culations of advantage from accessible and well-understood sources which are its natural province. But the voyages of the Spaniards and Portuguese had disclosed to the dazzled imagination of mankind new worlds, and races of men before unknown; the owners of treasures, apparently unbounded, which they had neither power to defend, nor skill to extract from the earth. The spirit of commerce mingled with the passion for discovery, which was exalted by the grandeur of vast and unknown objects. A maritime chivalry arose, which equipped crusades for the settlement and conquest of the new world; professing to save the tribes of that immense region from eternal perdition, and somewhat disguising these expeditions of rapine and destruction under the illusions of military glory and religious fanaticism. Great noblemen, who would have recoiled with disgust from the small gains of honest industry, eagerly plunged into associations which held out wealth and empire in the train of splendid victory. The lord treasurer, the lord steward, the lord privy seal, and the lord high admiral were at the head of the first company formed for the trade of Russia on the discovery of that country. For nearly a century it became a prevalent passion among men of all ranks, including the highest, to become members of associations framed for the purposes of discovery, colonisation, and aggrandisement, which formed a species of subordinate republics, the vassals of the crown of England. By links like these the feudal world was gradually allied with the commercial, in a manner which civilised the landholder, and elevated the merchant. Among the various objects of maritime expedition, Robert Thorne, a merchant of London, who had long resided at Seville, suggested to Henry VIII. the facility of opening a trade to the Spice Islands and the eastern continent (in spite of the papal distribution of the world) by voyages through the polar seas, farther from Newfoundland to the westward, or round the continent of Scandinavia towards the

* Hakluyt, 304. First edition, 1589.

east. These bold projects were not clogged by too minutely accurate information. "The sea," said Thorne, 66 can only be dangerous from ice within two or three leagues of the pole."* The distance from England to

the Spice Islands by these untried courses would, by Thorne's calculations, be 2000 miles less than the voyage from the Spanish peninsula either westward or eastward. In the last year of the reign of Edward VI. Sir Hugh Willoughby was sent, with three ships, to discover a north-eastern passage to the Indian Seas, by exploring the northern coasts of Europe and Asia; which, though ascertained as far as the north-eastern point of Norway by Alfred, had been so totally covered with darkness that the maps of the sixteenth century were altogether disfigured. This small squadron conveyed nearly 100 mariners, eleven merchants, two surgeons, and one chaplain, besides officers. The issue of the expedition was disastrous. Nothing is known of the fate of Willoughby's own ship, but that the vessel and the frozen bodies of the company were found, in the following year, at the mouth of a river in Lapland; with a melancholy fragment of a manuscript journal, carrying the account of the progress of the voyage to the period of the determination to winter in that inclement region. Richard Chancellor, who commanded one of the ships, reached a solitary port on the White Sea, called St. Nicholas, since grown into the considerable town of Archangel; which he found to belong to a prince who at that time first assumed the title of czar of Muscovy. Ivan Vassilowich IV., who then ruled the Muscovite dominions, was a barbarian of vigorous faculties, who, in the midst of brutal vices and scarcely credible crimes, showed many symptoms of regarding with generous eyes the civilisation which he dimly saw rising beyond his western frontier. Foreign physicians were seen at his court: he procured workmen and artists from England; and a colony of 300 men of useful and even refined occupation were prevented, by the jealousy

* Hakluyt, 251.

of mean monopolists in the Hanse Towns, from embarking for Muscovy in quest of fortune. *

After a toilsome journey of 1500 miles, Chancellor reached the czarian residence of Moscow, which he and his companions estimated to be of the size of the city of London with its suburbs. † The capture of Narva had then procured for the Russians some means of communication with Europe, through the Baltic, which brought to the court of Ivan other foreign envoys besides the English mariner. Among them was Possevino, an Italian Jesuit sent by pope Gregory XIII., and Sigismund baron Hirberstein, ambassadors to Ivan from Charles V. and his successor Ferdinand.

