Looking for China:The English in the Arctic in the...
Margaret SMALL
University of Birmingham
Although Europe and China had always been aware of each other's existence in a way that could not be said of Europe or Asia and the Americas,for example,the two regions knew remarkably little about each other well into the Early Modern period.As late as the sixteenth century,works were being published in Western Europe which claimed that the silk road to China was peopled with strange and monstrous races—dog-headed men,one-footed men,chest-headed men.[1]Even those countries actively involved in the trade with China circulated weird and wonderful reports about the country and the land route to it.Until the sixteenth century,China was part of the known world to England,but as inaccessible as if it were a part of another planet.
For much of the Middle Ages there was no direct contact between Chinese and Western societies.For the most part trade was conducted through central Asian intermediaries and Samarkand became a major trading post where East and West met.The fifteenth century diplomat Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo,talking about the trade at Samarkand,described how‘China sends silks,which are the best in the world,(more especially the satins),and musk,which is found in no other part of the world,ruibies and diamonds,pearls and rhubarb and many other things.The merchandize which comes from China is the best and most precious which comes to this city,and they say that the people of China are the most skilful workmen in the world.[2]They were brought with great difficulty by merchants travelling six months westwards through the steppe lands.[3]Western Asia may provided the main point of contact for East and West but by the thirteenth century some western Europeans reached China,and first hand reports were filtering back and forth across the continents.As early as 1261,there are Chinese records of Fulang at the court of Kublai Khan.[4]In Western Europe Marco Polo is the best known of the travellers to China.Although reasonably reliable,his reports of the court of Kublai Khan were doubted for centuries since they seemed to strain the limits of credulity,[5]but by the fourteenth century there are various reports of Italians and Germans who had crossed Asia to the Chinese court and whose reports substantiated much of what Polo had described.
Throughout the Middle Ages,however,the English played virtually no role in the trade with China—indeed one of the few instances when events in Eastern Asia impinged upon England was when the Mongols began to threaten Russia and the English lost their Russian market for fish.[6]But though the English took no active part in the Silk Road trade and communication with China,they were informed about it.The reports of the friar William Rubruck and his journey to Cathay exist only in three codices all found in England.[7]Those reports of the journeys to China which did circulate did little to entice people onto the journey.Most of them stress the cold,the wasteland,the desert and the dangers of being beset by bandits.[8]Moreover there were further difficulties in that by the fifteenth century the Ottomans and the Venetians had such established control over the traditional silk road routes that even were the English to brave the native conditions,they would have been unable to set up a rival English enterprise.
By the sixteenth century,however,Venetian power was waning.The centres of power in Europe were shifting west.With the discovery of the New World and the sea-routes round the Cape of Good Hope to India and South East Asia,Portugal and Spain began to take over much of the trading power that had once belonged to Venice.England was once again late on the scene.Although she had sponsored the voyages of John Cabot and Sebastian Cabot in the late 15th and early 16th centuries in order to try to find a viable route to Cathay and the wonders of the Orient,for the most part she was too caught up in internal affairs to join the race to discover new lands and trade routes until the second half of the sixteenth century.In 1552,however,two trained navigators,Richard Chancellor and Sir Hugh Willoughby took part in the first of a series of voyages through northern waters in a desperate attempt to find a sea-route to the East that would avoid the hazards of the silk road and the dangers of competition with Spain and Portugal for the southern routes.
The search for a northern passage to China became an English national obsession that lasted until the Norwegian Amundsen finally proved both the existence and the impracticality of the northwest passage in the beginning of the twentieth century.For nearly 400 years the English spent a considerable proportion of their maritime energy and experience‘looking for China’.This paper is only concerned with the first fifty years of that exploration,and why,with no evidence for the existence of such a passage from personal experience,the English spent so long looking for it.
As John Davis,writing in 1594 said,‘all impediments in nature and circumstances of former practises duly considered,the northerly passage to China seme very improbable’.[9]It is a curious statement for someone to make who had already sailed three times in search of a northwest passage,and would have sailed again had he been able to convince his supporters to fund a further voyage.Despite his declaration that observation of both nature and practice made the existence of a northern passage improbable,he was in fact,absolutely certain that such a passage must exist and tried to give explanations for its existence.Furthermore,he believed that it was intended that the English discover it.In the same document,he wrote that‘there remaineth no more doubting but that the landes are disjoyned and that there is a Navigable passage by the Norwest for us alone ordained to our infinite happines’.[10]It was divine destiny that the English find the sea-route to the Orient.The problem still remained in how to discover it.
Until recently most scholars concerned with the early searches for a northern passage have focused more on the realities of the expeditions and the quest for wealth than on the reasoning behind the searches.[11]Writers dealing with the changing perceptions of the north have mostly tended to examine the importance of mapping and observation,rather than theory in changing perceptions in the sixteenth century,[12]but such arguments overlook the fact that‘the decision to embark on costly and risky expeditions to explore a Northeast Passage must have been based on considerable faith in the belief that this route would be navigable’.[13]The same could be said of the northwest passage.The riches of China and the further hope of sailing south from there to the Moluccas(or the spice islands)were a great enticement to English sailors,but they weren’t sufficient for them simply to throw away their lives on a venture which they believed had no hope of working out.
