Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/301

 Rh on British soil, and leave to engage artisans, engineers, and physicians for the Tsar's service. He had not settled the essential question of the commercial competition in Russia itself, but Philip and Mary relied, as to that matter, on the man in command of the English ship on which he was to sail from Gravesend—a man destined, indeed, to play a leading part in the agreement arranged between the two countries.

His name was Anthony Jenkinson, and he served the Russian company for a wage of £40 a year. He was worth more. Since 1546, he had travelled all round Europe, and all the coast of Asia and of Africa. He had landed on Russian soil in July, 1557, made a long stay, for purposes of study, at Kholmogory and Vologda, and had not reached Moscow till December in that year. Well received by Ivan, he soon proved himself so thoroughly 'the right man in the right place' that once the Sovereign knew this particular Englishman he refused to have any other about him. He seems to have been a finished specimen of that race of business men to whom Great Britain owes her present position in the world—an extraordinary business mind, a broadness of view, a spirit of adventure, which no risk could alarm, a heart of steel, and an iron temperament. In April of the following year, we find him at Astrakan, after a whole winter season spent at Moscow. In August, first of all English sailors, he hoisted the red-crossed ensign on the waters of the Caspian. With only two of his fellow-countrymen to keep him company, he sailed away with a huge cargo of merchandise, enough to load a thousand camels, which he hoped shortly to hire from the Turkomans, and so make his way to Bokhara, across the steppes of Turkestan, and to more distant countries yet, if that might be. Why not to China? But at Bokhara war was to overtake him; the master of Samarkand was threatening the town. Jenkinson, as cautious as he was bold, beat a timely retreat, avoided the siege and the scenes of pillage that followed on it, and reappeared at Moscow in September, 1559, with a Bokharian embassy and five-and-twenty Russian prisoners rescued from the Turkomans. He offered the Tsar gifts, which the monarch graciously received—the tail of a white buffalo and a Tartar drum—and returned to England with a young Asiatic, the Sultana Aura, whom he proposed to present to the new Queen, Elizabeth. He also carried back the conviction that, from the commercial point of view, the Far Eastern countries through which he had just travelled were quite valueless. But he contemplated opening up relations with Persia, and, starting forth again in 1561, he received a friendly welcome at Kazbin, the capital of the Shah Tamas, and won the personal regard of Abdul-Khan, ruler of the Chirvan.

While he busied himself about acquiring these new markets