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A scene in India

Chapter 5 – England’s Attempts to Reach India in the Sixteenth Century

1499–1599

The Portuguese soon found that they had other rivals in the East besides the Turks. No Christian nation at the end of the fifteenth century seriously disputed the Papal award. But England, France, Venice, and Spain scrutinized its terms with keen eyes, and tried for a share of the Asiatic trade by every means within the strict letter of the Bull and the treaties based upon it. England’s century of failures, from 1497 onward, to reach India without infringing that settlement, disciplined our nation to distant maritime enterprise and forms the main subject of this chapter.

The Venetians strove to bolster up the old land routes through Syria and Egypt, as against the Cape passage, and outraged Christendom by abetting the Mamluk Sultan in his struggle with Portugal for the

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Indian seas. They thus retained the trade with Alexandria and the Levant – a monopoly svhich they had in time to share with the Turkey Company of England and the Mediterranean merchants of Marseilles. The Venetians realized, indeed, that the ultimate victory must be with the Cape route, and decided to divide its profits with Portugal in the West while encouraging the Turkish onset against Portugal in the East. In 1521 the court of Lisbon refused an offer of the Republic of Venice to buy up all the spices yearly brought to Portugal, over and above what Portugal itself required.

To the east of Suez, Venice made herself felt not by her actual presence, but by her intrigues. In the Indo-Portuguese archives she appears vaguely as an ill-wisher to Portugal and a confederate of the Turk. The Indian letters to Lisbon report such incidents as the arrest of a seditious Venetian pilot, or the apostasy of a Venetian who had turned Moor; rumours of joint preparations by the Turks and Venetians against the Portuguese; and apprehensions of the Turks and Venetians lest Portugal should block their Red Sea route by the capture of Aden. Of the French we hear little in the Indo-Portuguese records during the sixteenth century except that “the French will be ill-advised if they come seeking us.”

Spain proved a more serious rival. The demarcation Bull of 1493 overlooked the fact that the earth is a sphere. The Portuguese had, indeed, only to pursue their discoveries far enough to the east of the dividing

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Ferdinand Magellan

line, and the Spaniards to push theirs far enough to the west, in order that the two nations should meet angrily on the other side of the globe. This they did in 1521. Magellan, disgusted by the ingratitude of Portugal for his services under Albuquerque in the East Indies, offered in 1517 to find out for Spain a new road to Asia. Starting from Seville with five ships in 1519, he coasted down the American continent till he discovered the straits which bear his name. Then striking northwest across the Pacific he made the Philippine Islands, where he was killed in 1521.

But his squadron proceeded to the Moluccas, which had already been reached by the Portuguese via the Cape of Good Hope. One ship of Magellan’s five succeeded in returning to Seville in 1522, having sailed round the world and thus opened a lawful route for Spain into the East India seas.

When the consternation of the Lisbon court calmed down, the difficulty was found susceptible of diplomatic settlement. The Bull of 1493, in partitioning the undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal, started from an imaginary line in the Atlantic. It implied, however, a complementary line half-way round the earth, say 180 degrees distant, as the boundary of the

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two nations in Asiatic waters. But the sea mathematics of that age were unequal to the accurate determination of either line, although the second Borgian map in 1529 attempts to show both. Charles V of Spain had, as emperor, too many wars on hand in Europe to wish for further complications in the East. He possessed, moreover, in America, an India nearer home: an India which, instead of draining the mother-country of specie every year to carry on trade, was beginning to pour into her treasury inexhaustible stores of silver. Charles V wanted the sinews of war, and he could not pay his armies in nutmegs and cloves.

Notwithstanding his promise to the Spanish Cortes in 1523, during the first enthusiasm of Magellan’s discoveries, to defend them, Charles V in 1529 sold his claims to the Moluccas for 350,000 golden ducats (say £170,000) to Portugal. By the same Convention of Saragossa he accepted an Asiatic boundary-line between the two Catholic nations at 297½ leagues east of the Moluccas, reserving to Spain the right of annulling the bargain on repayment of the money. This disposed for the time of the difficulty, and the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580 – solemnly confirmed in 1581 – seemed to render the settlement final.

But diplomacy in Europe proved powerless, then and for two centuries afterwards, to quell the stormy passions of European rivals in Asia. The Portuguese jealousy had already been excited by the influx into India of Castilian Jews driven forth from Spain. Albuquerque proposed to make short work with these unhappy

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Native boatmen landing on the southern coast of India

emigrants, and asked leave to “exterminate them one by one as I come across them.” On the Spaniards attempting to trade at the Moluccas, the Portuguese captains waited for no orders from home, and after a fierce struggle of some years drove them out. In 1528 they forced the King of Tidore, the chief sovereign in the Moluccas, to promise never again to allow the Castilians to enter his river.

The Saragossa Convention of 1529 between Spain and Portugal provided that any Europeans except Portuguese who came within the line then agreed on should be punished as corsairs. But fighting still went on between the armed merchant ships of the two nations on the Indian seas. “In this manner do we go on day by day with these dogs, enemies of our Holy Faith,” a despairing Spaniard wrote of the Portuguese in 1532, “the knife forever at our throats, swallowing a thousand deaths.”

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Gateway of Imad-ad-daulah’s Tomb at Agra

The struggle flickered out only after the native princes surrendered their islands to the Portuguese or bound themselves by treaties absolutely to exclude the Castilians from their ports. At length in 1545 the Christian commanders came to an agreement, each side solemnly purging itself as “blameless of the cockle which the Enemy of Mankind had commenced to sow.” But the cockle of discord soon sprang up afresh. By a later treaty in the same year, the Spaniards surrendered their artillery and gave hostages as a guarantee that they would really evacuate Tidore; while their soldiers were offered service under the Portuguese. The monopoly of the two Catholic nations in the East, thus established, was destined to be drawn still closer by the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580.

The attitude of England to Portugal seems, on the other hand, to have been cordial. Ten years before the finding of the Cape route, the old friendship between the two nations had been cemented afresh, in 1489, by a “ratification of the Perpetual Peace.” When, therefore, our Henry VII, inspired by Da Gama’s discovery, determined to explore on his own account, he was careful to respect the rights of his “dearest brother and kinsman, the King of Portugal.” In 1500 and 1502, in granting somewhat wide charters to certain Bristol and Portuguese adventurers to sail under the English flag into all heathen countries of the seas, and to erect his royal banner on whatever island or continent they should discover, Henry VII expressly provided that

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they should not intermeddle with the possessions of the King of Portugal or any other friendly Christian prince. Spain and Portugal, secure in the Papal award, looked on unperturbed, and in 1521 Henry Via entered into a compact with the two nations against their common enemies and those of Christendom. In 1527 Charles V, Emperor and King of Spain, is said to have offered to sell his claims to the Moluccas to Henry VIII. This possible cause of a quarrel with Portugal came to nothing, and in 1529 the dispute between the two Iberian kingdoms was adjusted, as we have seen, by the Convention of Saragossa, while Henry VIII joined with them in negotiations for a general peace of Europe and league against the Turk.

