like Baker, Cole was one of a new breed of practitioners who applied mathematical principles picked up during the course of their work—rather than at university. Gabriel Harvey, one of Sir Thomas Smith’s protégés, later argued that anyone who condemned expert artisans or industrious practitioners—such as “Humfrey Cole, a Mathematical Mechanician,” or Matthew Baker the shipwright, or any other “cunning or subtile Empirique”—because they were “Unlectured in Schools, or Unlettered in Books,” must be seen as foolish.⁴⁵ Harvey’s point was that it was possible to be a superb practitioner without a formal university education.

Cole was a northerner—like Frobisher—who had trained as a goldsmith and then secured a job at the Royal Mint. By the 1570s, he was developing a reputation as a maker of precision instruments, which he produced at his workshop near St. Paul’s Cathedral. For Lok, he made, or supplied, an Armilla Tolomaei, a celestial globe that was left blank for plotting the constellations, and a blank terrestrial globe for plotting new lands or geographical features that might be discovered. Two other instruments, a Sphera Nautica and a Compassum Meridianum, enabled the navigator to determine the variation between true and magnetic North, and a Holometrum Geometrum was a device for charting the features of a coastline.⁴⁶

The mission’s account books—meticulously kept by Lok—show the amounts the investors spent on the essential items for the voyage. Although a goodly sum, just over fifty pounds, went toward the purchase of marine instruments, the largest amount by far was spent on victuals—£387, fourteen shillings, and ten pence. At this time, the practice of victualling was well developed, thanks to the work of Edward Baeshe, a naval administrator. During his tenure as the surveyor-general of victuals for the Royal Navy—he was the first to hold this office, created in 1550, as England began its search for new markets—Baeshe established the process for supplying the navy with food and equipment. In particular, he formalized standards for rations: a gallon of beer and a pound of biscuit (or bread, when in port) every day, two pounds of beef on “flesh” days, and a quarter portion of stockfish (or four herrings), a quarter pound of butter, and half a pound of cheese on “fish” days.⁴⁷

Lok would have been familiar with the allocation of victuals because as agent of the Muscovy Company he regularly sent sailors on long voyages. But it was Nicholas Chancellor, as purser, who was in day-to-day charge of procuring and preparing the provisions—and for this role he had served a long apprenticeship. He had grown up with the Muscovy Company, and after his father’s untimely death in 1556 he was “kept at writing school long” and acquired an understanding of algorithms and the “keeping of books of reckonings.”⁴⁸

The accounts of the voyage show there was a significant outlay on beer: five tons came from the queen’s own stocks. Chancellor also purchased three hogsheads—about 160 gallons—of aqua vitae, a distilled wine. The record is sketchy on what foodstuffs were bought for the expedition, but they would have included enough beef or pork for four days per week, stockfish for three days, as well as ship’s biscuit (every day), peas (four days), and cheese and butter (three days)—amounts that were typical on later expeditions.⁴⁹

Also, Lok and company invested in the general welfare of the sailors. Although the basic living conditions were spartan—only Frobisher had his own cabin and well-upholstered bed—the company hired a French surgeon to look after the crew’s health, providing him with a large chest filled with some exotic medicines supplied by a London apothecary. There was ambra grisi oriental, which, according to one modern expert, was “a wax-like substance from the sperm whale’s intestine found floating in the Indian ocean” and used as a stimulant. There were several laxatives—such as myrobboralia chebue bellerichi—and a remedy for diarrhea—boli oriental. For the treatment of venereal disease, there was argenti viti—quicksilver or mercury, administered as an ointment. Another strange drug was castorum, which was taken from the anal glands of beavers and used to counter the rancorous odor from gangrenous limbs.⁵⁰

As Edmund Hogan wooed investors and Nicholas Chancellor gathered the victuals, Lok considered the navigational requirements of the voyage itself. He realized that Frobisher and Hall, the second-in-command, did not have sufficient understanding of the latest navigational thinking. For all of Frobisher’s conviction and persuasive bluster, it had been obvious during his meeting with the Muscovy Company that he did not have a clear understanding of the route his ships would take. This would need to be addressed, and Lok knew just the man to help.

In May 1576, with about two weeks to go before the planned departure, John Dee, the queen’s astrologer and longtime cosmographer for the Muscovy Company, had approached Lok, “desiring to know of the reasons” for their enterprise. When he learned what was planned, Dee offered his services. Lok accepted the offer and invited him to his house, along with Frobisher, Hall, and William Borough.⁵¹ There, as Lok recalled, “I laid before [them] my books and authors, my cards [charts] and instruments, and my notes thereof made in writing.” These he had assembled over a period of twenty years, spending around five hundred pounds—a significant financial commitment.⁵²

In the days before departure, Dee met with Frobisher and Hall at Muscovy House and put them through a crash course “on geometry and cosmography” and the Northwest Passage. During his tutorials, he referred his pupils to a “great map universal,” which had been purchased for the expedition’s library of books and charts for one pound, six shillings, and eight pence: this was the world map of his old friend Gerard Mercator, published seven years earlier. Also, he provided them with Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or “The Theatre of the Lands of the World,” the world’s first recognizably modern atlas, which had been published in 1570.^*

With this intense tutoring from Dee, as well as the benefit of pioneering marine technology, boatbuilding, and medical knowledge, Frobisher was the best prepared captain that England had ever put to sea—despite the budgetary constraints. Yet for all their preparation and planning, Frobisher and his crew of thirty-four were still venturing into the unknown as they weighed anchor from Ratcliffe, in a protected loop of the Thames, on June 7, 1576.