1527.]

His Letter to Henry VIII.

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"It is my bounden duty," said the merchant, in bold satire, in his letter to the King, "to reveal this secret to your Grace, which hitherto, I suppose, hath been hid; which is, that with a small number of ships there may be discovered new lands and kingdoms, in the which, without doubt, your Grace shall win perpetual glory and your subjects infinite profit." As peace had just been made with France, Thorne urged that the present time was especially convenient for Henry to fulfil the natural desire and bounden duty of all wise monarchs in respect of increasing their dominions. "The world knows," he said, "that the desires of princes have been so fervent that, to obtain their purpose, they have in a manner turned the world up and down." But rarely had any prince such an easy opportunity of doing his share in turning the world up and down as was now offered to King Henry. The southern, eastern, and western quarters of the world were already occupied, and any interference with them must be attended with great bloodshed and great waste of treasure ; but the northern parts still waited for a possessor. They would certainly bring to their fortunate owner immense wealth and vast increase of power, and it was clear that, by the goodness of God, they had been reserved for England. If there had been failure in the previous undertakings, conducted by the Cabots, the experience of thirty years had suggested remedies. "Concerning the mariners, ships and provision, an order may be taken much better than heretofore: the labour is much less, the danger and the way shorter, to

us than to Spain and Portugal. Concerning the navigation, it is very clear and evident that the seas that commonly men say that, without very great danger, difficulty and peril, it is impossible to pass, those same seas be navigable, and without any such danger but that ships may pass, and have in them perpetual clearness of the day, without any darkness of the night; which thing is a great commodity for the navigants to see at all times round about, as well the safeguards as the dangers." In that region of perpetual daylight, about the North Pole, there would be ice and coldness, it was true; but Thorne urged that those obstacles would soon be overpassed, and then the voyagers would have open sea and temperate climate for all the rest of their way. Dangers and darkness had not hindered the Spaniards and Portuguese from discovering strange realms to their great advantage; and if Englishmen were deterred on these accounts, said the merchant, "it will seem your Grace's subjects to be without activity or courage, in leaving to do this glorious and noble enterprise."

Thorne proposed that an expedition should sail from England in a north-westerly direction till it reached the shores visited by John Cabot just thirty years before, and then proceed northwards till it had passed out of the icy region into the warmer climate which he believed to be in the neighbourhood of the North Pole. "Then," he proceeded, "it may be at the will and pleasure of the mariners to choose whether they will sail by the coasts that be cold, temperate, or hot. If they will go towards the orient, they shall enjoy the regions of all

1527.]

for Arctic Voyaging.

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the Tartarians that extend towards the mid-day, and from thence they may go and proceed towards the land of the Chinese, and from thence to the land of Cathay Oriental; and if from thence they do continue their navigation, following the coast that returns towards the occident, they shall fall in Malacca and so in all the Indies we call Oriental; and following that way they may return hither by the Cape of Good Hope, and thus they shall compass the whole world. And if they shall take their course, after they be passed the Pole, towards the occident, they shall go in the back-side and south seas of the Indies Occidental, and so they may return through the Straits of Magellan to this country, and so compass the world that way. And if they go right towards the Pole Antarctic, and then decline towards the lands and islands situated between the Tropics and under the Equinoctial, without doubt they shall find there the richest lands and islands in the world, of gold, precious stones, balms, spices, and other things that we here most esteem." Thus by each of the three routes which it was possible to take-the three routes which Thorne was the first to describe and which all later Arctic voyagers have attempted to follow or to improve upon only in detail-sure success was promised. "By this it appeareth," said Thorne in the conclusion of his argument," that your Grace shall have not only a great advantage of riches, but also your subjects shall not travel half of the way that others do which go round about as aforesaid."*

*HAKLUYT, Divers Voyages, pp. 212-219.

These fair promises-broken a hundred times as generation after generation of Arctic adventurers was tempted by them to embark upon an enterprise whose history is without a parallel for its constant course of failure and for the excellent benefit that resulted, in spite of and even in consequence of the failure, to the English character for pluck and perseverance-were broken for the first time in the very year in which they were uttered. Henry VIII. listened to them, and in the summer of 1527 sent out "two fair ships, having in them divers cunning men, to seek strange regions;" and among the cunning men was a Canon of Saint Paul's, "a wealthy man and a great mathematician," whose name has not come down to us. The ships were the Mary of Guildford, of which John Rut was captain, and the Sampson. They left Plymouth on the 10th of June, and sailed bravely up to old John Cabot's New-foundland, which they reached on the 21st of July. Thence they proceeded a little further north; but they soon lost heart. "We found many great islands of ice and deep water," as Captain Rut said in a letter to Cardinal Wolsey, "but we found no sounding, and then we durst go no further to the northward for fear of more ice." While seeking for some place of safety, the ships were parted by a storm, and the Sampson was never heard of afterwards. The Mary of Guildford sought her for ten days, and then her mariners, believing that she was wrecked, and fearing that they also would be lost if they waited any longer in the region of ice, turned back and put into a harbour of the New-found-land, and

1527-1536.] The Voyage of Master Hore.

87

thence, after making some further search for their missing comrades, came back to England in October.*

That, as far as we know, was the last experiment in Arctic voyaging made by Henry VIII. Of the private enterprises conducted during his reign very little is recorded. There is only one about which any details at all have come down to us, and many of these details are hardly credible. The chief promoter of this expedition was one Master Hore, of London, a lawyer who dabbled in cosmography, and, with more zeal than wisdom, sought to emulate the projects of the Cabots. In 1536 he so far interested others in his views that, with the assistance of several gentlemen of the Inns of Court and other people of substance, and with King Henry's sanction, he managed to leave Gravesend at the end of April in charge of two ships, the Trinity, of 140 tons burthen, and the Minion, which was somewhat smaller. His crew comprised thirty gentlemen "of good worship," and seventy persons of meaner sort. This company sailed westward, with a curve to the south, and after two months' voyaging, touched land for the first time near Cape Breton Isle. Passing thence towards the north-east they arrived at an island which they called the Isle of Penguins, because it was well stocked with great fowls, apparently our Newfoundland, which earlier voyagers, delighted with its store of fish, had called the Isle of Cod or Baccalaos, and different

* PURCHAS, His Pilgrims, vol. iii., p. 809; HAKLUYT, Voyages (copying from Hall and Grafton), vol. iii., p. 129. The accounts are contradictory and both extremely meagre.