The truth is that England believed herself on the eve of discovering a nearer way to India than either the Straits of Magellan or the Cape of Good Hope. In 1476 a Danish (or Polish?) pilot, John Scolus, is reported somewhat obscurely to have got to the passage north of Labrador, and, as Sir Clements Markham writes, “in 1477 Columbus himself learned from English sailors of Bristol the management of an ocean voyage, when he visited Ultima Thule” (Iceland). In 1480, a vessel of eighty tons sailed from Bristol under Captain Thylde, the pioneer of continuous English exploration, to discover a land to the west of Ireland called “Brasylle” – the Irish O’Brasil or Island of the Blest. He failed, but according to the Spanish ambassador, the Bristol merchants sent out two to four vessels every year from 1491 to 1498 on the same search.

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When, therefore, Columbus believed he had found a way to India south-west across the Atlantic in 1492, and mistook Cuba for Japan, the Bristol merchants redoubled their efforts by a north-western route across the same ocean. All such expeditions assumed the rotundity of the earth, and the vagueness of the Papal Bull of 1493, which embittered the relations of Spain and Portugal, gave cover to the English proceedings. That Bull excluded intrusion only toward “the west and south,” explicitly repeating these terms four times over, and making no reference to discoveries by the north.

The practical monopoly of Spain was to reach India by a southwest route; the practical monopoly of Portugal was to reach India by a southeast route; the English resolved to find India by a north-western or north-eastern passage. Spain saw that this might lead to an infringement on the Portuguese claims and on her own, but she did not press the point so as either to threaten a rupture or to prevent the English voyages.

Indeed the Bull of 1493, by referring exclusively to discoveries toward the west and south, left the north open; and the Spanish ambassador himself ad-mitted that the Bristol merchants had been yearly exploring in that direction before the Bull was granted. “You write that a person like Columbus,” runs a letter to him from their Catholic Majesties in 1496, “has come to England for the purpose of persuading the king to enter into an undertaking similar to that of the Indies, without prejudice to Spain and Portugal. He is quite

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at liberty.” The ambassador had been sent to England to negotiate a marriage between Princess Katherine of Spain and Arthur, Prince of Wales. In the previous decade Henry VII missed the offer of the Genoese Columbus, which would have made England the discoverer of the south-western route. In 1496 he granted letters patent to the Genoese Cabots – John and his three sons – to sail under the royal flag by the north, east, and west. The south is significantly omitted from the license.

John Cabot, a Genoese by birth but a naturalized citizen of Venice, appears to have visited Mecca, had sojourned in Portugal and Spain, and settled in Eng-land. With the aid of the Bristol merchants and the sanction of King Henry’s patent, he at length set forth from the Severn on May 2, 1497, in one small vessel, the Mathew, with a crew of eighteen, of whom seventeen were Bristol men. He hoped to reach Asia by the north Atlantic, as Columbus was then supposed to have reached it by the south, and “to make London a greater place for spices than Alexandria.” He returned on August 6th, having in reality discovered North America, but in the opinion of his contemporaries having gained for England “a great part of Asia, without a stroke of the sword.”

Slowly and with much reluctance did England abandon this belief. Yet the voyages of 1498, 1500, 1502, and subsequent years made it evident that America was not Cathay. The latter name, Cathay or Cataya, the old land travellers had vaguely applied to Tartary

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and China. In the sea voyages now to be described, it included also the northern shores of Asia. A copious and contentious literature has grown up on the pretensions of Sebastian, son of John Cabot, to have been the true discoverer of North America, and on his, perhaps juster, claim to have definitely given shape to the conception of a northwest passage to India. The idea of such a passage took possession of the stubborn English mind.

Of the resolute efforts to convert that idea into an accomplished fact I can narrate only the most memorable, drawing from the Calendar of State Papers and from Hakluyt’s Voyages. In 1527, Master Robert Thorne addressed a book to Henry VIII’s ambassador at the court of Charles V, urging the King of England to become a merchant like the King of Portugal, and advocating in great detail the north-western route. His father was one of the discoverers of Newfoundland, he himself had dwelt in Seville and adventured 1400 ducats in the Indo-Spanish fleet of 1527, with which sailed “two Englishmen sent to discover ‘the Islands of the Spiceries.’ ”

“Now then, if from the said New Found Lands the sea be navigable,” he argued, “there is no doubt but sailing northward and passing the pole, descending to the equinoctial line, we shall hit these islands, and it should be a much more shorter way than either the Spaniards or the Portugals have.” He estimated the length of the Spanish route by the southwest Atlantic at 4200 or 4300 leagues, while the English route by

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A Spanish ship of the Fifteenth Century

the northwest would be only 2480 leagues. Two ships were despatched in this year, including, according to Hakluyt’s account, the Dominus Vobiscum – “The Lord be with you.” One of the vessels perished off Newfoundland; the other returned, leaving the possibility of a north-western passage much as it was before.

A more persistent attempt was made in 1536 by Master Hore of London – “a man of goodly stature and of great courage and given to the study of cosmography.” With him went “many gentlemen of the Inns of Court and of the Chancery, and divers others of good worship desirous to see the strange things of the world” – sixty men in all, of whom thirty were well born. Starting in April, 1536, from Gravesend in two small vessels (one of 120 tons) they reached the coast of Newfoundland. There the crews were driven by starvation to eat each other’s flesh. In vain Hore upbraided them “in a notable oration, recounting how these dealings offended the Almighty.” They cast lots as to who should next die, but “such was the mercie of God that the same night there arrived a French ship in that port well furnished with victual, and such was the policie of the English that they became masters of

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the same, and changing ships and victualing them, they set sail to come into England.” The haggard survivors reached Cornwall in October, 1536, so worn by hunger and misery that one of them could not be recognized by his own father and mother save by a wart on his knee. The French captain, whom they had plundered, afterwards appealed to Henry VIII. His Majesty, however, was so moved by the sufferings of the English crews “that he punished not his subjects, but of his own purse made full and royal recompense unto the French.”

