CHAPTER II

ENGLAND AND THE OPENING OF THE ATLANTIC

IN the long perspective of history the accession of the House of

Tudor is an event of cardinal importance. Contemporaries may hardly have understood it; to them the victory of Bosworth appeared as but the latest incident in the dreary succession of plots and revolutions which had filled the English record for a century past. But their posterity can discern that the event does mark a definite stage in the growth of the English nation. After Bosworth certain fibres of the corporate life were dead, or withered and doomed to die, whilst others found scope for more vigorous development, for ramification and penetration of new areas of activity. The feudal baronage had disappeared, slain by its own degeneracy and loss of public spirit. Serfdom also was virtually gone; the English were now free men, with so few exceptions that publicists could generally ignore them and after another century it could become a legal maxim that there were no bondmen in the realm. The Church, in its medieval capacity of a state within the State, owning much of the property and exercising a great part of the administration and legal jurisdiction of the country, was in decline. It had grown unpopular with men of material motives, and Lollardism, its spiritual enemy, was yet alive and lurking to attack it; its downfall awaited only the revival of the power of the Crown. That revival is one of the most apparent results of the revolution of 1485. It carried with it a growth of patriotic feeling, an increase of security and consequently of trade and wealth, and an ambition for maritime power as the most effective means of national defence. So was England equipped to take advantage of the accidents of her situation, of the mental awakening and material expansion which were now offering their benefits to all European peoples alike. Nothing is more probable than that, but for the turn in English politics, the Renaissance would have left us not stronger but weaker, as it left Italy and Germany, and that the favourable juncture for our growth into a great Power would have been lost. The success of the Tudor monarchy offered a practical field to the dreamer, action to discipline imagination, a material reward for the labours of the scholar and the projector. In no sphere is this so apparent as in that of the maritime adventurer.

At Henry VII's accession the foreign commerce of England displayed the same general features as in the reign of Edward III. The greater, or at least the richer, part of it was in the hands of foreigners

of the German Hansa and the Flemings to the eastward, and of the Italians and Spaniards towards the west and south. Of English merchants there were two classes, the incorporated traders of the

INCENTIVES TO EXPLORATION

23 Staple and the Merchant Adventurers working across the Straits of Dover and the North Sea, and the independent merchants trading with Ireland, Aquitaine, the Peninsula, and occasionally perhaps with the Atlantic islands, and at rare intervals pushing into the Mediterranean and the Levant. Some of these western or ocean men hailed from Bristol, the Devon towns and Southampton, but many belonged to London, which was common ground to both types of enterprise, a fact which had an influence upon the rapid commercial advance of the capital during the Tudor period. It may be said in general that the North Sea trades, handicapped though they were by foreign competition, were yet the most frequented, and produced the greater part of the country's commercial wealth; whilst the western trades were scantier and less lucrative, but were to be offered, with the advance of ocean discovery, an opportunity of greater expansion. The realisation of this potentiality was, however, delayed by political factors: the Anglo-Spanish amity of the first half of the Tudor period acted as a brake upon enterprise, and it was not until the progress of the Reformation had made England the enemy of the Peninsular powers that the more dazzling possibilities of the ocean revealed themselves. Then at last was seen the true contribution of the western adventurers to the national development. For they were the originators of almost all the oceanic undertakings of the Tudor period, and they were the fathers of the generation that founded the old colonial Empire. The present chapter has thus to relate a twofold story-the achievement of commercial autonomy in European waters, and the turning of English energies to more distant regions.

