THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE

The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery by Richard Hakluyt is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE

THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE

Later in Henry the eighth’s reign, in 1527, a larger expedition, composed of “divers cunning men,” set out for Northern discovery, but with no more satisfactory results. Their enterprise was impelled by the weighty reasoning of Robert Thorne, the observant Bristol merchant, then in Seville (whom Hakluyt terms a “notable member and ornament of his country”), in his “large discourse” of that year to Dr. Ley, the English ambassador in Spain, urging the immediate need of English discovery in the north parts, “even to the North pole,” to overcome the advantages gained by Spain and Portugal in their discoveries of “all the Indies and seas Occidental and Oriental,” so “by this part of the Orient and Occident” compassing the world. Who were the “divers cunning men” composing this expedition Hakluyt endeavoured to ascertain through much enquiry among “such as by their years and delight in Navigation” might inform him. He learned, however, of one only, and his name he could not get—a certain canon of St. Paul’s in London, a “great mathematician, and indued with wealth,” apparently the leader. Two “fair ships” formed the squadron, one of them called “The Dominus Vobiscum.” They set forth out of the Thames on a mid-May day. When sailing “far northwestward” one of the ships was cast away as it entered into “a dangerous gulph about the great opening between the North parts of Newfoundland and the country lately called by her Majestie Meta Incognita.” Thereupon the other ship, “shaping her course toward Cape Briton and the coaste of Arambec, and oftentimes putting their men on land to search the state of those regions, returned home about the beginning of October.” So this story lamely ends.

Six years later an enterprise for discovery in the same parts was projected by certain London men, with the king’s “favour and good countenance,” under the leadership of one “Master Hore,” a “man of goodly stature and of great courage, and given to the studie of Cosmographie.” Master Hore’s “persuasions” were so effective that he soon drew into the scheme “many gentlemen of the Inns of court and of the Chancerie, and divers others of good worship, desirous to see the strange things of the world.” Two “tall ships” were obtained for the venture, the “Trinitie,” of one hundred and forty tons, which was designated the “admiral” (flag-ship) of the fleet, and the “Minion.” The company numbered about sixscore persons, of whom thirty were gentlemen. Among the latter were enrolled one Armigil Wade, “a very learned and vertuous gentleman,” afterward clerk of the councils of Henry the eighth and his successor, Edward the sixth; one Joy, subsequently gentleman of the king’s chapel; and Oliver Dawbeny, a merchant of London. All were “mustered in warlike manner” at Gravesend. After receiving the Sacrament they embarked and sailed away at the end of April, 1536. The adventures of these gentlemen-explorers were rare and tragic.

From the time that they left Gravesend they were more than two months at sea without touching land. At length they arrived in the region of Cape Breton. Shaping their course northwestward they came to the “island of Penguin,” where they landed. This was found to be a place “full of rocks and stones” and inhabited by flocks of “great foules white and gray, as big as geese.” These strange fowls were the sea-birds known as Penguins from their first discovery on this island, and afterward, when appearing in other parts, called Great Auks or Gare-Fowls. The sailors drove large numbers of them into the boats, and they made good eating. Quantities of their eggs were also seen on the island. No natives were encountered by the voyagers till they had lain anchored off Newfoundland for several days. Then one morning while Oliver Dawbeny was walking on the hatches he spied a boat full of savages rowing down the bay toward the ships. A ship’s boat was quickly manned and sent out to meet and take them. But at its approach the savages fled to a neighbouring island up the bay. The English pursued them, but they got away. On the island a fire was found, and by it the side of a bear on a wooden spit ready for roasting. A boot of leather was picked up, “garnished on the outward side of the calf with certain brave trails as it were of raw silke”; also a “great warm mitten.” The voyagers tarried in the Newfoundland seas till famine came upon them.

Now the tale becomes gruesome. Temporary relief was had from the stock of a nest of an osprey “that brought hourly to her young great plentie of divers sort of fish.” For a while they lived on raw herbs and roots gathered on the main. Then, the relief from herbs becoming of “little purpose,” some of the hardest pressed, when ashore in companies of two, seeking food, fell to feeding upon their mates. “The fellow killed his mate while he stooped to take up a root for his relief, and cutting out pieces of his body whom he had murthered broyled the same on the coles [fire] and greedily devoured them.” By this means, the chronicler grimly adds, “the company decreased.” The officers on shipboard wondered at this falling off till the fate of the missing was disclosed through the admission of one well-fed sailor, under the goading taunts of a starving mate who had come upon him in a field, drawn thither by the pungent odour of broiled flesh, that the meat upon which he had feasted was a piece of a man’s side.

