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BRISTOL ENTERPRISES

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surmises with which so many commentators have been tempted to surround it.

A number of independent historians, writing in the sixteenth century, give accounts of a voyage of discovery by Sebastian Cabot, the son of John. They obtained their facts, at first, second, or even third hand, from the utterances of the explorer himself. They are vague and mutually discrepant about the date, save that it was in the reign of Henry VII; but they do agree that Sebastian took two ships and sailed north-westwards into the Arctic ice in search of a route to Cathay, and that, having failed to find it, he turned southwards, coasted a great part of the American continent, and returned to England. They state, further, that he claimed to have discovered the Newfoundland cod fishery; but the credit of that, on much better evidence, is due to John Cabot in 1497. Of Sebastian Cabot's voyage it may be remarked that its commander (if he spoke the truth, and if he was correctly reported) was aware of the true nature of the opposite continent, and was looking for the North-West Passage. A fair inference is, therefore, that the undertaking was of later date than the second voyage of John Cabot.

There is no trace of any other voyages by the Cabots under Henry VII, although it has recently been discovered that Sebastian was still living at Bristol in 1505, when he was granted an annuity of £10 for good service.1 Before that date other hands had taken up the work. In March 1501 the King issued a patent to three Bristol merchants named Richard Ward, Thomas Ashehurst and John Thomas, and three natives (described as squires) of the Azores, João and Francisco Fernandes and João Gonsalves. The document conferred elaborate rights of discovery, colonisation and monopoly of trade, and apparently contemplated the establishment of a commercial factory somewhere in the north-west. The three Bristol men are all traceable in the customs records as doing regular business with Spain and Portugal, and as early as 1493 there is an entry showing a "Johannes ffornandus" exporting goods from Bristol to Lisbon. By other evidence it is known that João Fernandes had obtained a grant from the King of Portugal in 1499 to make discoveries in the north-west. There are scanty but conclusive indications that the Bristol syndicate sent out expeditions in 1501 and 1502, and that in the latter year three captured Eskimos were brought to England. Then, in December 1502 the King cancelled the existing patent and issued a new one to three of the former syndicate, Thomas Ashehurst, João Gonsalves and Francisco Fernandes, and to one new member, Hugh Elyot. More voyages followed in 1503, 1504 and 1505, after which the enterprise drops completely out of view. The only clue to the nature of the expeditions is that they went to "the new found lands", and 1 Newton, A. P., “An Early Grant to Sebastian Cabot”, E.H.R. xxxvii, 564–5. * Exchequer (Customs), E. 122, 20/9.

that one of them was organised, if not accompanied, by Hugh Elyot and Robert Thorne the elder, a man who was in other matters an ally of Elyot's, although his name does not appear in the patent. The enterprise was at one time promising, as is shown by royal gratuities to some of the voyagers and by the grant of £10 pensions to Gonsalves and Francisco Fernandes. The probable motives were fishing and fur-trading and the search for the North-West Passage. But the end was failure, and the last joint trace of the parties occurs in a Chancery suit wherein "Fraunces Fernandus Esquier" complains that he is imprisoned by Hugh Elyot for a debt of £100.1 Henry VII, although favourably inclined, had not spent £300 from first to last upon the whole of the exploring projects of his reign. A comparison of this petty sum with the cost of a court function or a single campaign in contemporary warfare reveals the value which the King set upon western discovery.

