Three weeks later, in a happier encounter, Frobisher and Lok met the commissioners of the venture at Muscovy House to receive the final judgement on the ore. It was held to be valuable.37 This test was key; the numbers were everything. The ore had produced grains of silver that suggested a ton of it would make £23 and 15 shillings. Taking into account the costs of transporting the ore back to England, for every £8 spent on the venture, each investor would receive £5 more. So the effort was worth it. The commissioners made their report to the queen’s Privy Council, and the council approved the third voyage whose purpose was to exploit ‘the great riches of the mines of gold found in the new countries’.38
A couple of years later, Michael Lok wrote of how Frobisher had carried himself before that third voyage:
And now Captain Frobisher having the thing that he so much hunted for, grew into such a monstrous mind, that the whole kingdom could not contain it, but as already by discovery of a new world, he was become another Columbus, so also now by conquest of a new world he would become another Cortes.39
These were the sentiments of a man then broken by hubris and stung by failure. The reality, as both Michael Lok and Martin Frobisher would soon discover, was that the riches of Baffin Island fell a very long way short of those of Spanish Mexico.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Master Lok’s Disgrace
In the spring of 1578 the confidence of Frobisher’s investors was at its peak. Michael Lok’s accounts read like a Who’s Who of the political and mercantile elite: privy councillors, earls, countesses, barons, knights, esquires, a royal customs officer, London mercers, skinners and haberdashers. Queen Elizabeth committed a further £1,350 of her own fortune, and Sir Francis Walsingham, her secretary, was the most ambitious investor of the council. One of the great men of mercantile London, Sir Lionel Duckett, was a venturer. Of even greater standing than Duckett was Sir Thomas Gresham, who invested as much in the voyage as Walsingham. Other smaller investors were experienced hands in trade and exploration like Anthony Jenkinson and John Dee. Michael Lok continued to pour into the venture huge sums of his own money. Indeed, the whole of Lok’s extended family bought into the enterprise.1
More now than simply a voyage to the other side of the world, this third expedition was really planned as a mining operation for which a colony would have to be established. Three ships – Judith, Gabriel and Michael – carried with them food, drink, weapons, ammunition and tools, and, for worship and edification, bibles, books of common prayer and twenty-four catechisms.2 The whole business was taken very seriously indeed, and Lord Burghley himself amended early instructions for the voyage. The objective was clear: 800 tons of precious ore would be brought into the River Thames and unloaded near London.3
Frobisher’s celebrity was thus secure. He was a hero, lauded by the poet Abraham Fleming as a new Ulysses ‘in skill and martial might’, a voyager ‘through brackish seas’ who had returned home with riches: ‘The golden fleece (like Jason) hath he got.’4 Complementing this overblown verse was Frobisher’s portrait, painted by Cornelis Ketel a little over a year earlier. In golden doublet and hose, Frobisher stands ready for action with a pistol in hand and his rapier in its scabbard, strident and aggressive, though just a little distracted, perhaps with his eyes on the islands of the north. Ketel set up the picture to suggest activity and purpose: a bosun’s whistle marks Frobisher’s command at sea, a globe on the table behind his right arm makes the viewer mindful of the greater ambition. Here was a man of steady purpose – and most certainly not a man to be crossed without consequences.5
For some months the venture appeared to be going smoothly. After some hair-raising moments of danger at sea, Frobisher was back in England in September 1578. He went first to see Elizabeth at Richmond Palace, and then travelled to London. Frobisher’s reputation shone in glory. His admirer and publicist Thomas Churchyard rushed to his printer in London and added a few lines of verse to a book already in press:
O Frobisher, thy bruit [reputation] and name
shall be enrolled in books,
That whosoever after comes,
and on thy labour looks
Shall muse and marvel at thine acts,
and greatness of thy mind.6
It was Michael Lok who saw to the practicalities of smelting and refining the ore, lodging at the Bull inn in Dartford in Kent. Meanwhile four Saxon metallurgists worked nearby under the supervision of Jonas Schutz and Humphrey Cole.7
