England has a rich heritage of overseas exploration – the names of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh immediately spring to mind – but the first of the great Tudor explorations took place when Drake was just a boy of thirteen. The full story of these expeditions is told for the first time in North-East Passage to Muscovy.
A group of London merchants was determined to expand overseas trade, and they set up the expeditions, in 1553 and 1556, to find a north-east passage to China and the riches of the Orient. Stephen Borough, a Devon-born sea captain, was a crucial figure in both the expeditions, which were dogged by storms, ice, fog and shipwreck and hampered by the lack of geographical knowledge. In the first voyage, the two ships accompanying Stephen were separated from him in a sudden gale. Despite taking shelter for the winter at 'The Haven of Death', the crews mysteriously perished, leaving behind an account of their adventures. Stephen's ship, the Eduard Bonaventura, managed to reach Russia and set up favourable trading terms with Ivan the Terrible – leading to the creation of the first joint-stock overseas trading company, the Muscovy Company. His second trip, in a small ship with a crew of only ten men, turned out to be truly epic. His was the first West European ship to explore the Arctic coast further east than the White Sea, until progress was eventually halted by an enormous wall of ice.
Stephen Borough never found a north-east passage but his exploits put England at the forefront of seafaring and navigation, and the Muscovy Company – whose dealings included a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth I from Ivan the Terrible – became the model for all later overseas trading companies. It was the first step in the creation of Britain's great maritime commercial empire.