First Scandinavian Discoverer of America.—The Cabots.—Willoughby and Chancellor (1553–1554).—Stephen Burrough (1556).—Frobisher (1576–1578).—Davis (1585–1587).—Barentz, Cornelis, and Brant (1594).—Wintering of the Dutch Navigators in Nova Zembla (1596–1597).—John Knight (1606).—Murdered by the Esquimaux.—Henry Hudson (1607–1609).—Baffin (1616).
Long before Columbus sailed from the port of Palos (1492) on that ever-memorable voyage which changed the geography of the world, the Scandinavians had already found the way to North America. From Greenland, which was known to them as early as the ninth century, and which they began to colonize in the year 985, they sailed farther to the west, and gradually extended their discoveries from the coasts of Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, to those of the present State of Rhode Island, which, from the wild vines they there found growing in abundance, they called the “good Vinland.”
But a long series of disasters destroyed their Greenland colonies about the end of the fourteenth century, and as Scandinavia itself had at that time but very little intercourse with the more civilized nations of Southern Europe, it is not to be wondered at that, despite the discoveries of Günnbjorn and Eric the Red, the great western continent remained unknown to the world in general.
One of the first consequences of the achievements of Columbus was the rediscovery of the northern part of America, for the English merchants longed to have a share of the commerce of India; and as the Pope had assigned the eastern route to the Portuguese and the western one to the Spaniards, they resolved to ascertain whether a third and shorter way to the Spice Islands, or to the fabulous golden regions of the east, might not be found by steering to the north-west. In pursuance of these views John and Sebastian Cabot sailed in 1497 from Bristol, at that time our first commercial port, and discovered the whole American coast from Labrador to Virginia. They failed indeed in the object of their mission, but they laid the first foundations of the future colonial greatness of England.
A second voyage, in 1498, by Sebastian Cabot alone, without the companionship of his father, had no important results, but in a third voyage which he undertook in search of a north-west passage, at Henry VIII.’s expense, in 1516 or 1517, it is tolerably certain that that great navigator discovered the two straits which now bear the names of Davis and Hudson.
The French expeditions of Verazzani (1523) and Jacques Cartier (1524), however memorable in other respects, having been as unsuccessful as those of Cortereal (1500) or Gomez (1524) in discovering the desired north-western passage, Sebastian Cabot, who in 1549 was created Grand Pilot of England, started in his old age another idea, which has become almost equally momentous in the history of Arctic discovery—the search for a north-eastern route to China. Accordingly, in the year 1553, a squadron of three small vessels, under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby, Chancellor, and Durfoorth, set sail from Ratcliffe, with the vain hope of reaching India by sailing round North Asia, the formation and vast extent of which were at that time totally unknown.
Off Senjan, an island on the Norwegian coast in lat. 69½°, the ships parted company in a stormy night, never to meet again. Willoughby and Durfoorth reached the coast of Nova Zembla, and ultimately sought a harbor in Lapland on the west side of the entrance into the White Sea, where the captain-general, officers, and crews of both ships were miserably frozen to death, as some Russian fishermen ascertained in the following spring. How long they sustained the severity of the weather is not known, but the journals and a will found on board the “Admiral” proved that Sir Hugh Willoughby and most of that ship’s company were alive in January, 1554. They died the victims of inexperience; for had they, as Sir John Richardson remarks, been skilled in hunting and clothing themselves, and taken the precaution moreover of laying in at the beginning of the winter a stock of mossy turf such as the country produces for fuel, and above all had they secured a few of the very many seals and belugæ which abounded in the sea around them, they might have preserved their lives and passed an endurable winter.
Chancellor was either more fortunate or more skillful, for after having long been buffeted about by stormy weather, he eventually reached St. Nicholas, in the White Sea. From thence he proceeded overland to Moscow, and delivered his credentials to the Czar, Ivan Vasilovitch, from whom he obtained many privileges for the company of merchants who had fitted out the expedition. In 1554 he returned to England, and shortly afterwards was sent back to Russia by Queen Mary for the purpose of negotiating a treaty of commerce between the two nations. Having satisfactorily accomplished his mission, he once more set sail from the White Sea, accompanied by a Muscovite ambassador. But this time the return voyage was extremely unfortunate, for Chancellor, after losing two of his vessels off the coast of Norway, was carried by a violent tempest into the Bay of Pitsligo, in Scotland, where his ship was wrecked. He endeavored to save the ambassador and himself in a boat, but the small pinnace was upset; and although the Russian safely reached the strand, the Englishman, after having escaped so many dangers in the Arctic Ocean, was drowned within sight of his native shores.
In 1556 the Muscovy Company fitted out the Serchthrift pinnace, under the command of Stephen Burrough, for discovery towards the River Obi and farther search for a north-east passage. This small vessel reached the strait between Nova Zembla and Vaigats, called by the Russians the Kara Gate, but the enormous masses of ice that came floating through the channel compelled it to return.
In spite of these repeated disappointments, the desire to discover a northern route to India was too great to allow an enterprising nation like the English to abandon the scheme as hopeless.