The next expedition which must be noticed was the famous one of Sir Hugh Willoughby in 1553 to find a passage by the northeast. Sebastian Cabot stands arraigned as a disloyal son who filched his father’s achievements to fabricate a reputation for himself. But he was also a skilled geographer and an indefatigable projector of voyages. Born in Bristol, and associated with his father in the patent of Henry VII for the expedition which in 1497 discovered North America, he became dissatisfied with the meagre rewards of Henry VIII for his map-making, and about 1513 repaired to Spain. There he found employment under King Ferdinand as a cartographer and member of the Council of the New Indies.

After various vicissitudes, during which he retransferred his services to England and back again to Spain, Sebastian Cabot finally returned to England in 1547, and gained distinction as arbitrator in an old-standing dispute between the London merchants and the Hanseatic

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Sebastian Cabot

colony of Germans in that city. When further consulted by the London merchants as to the depression of trade, due to the disturbed state of Europe, he advised them boldly to strike out a path for them-selves northeast to Asia, and under his impulse, on December 18, 1551, what is in reality the first English East India Company was formed. Its capital consisted of £6000 in £25 shares, with Sebastian Cabot as governor for life, and eventually twelve councillors for the voyage.

The daring project met with impediments, and it was not until May, 1553, that the little squadron could start. It consisted of three ships of 160, 120, and 90 tons, each with a pinnace and boat. Its object was “the discovery of Cathay, and divers other regions, dominions, islands, and places unknown.” It carried a complete set of instructions “by the Right Worshipful Master Sebastian Cabota Esquier, Governor of the Mystery and Company of the Merchants. Adventurers of the City of London,” and letters from “the Right Noble Prince Edward the Sixth, sent to the kings, princes, and other potentates inhabiting the northeast parts of the world.” We shall see that this double

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precedent of mercantile ordinances and royal missives was followed by the more permanent East India Company of 1600. Sir Hugh Willoughby, Knight, commanded as admiral or “Captain General,” and Richard Chancelor went as pilot-in-chief.

Into the controversy which surrounds this voyage I need not enter. It suffices for Willoughby’s fame that he was the first Englishman to reach Nova Zembla; that the results of the expedition led to an overland trade by way of Russia into Asia; and that he laid down his life in the attempt. From August 23 to September 18, 1553, Willoughby coasted the shore of northern Russia with two vessels of the squadron, and tried to explore inland. Here his diary comes to an abrupt close, although it would appear from a will that he was alive as late as January, 1554. In that long winter darkness he and the crews of his two ice-bound ships – about seventy men in all – perished of cold and starvation, freezing to mummies as they died. The next explorer found the weird company about two years later, Willoughby still sitting in his cabin with his diary and papers before him. A strange fate befell the poor corpses on the attempt to bring the vessels home, for we are told by the great Puritan writer John Milton, in his History of Muscovia, that “the ships being unstaunch, as is supposed by the two years wintering in Lapland, sunk by the way with their dead and them also that brought them.”

Richard Chancelor, the second in command, had got separated from Willoughby in a storm off the Lafoden

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Islands. He eventually reached Archangel, and obtained from the Russian sovereign, Ivan the Terrible, a grant of freedom of trade for English ships. On his return a new company was formed to take advantage of this grant, with a charter from Queen Mary in 1554, under the title of “the Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Lands, Countries, Isles, etc., not before known or frequented by any English.” Persons not members of the company nor licensed by it, who should venture into the Russian dominions, were to forfeit their ships and merchandise, one-half to the English crown and one-half to the company. The monopoly grew into the powerful organization known as the Russian or Muscovy Company, which by many voyages, perils, and diplomatic arrangements, established a trade through Russia to Persia; was a rival of the great East India Company; and lasted till toward the end of the eighteenth century.

This sea-and-overland expedition by the northeast had been chartered by Queen Mary in 1554 for the purposes of trade as well as of discovery. I must not pause to relate how Chancelor and Burrough promptly started in 1555–1556 to open up the path, or how its agent Anthony Jenkinson reached Moscow in 1557, dined with the Tsar “at six o’clock by candle-light,” and penetrated to Bokhara, where he met the traders from India and Cathay. It was not an overland route, but a northern passage by sea that had taken hold of the English imagination; and the trade by way of the Volga and the Caspian formed no answer to the

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Traders from India at Bokhara

problem which English seamanship had set itself to solve.

The death of Queen Mary put an end to constraints that had arisen out of her Spanish marriage, and with the accession of the Protestant princess in 1558 a host of projectors appeared. A rivalry sprang up between the advocates of the northwest and the northeast passage. In 1565 Anthony Jenkinson urged on Queen Elizabeth a northeast exploration by sea “to set forward this famous discovery of that renowned Cathay.” In 1566–1567 [Sir] Humphrey Gilbert wrote his noted Discourse “to prove a passage by the northwest to Cathay and the East Indies,” and offered to find it by the “travel hazard and peril of my life,” on condition that he and his heirs should be secured in the fruits of the discovery.

But the great north-western attempt of Elizabeth’s reign was the three voyages of Frobisher. Martin Frobisher, merchant, mariner, and on occasion corsair, had for fifteen years nourished a scheme for a passage northwest to Cathay. On his travels he met with Michael

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Lok, an adventurer equally daring, a more exact student of geographical science, and possessed of wealth earned by sea-trade. Lok’s father, while on business at Dunkirk in 1533, had torn down the Papal Bull excommunicating Henry VIII, rose into high favour with that sovereign, became alderman and sheriff of London, and died as Sir William Lok in 1550. His son Michael having commanded a ship of one thousand tons in the Levant, and. being stirred by “the great traffic into the East Indies” which he had seen in Spain, financed Frobisher’s first voyage.

After unsuccessful negotiations with the Muscovy Company, a charter was obtained from Elizabeth in February, 1575, for a northwest expedition in favour of Lok, Frobisher, and such others as would adventure. Lok subscribed £738 of the total £1613 required, and on June 12, 1576, their two little barks of twenty-five tons each, with a pinnace of ten tons, and thirty-four persons all told, sailed from Gravesend under Frobisher’s command. The pinnace was soon lost, one of the barks parted company in a storm and came home, but Frobisher went on, entered the straits to which he gave his name, and returned to Harwich on October 2, 1576 – bringing great hope “of the passage to Cataya which he doubted nothing to find and pass through.” Among his trophies were an Esquimaux with his canoe, whom he had enticed to the side of his little vessel, then stooping over the side had with his own arms “caught the man fast and plucked him with main force, boat and all, into his barque.”

