Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/234

 180 precedent of mercantile ordinances and royal missives was followed by the more permanent East India Com- pany of 1600. Sir Hugh Willoughby, Knight, com- manded as admiral or " Captain General," and Richard Chancelor went as pilot-in-chief. Into the controversy which surrounds this voyage I need not enter. It suffices for Willoughby 's fame that he was the first Englishman to reach Nova Zembla; that the results of the expedition led to an overland trade by way of Russia into Asia; and that he laid down his life in the attempt. From August 23 to September 18, 1553, Willoughby coasted the shore of northern Russia with two vessels of the squadron, and tried to explore inland. Here his diary comes to an abrupt close, although it would appear from a will that he was alive as late as January, 1554. In that long winter darkness he and the crews of his two ice-bound ships about seventy men in all perished of cold and starvation, freezing to mummies as they died. The next explorer found the weird company about two years later, Willoughby still sitting in his cabin with his diary and papers before him. A strange fate befell the poor corpses on the attempt to bring the vessels home, for we are told by the great Puritan writer John Milton, in his History of Muscovia, that " the ships being unstaunch, as is supposed by the two years win- tering in Lapland, sunk by the way with their dead and them also that brought them." Richard Chancelor, the second in command, had got separated from Willoughby in a storm off the Lafoden