But progress was slow – so slow, in fact, that by November Lok’s ingeniously built house of cards began to look precarious. No success in the smelting at Dartford meant that the main investors withheld the money they had promised. Without the money, Lok could not pay the sailors’ wages. Petitioned daily by the mariners, Lok returned to London. Then he went to Elizabeth’s court to persuade the ‘venturers’ to pay their money. Only two would do so, one of whom (improbably, given her iron grip on money) was the queen herself. By this time Frobisher himself was, according to Lok, ‘utterly destitute of money’, and on the third Thursday in November he came to London and practically stormed Lok’s house ‘in great rage and fury’, making serious allegations of corruption and false accounting, calling Lok ‘a bankrupt knave’, and swearing by God’s blood to pull him out of his house by the ears. It was in fact a mild enough threat by Frobisher’s standards, but Lok thought his sometime partner and protégé either drunk or mad. Lok later wrote: ‘And so Captain Frobisher departed, and proclaimed all these slanders against him [that is, Lok], in the [royal] court, and in the Royal Exchange, and everywhere in London and other places where he came.’8
For Lok, the rumour and innuendo was worse than any physical assault. There began a slow breaking down of his reputation in London and at court. Within two days the queen’s Privy Council knew that something was awry. At first they gave Lok the benefit of the doubt. Knowing the mariners and miners of the Frobisher voyages were complaining that Lok had not paid them, their lordships, though sure of his ‘honest dealing . . . in that behalf’, merely wanted to know the facts of what lay behind the complainants’ ‘clamorous disposition’.9 In what was surely the most discomfiting interview of his life, Lok appeared before the council to explain how he had handled the investors’ money, facing at the council table a number of those very investors. Whatever he said, it was not enough. The council was unconvinced that Lok’s sums added up, and auditors were called in to check his accounts.10
Lok later described the depression and acrimony in the workshops in Dartford in the months that followed, too neatly distancing himself from any responsibility for the mess by casting Frobisher as a kind of pantomine villain, playing, as Lok put it, ‘his part of general misrule’, continually pressing Jonas Schutz for a piece of refined gold that he could present to the queen as a new year’s gift, desperate for his knighthood. It was a sorry picture of ambition thwarted. No part of the operation was left unexamined by the auditors appointed by the council, and they were beginning, with ‘much enquiry’, to wonder why Schutz and his team were failing to produce precious metals.11
Perhaps more alchemy than metallurgy, buoyed up by inflated hopes and pushed and pulled by Frobisher’s ego and Lok’s misplaced optimism, the few grains of silver that Schutz had found in spring 1578 could not be turned into the huge quantities imagined by the adventurers. But the fact was that by now there were tons of worthless ore sitting in the workshops at Dartford. Investors had put tens of thousands of pounds into the venture, though what brought about its final collapse was the refusal of those investors (for very good reasons) to give up their latest commitment of money. There was something heroically hopeless in Lok’s efforts to persist for another couple of years in trying to make everything work, while his humiliation was deepened further by tangled accounts, audits, reports, petitions and explanations, allegations and counter-allegations, slanders and efforts (always unsuccessful) at saving face. A number of reputations – Michael Lok’s above all others – were ruined. Lok himself w
rote: ‘Great storms were raised in the court and in the city, both against Master Lok and against Jonas and the workmen.’12 There was no mention here of Martin Frobisher, the consummate survivor of storms both at sea and at court.
It all looks like a crazy speculation: a gold fever that addled the brains of courtiers and London merchants who should have known better. Their speculations were built, in turn, on the navigational fantasy of being able to sail easily and quickly to Cathay. But this was the reality of discovery. Travel was, in a familiar Elizabethan pun, travail: it was difficult, even deadly, in its seriousness. Frobisher and his men sailed tiny ships through ice and fog using navigational techniques that were at best experimental, and at worst deeply flawed. Easy as it is to smile at the notion of Frobisher being likened to Ulysses, those voyages were by any standards heroic. And the expeditions did bring back to England the features of a new world. What they produced by way of literary output, in books and pamphlets printed and read in London, was remarkable, counterbalancing – for us, though not at the time for Michael Lok – the losses of a spectacular misadventure.
