Nathaniel's nutmeg (3 page)

But more than a century of expeditions and mis­adventures were to pass before Courthope set sail in the
Swan.
His story begins not in the sultry climes of the
nutmeg islands, but in a land of icebergs and snow.

chapter one

Arctic
Whirlwinds

T WAS THE LOOK-OUT
who saw them first. Two crippled
vessels, rotting and abandoned, lay at anchor close to
the shoreline. Their hulls were splintered and twisted,
their sails in tatters and their crew apparently long since
dead. But it was not a tropical reef that had wrecked the
ships and nor was it malaria that had killed the crew.
England's maiden expedition to the Spice Islands had come
to grief in the ice-bound waters of the Arctic.

The historic 1553 voyage was the brainchild of a newly
founded organisation known as the Mystery, Company
and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery
of Unknown Lands. So impatient were these merchants to
enter the spice race
—
yet so unprepared for the risks and
dangers - that they allowed enthusiasm to overrule
practicalities and long before the ships had left port a
catalogue of errors threatened to jeopardise their mission.
The choice of expedition leader, or 'pilot-general', was
sensible enough. Richard Chancellor was 'a man of great
estimation' who had gained some experience of seafaring
in his formative years. His adoptive father, Henry Sidney,
so eulogised his young charge when presented to the
Company that the merchant adventurers thought they had
a new Magellan in their midst. Sidney explained that it
was Chancellor's 'good parts of wit' that made him so
invaluable and, never shy to blow his own trumpet, added,
'I rejoice in myself that I have nourished and maintained
that wit.'

When a doubting merchant tackled Sidney on his
enthusiasm for being separated from Chancellor the old
man had a ready answer. 'I do now part with Chancellor
not because I make little reckoning of the man, or because
his maintenance is burdenous and chargeable unto me. You
know the man by report, I by experience; you by words, I
by deeds; you by speech and company, but I by the daily
trial of his life.'

Sidney's rhetoric won the day and Chancellor was
promptly given command of the
Edward Bonaventure,
the
largest of the expedition's three ships. The governors then
turned to choosing a captain for the expedition's other
large ship, the
Bona Esperanza.
For reasons that remain
obscure they plumped for Sir Hugh Willoughby, a 'goodly
personage' according to the records, but one who had
absolutely no knowledge of navigation. Such a man would
have been a risk for the short hop across the English
Channel; to despatch him to the uttermost ends of the
earth was to court disaster.

When it came to deciding the passage to the Spice
Islands the merchant adventurers were most insistent.
Although they had watched the Spanish and Portuguese
successfully sail both east and west to the East Indies, they
plumped for an altogether more eccentric option. Their
ships, it was decided, would head due north; a route that
would shave more than two thousand miles off the long
voyage to the Spice Islands. It would have the added benefit
of avoiding conflict with the Portuguese who had been
sailing the eastern route for almost a century and had
established fortified bastions in every port. There was also
the question of illness and climate to consider. English
mariners had seen the Portuguese ships return home with
their crews decimated by dysentery and typhoid, often
contracted in the tropical climes of the Indian Ocean. At
least one man in five could expect death on the long
voyage to the East but that number was frequently much
higher and often entire ships had to be abandoned due to
a shortage of crew. Since the Portuguese were acclimatised
by birth to a hot climate men questioned how English
sailors, brought up on the frosty fringes of northern
Europe, could hope to return in rude health.

The expedition ran into trouble before it even set sail.
During delays at Harwich, it was discovered that a large
part of the provisions was already rotten, while the wine
casks had been so badly assembled that the wine was
leaking freely though the joints in the wood. But with the
wind in their favour the captains decided there was no
time to restock the ships and the expedition set sail on 23
June 1553.

So long as the vessels stuck together under the capable
direction of Richard Chancellor they were unlikely to run
into trouble. But as they rounded the rocky shores of
northern Norway, 'there came such flows of winde and
terrible whirlewinds' that Willoughby's ship was blown off
course. Chancellor had planned for such an eventuality,
suggesting that the ships regroup at Vardohuus, a small
island in the Barents Sea. He waited for seven days but,
hearing nothing of either the
Bona Esperanza
or the
Confidentia,
the third ship of the fleet, he pushed on
eastwards towards the White Sea.