At first,as mentioned above,the English concentrated on looking for a sea-route round the North of Europe and Asia.After all,although the northern latitudes of Europe had not been fully explored,even by the Vikings,Europeans did know the location and approximate longitudinal extent of Eurasia.The reports via the silk road from China had brought back information on the approximate latitude of cities such as Cambalu(Beijing).In 1552 Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancelor made the first attempt to discover an Eastern passage,but the result was disastrous.The ships became separated and Chancelor made for Russia.Willoughby's ship was caught in the ice and he stopped to overwinter but never returned.A year later Sir Richard Chancelor located Willoughby and the sixty two members of his crew in the Baltic where they had sealed themselves into winter quarters.When they were found,they still had plenty of provisions,but not one of them was alive.There are numerous theories about their deaths ranging from scurvey and hypothermia to the possibility that they sealed themselves into their winter living so well that they died of carbon monoxide poisoning.[14]The cause of death is not precisely known but it did lead the English to question the feasibility of arctic travel—something they had only just begun to consider even might be possible.
The reason that Willoughby and Chancellor had started by looking for a northeastern route was that traditional lore,inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans,held that the old world was an island surrounded by the great sea of Ocean.As early as the 8th century BC,Homer had described Ocean and thereafter few had questioned its existence although they had not always believed it was navigable.[15]Given the new explorations by the Portuguese and Spanish which had proved that there was a navigable southern Ocean,and the difficulties inherent in land travel they decided to search to see if there was navigable Ocean northwards just as there had been southwards or even open water.[16]The Northeast passage,however,proved elusive.By 1556 the English had succeeded in setting up a profitable trade with China,but they had also had three catastrophic attempts to find the northeast passage.At that point they decided to attempt the land route again.Anthony Jenkinson,a factor for the Moscovy company,was granted a license and a Tartar interpreter and sent eastwards from Moscow to China.The voyage was beset with problems.They were lost in the desert,travelled days without water,and were attacked by bandits who wanted to kill Christians in particular and who killed many of their camels.[17]Jenkinson was very fortunate to return to England alive,and thereafter interest in an English participation in a land route to China ceased almost entirely,and similarly a search for a North East passage also petered out although in 1580,two Englishmen Pet,Jackman did make one further search for a northeast passage.
Pet and Jackman's voyage was interesting because it showed both the persistent lure of China for the English,and the unwillingness people had to believe that a sea-route might not exist.John Dee,one of the two leading English geographers of the day was called on to advise Pet and Jackman and did so,agreeing that as far as Tabin,north of Russia,they would have to sail north of 70 degrees in freezing conditions,but he said that after Tabin,at‘the longitude of 142 degrees further Easterly,it is probable you shall find the land on your right hand runne much southerly and Eastward,in which course you are like either to fall into the mouth of the famous river Oechardes,or some other,which yet I conjecture to passe by the renowned Citie of Cambalu’(or Beijing).[18]It is obvious how such arguments were founded entirely on theory and supposition rather than evidence.Not even Dee,one of the leading geographers of the day,could really support his optimistic hope that the land would suddenly trend southward and lead the English merchants to the heart of China with actual evidence.There were no known northern routes.The English would simply have to look for it.By the time Pet and Jackman were making their searches,the majority of English interest was already focussed on the Northwest passage,and their failure cemented the belief that the western route was the more viable one.
The English search for the Northwest Passage in the sixteenth-century is in one sense the story of two men,Martin Frobisher and John Davis.Between them they made six voyages into the arctic between 1577 and 1587.They shared a fascination with the search for the sea-route to China,and both had spent most of their life at sea,and knew a great deal about ships and survival at sea.Aside from these two factors,however,they had little in common.Frobisher was rather a dare-devil sailor who lived on both sides of the law,crossing back and forth from illegal piracy to state-legitimated privateering and back again.He was no great thinker,and his voyages though better funded than Davis's had a troublesome legacy.Davis,by contrast,although an expert sailor also took a very academic approach to navigation.He had gone to sea when a boy,but had found some means of continuing to learn(perhaps because sailors were necessarily better educated than they are sometimes given credit for).We know for a certainty he was well-read both in English and Latin.[19]While his mentor John Dee was away in the continent,Davis stole a large number of books from Dee's library,and Dee noted which ones Davis had purloined.The list makes interesting reading.[20]These books ranged from philosophy to geography,astrology and mathematics and evidence of what he read became apparent in the treatises Davis himself wrote to gain support for his voyages.Davis had clearly poured thought into the possibilities of a northwest passage before he ever set off in search of it.Unlike Frobisher who though he studied more for this voyage than for any other that we know of,largely seems to have thrived on the excitement and the exploration,Davis poured over all the scholarly arguments in favour of the existence of such a passage.
Remarkably one foray into uncharted arctic waters in small wooden ships,braving the problems of freezing temperatures,dearth of any food sources,and pack ice did not convince either man to stay at home,or look for some easier source of wealth.Instead they both succumbed to the lure of the arctic and made repeated attempts in a series of insane voyages to find their way northwards to China.In part,they were spurred on to belief in the passage by the thinking man's dream—all the prominent geographers of the period were busy trying to find arguments why there should be a northwest passage.
