The Island at the Center of the World Read online

  History traditionally links the rise of England in the period with the elevation of Queen Elizabeth to the throne in 1558. But one could trace it to 1547, when an intellectually voracious twenty-year-old named John Dee did something countless students since have done: spent his summer abroad and returned flush with new knowledge and insights. After an academic career at Cambridge in which he proved to be something of a mathematical genius, Dee traveled to the University of Louvain in what is today Belgium. The rich summer sun of the Brabant region might have been revelation enough, but Dee soon found himself in a lecture hall gazing at an object that was, to him, transcendent. The teacher was Gemma Frisius, a Flemish mathematician and charter of the heavens, and what Dee saw was a map astonishing in its level of detail, in the new lands it portrayed, even in its lettering. The Low Countries, he discovered, were miles ahead of his island in new learning.

  Dee spent long candle-lit nights poring over Frisius's maps with a Flemish scholar named Gerhard Kremer. Kremer, an engraver by training, had, under the academic pen name of Mercator, begun to make a name for himself ten years earlier by creating a map of Palestine that rendered the Holy Land with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved. Mercator was a genuine Renaissance man—a master cartographer, an engineer of telescopes, sextants, surveying equipment, and other highly sensitive measuring devices, the author of a gospel concordance, promoter of the new italic typeface that made map print more legible—and in him Dee found a soul mate. In 1569, Mercator would publish the map that would give him his immortality, which rendered latitude and longitude as straight lines, the meridians of longitude evenly spaced and the distance between the parallels of latitude increasing in size as one approached the poles. It would solve a cumbersome problem of navigating at sea because with it sailors could plot and follow a straight course rather than have to constantly recalculate their position. (The Mercator projection is still a feature of navigational maps, although, even at that time, some mariners were as confused as later generations of schoolchildren would be by the distortions in size it caused.)

  In a nice foreshadowing of the complicated intermingling between the Low Countries and the British Isles that would shape the next century, when Dee returned to London he brought with him maps, measuring instruments, and globes, created by Mercator and Frisius, that would help spark England's rise to global prominence. What Dee's English colleagues found most intriguing about the maps and globes was an area most people would ignore: the top, the Arctic Circle. Frisius's map, oriented as if looking down from the north star, showed a distinct open channel cutting across the Arctic, which was self-confidently labeled in Latin Fretum trium fratrum. The sight of the boldly indicated Strait of the Three Brothers must have made Dee's English friends gasp. The Holy Grail for all learned and adventuresome minds was the discovery of a short passage to the riches of Asia. Finding it would repay investors many times over; for the English, it would vault their economy out of the Middle Ages and into the European vanguard. The legend of the Strait of the Three Brothers was confused even at that time, but it appears to have been based on the adventures of the Corte Real brothers, Portuguese mariners who explored the area around Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and who, in the minds of some, sighted, or perhaps even sailed, the fabled passage to Asia before two of them vanished into Arctic oblivion. (Ironically, the Spanish also had a theory about this mythical strait, only they called it the Englishmen's Strait.) Now there it was on Frisius's map, thanks apparently to Frisius's contacts with Portuguese mariners. It was on Mercator's globe as well, labeled simply fretum arcticum, arctic strait. As with most people in any endeavor, seeing the thing in print, seeing its coasts and coves delicately but decisively rendered, confirmed its reality.

  Fate, it seemed, had brought together the men, the means, and the time. The solution to England's twin crises of economy and spirit was out there. So the nation's leaders formed a business circle, chipping in twenty-five pounds per share and raising a total of six thousand pounds.

  With the principals lined up and funds ready, it only remained to choose the likeliest route—either the one indicated on Frisius's map or one of several others that were now being put forth with equal confidence. The point was to find a northern passage both because such a shortcut would render obsolete the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly on the Southern Hemisphere and because any northern peoples encountered along the way would be more likely buyers for English wool. That an Arctic sea route existed was beyond anyone's doubt. The universal belief among the intelligentsia in something we know to be a physical impossibility in wooden sailing vessels rested on several arguments, such as the one put forth by the Dutch minister and geographer Peter Plancius that “near the pole the sun shines for five months continually; and although his rays are weak, yet on account of the long time they continue, they have sufficient strength to warm the ground, to render it temperate, to accommodate it for the habitation of men, and to produce grass for the nourishment of animals.”

  The name by which the company became known gives away what happened on the first voyage it financed. A doughty mariner named Richard Chancellor took the northeast route, and while he failed to discover a passage to the Orient, he became the first Englishman of the era to make landfall at Russia. The so-called Muscovy trade that ensued—in which the English found a ready market for their wool, and imported hemp, sperm oil, and furs from the realm of Ivan the Terrible—was so profitable that the search for a northern route to Asia was largely abandoned.