The full account of Muscovy which we owe to these early travellers agrees remarkably with the simple but more descriptive narratives of Chancellor and his successors. The czar esteemed the friendship of Elizabeth, who paid court to him, and offered to him an asylum in her dominions if the hostility of his subjects or his neighbours should render it desirable. He granted ample privileges to the English traders, and expressed a warm desire to wed an English lady from the number of the queen's kinswomen. Though Elizabeth had not always been gentle to the ladies of her blood, she would not assuredly have doomed the most obnoxious of them to a fate so much more cruel than death. Some of the favours granted to an English ambassador will afford a specimen of the administration. "Leave for Richard Transham, an Englishman, the czar's apothecary, to go home with his wife and pro

L'Evesque, Hist. de Russie, iii. 162.

+ Hakluyt, 284.

The agreement of Chancellor with the excellent summary of the travels of Herberstein and Possevino,which DeThou has left us, is, in one particular, deserving of notice. The absolute power of Ivan appears to have been founded on the almost divine honour in which the czar was holden. "For," says De Thou, "such is the insane slavishness of the nation, that they believe every man who dies in a state of fidelity to the czar to be a religious martyr, as worthy of future happiness as those who put their trust in Christ." -Thuani Hist. Ixxi. 8, 9. Possevini, Moscovia, 1578. Herberstein Rerum Moscoit, Comment. 1558.

The Russian ambassador particularly named lady Mary Hastings. It was thought proper that she should allege the excuse of the feebleness of her frame, which unfitted her for such journeys. Hakluyt, 449.

perty; the same permission to Richard Elmes, a surgeon, and to Jane Richards, the widow of Bommell, a Dutch physician, who was roasted to death in the city of Moscow, in 1579."*

The attempts of the navigators to push their voyages far to the eastward appear to have closed in disappointment. But by the conquests of the Mahometan principalities of Casan and Astracan, on the Volga, Ivan became master of the Caspian; which opened a new course for English adventure towards regions renowned for their ancient wealth. Anthony Jenkinson employed thirty-six years of his life in journeys and voyages so extensive and various, that it is difficult to understand how any man in an age when languages and geography were so little known, could have accomplished them. His travels stretched from Algiers to the northern extremity of Russia, and from London, by Moscow, to Persia; and through that country to Bokhara on the Sogd; to say nothing of all the countries of Europe. With the difficulties which remained to be overcome, if he had completed his design by advancing to China or to India, it is unlikely that he should have been fully acquainted. The existence of a traveller so enterprising, so persevering, and necessarily so intelligent, the extent and judicious selection of his objects and means,would of themselves be sufficient to show the nature and force of the impulse which was at that period communicated to the English mind.

The same national movement produced the attempts to find a north-west passage to the treasures of the East. A settlement on Newfoundland facilitated these efforts. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the elder brother of sir Walter Raleigh, was the most zealous supporter of schemes for pursuing discovery through the seas which he thought open to the north of America. In 1567 Martin Frobisher, in two barks of twenty-five tons each, discovered the inward sea, called Hudson's Bay. About ten years afterwards he made two successive voyages into the same * Hakluyt, 499. 1546-1572. Hakluyt, 436.

seas, with a more considerable force, but with less accession to geography, and with expectations of a treasure which proved to be imaginary.* Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself, in 1583, undertook the command of a voyage of discovery, but it proved fruitless and disastrous. The largest ship deserted, under pretence of a contagious disease. The ship called the Admiral was lost in a storm at sea, which induced him to turn his course to England. In defiance of advice he chose to hoist his flag in a small vessel of ten tons, in which he continued to the last. In the last communication with him, during a tempest in which the sea rolled mountains high, he called out to the commander of a larger vessel in company, "We are as near heaven at sea as on land." A little afterwards, in the same evening, it was observed from the Golden Hind, that the lights of sir Humphrey's little bark suddenly went out. "The watch of the Golden Hind," cried the general, " is cast away;" which proved too true: —no further tidings of him or of his bark were ever heard. In 1585, and in the following year, the course of discovery was resumed by John Davis, in two very small vessels, with forty-one men, who entered the great northern sea, somewhat improperly called from his name Davis's Straits. To pursue these voyages further would be foreign to the present purpose. No reader of this age needs to be informed, that a series of voyages, honourable to British seamen, have nearly demonstrated the northern communication between the western and eastern seas of America; and have also checked human presumption, by showing, with almost equal certainty, that, in the present state of knowledge, that communication cannot be turned into a road for commercial navigation. But the patience under suffering, and the perseverance after disappointment, the hardihood, and skill, and calmness displayed by these early mariners, throw the strongest light on the value of that school in