Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/298

 274 the greatest dignitaries in the country~the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Treasurer; the Earl of Arundel, Comptroller of the Court; the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Privy Seal~had shares in the undertaking, it probably possessed a scientific as well as a commercial character. And probably, too, though chance was to play so great a part in the incidents of the voyage, a pretty clear idea of its object existed; for when one of the vessels reached the shores of Russia, interpreters were all ready on board her.

Martens ('Collection of Treaties,' ix. [x.], Introd., p. 6) mentions documents which go to prove that diplomatic relations between Ivan and Edward VI. had subsisted previously. The object of these is quite unknown to us. They had not served to propagate conceptions as to the great northern Empire that even approached reason and probability. Herberstein was to speak of it, twenty years later, as a legendary country, and gravely reproduce absurd tales of a huge idol called the Zlataïa Baba (an old woman modelled in gold), before which brazen trumpets stuck into the ground kept up a perpetual braying; of tribes who habitually died in the autumn and returned to life the following spring; and a great river in which fish were caught 'which had the head, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, and feet of a man, but which could not talk, and were very good to eat. …'

Trials of a more tangible kind than any meeting with monsters such as these awaited Willoughby and his bold comrades. A storm dispersed the little squadron, and Chancellor, with the Bona Fortuna, lost sight of his two consorts. Vainly he waited for them at Vardôhus, the port appointed for that purpose on the Norwegian coast, started forth again alone, and found himself, on August 28, in a bay, from which, on his arrival, several boats manned by fishermen took to flight. Pursued and brought back, these strangers informed the voyager that he had reached the shores of Muscovy. The authorities at Kholmogory hastened to warn Ivan, who invited the foreigners to Moscow, but gave them leave to dispense with this journey, and trade freely with his subjects, if that was the object of their coming. Chancellor, without even waiting for the Tsar's message, made his way to the capital, spent thirteen days there, saw the Tsar, and departed again to England, bearing the monarch's friendly reply to the circular letter of introduction with which the leaders of the expedition had been provided.

During the following winter, news reached Moscow that two ships laden with merchandise, and with the corpses of dead men on board, had been discovered on the shores of the White Sea. These were the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia, with their crews—83 out of the 125 men who had sailed from