Under Henry VIII there were sporadic attempts, in which the King showed more marked initiative than his father had done, to pursue the north-western discovery, and there was also a serious. promotion of trade with Guinea and Brazil by merchants of Plymouth, Southampton and London, those western men whose significance has already been noted. The first project of discovery belongs to the years 1516-17, when Sebastian Cabot and an English captain named Thomas Spert are said to have failed in a voyage intended for Newfoundland. This rests on the authority of Richard Eden, who wrote some forty years later. Apart from his statement, there is no evidence that either Spert or Cabot was engaged in the venture, but a document recently discovered shows that there was a voyage set forth in 1517 by John Rastell and others, whose ships got no farther west than Waterford.2 In 1521 Henry himself evolved a plan for the north-west, but he relied upon the merchants to provide most of the capital required. Those of Bristol professed willingness, but the Livery Companies of London virtually refused, alleging want of faith in Sebastian Cabot, the commander designated by the King. It does not appear that any ships actually sailed. Four years later an Italian captain, Paolo Centurioni, came to London to discuss an expedition, but died there before anything had been done. In 1527 there was an indubitable voyage, seemingly at the King's expense. John Rut, a shipmaster of the Royal Navy, sailed in May of that year with two ships. He pushed up the Labrador coast to 53° N. where one of the vessels was lost in a storm. With the other, Rut went south to Newfoundland, whence he sent a letter home by a fishing boat, and then he coasted North America until he came down to the West Indies. He touched at Porto Rico and San Domingo, and thence sailed home to England. This is the first recorded intrusion of an English ship in 1 Early Chancery Proc., Bundle 135, no. 76 (no date). 2 See Reed, A. W., in Mariner's Mirror, IX, 137-47.

THE NEWFOUNDLAND FISHERY

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son of

the Caribbean. In the same year Robert Thorne the younger, the Thorne already mentioned, wrote an address to the King on the subject of a northern passage to Asia. Thorne was a merchant doing business with Spain and Portugal, and he was eloquent upon the profits the discovery would yield. His idea was that a passage would be practicable over the Pole itself, and that the icebound area would be found negligibly small. His writing has been generally considered as the inspiration of Rut's voyage, but it is to be remarked that Rut did not follow the course Thorne recommended. Two more items close the list of exploring projects under Henry VIII. In 1536 one Hore led an expedition to Cape Breton. Although he lost many men by hunger he discovered nothing new, and did not penetrate beyond the waters known to the fishermen. Lastly, in 1541, the Privy Council was said to be planning northern discoveries, but no action is known to have followed its deliberations.

The abundance of cod upon the banks of Newfoundland had been reported by John Cabot in 1497, and the fishery was being actively exploited shortly afterwards. The Bristol syndicates of 1501-5 may have sent out fishing vessels, but apart from this there is no evidence of Englishmen regularly frequenting Newfoundland until the latter part of Henry VIII's reign. The Portuguese, on the other hand, were at work in the early years of the sixteenth century, and the French were not long behind them. Rut found Normans, Bretons and Portuguese fishing in 1527, but the first clear reference to an English participation occurs in an Act of Parliament of 1541. This, however, makes it probable that the industry was well established by that date. Such, in outline, was the English contribution to the oceanic discoveries of the great age. It was not a very brilliant effort, and, had it stood alone, might have made no great difference to the course of the country's development. But England, in common with the rest of Europe, experienced the reactions set up by the overseas enterprise of Spain and Portugal, and some appraisement of their efforts is necessary. To the imagination of mankind the impulse was very powerful, and it came at a time when mental energy was being generated by the advance of other branches of knowledge. The peoples of Europe were losing sight of the ideal of Christendom as a single entity and were beginning instead to respond to the urgings of national self-consciousness. When, therefore, the first discoveries were made, not only did they become subjects of eager speculation wherever men of wide outlook congregated, but also they promoted the growing tendency towards national development. Vast areas presented themselves in the early sixteenth century for exploitation by the ambitious, and almost as a matter of course it was decided that the exploitation must be on strictly national lines. It should not be forgotten, however, that another solution of the problem was imaginable, and that in the era of the Crusades the Powers of Christendom

would probably have made some attempt to approach the unknown by an effort of general European organisation. However, the age of discovery coming when it did, the channel into which the quickened imagination of the time directed the energy of Europeans was that of national expansion into other continents. The discoveries did not beget nationalism, but they did accelerate its growth, intensifying national animosities, and stifling, down to our own time, any hope of a European unity like that of the Roman Empire or the medieval Church.

