Merchants of Muscovy
In 1553, Richard Chancellor set out on a perilous voyage to Russia in order to bypass the Hanseatic League’s customs union.
1553-1556
Edward VI 1547-1553 to Mary I 1553-1558
By Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
The port at Archangel (Arkhangelsk) in Russia, painted in 1894 by Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939). It was here that Richard Chancellor found safety at last, and a market for English wool. The perilous journey was forced on the English by the cities of the Hanseatic League, a customs union that monopolised the easier trade routes through the Netherlands, Poland and the Baltic States.
Introduction
Richard Chancellor (?1521-1556) was the first Englishman to establish diplomatic relations with Russia, following an arduous, four-month voyage through uncharted Arctic waters. Tsar Ivan IV was delighted with his new trade partners, despite complaining that English merchants make money for themselves, and not for their princes.
IN the days of King Edward VI, the merchants of northern Europe’s Hanseatic League jealousy guarded trade in the Baltic Sea, and the Portuguese, whom the English navigators much admired, headed off rival ships before they could round the Cape of Good Hope, where India was waiting for them.* An alternative route to Russia and South Asia through the cold waters of the Arctic promised rich rewards for England’s wool industry — if such a route even existed, for no one had ever charted it.
On 10th May 1553, Sir Hugh Willoughby and his pilot Richard Chancellor set out in three ships for the Arctic Ocean.* During fierce storms around the North Cape in Norway, Chancellor in the Edward Bonaventura lost sight of Willoughby’s Bona Esperanza. A desperate search went unrewarded, and at last Chancellor pressed on alone, warily hugging the coastline of the Kola Peninsula south to the White Sea, and stumbling into Archangel that September.
This was before Sir Francis Drake made his historic circumnavigation and opened English eyes to the possibilities of sailing west: see The Voyage of the ‘Golden Hinde’. The first Englishman to reach Japan arrived in a battered Dutch ship in 1600: see Will Adams.
