North-East Passage to Muscovy

Stephen Borough and the First Tudor Explorations

C P Mayers, Kit Mayers

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780750940696
• eBook ISBN: 9780752495736
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

North-East Passage to Muscovy explores important and overlooked sea voyages, the motivation behind them, the geographical knowledge acquired on them which put England in the forefront of cartography, and the extraordinary dealings of the Muscovy Company - which included passing on a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth I from Ivan the Terrible.

CHAPTER 1

The Times

Stephen Borough made his first voyage of exploration in 1553. That was about four and a half centuries ago; it may seem so, but it is not really very long ago at all. For instance, most people can remember their grandparents and can remember talking to them. Mine were born in the 1870s. If we suppose that there are about fifty years between batches of grandparents, it would only need eight or possibly nine lots of grandparents to take us back to the 1550s.

The time may seem short when measured in cohorts of grandparents, but what a lot has changed! Things were very different then: for instance, we do not now set fire to our archbishops, as they did then (‘Bloody Mary’ had Archbishop Cranmer burnt at the stake in 1556). Our attitudes and thought patterns, and a great deal else besides, have changed enormously since then.

How can we possibly get into the mindset of Stephen’s time, a time when a belief in God pervaded everyday life, when the sun and the planets circled the earth¹ and the order of everything in the cosmos was taken for granted?² The Tudors’ concept of the four elements (fire, air, earth and water) may seem bizarre to us, but to them it was a system by which they could apprehend and explain many of nature’s mysteries. We may think them odd, but I wonder what they would make of our concepts of the spin of gravitons or the charm of quarks by which we seek to explain the behaviour of the elementary particles.

The physical world that they knew was also very different. In Stephen’s time, the population of London was about 50,000,³ which is about the same as the population of Keighley or Macclesfield today, and slightly less than that of Stourbridge or Weymouth.⁴ London was small, which meant that anybody who was anybody knew everybody else who mattered. (At that time, the total population of England was only about 3 million.)⁵

Looking back at England then, we can see that she was little more than an underdeveloped off-shore island. There was a good deal of internal trade, but as far as exports were concerned, wool and cloth were almost the only commodities that the English could offer, and together they accounted for over 85 per cent of the export trade.⁶ The quantity of wool and cloth that was produced increased slowly and steadily. For instance, the flock of sheep owned by Norwich Cathedral Priory increased from 2,500 in 1470 to 8,000 in 1520, and the output of traditional woollen broadcloth trebled in the first half of the sixteenth century.⁷ Bowden has calculated that there were about 11 million sheep and lambs in England and Wales in 1540–7.⁸ The wool and the cloth were traded overseas for wine and manufactured goods from the Continent. The woolsack that the Lord Chancellor sits on today is a surviving symbol of the erstwhile dominance of the wool trade. Many people all over the country found employment in the production of wool, from shepherds and shearers to those involved in the processes of spinning, weaving, fulling⁹ and dyeing. The term ‘spinster’, which applied to all unmarried women, reflects the very widespread involvement of the English people in the textile trade. The finished cloth was mostly sold through Calais, which, apart from Ireland, was England’s only overseas territory at that time. It was through the wool market at Calais, the ‘Staple’, that the customs dues were levied on wool and textiles, and these provided a large part of the Crown’s income. The Crown levied 40s on every sack of wool exported by Englishmen and 53s 3d on every sack exported by ‘aliens’ (foreigners).¹⁰

In Stephen’s day, the supply of food in England depended entirely on the harvest, as very little food could be imported from abroad, and the harvest in turn depended very much on the weather, and it was cold in the 1550s. It was the beginning of the period which later came to be known as ‘the Little Ice Age’ and which lasted from about 1550 to 1700.¹¹ There were bad harvests in 1549, 1550 and 1551,¹² and people starved. To add to the problems, there was an outbreak of ‘the sweating sickness’, or sudor anglicus, in London in 1551.¹³ It seems to have been a form of influenza, and it could kill young adults within twenty-four hours.¹⁴

The king at the time was Edward VI. He had been 9 when he was crowned in 1547, and he was heavily guided by his ‘Protectors’: first his uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and then, from 1549 onwards, by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.

His father, King Henry VIII, had spent all the money derived from the dissolution of the monasteries, and more, on vainglorious wars, his navy and a chain of forts and castles along the east and south coasts to defend England against the very real threat of attack by France or Spain, or both of them together.¹⁵ Fortunately for England, these two countries were much occupied at the time in fighting each other, and when peace was, for a short time, declared between them, neither had the strength left or the inclination to mount an attack on England. But King Henry had left the nation bankrupt.¹⁶

The whole economy of England was upset: landlords raised rents¹⁷ and tried to enclose land, local manufacturers went down, prices rose in what has been called ‘the sixteenth-century price revolution’, especially the price of grain, and real wages declined.¹⁸ There were popular rebellions in 1549 in Norfolk and the West Country, and serious riots in the Midlands and southern England, triggered largely by the sharp rise in the price of corn and also in part by opposition to Edward VI’s religious reforms.¹⁹

Then, in 1551, Northumberland was forced to honour some of the nation’s debts to the Continental bankers. This meant a dramatic rise in the prices of England’s textiles, which caused a sharp drop in sales on the Continent. The number of shortcloths exported from London fell from 133,000 in 1550 to 85,000 in 1552.²⁰ This dramatic drop in the sales of England’s chief export commodity affected the whole nation. The situation is described by the Duke of Norfolk in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:

The clothiers all, not able to maintain

The many to them ‘longing, have put off

The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers, who

Unfit for other life, compell’d by hunger

And lack of other means, in desperate manner

Daring the event to the teeth, are all in uproar,

And danger serves among them.²¹

It was the sudden fall in cloth exports that impelled the English merchants to seek other overseas sales outlets and that prompted Stephen Borough’s voyages of exploration.