Until the sixteenth century the English,like most Europeans,had thought that the Northern latitudes were uninhabitable and innavigable and too be avoided.One of the prominent and clearly stated ideas of the time was that‘all evil cometh from the north.’[21]Moreover,the north was not merely the source of evil,but it was also generally believed to be inaccessible.Form the fifth century BC onwards the majority of western Europeans believed that the far north was a frozen wasteland,so cold that it would instantly freeze to death any one who was foolish enough to venture there.[22]In other words,to journey beyond the arctic circle was certain suicide,and therefore impossible for humans to explore.
In the sixteenth century,however,sailors started trying to sail northwards.One can hardly say that the northwest passage became a national fixation for the English since there were only the six significant attempts to discover such a passage,but it did spur more attention from the English than any other part of the globe.Explorers were,as it is well known,trying to find an easy and accessible trade route to the China.To sail from Plymouth around the Straits of Magellan to Hong Kong is a distance of about 19000 nautical miles,no mean voyage even nowadays,and it was naturally more difficult in the sixteenth century.Spain controlled the southern route and while Drake's circumnavigation of the world which took place in 1577-8,the same years as Frobisher's second and third voyages,proved that it was possible to outrun the Spanish and have a profitable privateering venture through the Straits,it did not take such a voyage to prove to the English that a southern trading route was not a viable option.
The English simply could not compete with the Spanish.At the same time,however,the English wanted access to the fabled wealth of Eastern Asia.The Portuguese and the Jesuits had begun to act as intermediaries in the trade between Japan and China,and the Spanish had reached the Moluccas and the Philippines but nobody had established a good ocean trade with China,and were the English to do so,they would be able to play an important role in European luxury trade.In the sixteenth century England was a rather poor country,and the Tudor monarchs were notoriously unwilling to spend money,but people were so eager to find another route to China that practical,and well-respected merchants,academics,lords and even the Queen,invested in the voyages.Before they did so,however,they not unnaturally wanted to have some reason to believe that a northern route might exist.
This was in part because of the unknown nature of the Americas.It was first thought that there might be a route through the temperate latitudes.[23]Some thought there might be another isthmus in the north just like the Panama isthmus,[24]others that there was a sea-route through the continent,roughly equivalent to the Mediterranean,yet others that north America did not extend as far north as Europe.As late as 1576 when Sir Humphrey Gilbert published a treatise about the feasibility and probability of the discovery of a Northwest passage,he was certain that the extreme north of the Americas lay far south of the Arctic circle.[25]His tract,entitled‘A Discourse To Prove A Passage By The North—West To Cathay And The East Indies’though written in 1566 was not published until ten years later.Before he wrote the Discourse he had twice petitioned Elizabeth I to allow him to set off in search of a northern route to Cathay.[26]At first,he seems to have been undecided about whether an eastern or a western route was more viable,but by the time of the Discourse he had become convinced of the viability of a northwest passage.The Discourse was originally written partly to win support for his proposed exploration;and also to convince his brother John that his‘hope of this discoverie and passage,was not so rashe or foolishe as you[John]heretofore have deemed’.[27]The Muscovy Company heavily resisted Gilbert's proposal,and in the event,he was seconded to campaign in Ireland before he could set sail.In 1576 when it was printed,Gilbert finally saw his dream of searching for a north west passage put into action,but not by himself;rather it was Frobisher who sailed into the Northwest.
Frobisher and his partners are known to have read Gilbert's treatise,though how much it influenced the reality of their expedition is a matter of debate.It was,in fact,published at the request of George Gascoigne,a poet,thinker and cousin to Frobisher,and the date of its publication does not seem to have been a coincidence.Gascoigne wanted to win support for Frobisher's voyage.[28]The treatise was written in an academic manner,designed to appeal to the literate and educated.Although Gilbert drew information from earlier sixteenth-century voyages these were combined with arguments drawn from the classics.Using authorities such as Homer and Plato,he argued that the Americas were synonymous with the old world Atlantis and were therefore,by definition,an island.[29]Given that it was an island,there must be an ocean passage to the north of it,which Gilbert was convinced lay in the latitude of Labrador.Gilbert's geography was in part based on the idea that a northern straight would be in about 54 degrees latitude at an equivalent to the southern latitude where the Spanish had already found a sea route to the East through the Straits of Magellan.He interpreted information from the discoveries about currents,and trends of land and combined that with material drawn from the classics to create an image of the NW passage lying south of the Arctic circle.He therefore did not have to provide reasons for its uncongealed state.Instead he made its unfrozen state a reason for sailing westwards to the utterly unknown regions rather than sailing eastwards.He thought that the passage would run through latitudes where the compass was more useful than further north and the ropes and ships would not be frozen.
Gilbert's treatise was useful in providing intellectual arguments as well as discussions about the possibility of trading products,but by 1576 when his work was published and Frobisher was setting sail,his geography was no longer fully accepted.Explorers and stay-at-home thinkers alike continued to believe in an open water passage,but most showed that it must be further north than Gilbert had indicated.In 1555,the Italian geographer,Giovanni Battista Ramusio,author of one of the most influential geographical compilations of the sixteenth century,wrote that he had received a letter from Sebastian Cabot,one of the earliest English explorers who claimed to have sailed Northwest through open,navigable water as far as 67 degrees latitude and would have sailed further had his crew not mutinied.[30]There is no independent proof that Cabot ever made this voyage,and indeed he cannot have sailed as far north as 67 degrees which would have put him in the usually frozen seas off Baffin island,but the English clearly believed he had sailed there.The implication of his voyage was that there was an open northwest passage must be in the arctic regions.
