The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

History

The Arctic Adventures of Olivier Brunel

Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands evokes a fascinating, but little-known episode in the Low Countries' maritime history, the sixteenth-century search for a northeastern sea route through the Polar regions to Cathay, which we call China. Combining a gripping narrative with extensive references and many illustrations, Marijke Spies sets these Arctic adventures within their historical, political and epistemological contexts. It is a story which starts in Antwerp and moves north to Amsterdam and Enkhuizen, which plays its part in the politico-religious struggles of the sixteenth century and which is eagerly watched by the humanist cartographers, editors and publishers of the period. The author livens up her account with small fictional dialogues between her protagonists, the explorer Olivier Brunel, his employers Gillis Hooftman and Balthasar de Moucheron, and the cartographer Mercator.

Arngrimus Ionas Islandus provides the book's motto, which clearly evokes the perspective that Marijke Spies is taking on her complex, chaotic and colourful material: ‘But it were to be wished, that non would write Histories with so great a desire of setting foorth novelties and strange things,...’ (sic, in Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, voiages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation [etc.]. Vol. 1: ‘Containing the woorthy discoueries etc. of the English toward the North and Northeast by sea [etc.].’ London, 1598²). Indeed, she chooses not to streamline her story, highlighting instead the geographical uncertainties of the period, the many conflicting theories based on reports from merchants, tall stories from seamen, classical and Biblical sources, even etymological analysis and Cabalistic knowledge. More interestingly still, this story of halting and uncertain ventures into an unknown Polar region is narrated to us from the perspective of the period. At no time does an ‘omniscient’ twentieth-century voice intervene. In this way, the modern-day readers of this book are almost prone to the same insecurities as the sixteenth-century scholar, piecing together the coastline, placing the islands, theorising about the possible location of peoples and tribes. Our only support comes from the maps on the book's inside cover, which present a composite picture of the northern hemisphere as it was seen in the sixteenth century, a faint brown line indicating our current knowledge.

In an important first chapter, ‘The Man’, the wandering life of Olivier Brunel is introduced. Scant sources indicate he was sent north to learn Russian for trading purposes and imprisoned there as a spy at the instigation of the English, who were protecting their trade monopoly with Russia. Later he trades in Astrakhan for the Stroganov family. At one time Brunel was the only Westerner to have travelled as far as the Ob' river, which suggested to him that it might

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be possible to reach Cathay via a Northeast passage along the northern Russian coast. After another journey to Russia, he arrived back in Antwerp only to be sent out to locate the legendary island of Greenland, ‘lost’ since the fifteenth century. Returning to the Ob' to investigate the Northeast Passage for a new employer, the merchant Balthasar de Moucheron, he drowned in a muddy Russian river.

The next chapter focuses on contemporary knowledge concerning the arctic seas. Important sources for the sixteenth-century cartographers were the late-classical and medieval authors, such as Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius (400 ad), who theorised about two gulf streams which collided at the poles, or Adam of Bremen, whose History of the Archbishopric of Hamburg described Frisian explorers landing on an island full of Cyclops. The manuscript of the Inventio Fortunata, itself lost by then, had located a ‘Magnetic Mountain’ near the North Pole, which stopped all compasses and drew ships with iron nails inextricably onto its shores. Among the other ‘colourful images of the Arctic region circulating at the time’ were phenomena like the ‘sea lung’, a debilitating, suffocating fog. The ‘Sucking Sea’ made whole ships disappear with their crews, and there were imaginary islands, like Grisland and Drogeo.

However, this period saw the appearance of many new maps as a result of the invention of the printing

Johannes Vermeer, The Cartographer. c. 1668-1669. Canvas, 52 × 45.5 cm. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main.

press, the information technology revolution of the fifteenth century. Claudius Ptolemaeus' Geographia had been rediscovered at the beginning of the 15th century, presenting a sensationally new perspective on the world. Martin Wadseemüller produced a World Map (1507), which included the newly discovered lands of America and Johannes Ruysch' 1508 map showed four polar islands on the North Pole. As a result of what Marijke Spies calls the ‘Columbus syndrome’, though, there was a renewed confidence: ‘Quite suddenly the ocean came to be viewed as a system of traffic lanes rather than the edge of the world.’

Chapter iii presents the contemporary image of the wealth of Cathay, based on the thirteenth-century account of Marco Polo's journeys. Interesting too are the speculations about the tribes inhabiting the northern regions: the Hyperboreans, for instance, were the happiest, most virtuous people on earth and therefore were often situated the closest to the Pole. Chapter iv discusses the political and religious context to these stories of exploration. Antwerp in the 1570s was becoming a city full of political intrigue. It boasted 90,000 inhabitants with 10,000 to 15,000 Mennonites, Calvinists and Lutherans, but the Calvinists' attempt to take over the city had resulted in direct rule by the Duke of Alva. In the midst of this religious turmoil, however, Antwerp also witnessed the most fruitful period of humanist research and publishing, with the publication of Mercator's 1569 world map, and Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1572). Chapter v takes the story beyond the destruction wrought by the Spanish Fury in Antwerp (1576). Brunel, once more returned from Russia, was now despatched in a northwesterly direction, to seek the lost island of Greenland.

Finally, in Chapter vi, ‘The Northeast Passage’, the stakes are raised in this story of Arctic exploration, as three ships set sail from Texel in June 1594. Two belonged to the Antwerp merchant De Moucheron, now trading from Enkhuizen, and aimed to sail along the Russian coast to find a way through. The third ship, under the control of the merchants of Amsterdam and following the theories of Plancius, was to travel north of Nova Zemlaya hoping to sail across the North Pole. De Moucheron's ships established that their route was promising; the Amsterdam ship had to return. A second expedition, led by Van Linschoten and Barents, even resulted in a collision between their two boats. Finally, a third voyage, financed by Amsterdam merchants, ended with the famous adventure of the winter stay at Nova Zemlaya, until in the spring these crews too managed to reach their home port again in two open boats.

Marijke Spies ends her narrative about the search for a Northeast Passage to Cathay with an epilogue on Mathias Sofridus' fictional voyage aboard a Dutch ship which sailed across the ice masses of the North Pole to China by means of a windmill and spiked wheels attached to the hull. This fantastical story by Mathijs Syvertszoon Lakeman (1597) yet again reaffirms the belief in access to China across the Pole. The actual attempts of the sixteenth-century Dutch and

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Flemish sailors to reach Cathay via the North resulted in a greater knowledge of the Arctic area, but not in a trade route to acquire the riches of Cathay.

sabine vanacker

Marijke Spies, Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands: Olivier Brunel and the Passage to China and Cathay in the Sixteenth Century (Tr. Myra Heerspink Scholz). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997; 168 pp. ISBN 90-5356-263-x.