DREAMSTIMEIn c1552 English merchants, worried by the
collapsing Antwerp market, sponsored Sir
Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor to
search for a north-east passage to China. They
sailed in 1553, but Willoughby and his crew
died, their ship locked in ice off Norway or
Russia; Chancellor was more successful, pio-
neering a sea route to what’s now Arkhangelsk
(on the White Sea coast in Russia’s far north).
Both failed to find the mythical open-sea
route round northern Asia to China that had
become an English obsession but, by the be-
ginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the north-east-
ern explorers had enabled England to set up
the first of the great international monopolies- the Muscovy Company. In the Elizabethan
period, this became the model for European
expansionist trade.
Unknown lands
It is easy to forget that at the start of the
Elizabethan age, to western Europeans
at least, Russia was almost as unknown
a region as China – a situation remedied by
English explorers operating for the Muscovy
Company. Having failed to find a north-
east passage, over the following years
English explorers began to turn their
attention to land exploration instead.
As late as the 16th century, works
published in western Europe claimed that
the Silk Road (a series of trade routes linking
China with the Middle East and India) was
peopled with strange and monstrous races- dog-headed men, one-footed men,
chest-headed men. Even those countries
actively involved in the trade with China
circulated weird and wonderful reports
about the country and the land route to it.
Anthony Jenkinson, an employee of the
Muscovy Company, was sent to pioneer
an overland route from Moscow to China –
a remarkable undertaking. His expedition
did not find monstrous people, but it was
beset with problems. Sailing from Russia
across the Caspian Sea in 1558, he contin-
ued overland with a merchant caravan;
his party subsequently became lost in the
desert, travelled days without water, and
was attacked by bandits who vowed to
kill Christians and who did kill many of
their camels. He made it as far as Bokhara
(now Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan)
but banditry and war blocked his journey
east, and he was forced to turn back.
Returning to the Caspian, he discovered
that his boat had been robbed of everything
removable, from sails to anchors. He and
his resourceful companions fashioned their
own sails, spun their own rope and made an
anchor out of a wheel (though they then
fortunately encountered another ship
willing to trade them a spare anchor).
Elizabethans and the world / Explorers
Anthony Jenkinson’s
influential map of the region
east of the Baltic, produced
after his 1558 expedition