From the 1570s onwards,explorers,academics and backers alike provided a series of convoluted arguments why the water should not be frozen.These ranged from the simple theological argument that God would not have created a world which was not interconnected,to more subtle arguments about the very nature of the arctic.John Davis,for instance argued that the salt of the arctic waters raised their temperature enough that they would not be wholly frozen.[31]George Best,who sailed twice with Frobisher,meanwhile argued that while the waters were frozen in the winter months,the summer sun was sufficient to create an open passage.[32]
Frobisher himself,does not seem to have been much interested in any of these arguments.He was a man of action,courageous,charismatic and of limited imagination.In his fascinating,if somewhat damning biography of Frobisher,James McDermott calls the man‘abidingly semi-literate’.[33]Unlike most of those involved in northern exploration Frobisher simply did not have the education to have delved much into the reasoning behind belief in the existence of the northwest passage.He had met a Portuguese pilot who had claimed to have navigated the passage and he himself had simply become convinced that it must exist and felt the siren call of the wealth of the Orient.He moved with ease from privateering which seems to have crossed the line into outright piracy on occasion,to exploration in search of gold.Despite his lack of book-learning he seems to have convinced the scholarly,if gullible,Michael Lok that he was the man to lead an expedition in search of a northwest passage.Moreover when Lok's dreams of mounting such an expedition were sabotaged by the Muscovy company which did not want to support such a venture but at the same time did not want anyone else to carry it out,Frobisher's charisma seems to have won over the support of the Privy Council and induced the company to give the license to explore.[34]
Although Frobisher had had little difficulty in convincing Lok and the Privy council about the importance of the expedition,finding other backers was more troublesome.In the end 18 people invested a total of 875 pounds and Lok agreed to make up the difference(which came to roughly 740 pounds).Lok played a vital role in getting the English exploration of the northwest off the ground.He was the reader,the ultimate thinking dreamer.He was a merchant connected with the Muscovy company,and,until he got involved in the gold-quest that was the search for the northwest passage in the sixteenth century,he seems to have been a relatively canny businessman.He was also extraordinarily well-educated in geographical matters by the standards of the time and had spent over 500 pounds on geographical books and maps by the time he got involved with Frobisher.[35]He was bankrupted by his investments in Frobisher's enterprises but retained his geographical interests,and indeed seems to have helped Richard Hakluyt a great deal in publishing his material on the Northwest passage.In Frobisher he saw the sailor,and the charismatic leader who could put his dreams of geographical discovery into practise.
Frobisher,while charming,convincing and a practised seaman,was certainly not the most skilful one.Before setting out on the first of his three voyages,he and his chief pilot,Christopher Hall,were given a rapid series of tutorials in practical navigation by John Dee,the leading geographical authority of the period.How much use these were is doubtful.Frobisher and Hall wrote a letter back to Dee from the Shetlands in which Frobisher wrote‘I with M.Hall make our dutifull Commendations to you with as many thankes as we can wish,till we be better furnished of further matters to satisfy our duties to you for your friendly Instructions:which when we use we do remember you and hold our selves bound to you as your poore disciples,not able to be scholars but in good will for want of lerning,and that we will furnish with good will and diligence to the uttermost of our powers.’[36]The impression of this letter is certainly that the majority of Dee's teaching was either neglected or not understood.The expedition was furnished with up-todate navigational instruments.Before they had left,they had also acquired a small library of geographical material,but how useful these were to Frobisher is also doubtful.They are on odd selection of books.They included Mandeville's Travels,which was still thought to contain accurate information about the Far East at that time.They also contain William Cuningham's Cosmographical Glasse and Robert Recorde's Castle of Knowledge,but the only book which can be considered a remotely useful navigational work was Pedro de Medina's Regimento de Navigazio.[37]Since this was written in Spanish it is doubtful how useful it was.[38]Their largest expense was a chart made by William Burrough's,himself a seasoned sailor in northern waters.[39]This chart merely serves to show how much this was a voyage into the unknown.It was intended that Frobisher's expedition should sketch in new information onto the map,but the chart itself seems really to have been designed to be more useful for future explorers than for Frobisher and his crew.
Its designer,William Burrough,was extremely scornful of theorists and map makers who dared to try and write about hydrography and the oceans without having practical experience.Although Burrough saw the value in astronomy,cosmography and mathematical disciplines,he thought they were worthless for exploration without practical experience.[40]He himself had plenty of practical experience,he had sailed in search of a Northeast passage and far into the Atlantic.While the repeated searches for a northwest passage based more on map-makers beliefs than on real evidence show the dangers of geography without evidence,Burrough's chart also shows why such maps were popular.His map shows how unsatisfactory a chart based on nothing but eyewitness knowledge was,and why in some ways explorers of a northern passage needed the‘dreaming intellectuals’to give some direction to where they ought to attempt to explore.On this chart Burrough refused to speculate with the result that the chart is little more than a blank map.It is unsurprising that Frobisher and his crew also took with them a copy of Mercator's world map which showed an actual,if speculative,outline of lands and seas.Equipped with these few materials which were of limited use,and with their own experience at sea,Frobisher and Hall set out on the first of their arctic voyages.
