Hugh Willoughby was known, ironically, as Hugh the Navigator. He was born and brought up at Middleton Hall and educated in Sutton Coldfield. He was a soldier but was chosen to lead an expedition of The Company of Merchant Adventurers in 1553. With the blessing of Henry VIII he became captain of a fleet of three ships sent to find the North East passage to Cathay (China) and India. One of the ships was captained by Richard Chancellor, who was a sailor. He arrived at the planned rendezvous near Archangel but WIlloughby's and the third ship did not. They ran aground on the arctic island called Novaya Zemlya, where both crews were found, all dead, but with no evident cause of death. The contemporary poet, Thomson, dedicated the winter verse of a 'Seasons' group of poems to the events.
Sir Hugh Willoughby
'Miserable they
Who, here entangled in the gathering ice,
Take their last look of the descending sun;
While, full of death, and fierce with tenfold frost,
The long, long night, incumbent o'er their heads,
Falls horrible. Such was the Britons fate,
As with first prow (what have not Britons dared!)
He for the passage sought, attemptd since
So much in vain, and seeming to be shut
By jealous Nature with eternal bars.
In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,
And to the stony deep his idle ship
Immediate seal'd, he with his hapless crew
Each full exerted at his several task,
Froze into statues: to the cordage glued
The sailor, and the pilot to the helm.'
This romanticised version of the occurrence neglects the report that the entire crew was, in each case found in the main
cabin, not at their stations. A twentieth century theory probably explains what happened. The cabin would have been
heated by sea coal, as mineral coal was then called. Excluding draughts to keep in the heat would have caused the
combustion to release a high level of carbon monoxide, so that the crews died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
There is a nice irony here, since the Willoughby family income was substantially derived from 'sea-coal', which
outcropped on their Wollaton estates.