  The company expanded, and the nation with it. Elizabeth ascended to the throne; Drake circumnavigated the globe; Shakespeare wrote. When, in 1588, Philip II of Spain launched an invasion fleet toward England, intending to bring the island into his empire and win its people back to Roman Catholicism, the undersized English navy shocked the world by crushing the Armada. The aftermath of the victory was one of those moments when a nation suddenly realizes it has entered a new era. Theirs wasn't a dark and chilly island after all, the English public was informed by their great poet, but a “precious stone set in the silver sea.”

  By the early 1600s, however, the wheel had taken another turn. The queen was dead, and the Russia trade had fallen off. Faced once again with financial crisis, the company's directors made a decision to return to their original purpose. They would resurrect the Renaissance dream, commit themselves anew to discovering a northern passage to Asia.

  The man they now turned to to renew the quest is not the protagonist of this story, but the forerunner, the one who would make it possible. In the ranks of legendary explorers, Henry Hudson has been slighted: not celebrated in his time by the English public as Francis Drake or Martin Frobisher or John Cabot had been, not given nearly the amount of ink that history has devoted to Columbus or Magellan. There is a logic of personality in this: Drake had defined manhood for an era, and the Italian Cabot had a feckless charm (he was in the habit, after his celebrated return from the New World, of promising people he met in taverns that he would name islands for them), but when we come to Henry Hudson it is a dark and moody figure hovering behind the records, one seemingly more comfortable in the shadows of history. A new appreciation for the Dutch colony in North America, however, compels a reappraisal of the man whose fitful decision-making rerouted the flow of history.

  Nothing is known of his early career, but the fact that he was a ship's captain indicates that he had had a lengthy one by the time we encounter him in 1608. It's reasonable to assume that he had served in the defeat of the Armada twenty years earlier, though we have no information on this. The Muscovy Company tended to start apprentices as boys and have them work through one or more aspects of the business: bureaucrat, “factor” (i.e., agent), or sailor. Thus, one Christopher Hudson, who rose to the position of governor of the company from 1601 to 1607 and whom some historians have thought was most likely Henry Hudson's uncle, had worked his way up in the sales and marketing line, serving as a company representative in Germany in hi
s youth. Henry Hudson was in his forties when he stepped into the light of history, a seasoned mariner, a man with a strong and resourceful wife and three sons, a man born and raised not only to the sea but to the quest for a northern passage to Asia, who, weaned from infancy on the legends of his predecessors, probably couldn't help but be obsessed by it.

  The fire of obsession was fanned, in him as it was in the country, by a compatriot named Richard Hakluyt. Hakluyt was a consultant to the Muscovy Company, but more importantly he was a unique figure in his day: part journalist, part popularizer, part lionizer, above all a zealot for the internationalist cause in England. In the 1580s he began gathering log books, journals, and other records of voyages, and he published the whole lot of them in repeated waves—the main body under the title The Principle Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, which came out, with impeccable timing, shortly after the defeat of the Armada—creating a steadily building crescendo of popular enthusiasm for English adventures at sea. The result was to make England aware of itself in an international context, to see the European nations casting outward in a new age, an age of discovery. Hakluyt exhorted his countrymen to be proud that they were living in “an age wherein God hath raised so general a desire in the youth of this realm to discover all parts of the face of the earth.”

  Thanks to Hakluyt, mariners now saw themselves in historical terms. Because of Hakluyt, Hudson—a determined and self-possessed man to begin with—openly hungered for a place on the list that included Columbus, Magellan, Cabot, Cortés, and Da Gama. And for Hudson there was only one brand of glory. He would be the one to locate at last—after the failures (glorious failures, but failures still) of Columbus, Cabot, Chancellor, Frobisher, Cartier, Verrazzano—the fabled ribbon of icy blue water, sail through it, emerge into the nutmeg-scented air of Cathay, and singlehandedly open the planet wide. He believed he would be the one.

  He would be wrong in this. And yet, fate being what it is, his dream of achievement would come true—bounteously, far more strangely than he could have imagined. Fate would make him not just the somewhat ironic patron saint of a grand city that would rise in the future to the presumptuous title of capital of the world, but, along with it, of a society that would become a model for the world of a distant century. A wavering but unbroken chain would stretch from him to a far-off hodgepodge: of skyscrapers and bodegas, dim sum and hip-hop, supers and subways, limos and egg creams and finance and fashion—the messy catalogue of ingredients that, stewed together over time, would comprise a global capital, twenty-first-century style. To the extent any individual could, he would be a fulcrum on which history would turn: from a world of wood and steel to one of silicon and plastic.

