Voyages of Willem Barendszoon.
The states-general then resolved to send another expedition to prosecute the search for a passage, and on the 2nd of July 1595 seven ships sailed from the Maas for that purpose under the leadership of the dauntless Willem Barendszoon. There was another man in that fleet whose name stands high on the roll of Dutch heroes, Jacob van Heemskerk, who went on this occasion as supercargo of a ship of Amsterdam. But ice again obstructed the passage, and having done all that was possible to get through it, the explorers were compelled to put about and entered the Maas on the 18th of November.
Barendszoon was now of opinion that by sailing much farther north an open sea might be found, and as several geographers and travellers of note supported him in this view, the city of Amsterdam fitted out two ships, in which he and Heemskerk sailed from Vlieland on the 18th of May 1596. On this occasion Barendszoon visited Spitzbergen and reached 80° north latitude, but ice still blocked the road to China. One of the ships then returned home, the other was frozen fast and wrecked on the coast of Nova Zembla. The crew built a hut on the shore, and passed the winter in it, living largely on Arctic foxes and using the skins for clothing. In the spring they launched their two boats, in which they fortunately reached a Russian settlement on the mainland, and ultimately Heemskerk and eleven others reached the Maas, 29th of October 1597. Brave Willem Barendszoon died of exhaustion on the journey. In our own time the hut on Nova Zembla was found intact, having stood nearly three centuries on the frozen shore, and the relics it contained are now preserved in the national museum.
Historical Sketches.
When the first of these expeditions had failed, and while the result of the second was still unknown, some merchants of Amsterdam fitted out a fleet of four vessels, which in the year 1595 sailed to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Before this date, however, a few Netherlanders had visited the eastern seas in the Portuguese service, and among them was one in particular whose writings had great influence at that period and for more than half a century afterwards.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was born at Haarlem, in the province of Holland. He received a good general education, but from an early age he gave himself up with ardour to the special study of geography and history, and eagerly read such books of travel as were within his reach. In 1579 he obtained permission from his parents, who were then residing at Enkhuizen, to proceed to Seville, where his two elder brothers were pushing their fortunes. He was at Seville when the cardinal king Henrique of Portugal died, leaving the succession to the throne in dispute. The duke of Alva with a strong Spanish army won it for his master, and shortly afterwards Linschoten removed to Lisbon, where he was a clerk in a merchant’s office when Philippe made his triumphal entry and when Alva died.
Two years later he entered the service of a Dominican friar, by name Vicente da Fonseca, who had been appointed by Philippe primate of India, the see of Goa having been raised to an archbishopric in 1557. In April 1583 with his employer he sailed from Lisbon, and after touching at Mozambique—where he remained from the 5th to the 20th of August, diligently seeking information on that part of the world—he arrived at Goa in September of the same year. He remained in India until January 1589. When returning to Europe in the ship Santa Cruz from Cochin, he passed through a quantity of wreckage from the ill-fated São Thomé, which had sailed from the same port five days before he left, and he visited several islands in the Atlantic, at one of which—Terceira—he was detained a long time. He reached Lisbon again in January 1592, and eight months later rejoined his family at Enkhuizen, after an absence of nearly thirteen years.
Work of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten.
Early in 1595 the first of Linschoten’s books was published, in which an account is given of the sailing directions followed by the Portuguese in their navigation of the eastern waters, drawn from the treatises of their most experienced pilots. This work shows the highest knowledge of navigation that Europeans had then acquired. They had still no better instrument for determining latitudes than the astrolabe and the cross staff, and no means whatever for ascertaining longitudes other than by dead reckoning. The vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope was known by the appearance of the sea-birds called Cape pigeons and the great drifting plants that are yet to be seen any day on the shores of the Cape peninsula. The different kinds of ground that adhered to the tallow of the sounding leads to some extent indicated the position, as did also the variation of the magnetic needle, but whether a ship was fifty or a hundred nautical miles from any given point could not be ascertained by either of these means. When close to the shore, however, the position was known by the appearance of the land, the form of the hills and mountains, and the patches of sand and thicket, all of which had been carefully delineated and laid down in the sailing directions.
Linschoten’s first book was followed in 1596 by a description of the Indies, and by several geographical treatises drawn from Portuguese sources, all profusely illustrated with maps and plates. Of Mozambique an ample account was given from personal observation and inquiry. Dom Pedro de Castro had just been succeeded as captain by Nuno Velho Pereira, who informed the archbishop that in his three years’ term of office he would realise a fortune of about nine tons of gold, or £75,000 sterling, derived chiefly from the trade in the precious metal carried on at Sofala and in the territory of the monomotapa. Fort São Sebastio had then no other garrison than the servants and attendants of the captain, in addition to whom there were only forty or at most fifty Portuguese and half-breed male residents on the island capable of assisting in its defence. There were three or four hundred huts occupied by negroes, some of whom were professed Christians, others Mohamedans, and still others heathens. The exports to India were gold, ivory, ambergris, ebony, and slaves. African slaves, being much stronger in body than the natives of Hindostan, were used to perform the hardest and coarsest work in the eastern possessions of Portugal, and—though Linschoten does not state this—they were employed in considerable numbers in the trading ships to relieve the European seamen from the heavy labour of pumping, hauling, stowing and unstowing cargo, cleansing, and so forth. These slaves were chiefly procured from the lands to the northward, and very few, if any of them, were obtained in the country south of the Zambesi.