The other two vessels had also survived the storm. After
riding out the gale, Sir Hugh re-established contact with

the
Confidentia
and both headed towards the coastline. Here
Willoughby's inexperience began to tell. He sounded the
sea floor, pored over charts and scratched his head before
concluding that 'the land lay not as the globe made
mention.' Failing to locate Vardohuus's or Chancellor’s
vessel, he decided to press on with the expedition without
the flagship.

On 14 August 1553, he 'descried land', apparently un­inhabited, at 72 degrees latitude but failed to reach it due
to the quantity of ice in the water. If this reading is correct,
his ship must have reached the barren islands of Novaya
Zemlya which lie, remote and isolated, in the Barents Sea.
From here he appears to have sailed south-east, then north­west, then south-west, then north-east. The ignorance of
Willoughby and his men is staggering, for their course,
more than three hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle,
must have taken them in a giant arc through a dangerous
sea littered with melting pack-ice. On 14 September, they
again sighted land and shortly afterwards 'sailed into a faire
bay' somewhere close to the present border between
Finland and Russia. Willoughby s men were cheered by the
sight of 'very many seal fishes, and other great fishes; and
upon the main we saw beares, great deere, foxes with divers
strange beasts'. They planned at first to spend a week here
but 'seeing the yeare far spent, and also very evill weather,
as frost, snow, and haile', they decided to winter in the bay.

The expedition's directors in London must by now have
hoped that their ships had found the North-East Passage,
broken through it, and be well on their way to the Spice
Islands. But instead of balmy evenings and gently swaying
palm trees, Willoughby and his men had met with freezing
fog, impenetrable ice, and the realisation that London's
merchants had made a terrible mistake when they chose the
route over the North Pole. Those merchants had voc­iferously defended their decision, presenting logical and
compelling arguments to support their theories. As far back
as the year 1527, Robert Thorne, an English trader living in
Seville, had written to King Henry VIII with the exciting
(and highly secret) news that the Spice Islands could be
reached by way of the North Pole: 'I know it is my bounden
duty to manifest this secret unto your Grace,' he wrote,
'which hitherto, as I suppose, hath beene hid. 'The King was
left in no doubt that 'by sailing northward and passing the
Pole, descending to the Equinoctial line, we shall hit these
islands [the Spice Islands], and it should be a much shorter
way than either the Spaniards or Portingals have.'

The more the experts researched the north-eastern
route to the Spice Islands the more plausible it proved to
be. In an age when men still looked for perfect symmetry
on their maps, the northern cape of Norway showed an
exact topographical correspondence to the southern cape
of Africa. Geographers agreed that this was indeed good
news; the chilly northern land mass must surely be a second
Cape of Good Hope. The writings of the ancients also lent
credence to the idea of reaching the East Indies by a
northerly route. Pliny the Elder had written of a circular
sea at the top of the globe and a land called Tabis
penetrating into the far north. To the east of Tabis there
was said to be an opening which connected the Polar Sea
to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Such arguments were cold comfort to Willoughby and
his men, stuck fast in an expanse of ice. The bay in which
they had chosen to winter soon transformed itself into a
desolate wilderness; fishing proved impossible due to the
thickness of the ice and the wildlife disappeared with the
first snows. Even the birds, aware of the onslaught of
winter, migrated to warmer climes. Soon the ice floes had
trapped, then crushed, the ships and there was no escape.
With his crew growing hungrier by the day, Willoughby
sent out search parties to look for food, for people, for help.
'We sent out three men south-south-west to search if they
could find people,' wrote Sir Hugh, 'but [they] could find
none.' Next he sent a party westwards, 'which also returned
without finding any people'. A final team confirmed what
Willoughby had feared — that they were imprisoned in an
uninhabited wilderness.