From the first it was clear that they were prepared for a northern voyage.They took generous food supplies(enough for a voyage estimated at lasting one and a half years)and calculated into this were added rations for arctic sailing.Knowledge gleaned from the experiences of the Muscovy company had taught that sailors needed more in cold conditions.[41]Frobisher left no personal record of the voyage,but his pilot,Christopher Hall did.Much of Hall's record is a straight forward log book(which perhaps indicates some profit from Dee's teaching,since Dee certainly emphasized taking accurate observations and records).While from a mariner's point of view a log book may be useful,for the layman,or historian,it makes for remarkably unexciting reading.Hall's log glosses over much of the real danger of a voyage filled with difficulties.The expedition's backer Michael Lok fleshed out some of the drama of the voyage in a narrative which he compiled from sailors’ reports when the expedition returned home but he himself did not sail with the expedition.
Hall has a knack for understatement,and does not really make clear the reasons for turning back from the first voyage when he and Frobisher thought they had found the entrance to the Northwest passage.The ships were still well supplied,and they thought that,in discovering Frobisher strait,they had found the fabled route to the East.It seems clear,however,that they were forced to return home however,because on the 20th of August,the Inuit captured five of the crew and their small boat.Without the boat and with a crew reduced to thirteen men,Frobisher simply could not continue his voyage into the unknown.[42]
Frobisher gained backing for two further voyages,both of which were equally unsuccessful.Neither of them had the sole purpose of looking for a sea-route to China,however.Frobisher had brought back a black ore which appeared to contain flex of gold from his first voyage,and this had provoked a mild gold rush.Financial backers,including the queen,who had been unwilling to risk much money on the uncertain enterprise of a search for a northwest passage were more willing to invest in an expedition to mine for gold.Frobisher's second and third expeditions were always intended to serve a dual function of gold mining and exploration,but in a sense the one inhibited the other.
Frobisher's voyages proved disastrous financially and did little to further the discovery of a sea-route from England to China.Frobisher himself had had difficulty in retracing his own steps although Hall never seems to have been lost.On one occasion on the third voyage Frobisher and Hall disagreed about their location.Frobisher thought he was at Frobisher strait,Hall that they were too far south.The mists descended and Frobisher continued into the straight while Hall and three other boats pretended they did not know what Frobisher was doing when he entered what he thought was Frobisher strait,now known to be Hudson strait.Frobisher realised he was wrong about sixty miles in and named it mistaken straight,but then spent weeks sailing out again and back to Frobisher Bay.Hall was clearly certain enough of his navigation that he was able to bring them back to the same place on three occasions,but he could not communicate clearly to others where they had gone,nor map it well.Without Hall's own visual memory,the records were too poor to allow later explorers to figure out exactly where they had gone.Hall,although he recorded latitude,gave up recording direction of wind or sail and made no attempt to discern longitude.The legacy of the voyages was limited.Even John Davis sailing only ten years later,and able to talk directly with many of the people who had had a part in the planning of the voyage did not recognise that his own Lumley inlet was almost certainly the same place as Frobisher Straight.[43]
Davis was the intellectual,but not the dreamer.He,like Frobisher,was taught by Dee,and seems to have assimilated not merely Dee's teaching on practical navigation,but also some of his more philosophical idea.[44]He must have been among the better educated men in England,certainly in matters of navigation and geography.His early life is not well documented but he seems to have gone to sea fairly young.[45]Using his mixture of practical seamanship and scholarly knowledge,he wrote some of the most important navigational treatises of the sixteenth century.This was the man chosen by first Exeter and then London merchants to discover the northwest passage.[46]These men
moved with desire to advance God's glory,and to seek the good of their native country,consulting together of the likelihood of the discovery of the North—West Passage,which heretofore had been attempted,but unhappily given over by accidents unlooked for,which turned the enterprisers from their principal purpose,resolved,after good deliberation,to put down their adventures,to provide for necessary shipping,and a fit man to be chief conductor of this so hard an enterprise.[47]
These backers,as can be clearly seen had been far more swayed by intellectual arguments for the existence of a northwest passage than by dreams of gold.They were making a long term not a short term investment.Davis’s expeditions were never intended to be trading voyages,they were meant as exploring ones from the outset.Although he took a few trading goods with him,these were not sufficient to make the voyages profitable.He went with only two ships and forty-six men on a voyage of discovery.Oddly enough,four of these forty-six were musicians whose role was to cheer the crew and appease any natives.[48]
Unlike Frobisher's voyages Davis's are relatively easy to trace.His attempts at longitude were not accurate,but his latitudinal readings seem clearly so.He first hit Greenland,which he called the land of Desolation,but could not land because of the ice.He then sailed southwards around the Kap Farvel and then north to Godthaab which he found ice-free and temperate.They then continued on towards Baffin island and explored the Cumberland sound,the next inlet north of Frobisher bay.Like Frobisher,Davis was convinced that the passage he was searching for would be in the arctic regions,and brought ample provisions.Twice he increased the sailors’ rations in order to boost moral.[49]He remained convinced of the existence of an open passage,but by the end of August found that the winds were so consistently contrary that there was no hope of continuing.