And so, buried in the failure – though at first this was not at all obvious – was an achievement that could stand on its own feet: like those encounters with faraway places that a young Richard Hakluyt would have discovered in the bookshops of Paul’s Churchyard, there was in accounts of the Frobisher voyages a meeting of city, exploration, trade and literature. Elizabethan Londoners were able to continue to make sense of remote parts of the world. They were developing a feeling of purpose: part trade, part exploration for its own sake, part civilizing mission. Young gentlemen continued to volunteer for projects like Frobisher’s or Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s, in the hope of colonizing new lands.
The poet Thomas Churchyard celebrated this impulse in 1578, the year Gilbert obtained a new patent, a licence from the queen, for ‘planting’ America with a colony of settlers. Searching for inspiration, Churchyard sends his servant off into London to find news. The boy went, naturally, to where people talked in the city about the latest happenings:
My lackey had not walked in Paul’s
not twenty paces then,
But heard that sundry friends
of mine, had taken leave
At court, and were all shipped away.13
The draw of adventure was a powerful one for gentlemen who wanted to make their mark on the world. And the same thought had occurred to the London bookseller Thomas Hacket a decade earlier: true men left behind everything dear to them in order to seek out new lands. In two lines Churchyard expressed beautifully and tellingly a mixed bag of motives for exploration:
For country’s wealth, for private gain,
or glory seek we all.14
Was this trade? Certainly it was for London’s merchants who invested in new ventures and companies in Russia and Persia, the far eastern Mediterranean, Africa and later America and the East Indies. Was it the seeking out of knowledge? That was also what it represented for the younger Richard Hakluyt, driven by a sense of mission to discover the whole sphere of God’s creation. Was it to bring true Christianity to infidels? Churchyard most certainly embraced that motive: ‘the purpose of manifesting God’s mighty word and majesty among those that feed like monsters (and rather live like dogs than men)’.15
Two books about the Frobisher voyages stand out. One, by Thomas Ellis, ‘sailor, and one of the company’, was printed in the workshop of Thomas Dawson at the Three Cranes in the Vintry – the Thames wharf where for decades wine from France was brought ashore into London. The second pamphlet was by George Best, the son of the Muscovy Company’s first Russian translator Robert, and by 1578 a protégé of the influential Elizabethan courtier Sir Christopher Hatton.
Ellis’s account of Frobisher’s last voyage out to Meta Incognita was introduced by the kind of verse that spoke powerfully to literary London, full of exaggeration and conceit, and heavily encrusted with allusions to classical mythology: Frobisher was ‘A martial knight, adventurous, / whose valour great was such’ – Hercules, Perseus, Jason and Ulysses all rolled into one angry Elizabethan.16 But the book itself was in fact a narrative as spare and jagged as Ellis’s own line drawings of ‘great and monstrous’ pieces of ice they had found floating in the Arctic seas. Ellis articulates a self-conscious and doubtless deliberate stoicism in the face of danger and travail: ‘narrow straights, perilous ice, and swift tides, our time of abode there in snow, and storms, and our departure from thence . . . with dangerous blustering winds and tempests . . . was . . . uncomfortable’.17
George Best’s book about the Frobisher voyages was a manual of exploration and discovery. Best wanted his readers to find out how to discover new countries, to provision a voyage, to deal with strange peoples ‘be they never so barbarous, cruel and fierce’, and to navigate frozen seas and mountains of ice. New discovery was perilous for all kinds of reasons – from thieves and robbers, wild beasts, unsavoury meats, storms, mountains and darkness – but most of all (with here a nod to his father’s work for the Muscovy Company) because of ‘the ignorance of the language, the want of interpreters’. Trade was only on the edges of Best’s mind. What came first for him was the thrill of knowledge uncovered:
How pleasant and profitable it is, to attempt new discoveries, either for the sundry sights and shapes of strange beasts and fishes, the wonderful works of nature, the different manners and fashions of diverse nations, the sundry sorts of government, the sight of strange trees, fruit, fowls, and beasts, the infinite treasure of pearl, gold and silver, the news of new found lands, the sundry positions of the sphere, and many others.18