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Palace of the Great Khan

Frobisher also brought home certain pieces of stone which an Italian assayer, Agnello, declared to contain gold. Money was quickly forthcoming for a second voyage at a cost of £4500; the queen subscribing £500, afterwards raised to £1000; the lord treasurer, lord admiral, and other high officers £100 each. Even Philip Sidney caught the fever and put down for this and the next voyages £25, then £50: modest sums, but apparently beyond the young poet-courtier’s purse, as he figures in 1579 among the adventurers who had not paid their subscriptions – a defaulter for £77.

Frobisher’s second expedition, consisting of his former two little barks with “one talle shippe of her Majestie,” started on May 26, 1577. His hope was to pass into the “Mare Pacificum or Mare de Sur by which he may go into Cataya, China, the East India, and all

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the dominions of the great Cane [Khan] of Tartaria.” But his fixed resolve was to find more of the gold-bearing stone. On September 23 he returned to Milford Haven, bringing home a quantity of the supposed ore, went to court, and received from Queen Elizabeth great thanks and most gracious countenance.” The new northern land discovered on this voyage her Majesty named the Meta Incognita – the Unknown Turning-post into Asia – and designed to send thither chosen soldiers and discreet persons to form a settlement.

The hope of gold now wrought like a frenzy. It seemed as if England had within her grasp not only a passage to the East Indies about half as short as the Spanish route, but also stores of bullion which would reduce to contempt the silver of Spanish America. A German assayer, Schutz, engaged that two tons “shall yield in fine gold” twenty ounces, and although the mint officials gave no certain sound, it was resolved to secure at once five thousand tons of the ore. “The northwest passage is almost wholly lost sight of,” says Mr. Sainsbury in summarizing the State Papers; “gold is the pith, heart, and core of most of the correspondence.”

On May 31, 1578, Frobisher sailed on his third voyage from Harwich with eleven ships. The queen herself graciously wished him farewell at Greenwich. He carried the hopes and fears alike of the city and the court; and the divine blessing was sought by strict articles “to banish dice and card playing” “and to serve God twice a day, with the ordinary service usual

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in churches of England.” The password for the crews was “Before the world was God;” the countersign, “After God came Christ his Sonne.” Amid tempests and ice dangers so dire that Frobisher, “when all hope should be past ... resolved with powder to burn and bury himself and all, together with her Majestie’s ships, and with this peal of ordnance to receive an honourable knell” – the fleet secured its cargo of ore, and returned to England on October 1, 1578.

The gold mania rushed to a climax. Wild rumours spread as to the value of the freight; an ominous silence followed, then angry fears. Finally in 1583 the assay of William Williams proved that two hundred weight of “Frobisher’s ore” yielded but two minute particles of silver, not the size of a pin’s head, which were fastened with sealing-wax to the margin of the report. The three voyages had cost £20,160; involved terrible sufferings in stormy and ice-bound seas, and left ruin behind. Frobisher seems to have adventured what little he had, and in 1577 (?) his wife represented her hard fate to Secretary Walsingham as “your humble oratrix, the most miserable poor woman in the world.” A widow of good estate when she married Frobisher, she and her children were in a wretched room at Hampstead ready to starve, and she prayed for help in collecting an old debt of £4 to save them from famishing.

The miseries of Michael Lok were more drawn out. He had contributed or truly expended £6250 on the three voyages – he declared to the Privy Council in 1579 –

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Sir Francis Drake

“all the goods he hath in the world, whereby himself, his wife, and fifteen children are left to beg their bread, except God turn the stones at Dartford into his bread again.” No miracle took place. After lying long in the Fleet Prison and failing in attempts to re-establish himself in life, Lok was in 1614–1615, at the age of eighty-three, still being prosecuted for debts incurred for the Cathay Company thirty-five years before.

Meanwhile English exploration had not stood still. As the great struggle with Spain drew on, the Protestant spirit of England rose, and in 1578 Drake broke into the Pacific by the south-western route and visited the Moluccas, all Papal Bulls notwithstanding. Elizabeth hesitated to follow up to its mercantile uses her privateering hero’s voyage round the globe (1577 1580). But during the recriminations which ensued with Spain, she found it necessary to challenge the Catholic monopoly of the Asiatic trade based on the Papal settlement of 1493. The Pope’s award became a disputed “donation of the Bishop of Rome.” “The use of the sea and air,” she argued, “is common to all,” “as neither nature, nor public use and custom permitteth any possession thereof.” Drake’s voyage into the forbidden oceans, and Elizabeth’s challenge of the international system on which the interdict rested, opened up possibilities of a southern passage which

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the East India Company, twenty years later, turned into facts.

These possibilities and the ruin and discredit in which Frobisher’s search for gold had ended, somewhat abated the national interest in the northern routes. But expeditions still went on. In May, 1580, the Muscovy Company sent out two vessels of forty and twenty tons, the joint crews numbering but fourteen men and two boys, to discover a north-eastern passage to the “dominions of the mighty prince, the Emperor of Cathay.” One of the little barks, under Jackman, perished at sea; the other, under Pet, discovered the straits which bear his name between Waigatz and Russia, but was forced back by ice and returned to England in December, 1580.

After much negotiation a fourth voyage was entrusted to Frobisher, which marks the growing resolve of England to penetrate to Asiatic seas by the forbidden southern route. Its object was to “be only for trade and not for discovery of the passage by the north-east to Cataya,” unless the information could be incidentally obtained. Frobisher declined the command, and in June, 1582, the ships sailed under Captain Edward Fenton with designedly ambiguous instructions. “You shall take your right course to the isles of the Moluccas for the better discovery of the northwest passage,” provided that the discovery may be made “without hindrance of your trade;” and also to find a north-east passage if, on the same conditions, he could. The main idea seems to have been to reach the Moluccas

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by the Cape of Good Hope, or if needful by the Straits of Magellan, to open trade and to establish small settlements at places, to fight the Spaniards if attacked, and to inquire whether the northern passages which had defied all efforts from Europe could not be opened out from Asia. It was a vast enterprise, with a squadron of four ships aggregating 740 tons, besides pinnaces and shallops, provisioned for thirteen months, and with a subscribed capital of £11,600, of which £2000 were invested in merchandise.