  HIS FIRST VOYAGE was pure madness. While geographers debated whether the elusive passage to Asia lay to the northwest, via Canada, or the northeast, around Russia, what Hudson attempted in his first command was something fantastically bolder and far more ridiculous than either of these, something that no human being had ever tried: to go straight up, over the top of the world. He was relying on an “established” theory, first proposed eighty years before by Robert Thorne, a merchant-adventurer who argued that in addition to finding the ice melt away as one neared the pole, that the lucky sailor who ventured across the top of the world would benefit from the “perpetual clearness of the day without any darkness of the night.” Daylight may be handy, but to purposely steer a seventy-foot wooden boat, manned by a crew of twelve and powered only by wind, straight north on a direct course for the top of the world, defying the six-million-square-mile Arctic ice shelf, proposing to slice straight across it and come careening down the other side of the planet—the nerve of it beggars the imagination. No wonder that on the morning of April 19, 1607, Hudson and his tiny crew, including his young son John, whom he was probably in the process of training just as he had been trained, stepped out of the weak spring sunlight, shuffled into the dark ancient interior of the Church of St. Ethelburga just inside Bishopsgate (apparently successfully ignoring the tap houses crowding around the door of the church: the Angel, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, the Black Bull), took their places among the congregation, and beseeched the God of their forefathers to bless their endeavor.

  Even more remarkable than Hudson's decision to attempt such a voyage was that he survived it. Slicing through fog and ice, living on bear and seal (at one point the crew fell sick from rotten bear meat), surviving vicious storms and the horror of a whale attempting to surface under the keel of their ship, they made it above eighty degrees latitude, within six hundred miles of the North Pole, before Hudson noted drily, “This morning we saw that we were compassed in with Ice in abundance. . . . And this I can assure at present . . . by this way there is no passage.”

  By any normal measure the voyage would have been considered a failure, but normalcy was out the window—it was now the seventeenth century, a vast new world was out there. Entrepreneurs and ships' captains knew that crossing one false path off the list was a form of progress. Far from considering his attempt a failure (for one thing, Hudson's report of “many whales” off Spitzbergen Island led to a massive and lucrative whaling enterprise there in the following years, and, predictably, the decimation of the whale population), the company, immediately on his return in September 1607, signed him up to attack the problem again the next season.

  Hudson spent the winter at his London home, plunging into his charts and letters from fellow mariners and geographers, warming himself at his own hearth and in the company of his family, laying plans, perhaps meeting with Hakluyt himself—the two had by now become friends—to discuss options. The following season sees him setting off straightaway—April 22, 1608—in the same Muscovy Company ship, the Hopewell, this time with a crew of fourteen, sitting in his closetlike captain's cabin, carefully putting pen to the page of his logbook as they pull away from the Thames-side docks, heart thrumming with the high adrenaline of setting-forth, as he records dutifully: “We set sayle at Saint Katherines, and fell downe to Blacke wall.”

  He had a new course this time: northeast. It had been attempted by others, including his Muscovy Company predecessors, but the directors were still of the belief that to the north of Russia lay the best chance for reaching Asia. Hudson himself may have been doubtful—he had reason to believe the northwest was more likely—but he was willing to follow their wishes. Or so it seemed. The failure of his second voyage is less interesting than what happened on July 6, after he had concluded it was impossible to continue (on entering the strait that he had pinned his hopes on he writes with awe, “it is so full of ice that you will hardly thinke it”). Unable to find a way around the islands of Nova Zembla (today Novaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic), he was now “out of hope to find passage by the North-east,” and so proposed to alter course completely, tear up the mission directive from the company, and have a go at the northwest. After slaving for ten weeks against the raw elements of the Arctic, his crew, with good sense, balked at the idea of taking a detour straight across the Atlantic and into a wholly new wilderness. A near mutiny ensued; Hudson was forced to remove his gaze from the distant horizon of his obsession and focus instead on the human beings in front of him on the deck. He backed down. They returned to London.

  No sooner did he arrive than he was busy readying himself for his next foray. He had momentum now: two voyages in two successive seasons; two routes down, and one to go. He was convinced that he was zeroing in on the passage, that the puzzle that had occupied Europe for the length of the Renaissance was about to be solved. The answer, it now seemed certain, lay in the misty, all-but-unknown region that was only recently being labeled on maps as America.

  At around this time—possibly before the 1608 voyage—he received letters from his friend and fellow explorer, the considerably larger-than-life John Smith, who had fought in Hungary against the Turks, was captured and sold into slavery in Istanbul, won the heart of his female captor, escaped to Transylvania via Russia, and trekked
across North Africa—all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Not content with such a résumé, in 1607, Smith spearheaded the founding of a colony in Virginia—what would be the first permanent European settlement on the North American coast (Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony, which broke ground in 1587, had vanished by the time relief forces arrived in 1590), where he and his comrades were now living out a hell on earth (only thirty-eight of the one hundred and fifty original colonists survived the first winter). Smith sent Hudson maps of the North American coast, together with certain theories he had been developing. These were precisely what Hudson wanted to hear; they conformed with his own theories: that a sea or river somewhere to the north of Virginia gave out onto the Sea of Cathay. (Smith's information seems to have come from Indians who talked of a great ocean accessible via the Hudson River—presumably the Great Lakes, reachable via portage through the Mohawk River valley.)