At this time, the English had done very little in the way of exploration, though there is no doubting the fact that they were excellent sailors. They had been making regular voyages to Danzig for many years,²² to Iceland,²³ to all the ports on the Atlantic coasts of Europe, and into the Mediterranean.²⁴ English ships had also reached Morocco²⁵ and Guinea (the Ivory Coast),²⁶ and had crossed the Atlantic to Newfoundland in the wake of Basque fishermen.²⁷ At least one English ship, the Barbara of London under Captain John Phellyppes, had reached the Caribbean in 1540, with ‘one Robert Nycoll of Depe’ (Dieppe) as pilot (a Frenchman, despite his Scottish name). There they seized a Spanish ship and some valuable charts of the Americas.²⁸

The most adventurous of the English seamen had sailed to Brazil, led by William Hawkins, who made three voyages there in 1530, 1531 and 1532.²⁹ He almost certainly used foreign (probably French) pilots to get there,³⁰ as did Robert Reniger and Thomas Borey, who sailed there in about 1540, and ‘one Pudsey’ (as Hakluyt calls him), who also sailed there and built a fort at the Baya de Todos Santos in 1542.³¹

But none of this was pioneering. The Portuguese had been sailing to Brazil regularly for thirty years or more before Hawkins arrived, and a Frenchman, de Gonneville, had sailed there from Harfleur in the Espoir as early as 1504.³² The English could certainly sail the high seas, but apart from the voyages to Brazil they had until the 1550s confined themselves to the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and all the sailing routes that they used had been anticipated by others.

By contrast, the Iberians had already circled the globe, and by the middle of the sixteenth century ships of Portugal sailed regularly to East Africa to trade for gold, which they then took on to Goa and Malacca (on the Malay Peninsula), where the gold was traded for spices to be taken back to Europe. At the same time, Spanish ships were sailing regularly from Seville to ports in the Caribbean Sea to collect silver and gold from their mines in Mexico and Peru.

When the English did at last set out to explore, it was many years later than the Iberians. Like them, the English also hoped to reach the Spice Islands and the fabulous Orient, which were ‘the most richest londes and ilondes in the worlde, for all the gold, spices aromatikes and pretiose stone’, according to Roger Barlow, who had found out a great deal about the Portuguese and Spanish explorations. He went on to propose a route that was not already dominated by the Portuguese or the Spanish, ‘out of spayne thei saile all the indies and sees occidentales, and from portingale thei saylle all the indies and sees orientalles, so that betwene the waie of the orient and the waie of the occydent they have compassed all the world . . . so ther resteth this waie of the northe onelie to discover’.³³

Thus it was that Stephen Borough of Devon and his colleagues became the pioneers of English exploration when they set out in search of a northerly route to the Orient in two expeditions, one in 1553 and another in 1556. Twenty-odd years later, the English tried again, this time to the north-west, sending out three expeditions under Martin Frobisher in 1576, 1577 and 1578.

This book is about Stephen Borough and the part he took in these English expeditions, the ones in search of a north-east passage to the Orient.

CHAPTER 2

Stephen Borough at Home

In this chapter Stephen Borough’s family and home life, as far as we know them, are discussed. His nautical career occupies most of the later chapters of this book.

Stephen Borough, the future sea captain, navigator and explorer, was born on 25 September 1525, at a small manor farm called Borough, in the parish of Northam, North Devon.¹ (The family name of Borough – spelled in several different ways – and the name of the farm where he was born were the same.)² His infant world consisted almost entirely of his mother (née Mary Dough) and his nurse. A little later, he would get to recognise the faces of his father, Walter Borough,³ and his uncle Thomas,⁴ who between them ran the farm, and the faces of the servants, one or two servant girls in the house and three or four men and b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations in the Text
• Illustration and Text Credits
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Times
• 2 Stephen Borough at Home
• 3 The Aims and Organisation of the 1553 Expedition
• 4 The Ships of the 1533 Expedition and their Crews and Equipment
• 5 Geographical Knowledge
• 6 ‘The Haven of Death’: Sir Hugh Willoughby’s Account of the 1553 Voyage
• 7 The Voyage of the Edward (1553)
• 8 The Voyages of the Serchthrift
• 9 Stephen Borough’s Navigation
• 10 The Muscovy Company
• 11 Other Consequences of the First Voyages and Subsequent Attempts on the North-East Passage
• 12 A Summary and Assessment of Stephen Borough’s Nautical Career
• Appendices
• Notes and References
• Photo Section