After a year’s absence Captain Fenton returned to Plymouth in May, 1583, with a sad tale of failure. He has been accused of deviating from his instructions. with the design of seizing the Island of St. Helena, “theire to be proclaimed Kyng.” It is certain that he took six months to reach Brazil. Contrary winds and want of victuals, he wrote to Burleigh, then prevented him from passing the Cape of Good Hope, while the news of a great Spanish fleet at the Straits of Magellan deterred him from attempting that route. He decided to traffic, or buccaneer, along the coast of Brazil; fought a battle with a Spanish squadron; and came back with the empty words that, but for these mishaps, he dared well assure the lord treasurer they had brought home in honest trade above £40,000 or £50,000.

As a matter of fact, he bartered away one of his ships to the Portuguese, lost another at the River Plate, quarrelled with his officers, buried forty-five of his men, and did nothing. It still took men of the

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Drake and Cavendish stamp to break into the Indian seas. But the union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal under Philip II in 1580 gave a new incentive to the task. Apparently in the very year of Fenton’s return, 1583, the danger to Europe of allowing Spain to enjoy both Portugal and the East Indies was publicly discussed. The remedies proposed were for England to seize and fortify the Straits of Magellan; to take and keep Port St. Vincent in Brazil, and to discover the northeast passage with all speed.

The time for these heroic measures had not come. Yet the next few years saw memorable attempts both to the north and the south. In 1585, 1586, and 1587 John Davis made his three great voyages, in each of which he felt convinced that he had found the northwest route. As the result of the first, he announced to Walsingham, on October 3, 1585, “that the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful, but at any time almost to be passed, the sea navigable, void of ice, the air tolerable and the waters very deep.” On returning from the third he declared, in September, 1587, “the passage is most probable, the execution easy, as at my coming you shall fully know.”

Davis discovered’ much, but he had not found the outlet,, and he became a mark for the scoffer. The crisis of the Spanish Armada in the following year, 1588, absorbed the whole energies of the nation, and his alleged north-western route ended in disbelief and contempt. Yet although mistaken, he was honest, and in 1595 he still held that “it seemed most manifest

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that the passage was free and without impediment towards the north, but by reason of the Spanish fleet and unfortunate time of Mr. Secretary’s death, the voyage was omitted and never sithins attempted.”

Events had taken place which fixed the eyes of the nation on a very different route. On the assumption of the crown of Portugal by Philip II of Spain in 1580, one of the rival claimants, Don Antonio, Prior of Crato, appealed to arms, was defeated, and sought shelter in England. The union of the two Iberian monarchies, with the command of the joint resources of the East and West Indies which it gave to Philip, seemed a menace to all Europe. France and England drew closer together, and Elizabeth encouraged the fugitive Antonio to the furthest limits short of a rupture with Spain. Some relief she could openly afford to an unfortunate prince in whose veins the blood royal of Eng-land, even if tainted by illegitimacy, flowed. In November, 1581, the ‘Spanish ambassador gave a check to her hesitating designs and official disclaimers by demanding the arrest of the pretender. The armed ships bought for Don Antonio in the Thames, he declared, had sailed past the queen’s own window at Greenwich with the flag of Portugal displayed. “Your Majesty will not hear words, so we must come to cannon, and see if you will hear them.” Elizabeth, without raising her voice, told him that if he used such threats she would throw him into a dungeon. But she was not yet prepared for an open breach with Philip.

She was willing, however, to see her subjects do

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Greenwich in 1662

what she feared to undertake. The Spanish monopoly of the Magellan route had been challenged during the diplomatic wrangle arising out of Drake’s voyage round the world in 1577–1580. In July, 1586, Thomas Cavendish set forth on the same course with three small ships of 140, 60, and 40 tons respectively, with crews aggregating 123 men. Philip II had attempted to forestall such irruptions into the Pacific by a fortified settlement commanding the Straits of Magellan.

But Cavendish found the miserable colonists dead or fleeing from the place, which he contemptuously named the Town of Famine. Pillaging, prize-taking, and burning to the water’s edge, he raided up the Pacific coast of Spanish America, buccaneered through the Spanish and Portuguese islands of the Indian Ocean, and finally returned to England by the Cape of Good Hope with one surviving ship, in September, 1588, to be sung in ballads and flattered by the court.

Two months before his arrival Spain had struck her long suspended blow. In the summer of 1588 the

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Invincible Armada came and perished. Even Elizabeth felt that the time for pretences was past. In the following year, 1589, as recorded in the State Papers, she received a memorial setting forth the benefits to the realm of a direct trade with India and praying for a royal license for three ships. Leave granted, the capital was raised, and in April, 1591, the first English squadron sailed round the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian seas. One of the three ships, the Merchant Royal, had to be sent back to England from Table Bay, laden with victims of the scurvy. Of the two which sailed on, the Penelope went down in a tempest with the commodore or “General” George Raymond and all hands. But Captain James Lancaster in the Edward Bonaventure passed up the African coast to Zanzibar, crossed over to Cape Comorin, reached the Malay Peninsula, and returned by Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope.

Atlantic hurricanes buffeted him about from the West Indies to Newfoundland and back again. While on shore with most of the crew, his sole surviving ship was blown far out to sea with only five men and a boy on board, but she at length reached England. Captain Lancaster, after generous succour from French vessels, himself arrived at Rye in 1594. Of 198 men who had rounded the Cape of Good Hope with him in 1591, barely twenty-five again saw their native land. But they brought back a precious cargo of pepper and rich booty. The only dangerous enemies they had met were the scurvy and the storm. Lancaster’s voyage

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tore the Papal award of 1493 into shreds, and with it the charter of the Catholic monopoly in the Indian seas.

We must be careful, however, not to overestimate the binding force of the Bull of 1493. I have said that at the end of the fifteenth century no Christian nation seriously disputed the Papal award. But the outbreak of free thought during the first quarter of the sixteenth, which grew into the Reformation in Germany and England, was also represented in France by the struggle of Francis I with the Pope. The witty king among his courtiers would have liked to see the testament of Father Adam which authorized his Holiness to divide out the world. For a moment, indeed, Francis I seemed disposed to give practical effect to his jibe. The Florentine Captain Verazzani, whom he commissioned to make discoveries to the northwest, adventured about 1524 southwards within the demarcation line.

The expedition failed. The explorer was eaten by cannibals, or, as is supposed with less likelihood, was captured by the Spaniards and hanged at Madrid, and the Eldest Son of the Church never repeated the attempt. When the Huguenots became a power in France, during the middle of the century, the forward party settled colonies on the coasts of Brazil and Florida, between 1555 and 1564. But the Brazilian settlement lapsed to the Portuguese, the Florida colonies were destroyed by the Spaniards and were chiefly remembered in France as episodes in the Protestant movement. Such infringements of the Papal award formed maritime incidents of greater religious or political

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The beach at Madras.

