Nathaniel's nutmeg Read Free Page B

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.
    More than five years was to pass before a search ship from England finally discovered what had happened to the Bona Esperanza and Confidentia. Sailing into the bay where Willoughby had chosen to winter, the would-be rescuers stumbled across the ghostly and rotting hulks of the two ships — ships which had ended their days as charnel houses. The crew's final grim months remain a mystery, for Willoughby, racked by hunger, stopped recording daily entries in his ship's log. All that is certain is that he and his crew survived much of the winter, for the rescue party found wills dated January 1554, a full four months after the vessels had entered the bay.
    The final, macabre twist in the tale was recorded by Giovanni Michiel, the Venetian ambassador to Moscow. The search party, he wrote, 'has returned safe, bringing with them the two vessels of the first voyage, having found them on the Muscovite coast with the men on board all frozen. And they [the rescuers] narrate strange things about the mode in which they were frozen, pen still in hand, and the paper before them, others at tables, platter in hand and spoon in mouth; others opening a locker, and others in various postures, like statues, as if they had been adjusted and placed in those attitudes.'
    While Willoughby and his men froze to death, Richard Chancellor had fared rather better. Relying on the wit that had so enamoured him to his adoptive father, he quickly foresaw the danger of Arctic pack-ice. Dropping anchor in the White Sea close to present-day Archangel, he abandoned ship and trudged his way overland to Moscow. At first he was disappointed in what he found. The city, he thought, was 'very rude' and the houses 'all of timber'. Even the imperial palace was disappointing - 'rather low' and with 'small windows' it was 'much like the old buildings of England'. But Chancellor soon changed his tune when confronted with the barbaric splendour of Ivan the Terrible's court. Ivan greeted him in 'a long garment of beaten