Davis found the funding for two subsequent voyages,both equally unsuccessful although on his third voyage he carried out a remarkable feat of navigation,sailing up Baffin Bay as far as seventy-three degrees north,before sailing down the coast of Baffin Island,passed what he called Lumley inlet,which we now know is the same place as Frobisher Bay.He continued on past the‘furious overfall’which is the entrance to Hudson strait and back down the coast of Labrador.On this voyage he sailed further north than anyone was to do for a further two hundred years,but still failed in his goal.
Like Frobisher,Davis never discovered the northwest passage,but he continued to believe in its existence.Unlike Frobisher he never lost sight of the purpose of his voyage,namely to find a sea route to China,and when he lost financial backing for further attempts published works which he hoped could convince others of the existence of a navigable passage.He resorted to similar arguments to those made by Gilbert a quarter of a century earlier,providing proofs drawn from ancient authorites.For him,however,these were not sufficient.The Northwest passage was more than an intellectuals dream,it was a reality proved by his voyages.In his Worlde's Hydrographcial Description,when discussing the uncongealed state of the arctic waters he said‘what neede the repetition of authorities from writers,or wrested philosophical reasons,when playne experience maketh the matter so manifest’.[50]Surprisingly his own three voyages in the Arctic made between 1585 and 1587 had left him convinced that an open,navigable northwest passage did exist.
But though ultimately for him experience was enough to provide the evidence of a navigable passage,it was not where his voyages had begun.Unlike Frobisher,he had begun with the intellectual's dream furthered by his conviction in the perfection of God's creation.He thought that God,would not have created any part of the world to be uninhabitable saying:
If any man be persuaded to the contrary of this truth,he shall doe himselfe wrong in having so base an imagination of the excellency ofGod's creation,as to thinke that God creating the world for man's use,and the same being divided but into five parts,three of those parts should be to no purpose.[51]
He also believed that God would have made sure that in some way disadvantages of nature were balanced out so that for instance,the coldness of the arctic would be counterbalanced by the salt of the sea.His rather convoluted argument runs that:
Since hot and cold,being opposites,cannot exist in the same place,but the one must of necessity avoyde,the seas not being able by the bandes of nature to step backe dothe therefore cause the coldness of the ayre(by reason of his naturall heate)to give place,whereby extremities being avoyded the air must of necessities remayne temperate,for in nature the ayre is hote and moyst,the colde then being but accidentall is the sooner avoided,and natures wrongs with ease redressed.[52]
The wrongs of nature are that the natural climate is such that all water would be frozen if the air temperature were the only factor.These wrongs,however,have been redressed by God ensuring that there was enough salt in the water to counterbalance the coldness of the air.
Davis created an image of the world formed on philosophy,theology and theory as much as on reality.But he used this entirely theoretical vision of the world for a very practical purpose to attempt to forge a trade route for England with China.His voyages in the arctic were the most successful for hundreds of years,sailing far into arctic waters without loss of life.He was a pragmatist above everything,but he based his explorations on his own geographical theories.These theories provided the grounds for believing in the existence of a navigable northwest passage.He then had the skill and the desire to put them into practise and attempt to discover the way to China.Ultimately,however,he was no more successful than Frobisher.Between them they carried out six courageous if insane voyages of discovery in small wooden boats through frozen waters in the space of less than ten years.The northwest passage garnered more investment than any other area of English exploration in the sixteenth century.Nonetheless the Northwest passage at the end of the sixteenth century remained nothing more than an intellectual's dream.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish and the Portuguese had begun to trade with China and even the Dutch had reached the China seas,but the English remained defeated by geography.Only with the advent of air travel could England and China take advantage of the shorter distances of the polar circles,but until then they were restricted to the southern sea-routes round the Cape of Good Hope or through the Straits of Magellan.In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries these routes were simply not feasible for the English since in addition to natural hazards these routes brought them in conflict with the Portuguese and Spanish.[53]And yet China was still seen as the ultimate trading destination—the originator of so much that the English wanted.It was enough to make them pin their hopes on unfounded academic descriptions and defy the traditional lore to brave the Arctic,looking for China.
【注释】
[1]The author can be contacted at m.small＠bham.ac.uk.P.Jackson,‘Marco Polo and his“Travels”’,Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,61(1998),90.
[2]C.Markham(trans.and ed.),Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonázelez de Clavijo to the court of Timour at Sarmarcand,A.D.1403-6,(Cambridge,2010),171.
[3]F.Wood,The Silk Road;Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia(London, 2003),14.
[4]P.Jackson,‘Marco Polo and his“Travels”’,93.
[5]P.Jackson,‘Marco Polo and his“Travels”’,83.
[6]I.de Rachewiltz,Papal envoys to the Great Khans(London,1971),80.
[7]I.de Rachewiltz,Papal envoys to the Great Khans,141.
[8]See for instance the description of William of Rubruck,‘The Journal of Frier William de Rubruquis French man of the order of the minorite friers unto the East pars of the worlde.AD 1253,’in R.Hakluyt(ed.),The Principal Navigations,Voyages,Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation,12 vols.(Glasgow,1903-1905),I.229-301,particularly 277.
[9]John Davis,‘The Worlde's Hydrographical Description Wherein Is Proved Not Onely by Aucthoritie of Writers but Also by Late Experience of Travellers and Reasons of Substantiall Probabilitie,That the Worlde in All His Zones,Clymats,and Places Is Habitable and Inhabited,and the Seas Likewise Universally Navigable without Any Naturall Annoyance to Hinder the Same’,in C.Markham(ed.),The Voyages and Works of John Davis the Naviagator(London,1881),195,215.