Early in the Tudor period England became involved in that movement towards geographical discovery which had already absorbed the energies of Portugal, but before tracing the record of her activities oversea, we may enquire why a country with so ancient a maritime tradition as ours was so backward, compared with Portugal and Spain, in pursuing it. For fifteenth-century Portugal, Africa was the land across the narrow seas, just as France was for England. Either country found an outlet for its surplus energies in oversea conquests, but whereas those of Portugal led to something further, those of England did not: the Hundred Years' War and the ensuing civil commotions provide a reason for the lack of English enterprise upon the ocean. Portugal, in addition, combined with the ordinary adventurous spirit a strong religious impulse. In the Peninsula and the Mediterranean the crusading idea was yet alive. By the fifteenth century the Muslim had long been cleared from Portugal itself, and in Spain he was on the decline; but in the Mediterranean his power was advancing. The virile and brutal Turk had succeeded the cultured Saracen. He had established himself on the soil of Europe, and in the course of the century had taken Constantinople and made himself a sea power, and was now reducing Venice to a state of dependence and threatening

to close the old Levant routes to the East. None could foretell where the Turkish advance would stop. Men whose ancestors had fought the infidel for generations were quick to take up the new challenge, and the Portuguese exploration of the African coast was largely inspired by the hope of converting the negroes to the faith and of finding a road to the Christian people vaguely known to exist in eastern Africa. Yet further lay (or was thought to lie) a similar inducement. Christian travellers in the thirteenth century had reported the Mongol princes of Asia as very complaisant towards their faith; and the hope had never entirely died of bringing Central Asia upon the backs of the Muslims of the Nearer East. This was remote enough from the immediate prospects of Portugal, yet in the general confusion of thought and lack of geographical knowledge it may have strengthened the will of the Portuguese to seek in African discovery a counterpoise to the Turkish power. Upon England, remote from the Turk, these considerations had but a faint effect.

Geographical position illuminates the question in yet another way. The geographical knowledge possessed by Greece and Rome had perished in western Europe amid the confusion of the Dark Ages. In the Eastern Empire it had survived and had been passed on to the Saracens who conquered Egypt and Syria. They, in the early Middle Ages, were far more highly instructed in all the sciences than were their European contemporaries. The Crusades brought Europeans of all countries into contact with the Saracens, but it was the friars and merchants of Italy rather than the fighting men of the north who reaped the intellectual benefit; and it is established that Italy supplied to Portugal the rudimentary knowledge of world geography which gave an edge to her crusading fervour. Italian cosmographers corresponded with Henry the Navigator, and Italian pilots bore their part in the early expeditions to the Atlantic islands and the African coast. Above all, Italy was the creator of the portolano, the handy pilot's chart by means of which a man could really profit by the discoveries of others and could record his own. Portolani were in common use among the Mediterranean seamen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but Chaucer's shipmaster could not have read one had he seen it. There was an immense difference between the potentialities of scientific navigation, however crude its instruments, and those of blundering by a sort of animal instinct along familiar sea tracks and coastlines. Here again, Portugal had the advantage of new methods from which the northern seamen were far remote.

Not only was England in the fifteenth century very poorly equipped with such world knowledge as existed, and not only had her overseas expansion taken a direction in which success would have been more injurious than failure, but in another matter also she was handicapped. The men of the Mediterranean, with Italians again as the pioneers, had evolved a commercial technique superior to that of the English,

THE CABOT VOYAGES

25

although not perhaps to that of the Flemings and Germans. England was wealthy in a way, but the wealth was not in mobile form. The merchant who wanted to withdraw his gains from adventure invested them in land, for banking facilities were unknown to him. Even late in the sixteenth century it proved difficult to raise capital for new undertakings; men reputed to be worth many thousands would subscribe no more than £50 or £100 to a project in which they had good faith; and it was not until the joint-stock company made its appearance in 1553 that a means existed whereby a large number of investors could combine their very small investments.

Nevertheless England did react, although feebly, to a historical law which has operated with fair constancy. Whenever a people has emerged from a successful war of liberation or consolidation-has become a nation in fact-it has tended to divert its energy to outward expansion. Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain and expelled the Moorish power; and at once they listened to Columbus. Henry VII replaced feudal anarchy by a strong government, and then he and his merchants glanced for a brief moment across the ocean.

