On March 10 they arrived at Rio das Palmas on the Grain Coast. Going on from thence to the River of Sestos they heard news of six French ships on the coast, and decided at once to make for the Mina region lest the French should spoil their trade. Picking up some ivory on the way, they reached Hanta on the Gold Coast on March 31. Next day five Portuguese ships were sighted, but no action took place till after dark, each side cautiously manœuvring to get to windward of the other. In the night Towerson in the Minion, having got the wind of the Portuguese admiral, fought with him for about two hours, shooting him several times through the hull, while the Portuguese were only able to fire into the Minion’s rigging. After this the Portuguese sheered off and attacked the Christopher without doing much damage. Next morning the enemy were nowhere to be seen; it was decided to seek for and fight them before continuing to trade, but after two days’ fruitless search the plan was given up and the squadron returned to the coast.

Here they heard that some French ships were in the vicinity, and, England and France being now at war, decided to attack them. On April 5 they saw three Frenchmen and gave chase. They were successful in capturing one of 120 tons, the Mulet de Batuille, and in her 50 lb. 5 oz. of gold. Arriving at Egrand, the easternmost place on the Gold Coast, they found the French prize to be leaky, and were obliged to spoil and sink her. Towerson now proposed to go on to Benin, but the majority of the company refused. The fleet then separated to trade at various places on the coast, agreeing to rally on the Minion if attacked. At this time the men began to be sickly, and six died. Having sold all her cloth at Egrand the Minion sailed westwards on May 10, picking up the Christopher and the Tiger on the way. Both reported little trade, and the negroes in general seemed hostile and suspicious. For another six weeks they continued on the coast, trading at some places and being repulsed at others, until victuals began to run short. The crews of the Tiger and the Christopher were willing to attack the Portuguese ships at Mina and so supply themselves, but the Minion’s men would not consent for fear of hanging when they should reach home. At Samma the natives refused to supply either gold or food, having made an agreement with the Portuguese, and the English therefore burned the town. Next day, June 25, they set sail for England.

Great difficulty was experienced in getting away from the coast. Six days after sailing they again sighted land and found themselves 18 leagues to leeward of the place they had started from, owing to the extraordinary strength of the current. It was now decided to head southwards as far as the equator before attempting to beat to the westwards, and on July 7 they arrived at the Island of St. Thomé. A stay of nearly a month was made at this island before, on August 3, a fresh start was made and the homeward passage was begun in earnest. The shortage of victuals became more serious, and on the advice of a Scot, taken prisoner in the French ship, they called at the Isle of Salt, one of the Cape Verde group. They obtained a few goats and a quantity of fish and sea-birds. The Scot went ashore on the island and was not seen again: it was supposed that the inhabitants found him asleep and carried him off. On August 24 the master of the Tiger reported his ship leaky and his men too weak to keep her afloat. There were now only thirty sound men in the whole fleet. A fortnight later the Tiger had to be abandoned in mid-ocean, in latitude 25° N. Still the long voyage was protracted, and the latitude of Cape St. Vincent was not reached until October 6. The Christopher being now very weak, it was agreed to put into Vigo and send for more men from England. But a fair wind sprang up, and Towerson decided to make one more effort to reach home, fearing that, once in Vigo, the treasure would never be allowed to go out again. Two guns were fired to warn the Christopher, and the Minion sailed on. The Christopher appeared to be following, but, the next morning being foggy, they lost sight of her. Towerson mentions that he concluded at the time that she had either outsailed them or gone back to Vigo, but he strangely omits to state which supposition turned out to be correct, and we are left quite in the dark as to the Christopher’s fate. At the time they parted company there were only twelve men in health in the two ships. After losing most of her sails in a great south-westerly gale, the men being too weak to handle them, the Minion arrived at the Isle of Wight on October 20, 1558.

The total amount of gold and ivory obtained on this voyage cannot be stated owing to want of clearness in the account, but it would appear that it was not nearly such a successful venture as the previous ones, although more capital was involved. The truth was that, between the French and the English, the Guinea trade had been somewhat overdone, and the huge profits of the first adventurers could not be expected to continue. The Portuguese had hitherto restricted their own trade on the coast for this very reason, but now the negroes were becoming spoiled and inclined to play off one competitor against the other. One new thing was certainly revealed by these voyages, and that was that the Portuguese were impotent to make good their boasted monopoly. A simple process of reasoning led Englishmen to ask if the Spaniards were in the same case; and it was not long before an affirmative answer was to be supplied by Hawkins and Drake.

CHAPTER XII
THE NORTH-EAST PASSAGE AND THE WHITE SEA

Shortly after the death of Henry VIII there reappeared in England that mysterious and elusive figure which has so often flitted across the page of this history—Sebastian Cabot. Although he had passed thirty-five years in the service of Spain, had received high pay and honour, had been appointed to the command of an important expedition, and had been forgiven for his mistakes and incapacity on his return, he was never really content, and was for ever ready to plot and intrigue that he might skip from the service of one master to that of another. But Sebastian Cabot was not the subtle and calculating villain that he has often been painted. The key to his unending restlessness was nothing more nor less than an egregious vanity, a never-satisfied desire to be praised, looked up to, consulted, a morbid fear that he was falling in the esteem of his fellows. Hence his offers to betray secrets which he never possessed, his boasts of exclusive knowledge in astronomy and navigation which he never revealed, and his tacit acquiescence in the attribution to him by contemporary historians of the honour of being the original discoverer of North America. Yet with all his hollowness he was a useful man: he probably knew as much of the scientific side of navigation and geography as any man living, although he professed to know much more; and in the course of his long career he could not have failed to acquire a very perfect knowledge of the details of Spanish methods of exploration and discovery.