[10]John Davis,‘The Worlde's Hydrographical Description’Wherein Is Proved Not Onely by Aucthoritie of Writers but Also by Late Experience of Travellers and Reasons of Substantiall Probabilitie,That the Worlde in All His Zones,Clymats,and Places Is Habitable and Inhabited,and the Seas Likewise Universally Navigable without Any Naturall Annoyance to Hinder the Same,in C.Markham(ed.),The Voyages and Works of John Davis the Naviagator,195,215.
[11]J.L.Allen,‘The Indrawing Sea:Imagination and Experience in the Search for the Northwest Passage,1497-1632’,in American Beginnings:Exploration,Culture and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega,(ed.)Emerson W.Baker(Lincoln and London,1995),7-35;D.Quinn,‘Frobisher in English exploration’,in T.Symons(ed.),Meta Incognita:A Discourse of Discovery:Martin Frobisher's Arctic Expeditions 1576-1578,(Hull,Quebec,1999),I.10-19,J.K.Wright,‘The Open Polar Sea’,Geographical Review,43(1953),338-365.
[12]See,for instance,R.Baldwin,‘The testing of a new academic trinity for the northern passages:the rationale and experience behind English investment in the voyages of Frobisher,Jackman,Davis and Waymouth 1576-1605’,in Voyages and Exploration in the North Atlantic from the Middle Ages to the xvith century;papers presented at the 19th international congress of historical science Oslo 2000,(ed.)A.Agnarsdóttir(Reykavik,2001);E.Okhuizen,‘Exploration and Mapping of the Northeast Passage and northern Eurasia,15th-19th Centuries’,in The Northeast Passage from the Vikings to Nordenskiöld(eds.)E Hakli,J.Nurminen and N.-E.Ruralia(Helsinki,1992),10-49;R.Ruggles,‘The Cartographic Lure of the Northwest Passage:Its Real and Imaginary Geography’,in T.Symons(ed.),Meta Incognita,I.179-256.
[13]Okhuizen,‘Exploration and Mapping’,11.
[14]Eleanora C.Gordon,‘The Fate of Sir Hugh Willoughby and His Companions:A New Conjecture’,The Geographical Journal,152(1986),243-247.
[15]Homer described Okeanos as a fresh-water river surrounding a disk-like earth;see Iliad 18.483-490,Odyssey 11.13,by the time of Herodotus,when the Atlantic had become part of the Greek sphere of knowledge,Ocean was no longer thought of as a river,but as a sea-edge to the world.Herodotus 4.36.Later writers,continued to associate Ocean with Homer's portrayal,however,explicitly comparing the Atlantic to Homer's river.Strabo,I.1.8.For a discussion of Ocean as a limit to the world,see J.Romm,The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought:Geography,Exploration,and Fiction(Princeton,1992),15-16.
[16]M.Small,‘From Jellied Seas to Open Waterways;redefining the northern frame of the knowable world’,Renaissance Quarterly,21(2007),315-339.
[17]A.Jenkinson,‘The Voyage of Master Anthony Jenkinson,made from the city of Mosco in Russia,to the city of Boghar in Bactria,in the year 1558:written by himself to the Merchants of London of the Muscovy Compan’,in R.Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations,Ⅱ.449-479,particularly 469-472.
[18]John Dee,‘Certaine briefe advises given by Master Dee to Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman,to bee observed in their Northeasterne discoverie,Anno 1580’,in R.Hakluyt(ed.),The Principal Navigations,Ⅲ.252.
[19]C.Markham,Life of John Davis,the Navigator,1550-1605,Discoverer of Davis Straits(London,1889),9.Davis's knowledge of Latin is evident from the books which he is known to have taken from Dee's library.In the margins of his catalogue of 1583,for example,Dee records that Davis took Isocrates and Archimedes’collected works published in Greek and Latin from his library.See entries 69 and 70 in John Dee,Library Catalogue,published in facsimile in J.Roberts and A.G.Watson(eds.),John Dee's Library Catalogue(London,1990).
[20]See,for example,entry 39 in Roberts and Watson.
[21]M.Lambard,‘from a testimonie of the right and appendances of the crowne of the kingdome of Britaine his“Aρκαivoμiα fol.137,2”’,in R.Hakluyt(ed.),The Principal Navigations,I.5-7.
[22]See for example,Virgil,Georgics 1.233,Aeneid 7.225;Ovid,Metamorphoses 1.45-50;Cicero,‘Dream of Scipio’,Republic 6.21.Even late Latin authors like the Neoplatonists,Martianus Capella and Macrobius created geographies of the sphere which were founded upon the idea(Martianus Capella,De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae,VI.604-5,Macrobius,Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis,Chapters 5 and 6.
[23]See for instance,Allen,‘Indrawing Sea’,13;P.Martyr of Anghiera,The Decades of the New Worlde or West India Conteyning the Navigations and Conquests of the Spanyardes with Particular Descriptions of the Most Ryche and Large Landes and Islandes Lately Found in the West Ocean(Michigan,1966,first published 1555),223v.
[24]See,for instance,S.Münster,‘Tabula novarum insularum,quas diversis respectibus Occidentales＆Indianas vocant’,in Cosmographiae Universalis Lib.VI(Basel,1550).