John Cabot or Cabotto, a Genoese by birth and a naturalised Venetian, was living at Bristol early in 1496. It was not a town in which Italians ordinarily did much business; but it was already visited by Portuguese ships direct from Madeira and possibly from the Azores, and this may have helped to stimulate in its inhabitants that interest in ocean discovery which they undoubtedly felt.1 There is a record of Bristol ships having made fruitless voyages into the Atlantic before Cabot's time. Perhaps they were trying to find their way to the Azores, perhaps they were looking for something further; at least there was a stimulus of some kind. Cabot was there to preach a doctrine long familiar to speculative geographers—that the eastern shores of Asia must extend sufficiently far round the globe to be accessible to ships sailing westwards from Europe. The voyage, according to these thinkers, was practicable, and the inducement to attempt it was the spice trade, which Venice was losing by Turkish intolerance, and which Portugal had not yet gained by the success of Vasco da Gama. Reports of the earlier discoveries of Columbus had now come to hand, but it was obvious to commercial men that, however strongly he might assert that he had been in the islands of Asia, he had certainly not yet found the true spice islands or the civilised peoples of China and Japan. In March 1496 Cabot obtained from Henry VII a patent empowering him to search in the east, north or west for lands hitherto unvisited by Christians, and to enjoy a monopoly of any new trades so discovered. The Crown was to receive onefifth of the profits, but was to contribute nothing towards the expenses.

1

Ship from Madeira, P.R.O., Exchequer, E. 122, 20/5, Sept. 19 (customs ledger), 1485/6; for the Azores probability, the undoubted residence of Azoreans in Bristol (vide infra).

In the spring of 1497 John Cabot sailed from Bristol with a single small vessel, and at the beginning of August he was back in England with a report of the discovery of a new coast to the westward. No journal or map of the voyage has been preserved, and there are no details of latitude or longitude, so that it remains uncertain whether the land was Nova Scotia, Newfoundland or southern Labrader; but it must have been one of them, for it had a temperate summer climate, was not in an Arctic latitude, and was near enough to Europe for the whole voyage to be accomplished in three months. Cabot himself was convinced that he had reached the mainland of Asia in its northerly extension, and that with a better equipped expedition he could follow its coast westwards and southwards and so reach the profitable countries of China and Japan. The King and the merchants accepted his contention, and showed much enthusiasm for the completion of the discovery. Henry conferred upon Cabot a gratuity of £10 and an annual pension of £20. He paid also, according to a contemporary, the expense of fitting out one ship, although a second patent, issued in February 1498, makes no promise of pecuniary aid but merely permits Cabot to pursue his exploration with the assistance of the King's subjects.

On his second voyage Cabot sailed from Bristol in May 1498 with four or five ships freighted by merchants of London and Bristol, a few of whom had received loans from the Crown for that purpose. His expressed intention was to found a trading factory on the coast of Asia, and neither he nor anyone else had the least suspicion that the land already visited belonged to a continent distinct from Asia. In other words, there can be no possibility that he went to seek a northwest passage, which would pre-suppose an America to circumnavigate. This question is important, because there is no contemporary record of what actually happened on this voyage, and the rest of John Cabot's story is a matter of inference. All that is established is that he sailed and had not returned as late as October, but that probably, although not certainly, he came home at a subsequent date. It is, however, possible to say that the voyage was a disappointment-in contemporary eyes, a failure-for he found nothing of what he went to seek. The farther shores contained no Chinese cities, no wealthy Japanese with gold-roofed houses, no spice trade. If John Cabot made an extensive coastal voyage and came again to England, it was with the knowledge that the continent beyond the ocean was not the Asia described in gorgeous detail by Marco Polo two centuries before.

The above account of John Cabot's expeditions is based on good evidence, some of it the unimpeachable testimony of administrative documents, and the remainder contained in news letters written by observers in London at the time; and if the story appears meagre, the reason is that it has been rigorously divested of the cloud of