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.
Part 1 of 2
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.
Précis
In 1553, Richard Chancellor was engaged to take Sir Hugh Willoughby to Russia by sailing around the northernmost tip of Norway, in the hope of bypassing jealous competitors in Continental Europe and reaching Russia or even India. But their ships were driven apart in a storm, and four months after leaving England Chancellor arrived in Archangel alone. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
The chilly rocks of the North Cape, on the tip of Norway where the Norwegian Sea meets the Barents Sea, both part of the Arctic Ocean. It was here that raging storms separated Chancellor from Willoughby. Willoughby’s crew were found dead the following Spring, having tried to last out the cruel Winter in their ship.
TSAR Ivan IV, better known by his nickname of Ivan the Terrible, was delighted at the prospect of outwitting the Europeans who had been choking the more southerly trade routes, and brought Chancellor six hundred miles to Moscow by sleigh. He replied to Chancellor’s letters of introduction from King Edward VI most warmly, and granted the Englishman’s Muscovy Company a monopoly on Anglo-Russian trade that lasted until 1698, though he later expressed puzzlement that Queen Elizabeth I let her merchants keep so much of the profits.*
Willoughby and his crew were found frozen to death in their ships next Spring. On his next visit to Russia in 1555 to 1556, Chancellor relaunched the ships at Archangel, and then brought Ivan’s ambassador, Joseph Nepeya, back to London for a trade delegation. With them went Willoughby’s distressing journal.
Sadly, after dropping his illustrious passenger safely off in the capital, Chancellor was shipwrecked near Fraserburgh in Scotland on 10th November 1556, and there lost his life.
The failure to pursue the good relations between England and Russia can be put down in part to the struggles for the Russian crown that followed Ivan’s death, the ‘Time of Troubles’; England was also hit hard by the Civil Wars and Interregnum (1639-60), and by the Navigation Acts (beginning in 1651, repealed 1826) that restricted foreign competition in the mistaken belief that this protected English interests. Contacts were renewed by Peter the Great in the time of William and Mary. See Britain and the Tsars, and The Grand Embassy.
Précis
Chancellor was heartily welcomed to Moscow by Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and for more than a century Chancellor’s Muscovy Company enjoyed exclusive rights over Anglo-Russian trade. He even brought Ivan’s ambassador Joseph Nepeya back to England on a trade delegation in 1556, but tragedy befell Chancellor soon after, when he was shipwrecked off the Scottish coast. (55 / 60 words)