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struggles. The punishment provided by the Bull of 1493 was excommunication; and to sovereigns like our Henry VIII, who had broken or were about to break with the Roman See on other grounds, the sentence ceased to have terrors. To James I, and to Protestant rulers like Cromwell or the champions of Flemish and Dutch liberty, the Bull was null and void.

Meanwhile the Papal settlement had passed into the public law of Europe. It is not needful here to inquire whether the Bull of 1493 was only ad spiritualia. The treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and the Convention of Saragossa in 1529, practically, although not expressly based upon it, were diplomatic facts backed by powerful armies. If Henry VIII had challenged the principle of the Bull embodied in these instruments, he would have run the gauntlet of Portugal, Spain, and the empire. If Elizabeth had as queen openly encroached within the Spanish line, she would have had to reckon with Philip II. It did not suit her to do so until urged on by his war preparations and emboldened by the destruction of his Armada. During nearly a century England tried to reach India by every possible route not precluded by the treaties which gave effect to the Bull – through the ice-bound seas of the northwest and the northeast, overland across Russia by means of the Muscovy Company, and due east, as we shall presently find, by way of the Sultan’s dominions and the Levant.

The other Protestant sea-power of northern Europe had adopted a similar policy. As early as 1565 the Dutch established a factory, or trading-post, at Kola

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on the north Russian route, and soon began to explore eastwards toward Cathay. Uncertain attempts, Dutch or Swedish, followed. In 1593 commenced the series of determined efforts of Holland to reach Asia by the northeast passage, which have placed William Barents in the foremost rank of Arctic explorers.

His first voyage occupied the summer of 1594, and brought him through storms and ice-floes to the Islands of Orange. On the second voyage in 1595 he found the strait south of Waigatz Isle blocked with ice, was imprisoned by the frozen masses at Idol Cape, but eventually reached Staten Island off Tierra del Fuego. Despite this achievement, the States-General decided not to expend public money on further attempts to discover a north-eastern passage, with so little prospect of a pecuniary return. But to encourage private adventurers they offered a large reward in case of success. A third expedition accordingly started in May, 1596, with Barents as pilot-in-chief, and keeping more to the north reached Spitzbergen. They were forced “in great cold, poverty, misery, and grief to stay all that winter” at the Haven of Nova Zembla, and the much-enduring Barents died on the return voyage to Holland in the following spring. By this time the Dutch, like the English, were resolved to reach India by the south, in defiance of Spanish treaties and Papal Bulls. From freedom in religion sprang the freedom of the sea.

Not only had the diplomatic settlement of the undiscovered world, based on the Papal partition, broken

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A scene in India, near Bombay

down, but the methods of exploration had profoundly changed. Medieval sea-trade rigorously enforced the maxims of secret commerce. Venice, like Carthage of old, punished with death the revealer of a maritime route, and the export of charts of discovery was a capital crime. The Adriatic merchants raised a wall of mystery between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

They “laboured to make us strangers to the Great Turk, the Egyptians, and bordering countries, and brought them to that ignorance of our nation, that they thought England to be a town in the kingdom of London,” wrote Sir William Monson. In 1424 the Doge had considered a copy of the travels of Marco Polo, together with a map (probably the precious Medicean portulan of 1351) as a State gift worthy to accompany

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The Jain Temple at Girnar in Gujarat, Western India

The Jain temple on the mountain of Girnar, near Junagadh in Gujarat, Western India, is one of the most picturesque and ancient temples in the country. The history of Girnar, an ancient name of which was Raivata, goes back to the time of Asoka in the third century before the Christian era.

the thanks of the Republic to Prince Pedro of Portugal for his good offices in negotiating a treaty with the emperor.

This doctrine du secret commercial, which weighed heavily on early exploration, ceased to be tenable in the sixteenth century. Prince Henry’s cartographical school at Sagres, in the fifteenth, had done much to render available the then existing stock of knowledge regarding the undiscovered world. But it was the application of the Flemish printer’s and graver’s art to map-making at the beginning of the sixteenth century that gave the death-blow to secret commerce. A magnificent school of cartography grew up at Antwerp and Bruges – a school ennobled by master-minds like Mercator, Ortelius, and De Jode, and fertile in processes of map-reproduction destined to make the discoveries of one nation the common property of all.

The Netherlands school of geographers rendered possible the developments in maritime commerce which culminated at the end of the sixteenth century in the English and Dutch East India Companies. It started from the theoretical cosmography of the Ptolemaic system, and the Roman itineraries of which the Peutingerian Tables (circ. 226 A.D.) form a striking example. To these it added the actual discoveries, and some of the conjectural errors, embodied in the mappemondes and portulans of the middle ages. The voyages of Columbus and Da Gama made the medieval charts obsolete. On the ruins of the old cosmography the Italian and Dutch map-designers built up a new geography,

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and the Antwerp map-printers published it to the world.

The system of secret commerce had thus to give place to a doctrine of exclusive right founded on priority of discovery. This doctrine, crudely expressed in the demarcation Bull of 1493 and elaborated by later diplomacy, gave a monopoly to the first comer. The drift of affairs in the next two centuries disclosed, however, that such national monopolies afforded no final settlement for the newly found regions of the globe. The right of discovery had to submit to modifications based on the plea of non-effective occupation. But from first to last, monopoly was the guiding principle – the monopoly secured by secret trading, the monopoly of the Papal Bulls and treaties founded thereon, the monopoly given by the right of discovery, and the monopoly derived from that right modified by effective occupation. To this long tradition of monopoly the English and Dutch East India Companies became the residuary legatees, and it profoundly influenced their whole history.

If, during nearly a century, the Portuguese maintained the monopoly of the Indian trade, they for a time enforced it in no grudging spirit toward other Christian nations. Beyond Lisbon to the south, indeed, all intruders were treated as pirates, and misleading reports were spread, according to the maxims of secret commerce, about the dangers of the route. But in 1500, immediately after Da Gama’s discovery, the Portuguese king admitted naturalized foreigners to trade with the

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Jaipur, a modern centre of Indian trade

East at Lisbon itself, and he cordially entered on a project for an Indian mart in northern Europe. Bruges, the outlet to the North for the Eastern trade by thy medieval land paths, had decayed, owing partly to the blocking of the Asiatic routes by the Turks, partly to the vengeance of Maximilian of Austria for its revolts, but permanently in consequence of the silting up of its river and ports.