For some ten years at least he had been contemplating the re-transference of his services to England. In November 1538 he approached Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry VIII’s envoy in Spain, with a request to be recommended to the king. Wyatt’s memorandum runs: ‘To remember Sebastian Cabote. He hath here but 300 ducats a year, and he is desirous, if he might not serve the King, at least to see him, as his old master.’ This touching manifestation of affection failed of its effect. Henry showed no inclination to outbid the emperor for Cabot’s expensive talents, and no more is heard of the intrigue until 1547. On October 9 of that year, some eight months after the accession of Edward VI, the Council made out a warrant for £100 ‘for transporting one Shabot a pilot to come out of Hispain to serve and inhabit in England’.[[288]] The sum was far too large for the expense of the journey alone; possibly some bribery was needed to get Cabot out of the country. The affair was still not cleared up nearly two years later when an entry occurs relative to this same sum of £100, the warrant for which was to be ‘taken up by exchange’ by Henry Ostrich, a member of a business house which had dealings in Spain.

The date of Cabot’s flight can only be approximately stated. It almost certainly took place in the summer or autumn of 1548. On the 6th of January of the following year King Edward, or rather the Protector Somerset, granted him an annual pension of £166 13s. 4d., payable quarterly, the first instalment to date from Michaelmas, 1548; which date was doubtless near the commencement of his service in England.[[289]] Cabot had probably given out that he had travelled to England on private business. He certainly made no resignation of his office of Pilot Major of Spain. Consequently more than a year elapsed before the emperor troubled to ask for his return. In November 1549 Sir Philip Hoby wrote from Brussels that the emperor had expressed a desire for Cabot to be sent back. Five months later the Council replied that they were not detaining him in England, but that he refused of his own accord to leave; and that as he was an English subject they could not compel him. With this the matter dropped. Cabot was frequently described by writers of the latter half of the sixteenth century as an Englishman by birth, although there is little doubt that he first saw the light in Venice. He himself lied freely on the point as occasion demanded, and at this period it was obviously to his interest to pose as an Englishman.

His position and occupations in England at this time are obscure. Hakluyt states that he was ‘Grand Pilot’ of England, but there is no other evidence that such an office then officially existed. The adventurers of the Council doubtless entertained schemes of diverting some of the wealth of the new worlds into the coffers of their own State. The long stagnation of the English mind on such subjects was at last breaking up, as many contemporary events indicate; and mid-century England was virgin ground for the boastings and mystifications of the old intriguer, who revelled in the impression he produced on the unsophisticated islanders. The esteem in which he was held is proved by several passages in Eden and Hakluyt. But the only project, prior to that of the north-east voyage to Cathay, of which even a hint survives, is that referred to in a letter from Cabot to Charles V, informing him of a design of the Duke of Northumberland to fit out an expedition to Peru in co-operation with the French.[[290]] Needless to say, the scheme was never put into execution. Cabot was simply amusing his credulous hosts while at the same time ingratiating himself with the emperor by betraying them. It almost looks as if he had in view at this time yet another change of employers. His one real achievement during his declining years did not take shape until the last year of Edward’s reign.

The general progress of discovery and the growth of English manufactures led to the project of finding a passage to Cathay by the north-east. Theoretically there were four ways of reaching from Europe the shores of eastern Asia, which were still regarded as the most desirable mercantile goal in the world. The most practicable route, via the Cape of Good Hope, had been discovered and monopolized by the Portuguese, and no ship of any other nationality had yet traversed it. The Spaniards had opened up the corresponding western voyage through the Straits of Magellan or South-West Passage, although they did not use it to anything like the same extent, preferring to reach the Pacific by transhipment across the isthmus of Panama. Frequent attempts, English for the most part, had ended in nothing but discouragement for those who dreamed of a North-West Passage through the ice-strewn gate of Davis Straits. The fourth method only then, through ‘the north east frostie seas’, remained to be tried. Few practical men could at this stage have put any trust in the facile theory of Robert Thorne that it was possible to sail due north over the Pole itself. But the coast-line of northern Russia and Siberia was entirely unexplored, and, on the principle of omne ignotum pro magnifico, it seemed to offer a glorious solution of the great problem. Some expansion of the field of England’s commerce was imperatively needed, for the old European markets were now being exploited to the fullest possible extent, and the increasing luxury of living, coupled with the industrial unrest due to the transformation of the land system, rendered an extension of oversea trade essential to the salvation of the country. The new England of the Renaissance, seething with restless energies which waited to take shape and direction, was incapable of living in a state of economic isolation from the rest of the world.