Willoughby and Chancellor Voyage (1553): England Reaches Russia

The Willoughby and Chancellor voyage of 1553 was England’s first attempt to find a Northeast Passage, a sea route to Asia around the north of Europe. Three ships sailed from London in May 1553 under Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor. Willoughby and the crews of two ships died during the Arctic winter, but Chancellor reached the White Sea and travelled to Moscow, opening direct trade between England and Russia.

Background

In the mid-16th century England’s economy depended heavily on exports of woollen cloth through Antwerp, and that trade was faltering. London merchants looked for new markets and for a share of the rich Asian trade then dominated by Portugal and Spain, whose routes to the east went south around Africa or west across the Atlantic and Pacific.

A northern route seemed to offer England its own path to China. The idea was promoted by the veteran navigator Sebastian Cabot, son of the explorer behind the first English voyage to North America, who had returned to England in 1548 after decades in Spanish service.

Between 1551 and 1553 a group of merchants and courtiers formed a company, often called the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, with Cabot as governor. Around 240 investors put up £25 each to fund the expedition, an early example of shared-risk joint-stock financing.

The expedition sets out

Three ships were fitted out, their hulls sheathed with lead against shipworm:

• the Bona Esperanza, about 120 tons, the flagship of Sir Hugh Willoughby, captain-general;
• the Edward Bonaventure, about 160 tons, with Richard Chancellor as pilot-general and Stephen Borough as master;
• the Bona Confidentia, about 90 tons.

Willoughby was a soldier with little sea experience, chosen for his standing and leadership. Chancellor, who had studied navigation and had been brought up in the household of the courtier Sir Henry Sidney, was the expedition’s principal navigator. Cabot drew up detailed ordinances on discipline, record-keeping and treatment of foreign peoples. The ships also carried letters from Edward VI addressed to any rulers they might meet.

The fleet set out from Ratcliffe, just below London, on 10 May 1553, saluting the court at Greenwich as it passed down the Thames; the young king lay there mortally ill. Contrary winds then held the ships at Harwich and on the English coast until late June. Edward VI died on 6 July, while the ships were still at sea.

Separation and disaster

After slow progress up the Norwegian coast, the ships were scattered by a storm near the Lofoten Islands at the end of July or early August 1553. The agreed meeting point was Vardø (then called Wardhouse), a Danish-Norwegian fortress near the North Cape.

Willoughby’s two ships missed the rendezvous. They wandered east into the Barents Sea, where his journal records sighting land that some have identified with Novaya Zemlya, though this is uncertain. As winter approached they turned back and, in mid-September, anchored at the mouth of the Varzina river (called Arzina in English accounts) on the bleak north coast of the Kola Peninsula, in Russian Lapland.

Willoughby sent out parties to look for inhabitants, but found none. The men never left. A will witnessed aboard in January 1554 shows that some were still alive then. In 1554 Russian fishermen found the two ships with all their crews, about 60 to 70 men, dead. Willoughby’s journal survived and was later published.

The cause of death is uncertain. Cold, scurvy and starvation are the traditional explanation. Some modern writers suggest the crews may have been poisoned by carbon monoxide from stoves burning in sealed cabins, but there is no direct proof.

Chancellor reaches Russia

Chancellor waited at Vardø for a week, then sailed on alone. In late August 1553 the Edward Bonaventure entered the White Sea and anchored in the bay of St Nicholas near the mouth of the Northern Dvina, close to the site of the modern city of Severodvinsk.

Local people told the English that the land was Russia, ruled by Ivan IV, who had been crowned tsar in 1547. Officials sent word to Moscow, and Chancellor was invited to the capital. He made the journey of more than 1,000 kilometres overland by sledge in the depth of winter.

In Moscow, Chancellor was received with great ceremony at the Kremlin. His account, preserved by Richard Hakluyt, describes the splendour of the court, the gold plate at the tsar’s banquet and the size of Moscow, which he judged larger than London with its suburbs, though more roughly built. Ivan, who was seeking allies and Western goods and wanted to bypass the Hanseatic and Livonian merchants who controlled Russia’s Baltic trade, gave Chancellor a letter dated February 1554 inviting English merchants to trade freely.

Chancellor returned to the White Sea and sailed home in 1554, arriving to find Mary I on the throne. His observations on Russian government, religion, trade and military power, written up with the help of the scholar Clement Adams, gave English readers one of their first first-hand descriptions of the country, which most Englishmen then knew only by rumour.

Consequences

Chancellor’s success transformed the company. On 26 February 1555 Mary I and her husband Philip granted a charter to the Muscovy Company, formally “the Merchants Adventurers of England for the discovery of lands, territories, isles, dominions and seignories unknown”. It was one of the earliest large English joint-stock companies.

Chancellor sailed again in 1555 and obtained generous trading privileges from Ivan IV. On the return voyage in 1556 he carried the first Russian envoy to England, Osip Nepeya. The Edward Bonaventure was wrecked in a storm in Pitsligo Bay on the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on 10 November 1556. Chancellor drowned, but Nepeya survived and reached London.

Willoughby’s two ships, recovered and manned by new crews, were lost on their way home in 1556 or 1557.

Legacy

The White Sea route linked England and Russia for decades. English merchants exported cloth and imported furs, wax, flax, hemp, tallow and cordage, vital materials for shipbuilding. Russia founded the port of Arkhangelsk near the Dvina mouth in 1584, partly to serve this trade.

The Muscovy Company also financed further exploration. Stephen Borough reached the region of Novaya Zemlya and Vaygach in 1556, and Anthony Jenkinson travelled through Russia to Bukhara in 1558–1559. Later attempts to find northern sea routes, such as the Arctic voyages of Martin Frobisher to the north-west, built on this experience.

The joint-stock model pioneered by the Muscovy Company was copied by later trading companies, including the East India Company, founded in 1600. The Northeast Passage itself was first navigated in full only in 1878–1879, by the Swedish expedition of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld.

Timeline

• 1553, 10 May: The three ships set out from Ratcliffe, near London.
• 1553, 6 July: Edward VI dies.
• 1553, late July–early August: A storm near the Lofoten Islands separates the fleet.
• 1553, late August: Chancellor anchors near the mouth of the Northern Dvina.
• 1553, mid-September: Willoughby’s ships anchor at the Varzina river on the Kola Peninsula.
• 1553–1554, winter: Chancellor is received by Ivan IV in Moscow; Willoughby and his men die.
• 1554: Chancellor returns to England; Russian fishermen find Willoughby’s ships.
• 1555, 26 February: The Muscovy Company receives its royal charter.
• 1556, 10 November: Chancellor drowns in the wreck of the Edward Bonaventure off Aberdeenshire.

Why it matters

The 1553 voyage failed to find a route to China but succeeded in something its backers had not planned: direct diplomatic and commercial ties between England and Russia. It produced one of the first great English joint-stock companies and launched a century of English Arctic exploration, at the cost of more than sixty lives.