In the past few years, I have spent numerous hours delving into the many ‘travails’ of Richard Norwood (1590-1675), a mariner, teacher, and the first surveyor of Bermuda who wrote about his life in a manuscript he entitled ‘Confessions’. This year our small editorial team consisting of me, Kirsty Rolfe, and Sara Norja, has made good progress on our new edition of Norwood’s (1590-1675) manuscript for the Hakluyt Society^[1], one result of a slightly adventurous research trip in March 2020.

The ‘Confessions’ is an interesting combination of a spiritual autobiography, a conversion narrative, and an account of a mobile life: a true smorgasbord as we say. However, when thinking about the topic for this blogpost for MEMOs I presumed I had not found anything in Norwood’s writings that would illuminate the relationship between England and the Islamic worlds, and hence I would have to write about something else. After all, I had been recently more concerned with other geographies of travel and mobility: Bermuda, the ‘Atlantic world’, and continental Europe. But, as it often turns out, on closer inspection there were connections after all. I had just forgotten how early modern mariners went everywhere and that ultimately everything is connected. This should remind every student of travel and mobility not to focus on just one geography at a time but to remember that previous cultural encounters and ‘travails’^[2]  often informed a lifetime of journeys and that it is useful to keep a biographical perspective in mind when studying mobility. This was the case also with Norwood.

Norwood’s encounter with the Islamic world comes in focus when after a few years of travelling he is contemplating whether to continue the life of precarious mariner, or to return to shore for good. After fighting in the Dutch Wars in 1608-09 the ailing and impoverished Norwood wanders around continental Europe and ends up in Rome, where he either engages in very convincing dissimulation or embraces the Catholic faith. At the last minute, Norwood decides to abandon his plan to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and returns home in an English ship which might have been a Levant Company one.

After his continental wanderings Norwood returns to his old seafaring occupation, but something is not the same. After all the setbacks and hazards, his excitement, curiosity, and lust for travel was waning. The reasons for this were multiple, not least family opposition. Norwood’s family had been firmly against him becoming a sailor from the start, believing contemporary stereotypes about their drunkenness and ill living. But again, this was not the only thing holding him back.

Summarizing why he had grown weary of travel, Norwood mentions the sin of avarice – the more he had invested his own and his cousin’s money and time to trade and seafaring, the more this had lured him away from a path to salvation. There were also embodied obstacles on his way. Unfortunately for a seafarer Norwood was prone to seasickness and had also started suffering from pains in his hands, pains that prevented him from working and hence forced him to weigh his options.

During the time Norwood was reminiscing and pondering his future, he had bound himself ‘apprentice to the masters mate dwelling in Limehouse’ for five years.^[3] In the end, Norwood ended up serving only for two years and two voyages to the ‘Straits’, i.e. via the Straights of Gibraltar to the Eastern Mediterranean. He lists his itineraries, which soon turn into a geography of dangers and risks:

notwithstanding I conti=

nued with him but two yeares or little more

and in that time made two voyages into

the Streightes, touching in Spayne & Italy.

and Sicilia, but making our voyage to Zant^[4]

Smirna^[5], Sya^[6], Peterasse^[7], and other places vnder

the Turkes^[8] dominions. In these

voyages we wherby were severall times

in much danger of the Turkish pyrates…

In addition to his ailing body and other perpetual dangers of early modern seafaring (including almost being swept in the sea by a gust of wind) Norwood here mentions a familiar annoyance from other contemporary travel accounts and captivity narratives of the period: the Turkish pirates. He writes that in the same two voyages, he had wanted to fight these ‘Turkish pirates’ notwithstanding the risks involved, because he had seen with his own eyes where a Christian might end up, bound as a galley slave for years:

…we were severall times alone pursued and likely

to haue bene sett vppon by Turkish pyrates^[9]

which the Lord was pleased to prevent, one ~

while by one accident, another while by another,

although as formerly when I was a souldier

so now beeing at sea, I desired to haue seene

such a peece of service as a fight, Which without

the speciall preservation of God might haue cost

me deare, as by the miserable condition of

many poore slaues or captiues^[10] in the Galleyes

might appeare, of which I was an ey Witnes

having had occasion in those voyages to

goe aboord the Turkish galleyes.

Norwood knew that his urge to fight with pirates would have involved too many risks. He considered himself a sinful man who could not necessarily count on God’s Providence to save him from captivity, and the miserable fate of a galley slave. Pondering the point of travel and what had initially lured him to it, Norwood thought that his belief in the great mysteries and wonders of the world had started to fade now that he had seen with his own eyes how the world of travel was just full of annoyances and dangers. Norwood concluded that he had become ‘well satisfied with travaile’, and especially with the Levant. He had began to think

…that the world did not in any partes

of it abound with those rarieties and delightes

which I had sometimes thought to find; but

on the contrary that a man was lyable

to sundry calamities and dangers.

Despite these sombre thoughts of quitting the world of travel for good, a new opportunity soon presented itself. Norwood was hired by the Virginia Company in 1613, to go to Bermuda and for a while his mobile life would continue. He was not yet ready to let go of mobility, but the time would eventually come. To Norwood Turkish pirates and their captives might have been a fleeting experience, but they contributed to his decision to leave travels behind. This story of Norwood’s travails should remind us that the meanings of setbacks and disappointments might not be immediately visible to people experiencing them, nor to those who study them many years later.

[1] The manuscript is held in the Bermuda Archives. See Richard Norwood, Confessions,” (1639–40), 4105 – 003 PA 0307, Bermuda Archives. For the Hakluyt Society, and especially its essay prize which is currently open for submissions, see our website: https://www.hakluyt.com/hakluyt-society-essay-prize/.

[2] Early modern double-meaning of travel as both work and suffering very much intended here.

[3] The years fall between Norwood’s travels in Italy in 1609-10 and his departure to Bermuda in 1613, where he was to become the island’s first surveyor, mapmaker, and later teacher in the free school.

[4] Zante, i.e. Zakinthos in Greece.

[5] Present day Izmir in Turkey, Smyrna was an important crossroad of Levant trade on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, from where trade caravans left for Syria and Persia.

[6] This is likely Sio or Chios, famous for its trade.

[7] Current day Patras is Greece's third-largest city and the regional capital of Western Greece, in the northern Peloponnese. It was the capital of ‘Morea’ from where caravans

[8] i.e. Ottoman domains.

[9] In 1610 this would have been a common fear of English trading ships, as the Ottoman alliance was weaker than during Elizabeth I’s reign.

[10] Experiences of captivity and the so called captivity narratives might have been among the texts Norwood was reading at this time.