The Portuguese king made Antwerp the entrepôt of Indian produce for northern Europe, and the opening up of a new branch of the Scheldt, by. the scouring of the channel about 1504, gave it a sea approach such as Bruges had not enjoyed even in the height of her prosperity.

Lisbon thus became the port of trans-shipment between the East and the great colonial mart of Antwerp. During the first half of the sixteenth century England’s

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direct traffic with Lisbon was small, although we find Henry VII granting a charter in 1500 to a joint company of English and Portuguese adventurers, and Portuguese merchants figure among the residents in London with whom the Venetians were in 1507 licensed to trade. But between Antwerp and London an enormous traffic grew up. Antwerp not only supplied England with the precious stones, fine fabrics, spices, drugs, and dyes of the East, but she took in return and distributed to Europe the raw materials and manufactures of England, as a long list of these exports and imports in 1560 shows.

In 1550 the Emperor Charles V found that the English merchants employed twenty thousand persons in Antwerp, and he refrained from imposing the Inquisition on the city, lest, it should drive the Englanders away. They did business with a Portuguese colony on the Scheldt, and no fewer than three hundred wealthy Spanish families had their domicile in Antwerp. Over five hundred vessels are reported to have sailed in or out in one day, and the ships and small craft were said to aggregate ninety-two thousand a year.

This centre of the world’s traffic, Dives Antwerpia, almost at our doors, gave an impulse to the mercantile spirit in England. “Clear-sighted persons at court” advised, as early as the reign of Henry VIII, a policy of colonial enterprise in place of interference in the continental wars. “Let us,” they said, “in God’s name, leave off our attempts against the terra firma, as the natural situation of islands seems not to suit

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with conquests of that kind. Or, when we would enlarge ourselves, let it be that way we can, and to Which it seems the eternal providence has destined us, which is by sea. The Indies are discovered, and vast treasure is brought from thence every day. Let us, therefore, bend our endeavours thitherwards; and if the Spaniards and Portuguese suffer us not to join with them, there will yet be region enough for all to enjoy.” For these statements we have no less an authority than Lord Herbert in the sixteenth century.

From the outset, therefore, the Indies formed the goal of English maritime enterprise in the sixteenth century. The efforts to reach that goal by a northwest or a northeast passage I have already described. But Elizabeth did not confine her attempts to the north alone. As far back as 1553 English ships began to make their way to the coast of Guinea – an infringement of Portuguese rights profitable to the Portuguese themselves, and placed on a treaty basis in 1572. The occasional seizures and reprisals which followed did not seriously disturb the amity of the two nations; and England’s friendship on the Newfoundland bank was worth some concessions in the South. For the English had the best ships engaged in the Atlantic fisheries, and, although in 1577 they numbered but fifteen as against fifty Portuguese and a hundred Spanish, they were said to give the law to the rest.

Elizabeth’s diplomacy enabled her adventurers to push not only southwards by Guinea, but also eastwards through the Mediterranean. In 1577, according to Sir

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William Monson’s Naval Tracts, she sent a mission to the Emperor of Morocco, with the result that the English merchants secured a firm footing and gradually ousted the Portuguese from the trade. In 1579 her envoy to the Ottoman Sultan obtained permission for English merchants to resort freely to the Levant, and in 1581 she granted a charter of incorporation to the Turkey Company. After the joint Armada of Spain and Portugal against England perished in 1588, Elizabeth extended the scope of this corporation in 1593 to India, under the title of the Governor and Company of the Merchants of the Levant.

The union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580 was to the Protestant sea-powers of the sixteenth century what the closing of the Eastern land routes by the Turks had been to Christendom in the fifteenth. Again a great necessity arose for a new departure in Indo-European commerce. Portugal was dragged at the heels of Spain into her suicidal grapple with the Reformation; and the Catholic monopoly of the Indian trade Went down with the Armada in the English Channel and North Sea. From the moment that Philip II added Portugal to the Spanish monarchy, the English and Flemish adventurers foresaw the end. In 1580 divers London traders petitioned the Council for Elizabeth’s consent to an expedition direct to India; a year later the Dutch made a similar application to William I The life-and-death struggle which followed, by united Spain and Portugal on the one hand against England and the Netherlands on the other, was fought

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out, not by royal fleets and armies alone, but also by the merchants of the rival nations. The Dutch and Spanish war of commercial edicts scarcely makes itself heard in history amid the din of battle, the shrieks of street massacres, the groans from Inquisition chambers, and the inrush of the ocean through the dikes But it gave a staggering blow to the Catholic monopoly of the Indian trade. In 1585, for example, Philip II ordered the seizure of all Dutch ships in Spanish waters. The States-General retorted by forbidding any Dutch vessels to trade with Spain or Portugal under pain of forfeiting both ship and goods. If these menaces had some ring of empty shouting in front of the battle, they soon acquired a very real meaning. Spain ruined Antwerp. The States-General issued ten proclamations between 1585 and 1600 against trade with Portugal or Spain. In 1595 the States-General forbade all navigation of Dutch vessels within Spanish waters, and in 1596 sent a ship of war as far as Calais to arrest any Dutch craft on its way to Spain, Portugal, or Italy.

England, thus deprived of her Indian trade through Antwerp, had meanwhile met the difficulty in the Elizabethan fashion. The open enmity authorized by the rupture of diplomatic relations with Spain in 1584 1585, broke out into blows between a Portuguese ship of the East Indian fleet and two English vessels in 1586. In 1587 Drake captured off the Azores the San Filippe, a great carrack bearing the king’s saint-name and laden with an Indian cargo which yielded £108,049 of prize-money. In 1592 Sir John Burrough swooped

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Indian carpenters at work in their shop

down on the homeward-bound Indian ships near the Isle of Flores, drove one ashore, and took the other – the Madre de Deos, almost the largest vessel belonging to the Portuguese crown, with a cargo valued at £150,000. Such windfalls, however, proved a poor substitute for England’s regular Indian trade through Flanders, now stamped to death under the heels of Spanish armies. Leave was at length obtained from Elizabeth to strike into the direct Indian trade, and in 1591, as we have seen, the first English squadron sailed round the Cape of Good Hope.

