Once turn'd round

Tape 1; Session 2: A Compass is more use than a map

Have you heard of Great White?

Not the species of shark, but a place – a littoral, once at the navigable limit during the short Arctic summer and, the rest of the year, impossible to find among the greater white of pack ice. (That, of course, is changing now.)

The first evidence we have of Great White's existence is on a chart dated 1504, made by an unknown Venetian mariner. We don't know if it was drawn from experience, reportage or conjecture. We don't know for whom it was made, nor what adventures it might have inspired before it came into the hands of a London merchant named Johannes Cruytser -- my ancestor -- around the end of that century.

The map is crude, sketched upon the stretched and scrubbed skin of a white-furred animal, neither accurate nor decorative, physical features almost obliterated by a web of compass roses and rhumb lines, and it seems to confuse the British Isles with Iceland, which isn't separately marked. Up near the top there's a ragged fringe of coastline that could be taken for a bit of Greenland's west coast, but it's more likely some part of Baffin Island -- or it might be the edge of the ice-pack mistaken for land. And then above that, where modern maps place Baffin Bay, there's a cluster of forested hills and lakes, feathering down into a barren beach, and scratched between two mountain ranges are the words 'Alba Maior': Great White.

It's under glass now at the Lowestoft Museum. I've never seen another quite like it. On a 1569 chart, the Flemish geographer Gerhard Mercator made a mountain out of his North Pole, surrounded by a whirlpool which was fed by four mighty streams that crossed an Arctic continent. Johannes Cruytser's map shows the Pole as a bottomless pit, into which the seas empty through spiralling valleys. Well, it's all fantasy, of course, doesn't even correspond to what people knew at the time, but for Johannes that map was the blueprint for a reckless gamble and the key to his future prosperity. I couldn't say whether he was blessed with intuition or a lucky idiot, but the gamble eventually paid off. Financially, anyway.

Maps weren't considered definitive. They were useful as indicators to likely finds, sources of hope and inspiration to the explorer, and a reason to keep going on a given course. But as far as navigation went, a compass was more use than a map.

The Cruytsers lived in Southwark, an unattractive address in those times. Southwark had a reputation for violent crime, bawdy houses and cruel entertainments, but it all made for affordable land nearby. Their house was built by Johannes's father Cornelis, who arrived in London in the 1530s and bought a Patent of Denizenation. Cornelis had been a merchant in Rotterdam but he wanted bigger and better, and he set himself up in London as an importer of skins and furs. The company and the house passed into his elder son's care on his death.

By the standards of the day the house wasn't grand, though it had a walled garden, stabling, south and west wings and a galleried dining chamber. One thing is certain: it was not well secured, for one summer's night in 1567, an unwelcome visitor gained entrance across the roof of a nearby inn and a forced window casement in the servants' quarters. The intruder was a scholar and former itinerant preacher called Hod Clerke, and he had come to visit vengeance upon the house of Johannes Cruytser.

TAPE 1, SESSION 3: .

Cornelis's wife Katherine bore him two sons and a daughter: the eldest son Jacob died an infant. Johannes inherited house, business and money at age twenty-three and at first showed little of the crazed ambition that had driven Cornelis to lose three of his four ships in search of new worlds and opportunities for trade. (Cruytser Senior had drowned, aged fifty-six, off the coast of north-west Africa on the third of his ships to go down.) Johannes limited himself to exporting cotton and importing grain and furs, a steady trade across the North Sea and into the Baltic, until in his mid-twenties he somehow got hold of the map; after that he turned by degrees as mad as his father.

Details are scant. Though Cruytser belonged to a company of merchant venturers, he was loath to share his plans with potential rivals and in the months leading up to the first expedition to Great White he seems to have taken pains to conceal any deviation from his normal business. However, there's documentary evidence that in the spring of 1552, he called in all his debts, sold off his remaining stock and spent some of the money refitting his father's last ship, the eighty-eight foot caravel Philip. The ship, already almost twenty years old, had a heavier keel and a second skin added, extra bulkheads installed for strength and the overweight forecastle cut down for a faster profile. She was provisioned for a voyage of five months. With what money was left Johannes bought a pinnace named Cormorant, twenty-two tons and lateen-rigged on both masts, which he ordered converted to a partial square rig. A long voyage was clearly planned. From the quantities of fur-lined clothing reportedly stowed on the ships it was likely northward: probably, unless Cruytser was changing trades, to Svalbard or Greenland in search of polar bear skins and walrus ivory.

Unlike his father, Johannes Cruytser didn't sail on every voyage of discovery that he instigated. The Philip and the Cormorant left England in mid-May 1552, a year that is historically significant for the death of the boy king Edward and accession to the throne of his half-sister Mary. The Philip returned alone twenty-three weeks later with five survivors from the Cormorant's crew aboard. The pinnace had proved inadequate: tipped over and lost to heavy seas in July.

Commercially, however, the voyage had been an outstanding success. The ship's hold and deck and almost every compartment that had been emptied of provisions on the outward leg were packed tight with animal skins, walrus ivory, and soft white feathers; and, the Philip's captain reported, there was plenty more to be had on the shores of Alba Maior.

Even before the ship had been completely unloaded at the legal quays next to the Tower, Johannes Cruytser was planning a second voyage for the spring of 1553.