Borough (or Burrowe), Stephen (1525–1584)

English navigator, brother of William Borough. In 1553 he went on the expedition under Hugh Willoughby (died 1554) from the River Thames to find a Northeast Passage to Cathay (China) and India; this was the first English voyage to Russia. On a second expedition in the Serchthrift (1556), he was the first European to visit the Kara Straits between Novaya Zemlya and the Vaygach Islands. Probably about 1558 he went to Spain, and was the first to propose a translation of Cortés's work, known in England as Eden's Arte of Navigation (1561).

Borough went on another expedition to Russia in 1560, ‘the seventh voyage of the merchant adventurers to Moscovy’ (Hakluyt). In 1563 he was chief pilot and one of the four masters of the queen's ships in the River Medway. Some of his records appeared in Haklyut's The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation.

On the first voyage to Russia Borough was master of the Edward Bonaventure. Separated by storms from the other two vessels, he sailed on into the White Sea, reaching and naming North Cape.