Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/239

Rh were sent out, which sailed up the Dwina as far as Vologda, from which port Chancellor, who was in command, proceeded again to Moscow, and there arranged a commercial treaty with the Czar, in which all the usual privileges were accorded to the English traders. In 1556 the company again sent out two ships, which returned the same year, bringing along with them the two that had been frozen up in Lapland in 1553, in one of which was Sir Hugh Willoughby's body. They also brought an ambassador to the King and Queen of England from the Czar; but, the vessel in which he sailed being shipwrecked on the coast of Scotland, he lost nearly the whole of the valuable presents for their majesties of which he was the bearer. The next year four vessels were dispatched, one of which carried back the ambassador, and along with him Mr. Anthony Jenkinson, as agent for the company, the interests of which were afterwards greatly promoted by his exertions. After reaching Russia, Jenkinson set out on a voyage down the Volga to Astracan, from whence he crossed the Caspian Sea to Persia, and made his way to the city of Bokhara, or Boghar, as he calls it, which he found to be the resort of merchants not only from Russia, Persia, and India, but from Cathay or China, from which last country the journey occupied nine months. Jenkinson, whose object was to establish a trade between the company's Russian factories and Persia, returned from this journey in 1560, and, coming home to England the same year, published the first map of Russia that had ever been made. He is said to have made no fewer than six subsequent voyages to Bokhara by the same route; yet the prospect of the trade which he thus opened to the company, Anderson remarks, "was dropped some few years after, and remained as if it had never been thought of, until the reign of King George II. in 1741, when it was revived by an act of parliament enabling the Russia Company to trade into Persia; upon which considerable quantities of raw silk were brought home by the very same way that