[25]H.Gilbert,A Discourse of Discouerie for a New Passage to Cataia(London,1576).
[26]H.Gilbert,‘Petition from Humphrey Gilbert to the Queen BL,additional MS 4159 no.392[1565]’,in David B.Quinn(ed.),The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert,Vol.I(London,1940);H.Gilbert,‘Petition from Humphrey Gilbert to the queen,state papers domestic,Elizabeth.Sp 12/42,23(ii)[1566]’,in D.B.Quinn(ed.),The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert,Vol.I(London,1940).
[27]H.Gilbert,‘A Letter of Sir Humphrey Gilbert,Knight,sent to his Brother,Sir John Gilbert,of Compton,in the Countie of Devon Knight,concerning the discourse of this Discoverie’,in David B.Quinn(ed.),The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises,Vol.I.134-135.
[28]G.Gascoigne,‘To the Reader’,in A Discourse of a A Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia,reprinted in Voyages and Colonising Enterprises,132.See also Quinn,‘Frobisher in English exploration’,in David B.Quinn(ed.),The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises,Vol.I.31.
[29]M.Small,‘From Thought to Action:Gilbert,Davis,And Aee's Theories Behind the Search for the Northwest Passage’,The Sixteeth Century Joural,44(2013),1041-1058.
[30]G.B.Ramusio,‘Discorso sopra il Terzo Volume’,in Navigationi et viaggi (ed.)Giovanni Battista Ramusio(Venice,1565),Ⅲ.4r-v.
[31]J.Davis,‘Worlde's The Worldes Hydrographical Description’,221.
[32]G.Best,‘A true discourse of the three Voyages of discoveries,for the finding of a passage to Cathaya,by the Northwest,under the conduct of Martin Frobisher Generall:Before which,as a necessary Preface is prefixed a twofold discourse,content certain reasons to prove all partes of the World habitable.Penned by Master George Best,a Gentleman employed in the same voyages’in R.Hakluyt(ed.),The Principal Navigations,VII.271.
[33]J.McDermott,Martin Frobisher:an Elizabethan Privateer(New Haven, 2001),10.
[34]J.McDermott,Elizabethan Privateer,103-104.
[35]J.McDermott,‘Michael Lok,Mercer and Merchant Adventurer’,in T. Symons(ed.),Meta Incognita,I.134.
[36]J.Dee,General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Arte of Navigation:annexed to the Paradoxal compass in plain and now first published,24 years after the first invention thereof(London,1577),a,2.
[37]J.McDermott and D.W.Waters,‘Cathay and the Way Thither’,in T. Symons(ed.),Meta Incognita,Ⅲ.364.
[38]D.Waters,The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times(London,1958),144.
[39]J.McDermott and D.W.Waters,‘Cathay and the Way Thither’,362.
[40]W.Burough,‘A dedicatorie Epistle unto the Queenes more excellent majestie,written by master Willion Burrough late comptroller of her Highness Navie,and annexed unto his exact and noteble mappe of Russia,briefly containing(amongst other matters)his great travailes,observations and experiments both by sea and land especially in those Northeastern parts.To the most high and renowned Princesse Elizabeth by the grace of God Queene of England,France and Ireland,＆c’,in R.Hakluyt(ed.),The Principal Navigations,Ⅲ.211.
[41]R.McGheee,The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher(Montreel,Quebec,2006),41.
[42]D.H.Eber Encounters on the Passage:Inuit and the explorers(Toronto,2008),5.
[43]D.D.Hogarth,‘Resolution Island,Then and Now’,Terrae Incognitae,30 (1998),38-39.
[44]E.G.R.Taylor,Tudor Geography 1485-1583,(London,1930),99.
[45]C.Markham,Life of John Davis,the Navigator,1550-1605,Discoverer of Davis Straits,9.
[46]T.K.Rabb,Enterprise and Empire:Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England,1575-1630(Cambridge,Massachusetts,1967),124-125.Five Exeter merchants contributed the bulk of the funding providing£475 between them;most of the remaining£700 raised for the second voyage was provided by merchants from London and Totnes.W.Cotton,An Elizabethan Guild of the City of Exeter;an Account of the Proceedings of the Society of Merchant Adventurers During the Latter Half of the 16th Century(Exeter,1873),82-84.
[47]J.Marchant,‘The first voyage of M.John Davis,undertaken in June 1585 for the discoveries of the Northwest passage,Written by M.John Janes Marchant,sometimes servant to the worshipfull Master William Sanderson’,in R.Hakluyt(ed.),The Principal Navigations,VII.381.
[48]J.Marchant,‘The first voyage of M.John Davis’,381.
[49]J.Marchant,‘The first voyage of M.John Davis’,385.
[50]J.Davis,‘The Worlde's Hydrographical Description’,215.
[51]J.Davis,The Seaman's Secrets Devided into Two Parts Wherein Is Taught the Three Kindes of Sayling,Horizontall,Paradoxall,and Sayling Upon a Great Circle(London,1643,first printed 1599),sig.C1(16).
[52]J.Davis,‘The Worlde's Hydrographical Description’,221.
[53]On the dangers of this route,see C.R.Boxer,‘The Carreira da India’,in C.R.Boxer(ed.),Tragic History of the Sea(Cambridge,1968),1-30.