When this report was brought to the captain he called the company together and addressed them earnestly upon the awfulness of such conduct. “If,” he piously argued, “it had not pleased God to have helpen [helped] them in that distresse that it had been better to have perished in body and to have lived everlastingly, than to have relieved for a poore time their mortal bodyes and to bee condemned everlastingly both body and soule to the unquenchable fire of hell.” He besought them all to pray “that it might please God to look upon their miserable present state and for his own mercy to relieve the same.” Still the famine continued unrelieved. At last, in sheer desperation, “they agreed amongst themselves rather than all should perish to cast lots who should be killed.” But the very night of this agreement, “such was the mercie of God” that a French ship well furnished with victuals hove into the harbour where they lay. Their action was prompt. “Such was the policy of the English,” as our chronicler ingenuously puts it, “that they became masters” of the Frenchmen’s craft, “and changing ships and victualling them they set sail to come into England.” In blunter words, they despoiled the Frenchmen of their property and made off with it, leaving them behind; not altogether desolate, however, for they were left with a ship partly provisioned from their own store.

The expedition arrived back in England about the end of October, when the gentlemen of the party enjoyed a succession of entertainments, first at a “certain castle belonging to Sir John Luttrell,” afterward at Bath, Bristol, and London. The voyagers told in their reports how they had journeyed so far northward that they had seen “mighty islands of ice in the summer season on which were hawkes and other fowles to rest themselves being weary of flying over far from the main.” And how they had also seen “certain great white fowles with red bills and red legs somewhat bigger than herons which they supposed to be storkes.” Some months later the despoiled Frenchmen had got back to their home port, and they appeared in England with complaint to the king and demand for redress. After an examination of the matter, however, the king was “so moved to pity” by the tale of the distress of the Englishmen, which was shown to be the occasion of their high-handed act, that “he punished not his subjects, but of his own purse made full and royal recompense unto the French.” Which was certainly generous as should become a king.

The account of this voyage was the one that Hakluyt travelled two hundred miles on horseback to get from the sole survivor of the company living at the time of his writing, or, in his own words, “to learn the whole truth of this voyage from his own mouth as being the only man now alive that was in this discovery.” He was Thomas Buts, a son of Sir William Buts of Norfolk. Hakluyt relates that upon his return from the voyage Buts was so changed in appearance through the hunger and misery he had undergone that his parents did not recognize him as their son till they found a secret mark on his person, “which was a wart upon one of his knees.”

With the accession of Edward the sixth, the boy king, in 1547, new projects began to develop for further discovery northward. Sebastian Cabot was again in England and settled at Bristol. He was now an old man, yet still stalwart in mind and red-blooded for action. His fame was widespread and he had come to be called “The Great Seaman.” While pilot major of Spain, he had, with other achievements, made important discoveries in South America. Heading an expedition originally planned to pursue discovery in the Pacific, through the Strait of Magellan (discovered and passed by that brilliant Portuguese, Fernao de Magalhães, in 1520, who the next year discovered the Philippines), he had explored the River Plate, naming it Rio de la Plata, the Silver River, because of the splendour of the silver ornaments worn by the Indians of the region, and had anchored off the site of the present city of Buenos Ayres; had built a fort at one of the mouths of the Parana and begun a settlement there; had further ascended the Parana; penetrated the Paraguay; and thence entered the Vermejo, where he and his party had a fierce fight with the savages. In Edward’s second year, 1549, he was appointed Grand Pilot of England, with an annual pension of £166 13s. and 6d. in consideration of the “good and acceptable service done and to be done” by him for the English crown.

Not long after he is found turning from the Northwest Passage and advising a new voyage for the discovery of a Northeast route to India.

From this a project of various London merchant adventurers developed which resulted in an expedition in 1553 starting under Sir Hugh Willoughby and continued by Richard Chancellor, which, although failing to find Cathay, made notable discoveries with the opening to Europe of the great empire of Russia.

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