THE DISCOVERY OF RUSSIA
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS ir BELIEVE they be such men for hard living as are not under the sun : for no cold will hurt them. . . . They may not say, as some snudges in England say, I would find the Queen a man to serve in my place, or make his friends tarry at home if money have the upper hand. No, no, it is not so in this country." Thus, nearly 400 years ago, Richard Chancellor, the first Englishman to make the voyage to Russia, wrote of the Russian soldiers.
It is more than twenty years since I first read that verdict. I was lately home then from the Baltic countries, which I had seen as a cockpit of confused fighting between Germans, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians and Poles. In the course of my journeys I had had occasion to visit a Bolshevik outpost on the remote borders of Latgalen, and had talked to the boys, homesick for Siberia, who were there holding the line for the Red Army. I like to remember this summer that we were " tovarich " to each other during the brief hour that we spent in company. My meeting with them, a later sight of red-pennoned Cossack lancers resting in a stubble of rye on their road towards Warsaw, the strangely divergent tales of travellers coming out of Russia, had whetted my curiosity about a country of which till then I had known little but its novels and its dances. Back again in London, I set myself in a spell of leisure to study the earliest English voyages to the north-east. I was fascinated both by the story and by the manner of its telling. I have not met since many Englishmen familiar with either. Let me try to give such brief taste of their quality as may tempt others, as ignorant as I till then had been, to read the noble English in which much of that now un- regarded history was written.
"It is to be marvelled, if there be any prince content to live quiet within his own dominions. For surely the people would think he lacketh the noble courage and spirit of all other." So in 1527 Robert Thorne—an English merchant long resident in Seville, whose father had been joined with Hugh Eliot in the discovery of Newfoundland— prefaced a plea which he addressed to King Henry VIII for a voyage of discovery to the north. It is clear from the more detailed and practical memorandum, supported by a map, which Thorne in the same year wrote for the King's ambassador, that the "Islands of Spicerie " were a main lure to this adventure. (Spices were more precious in England then than now. There were as yet no root crops and no imported feeding-stuffs. Each autumn, when the grass failed, many cattle had to be slaughtered, and spices were needed to make their meat savoury in winter.) Three of the four parts of the world had been discovered by other princes, out of Portugal and out of Spain. (What a fine start, it pleased me to think, standing a few years ago by the tomb of Queen Philippa, John of Gaunt's daughter, in the noble abbey of Batalha, the English blood in her son, William the Navigator, had won for the sea-going courage of Portugal.) The north part of the world remained for discovery and would yield a way to the coveted islands shorter by more than 2,000 leagues. That passage, it was commonly said, was one of great peril. But if the way, said Thorne, was dangerous for a few leagues on
either side the Pole, ships in those seas may have "perpetual clear- ness of the day without any darkness of the night." He summed up his faith in a magnificent phrase—" There is no land unhabitable nor sea inriavigable."
It is interesting to trace the English attempts to discover both the North-East and the North-West Passages back to eloquent words —the one to Thorne's paper, the other to the discourse of Humphrey Gilbert which inspired the voyages of Frobisher and Davis. Sebas- tian Cabot, who came home in old age from his employment as Grand Pilot of the Emperor's Indies, had "long before had this secret in his mind." A company of merchants seeking outlets for exports was formed in 1551 and chose three ships to undertake the quest for which Thorne had pleaded. Cabot himself drew up the ordinances for the voyage. He wished them read once a week to the ships' companies, and fine reading they make. He enjoined "every manner of person, without respect, to bear another's burden." He asked for reports to be sent home of their passage through those "dangers of the seas, perils of ice, intolerable colds," which, de- picted by sundry writers, had caused "wavering minds and doubt- ful heads" to withdraw from the voyage and to dissuade others from joining it. He ended by "praying the living God, to give you His grace, to accomplish your charge to His glory, whose merciful hand shall prosper your voyage, and preserve you from all dangers."
Sir Hugh Willoughby, at his own request, was made "General of the Voyage." With him in command of the 'Edward Bonaventure,' sailed Richard Chancellor, released for the purpose by Sir Philip Sidney's father. The three ships left London early in May of r553. They were towed down the river by small boats, in which their mariners, attired in sky-blue cloth, "rowed amain." At Greenwich, the people stood thick upon the shore to see them pass. The Privy Council ran to the windows of the palace, the courtiers to the tops of the towers. The King alone, Edward VI, was not there to see. He was sick already with the illness of which within two months he was to die. The ships could not clear the English coast until June 23rd. "Traversing and tracing the seas," at the end of July they were among the "very gentle people" of the Lofoten Islands. Early in August the 'Bona Esperanza ' and the 'Bona Confidencia ' were parted from Chancellor's ship in a storm. They sailed on, and were caught in the ice off Lapland. There Russian fishermen found them next spring, their gear and cargoes intact but their crews dead. Ivan the Terrible had their belongings collected and put under seal for return to England.
Chancellor, too, sailed on. He found at length the unending daylight which Robert Thorne had foretold—" no night at all," he reported it, "but a continual light and brightness of the Sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty Sea." He entered the White, Sea and there landed. Thence, after much delay, while the pleasure of the Tsar was sought, he set off on the 1500 mile journey to Moscow. The Tsar's invitation met him, and the Russians competed with each other to speed him on his road. In Moscow, after twelve days' waiting, the Tsar, "in a long garment of beaten gold, with an imperial crown upon his head, and a staff of crystal and gold in his right hand," received him ; and they dined that day a company of zoo, all served on golden plate.
The story runs on—through the pages of Hakluyt, through many State papers, through Russian archives. Chancellor voyages again to Russia, and, bringing to England Osep Napea, the first envoy from the Russian court, is wrecked and drowned on the Scottish coast. Napea has in London a triumphant welcome, reflected in many journals of the year. Anthony Jenkinson goes back with him to Moscow and is credited with having conveyed the proposal of marriage which Ivan the Terrible addressed to Queen Elizabeth. Another ambassador, Theodore Pisemsky, comes from Moscow. The detailed report of his journey from Scarborough to London in a year of the plague, of his reception by the Queen at Windsor, rests in the Moscow archives. Some day, I hope, an English scholar will interweave the English and Russian records of that century into a single and complete narrative. Meantime the pages of Hakluyt guard the fame of voyages and heroisms that have echoed after four centuries this summer in the journeys of gallant British convoys through the Arctic, in the brave endurance of Russian men and women along their remote and tortured front.
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