With landfall denied and the Confidentia leaking badly, Willoughby decided to turn about and head back whence they had come. As they approached the shores of the Kola Peninsula, one storm after another battered the small vessels — “very evill weather, as frost, snow and haile, as though it had beene the deepe of winter.” The tired and dispirited Willoughby was simply unprepared to continue battling the hostile elements, and he set his sights on securing a safe anchorage in some sheltered harbor. This he found at Nokujeff Bay, a body of water surrounded by barren land, and here he dropped anchor.
Three scouting parties were sent in different directions to scour the area for signs of native settlements, but all to no avail; they returned “without finding of people, or any similitude of habitation.” Days shortened, bitter cold set in, and before long the thick snow of early winter blanketed the ships’ decks.
At the time the gallant little fleet had set out from London, three months earlier in the balm of England’s late summer, no thought had been given to the possibility of becoming ice-locked or of having to winter in the Arctic. Little did they know. The expedition’s chronicler drew a pathetic picture of what unfolded next:
… the days became shorter and shorter, and after 25th of November our voyagers saw no more of the sun even at mid-day. No one was aware of any means of guarding against the cold, and, indeed nothing had been brought for the purpose; for at that time they had no idea in England what a winter in Russia, or in the northern regions in general, was; moreover, the country surrounding Nokujeff Bay was quite bare of wood, so that at that spot were frozen to death, with Sir Hugh Willoughby, the strong crews of both vessels, consisting of sixty-five men. Most of them may have commenced their eternal sleep during the night of more than a month’s duration, from the 25th of November to the 29th of December. But from a signature of Willoughby, it is certain that he was still alive at the end of January, 1554.
Probably before his decease he was even several times rejoiced by a sight of the sun at mid-day; but what a sense of horror it shone upon! Two frozen-up vessels full of stiffened corpses, and only partly discernable through the snow which had drifted over them, towards which the looks of the remaining unhappy voyagers, now but half live, were involuntarily turned, as, hopeless, and deprived even of the comforts of religion, there were despairingly awaiting the same fate.[5]
In the early summer, Russian fishermen came across the two ghostly vessels, and they reported finding Sir Hugh “congealed and frozen to death,” sitting in his cabin making an entry into his journal. Others of the crew, seemingly like a tableau in a wax museum, were described as being frozen with plates in hand or spoons to the mouth, with one man standing opening his locker and “others in various postures like statues.”
Willoughby had elected to winter on board the frozen-in ships; Chancellor chose to establish quarters ashore. It is argued that had Willoughby wintered in snow houses within a protected space he might have survived, whereas others contend that Sir Hugh and his sixty-five companions were doomed from the start, whatever the shelter. As one historian has it, the expedition’s leader suffered from “want of skill and inconstancy of purpose that had led him into difficulties; want of adaptability made the difficulties fatal.” Chancellor’s chronicler concludes, with characteristic British understatement, “One must say they were men worth of a better fate.”[6]
Chancellor and the crew of the Edward Bonaventure fared better than their ill-fated companions on the sister ships. Archangelsk at the time had grown into a substantial Russian settlement, and on his arrival to the area the inhabitants, who were awed by the great size of the English ship, met him with curiosity, warmth, and above all, with reverence. Chancellor seized the moment and in a lordly fashion greeted the awed visitors warmly — taking “them up in all loving sort from the ground.” When news of the Englishman’s landing eventually reached Moscow, the exotic visitor was invited to visit the capital as an honoured guest, so great an impression he had created. Within a few weeks of coming ashore, Chancellor had subtly morphed from an unlucky mariner into a figure of highest consequence — His Majesty’s unofficial envoy to the court of Tsar Ivan IV, “The Terrible.”
On November 23, accompanied by two of the merchants voyaging with him, Chancellor set off by sleigh to Moscow, a distance of 625 miles. Twelve days later, he arrived at the capital and the small party was received by the tsar, who gave them a warm reception and graciously accepted the open letter — credentials, as it were — that Edward VI had supplied to each of the three ships, a message written in many languages:
We have permitted the honourable and brave Hugh Willoughby, and others of our faithful and dear servants who accompany him, to proceed to regions previously unknown, in order to seek such things as We stand in need of, as well as to take to them from our country such things as they require.[7]
Ivan was delighted with the Englishmen and with their opportune visit to his capital. Russia at the time had not yet extended its empire to the shores of the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea was firmly closed to Russian shipping for that “window to the West” was under the disputed control of two hostile powers: the Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Swedish Empire. The very presence in Moscow of the tsar’s distinguished and genial English guest, however, demonstrated that an open sea route to the west was available to Russia through the Arctic. Furthermore, the Muscovy Company gave every indication of being an ideal trading partner. Ivan was well pleased and he sent Chancellor back to England with promised trade privileges. Thus rooted a long history of Anglo–Russian trade and friendship.
Chancellor, alas, did not survive long enough to enjoy the fruits of his initiatives. In 1556, as a follow-up to his initial trip to Russia, he undertook a second such voyage, and accompanying him on the return home was the tsar’s first ambassador to England. It was a rough passage and as they neared the Scottish coast, an “outrageous tempest” struck the ship. The vessel was driven ashore and Chancellor, hauling the Russian onto a lifeboat, barely managed to escape the condemned ship. He successfully got the envoy ashore, but in the process the boat was swamped and he perished along with much of the crew.
Chancellor’s groundwork in Russia resulted in a period of intense activity for the Muscovy Trading Company and notable successes were achieved, particularly in the Arctic fur trade. These developments did not escape the covetous eyes of the Dutch, who within the decade formed the Dutch White Sea Trading Company, the purpose of which, as the name indicates, was to do business in that region. In 1565, the firm charged Oliver Brunel to establish a trading post at Archangelsk, and to develop his country’s presence in the Arctic. This resourceful and quick-witted individual wasted little time in getting on with it. Within months he had charmed his way into the local society and in the process mastered its language, thus enabling him to deal directly and more advantageously with the hunters. No small-time apparatchik was he — now a growing threat to the hitherto virtual trade monopoly enjoyed by the Muscovy Company. The enraged English managed craftily to persuade Archangelsk officials that the Dutchman was a spy, and the authorities reacted by arresting and imprisoning him. Brunel eventually gained parole, and exiting from jail he fell into the waiting arms of the enterprising Strogonoff family, a Russian merchant clique that eventually came to control Siberia’s entire fur industry — the country’s nineteenth-century Astors. Brunel mustered all his persuasive skills and convinced his benefactors to bypass the British by directing the fur trade of the greater White Sea area through the Dutch. A coup of no small significance.
Successful as he was in matters of trade, Brunel was driven by the burning ambition of laying bare the Northeast Passage, a cause that shaped his life for the following two decades. In those years under a succession of sponsors — the Strogonoffs, Dutch merchants, the Danish King, English fur barons — he undertook five expeditions into the Russian Arctic, one of which was by land to the Ob River in central Siberia, the first European to reach those parts. And then, on his final journey in 1584, he and his ship vanished mysteriously without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again — victim of the Arctic’s beguiling song.
Brunel’s early success on the White Sea, however, and his subsequent thrusts into the frozen east served to enflame further Dutch interest in the elusive eastern passage. The most renowned of the country’s ensuing explorers was “the prudent, skillful,