Incidental to George Best was what he called, three times in his book, ‘the supposed continent of America’. He, like everyone else, embraced Frobisher’s ambition to get to Asia. A crude but highly effective woodcut map in his book showed Arctic islands stamped all over with the names and ambitions of the voyages: Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland, Hatton’s Headland, Cape Walsingham, Lok’s Land, Countess of Sussex’s Mine, Cape Best (of course), Mount Oxford, and even, to the south of the island Frobisher had named West England, Charing Cross.19
We might imagine that the Frobisher debacle shook some sense into mercantile London and the keen investors of Elizabeth I’s court, that they would concentrate instead on returning to the old trade with Europe, which was still necessary in spite of war and rebellion in France and the Low Countries and England’s deteriorating relations with the kingdom and empire of Spain. Sensible and pragmatic Elizabethans would surely turn away from fantasist obsessions with faraway places that were impossible to get to. But the impulse to set out on improbable sea journeys became difficult to resist, all the more so with the return home in 1580 of Sir Francis Drake from his spectacular circumnavigation of the globe. Drake’s was an example of a certain kind of financial investment made by Elizabeth and her courtiers – privateering – that actually succeeded.
So much of all this moved in fits and starts: some successes, many failures; opportunities and possibilities embraced, others ignored. It was a great jumble of motives and factors. Certainly there was no long-term plan in Elizabeth’s reign for seaborne dominion or empire, no easy nineteenth-century narrative of England’s world dominance. But there was in Elizabethan London a spark of an ambition to do something – or at least a kind of vocabulary and set of assumptions more or less common to theorists and writers who thought about why it was important to sail off to far parts of the world and what they should do when they got there. What those things were Elizabethan writers articulated in words that would later cause robustly self-confident Victorians to prick up their ears. In 1578 George Best asked Sir Christopher Hatton ‘to behold the great industry of our present age, and the invincible minds of our English nation, who have never left any worthy thing unattempted, nor any part almost of the whole world unsearched’.20 Best really had his eye (like most others writing his kind of book) on Spain and Portugal: if those two global powers could dominate the south-eastern an
d south-western parts of the world, then it was up to England to discover and hold the north-east and north-west.
Only John Dee called it an empire, but few could hope to keep up with the complicated manoeuvrings of Dee’s mind in the later 1570s, years when he went to and from Elizabeth’s court carrying great piles of papers of abstruse scholarship and scrolls of evidence, all to prove the queen’s dominion over the northern seas and oceans. Dee was interested in Elizabeth’s claim to the north, fixing on the possibilities for trade and colonization, a ‘British Empire’, ‘the incomparable island of the whole world’.21 For Dee’s contemporaries, the ambition was as extravagant as his prose. And it was not a simple model of empire, but one with all kinds of permutations and subtleties that reflected the intricate mechanisms of Dee’s brain.
And so, while John Dee saw in his mind’s eye a great territory in northern oceans discovered and then colonized by England – calling that territory a British empire – pedestrian thinkers tended to run along more well-worn tracks of ambition. The Frobisher voyages did not squash the hope of Cathay. In fact the failure of Frobisher and Lok – or perhaps, more to the point, their brief sniff at success – may even have been the reason the Muscovy Company at long last, in 1580, put its corporate muscle behind another expedition to reach the court of the Great Khan. It went through all the familiar phases: the help of experts (this time Dee and the elder Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple), the endorsement of authorities (Gerard Mercator wrote that ‘The voyage to Cathay by the East, is doubtless very easy and short’), the gathering of resources, and the unforgiving reality of sailing into impenetrable north-eastern waters.22 A single entry in the voyage’s navigational log is especially revealing: ‘This day all the afternoon we sailed under a great land of ice, we sailed between the land and ice, being not able to cross it.’23 That entry was made in the harsh waters of the Kara Sea in late July; sailing along the top of Russia was now shown to be as futile as it was terrifying.
London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City Page 21
