Merchant Adventurers: The Voyage of Discovery that Transformed Tudor England, James Evans, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2013, 400pp, £25 (hardback)
The story of sixteenth-century England’s exploration of the world beyond its shores is a well-worn path, and in truth the material has worn well, finding new generations of readers since the Victorians famously rediscovered Richard Hakluyt and saw reflected in his heroes their own image. Thus might the roots of modern empire be uncovered in an earlier era, even if The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, first published in 1589 and expanded to three volumes in 1598-1600, featured rather more failures than it did successes (and of the triumphs not a few were by foreign explorers). Hakluyt included some of the material on which this new book is based, and one way of telling the story of an ill-fated quest for a north-east passage to Asia in 1553 would be to map it onto its Victorian corollary, the disaster that befell Sir John Franklin’s famous expedition to find a north-west passage in 1845. The par- allels are indeed striking, as the imaginatively-rendered discovery of ‘ghost ships’ manned by the dead with which this account begins demonstrates. For James Evans, however, the expedition of 1553 is an unduly neglected epic that would have rather more positive consequences for Tudor England, and indeed in the longer term. In this respect, Merchant Adventurers: The Voyage of Discovery that Transformed Tudor England would be wholly at home in the Victorian imagination, its tone commemorative and elegiac, rather than critical or indeed analytical. Nonetheless, while not all readers might agree with the author’s belief that ‘the first duty of historical writing is to be a pleasure to read’ the book succeeds in bringing this fascinating episode in maritime history to life.
The story of how, inspired by the well-known cartographer Sebastian Cabot, backed by the investors of the title, and led by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, three ships left London in search of a passage to the east via the north, is a story of discovery, trade, and death. But it is also part of a broader history of geopolitics, diplomacy and cultural encounter, and the book covers a lot of ground (and sea). Evans situates the quest for a new, shorter route to the lucrative Asian market that would avoid the Spanish and Portuguese (for whom at the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 the pope had carved up the New World) in the context of European interna- tional politics. Divided into three sections, the book devotes much of the first, ‘Turning Outward’, to setting the scene for the second, the voyage itself, ‘Into the Frozen Sea’; the final section, ‘Merchant Adventurers of England’, examines the immediate and longer-term impact of the venture. If the first is overlong and the third rather repetitive, struggling as it does to justify the unfortunately-chosen subtitle, the highlight of the book by far is the account of the voyage itself. It is here, one might suspect, that the author’s real interest lies. The telling of how the three ships became separated, one to make contact ultimately not with the warm climate in the east with its lucrative spice trade but with a frozen Moscow and its rather more mundane offerings (wax, tallow and ‘train oil’ – for which a market would be found in England nonetheless), while the other two were lost, their crews to be found dead by fishermen, is a gripping narrative packed with detail. Here, rather more obviously than elsewhere in the book, good use is made of original sources such as Willoughby’s logbook, which was found with his preserved, frozen body in the Bona Esperanza and survives to this day. Evans captures well the problems of sixteenth-century naviga- tion and the ships’ vulnerability to a sudden deterioration in the weather, so tragically illustrated in this story.
Historians have long been alert to the significance of the links between mercantile and state interests – aspects of early modern power-broking that overlapped considerably. Evans situates this episode in the context of Eng- land’s relations with Spain and France, and explores how the development of diplomatic and commercial links with Ivan the Terrible’s Russia – the far from intended outcome of the original design – had implications for the European balance of power. The book is a reminder of how complex the political and religious situation in England became following the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Each of the English subjects who feature in these pag- es had accommodated themselves to the breach with Rome that the new, sickly boy-king Edward VI had cemented. Unbeknownst to the sailors and merchants on the Edward Bonaventure, Bona Esperanza, and Bona Confi- dentia, however, he had died shortly after their departure, and the survivors returned to England to find Mary I on the throne, who had in the meantime executed their chief sponsor (father-in-law to the uncrowned Lady Jane Grey), the Duke of Northumberland. As it turned out this was not a fatal blow (at least for the merchants) but the new political climate – not least the unpopularity of Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain – meant that a trading agreement with Russia, and the diplomatic and political concord that this entailed, had implications further afield. Just as would happen half a centu- ry later with the Ottoman Empire, English merchants agreed to supply raw materials to the tsar, in each case contributing to a war effort that indirectly strengthened England and weakened her rivals. While the Cabot-inspired Chancellor failed to find a route to the east, the development of trade with Russia was, as Hakluyt recognized, psychologically as well as technologi- cally reassuring to a nation that looked on enviously at the success of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.
It is too much to state, however, that this venture ‘transformed Tudor Eng- land’, and in its final section the book resorts to special pleading rather than hard facts to sustain its claim that ‘in England, organized mercantile explo- ration began in 1553.’ This is only marginally more plausible than Philip Larkin’s fiction that ‘sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three’. For all that Cabot is shown to be an important innovator in England’s maritime development Evans does not make the case that the Muscovy Company, founded in the wake of the 1553 expedition, established a template for later commercial activities, nor that England was in any way ‘transformed’. Lasting success would follow later, under Elizabeth, whose excommunica- tion from Rome in 1570 led to the expansion of English initiatives in the Mediterranean and, in the longer term, in the Far East. The promoters of the 1553 expedition made the most of their failure; but the spice trade was the Holy Grail, and it was to this area of the world that England would direct its energies in the seventeenth century.
In fact, the story is sufficiently compelling not to require such grandiose claims: it is a heroic and tragic tale that for all the commercial and political agents at work remains, above all, a story of courage and endeavour. Evans is alert to the complexities of early modern diplomacy and cultural encounter, and the description of the survivors’ experiences in Russia com- plements well the treatment of what they endured at sea. While the book is sumptuously illustrated with colour prints, it would have benefited from tighter editorial control. Dividing the book into no fewer than sixty-six chapters (most of which are no more than two or three pages in length) makes for a choppy and at times superficial narrative with rather artifi- cial coherence. Evans points out on more than one occasion that Cabot’s recognition of the need for captains and navigators to maintain a written record of their travels, carefully logging and mapping so that others could follow in their wake, was a highly significant innovation (however obvious it might appear to us today). Its value is equally obvious to the historian, and was understood by Hakluyt. We should perhaps trust more to such records – and their inevitable lacunae and puzzles – and resist the urge to join the dots. The story recounted here is sufficiently epic without intrusive padding, as readers interested in narratives of journeys into the unknown such as this will discover for themselves.
52 x 30cm, © The British Library Board, Royal 20 E lX f29v-30
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