As the era of oceanic competition set in, it confirmed another process which was independently beginning, the decline of the Mediterranean as the focus of Christendom. Italian prosperity was already threatened by the advance of the Turk, which interrupted the ancient lines of communication between Europe and the civilised East. Intercourse with the East was by this time a necessity of life to Europe, and had there been no alternative route there must have been a mighty effort to roll back the tide of Muslim conquest-a new Crusade, economic as well as religious in its motives, resulting, if successful, in the preservation of Italian supremacy in the arts of life and in the reconstruction of some form of pan-European authority. But the alternative presented itself, the heroism and will-power of Europe sought the oceans, and the Mediterranean and its culture declined. A concrete illustration of the process finds expression in an English Act of Parliament,1 attributing the decay of Southampton to the fact that "the King of Portugal took the trade of spices from the Venetians at Calicut," since when, "few or no carracks, galleys nor other ships have repaired unto our said town, nor be like to repair hereafter"; for Southampton's function in the old economy was to be an outpost of the Mediterranean, a distributing-point for the Asiatic goods obtained by the Italians in the Levant.

The Portuguese handled the wealth of Africa and the East in a different fashion. They made Antwerp the staple for distribution over northern Europe, and the city, already prospering by reason of its geographical position, enjoyed its most splendid period in the sixty years preceding the revolt of the Netherlands against Alva and Philip II. Thereafter London and Amsterdam shared its spoils and those of its Portuguese feeders, but the commercial headship of Europe had left Venice and Genoa and their neighbours for ever.

Spanish treasure from the West in like fashion stimulated the enterprise of the Netherlands and Germany rather than that of Italy. Charles V was Holy Roman Emperor as well as King of Spain, and the effect of the connection in piling up the fortunes of German financial houses was remarkable. The Fuggers and the Welsers of Augsburg, the outstanding examples, had founded their position under the conditions of medieval trade. But they were able to

1 22 Hen. VIII, c. 20.

POLICY OF HENRY VII AND HENRY VIII

31 change with the times. They had sufficient capital to finance the Emperor's wars and so to secure from him concessions whereby they accumulated a great deal more. They exploited mining and other property all over Europe and Spanish America, skimmed the cream. from the treasure fleets, and vitalised business enterprises hitherto untouched. But the men who followed in their footsteps, at first feebly and doubtingly enough, were not the worn-out merchantnobles of Venice, but the western men of England, France and the Dutch Netherlands. English mining, for example, began to be scientific in the reign of Elizabeth, and drew its instruction from the Fuggers' men from Germany and its capital from London merchants who were profiting by the African and Caribbean trades. Mobile capital was foreshadowing its power.

It was in a world in which these new forces were stirring that Henry VIII succeeded to the English throne. The maritime development of the country owes as much to him as to his father, although the debt is of a different kind. He took a more active interest in discovery, but his efforts yielded virtually no result. He took a rather less active interest in trade, and so Henry VII's good work was not vigorously followed up; yet the damage was not considerable, for English trade was now healthy enough to stand by itself. But in another direction Henry VIII accomplished what Henry VII had only contemplated-he built a first-class fighting Navy and devised a naval administration which had no equal in Europe for a century to come. That, in the purely maritime sphere, is his contribution to the advance of England, and its success was in great measure due to his pursuit of a foreign policy far less cautious than that of his father. The naval side of the French wars also affected relations with the Hanseatic League. No sooner had the king's ships become a prominent factor in the national defence than the question of naval stores became vital. The Baltic was then the producing area of the hemp, pitch and spars so essential for wooden warships. The Hansa was in a position to cut off supplies, and therefore, although there were disagreements in time of peace, the approach of war modified Henry's attitude towards the League, with which at the end of his reign he was on cordial terms. In 1544-5 it sold him several warships of the largest size, including the famous Jesus of Lübeck. Thus the politics of the reign entailed a postponement of the inevitable day when England should shake herself free from the heaviest shackle upon her commercial autonomy.

Henry VII had seen that the predominance of the Hanseatic League was an obstacle to the growth of English commerce. By well-timed interference in the Wars of the Roses it had secured from the English Crown a privileged position as against all other foreign merchants, and it even paid lower customs duties than Englishmen themselves. These privileges were embodied in a treaty signed at

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