When showing how the Turkish seizure of the ancient land paths constrained Christendom to seek an ocean route to India, I added a caution not to exaggerate the effects of that single cause. So now that Philip II’s crusade against the Reformation stands disclosed as a compelling influence which led the Protestant

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Powers of the North to break into the Eastern seas, we should not forget that it was only the last and most imperious of many influences that had been at work. At the end of the fifteenth century Portugal held a unique position, with the geographical science of the Mediterranean at her back, and the unexplored Atlantic in front. At the end of the sixteenth, owing to improvements in navigation and the labours of the Flemish map-makers, she had to share these advantages with the maritime nations of northern Europe. Sooner or later the Catholic monopoly must have collapsed. That it collapsed at the particular moment and in the exact way that it did, resulted from the same spirit of military and religious aggression to which it owed its birth. For the Portuguese Order of Christ and the conversion of the infidel, we have but to substitute the Spanish infantry of Alva and the persecution of the Protestants. The exalted fervour with which Da Gama, after his solemn vigil, received the sacred standard on the Tagus beach in 1497, breathes in Don John’s ejaculation as he marched forth from Namur with the Pope’s banner floating over him in 1578. “Under this emblem I vanquished the Turk; under the same will I conquer the heretics.”

Not only had the Catholic trade through Lisbon and Antwerp been crushed, but the still older channel through Egypt and Venice was now closed. From the blocking of the Syrian trade-routes by the Turks in the fifteenth century to far on in the sixteenth, Venice had been a chief intermediary between England and the

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East. Her “argosy” to Southampton in 1587 perished miserably, and what between the anti-Catholic movement in England and other causes, the trade came to an end. It was a great ship of 1100 tons, richly laden, with an English pilot on board. The entrance by the Isle of Wight was extremely dangerous for the unmanageable monster in a high October sea, and the pilot refused to attempt it. But the Venetians compelled him by force. “When the poor man,” wrote an eye-witness, “neither with persuasions nor tears could prevail, he did his best to enter the Channel of the Needles; but such was the greatness of the waves, and the unwieldiness of the ship, not answering her helm, that she struck upon the Shingles, where she, her goods, and company, except seven poor creatures, perished.” So in the very autumn before the Spanish Armada strewed the coast of Ireland with her timbers, the last shipment from Catholic Venice was wrecked off the Isle of Wight.

If the destruction of the Armada threw open the ocean to the Protestant Powers of the North, Spain still remained mistress of the Mediterranean. She commanded the Straits of Gibraltar, and as the sovereign power of Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, and the Duchy of Milan, she controlled the commerce of the great inland sea. Her naval supremacy only ended where that of the Turks began. As the conflict between England and Spain became more bitter, Philip II consoled himself in some measure for the loss of the Atlantic by tightening his grasp on the Mediterranean highway. The

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The harbour of Goa in 1772

English Levant Company, expanded in 1593 into an overland Indian company, found itself menaced. The union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, in this respect also, compelled the Eastern trade to seek a new route.

Among concurrent causes which led to the founding of the Dutch and English East India Companies the travels of Linschoten and Fitch held a distinctive place. From 1583 to 1589, John Huyghen van Linschoten of

Haarlem dwelt at Goa in the train of the Portuguese archbishop. A keen observer, and a Dutchman at heart, Linschoten on his return to Europe in 1592 placed at the service of his country the stores of knowledge which he had accumulated in Indo-Portuguese employ. The States-General granted him a license to publish his work in 1594, and although the First Part, or the Itinerario proper, was not completed till 1596, the Second Part, setting forth the routes to India, was available in 1595. Its effect was instantaneous. In 1595 a squadron of four ships was despatched under Cornelius Houtman

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“to the countries lying on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope,” and the journals of the voyage show that Linschoten’s sailing directory was used on board. Houtman returned in 1597, having lost two-thirds of his crews and done little in actual trade, but bringing back a treaty with the King of Bantam which opened up the Indian Archipelago to Holland.

Linschoten’s work was in some sort a revelation. All northern Europe learned that the path lay open to India, and that the Indian system of Portugal was rotten to the core. English and German translations appeared in 1598, two Latin translations in 1599, and a French translation in 1610. The preface to the English edition in 1598, by W. P. (generally supposed to be William Philip), sounded like a trumpet-call to the nation, and gave a direct impulse to the founding of the East India Company. It speaks of the “great provinces, puissant cities, and unmeasurable islands” of the Indies. “I doo not doubt, but yet I doo most heartily pray,” it adds, “and wish that this poore Translation may worke in our English nation a further desire and increase of honour over all Countreys of the Worlde” by means of “our Wodden Walles.”

England had, meanwhile, received a similar impulse of her own, and from a native source. In 1591 Ralph Fitch returned to London with a marvellous tale of travel. The first Englishman who dwelt in India was Thomas Stephens, of New College, Oxford, 1579, unless we accept the legend of Sighelmus of Sherbourne’s pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas near Madras, in the

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reign of King Alfred. As rector of the Jesuits’ College at Goa, Stephens’s letters to his father are said to have quickened the desire of the English merchants for direct trade with the East. In 1583 Ralph Fitch set forth with three principal companions bearing letters from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Cambay and to the Emperor of China. They journeyed by the Euphrates valley to Ormuz, where they were arrested by the Portuguese, and carried thence as prisoners to Goa.

Emerging from this captivity in 1584, Fitch visited the court of the Emperor Akbar, in northern India; one of his companions married a native woman, another entered the Moghul service, a third had turned monk at Goa. But Fitch went on. After many adventures in Burma, Malacca, the “Golden Chersonesus,” and Bengal, he again explored the Portuguese misrule in Cochin and Goa, and thrilled London in 1591 with the magnificent possibilities of Eastern commerce. The effect was, as we have seen, the expansion of the Turkey Company into an East India Company in 1593, with a charter to trade through the Grand Seignior’s “countries overland to the East Indies.” Its ultimate consequences were more important. Fitch had done for England perhaps less than Linschoten did for Holland. But the less sufficed.

It now became a race between England and Holland for the capture of the Indian trade. Houtman’s expedition of 1595–1597, under the impulse of Linschoten, was quickly succeeded by others. In 1598 five other Dutch squadrons sailed, including the one under the

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A Burmese street band

famous Van Neck, whose return with more treaties and a rich freight intoxicated the nation. Houtman himself went forth on a second expedition, in which he and many others were treacherously slain. The survivors returned in 1600.

Between 1595 and 1601 no fewer than fifteen Dutch expeditions started for India by the Cape of Good Hope or the Straits of Magellan. By that time associations for Eastern trade had been formed through-out the United Provinces, and in 1602 they were amalgamated by the States-General into the Dutch East India Company.

England pressed hard after Holland, although with less certain steps. It seemed, indeed, that Captain Lancaster’s heroic voyage of 1591–1594 had given the lead

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to our nation, and if followed up it would certainly have placed us first in the race. But Elizabeth still cherished some flickering fancies about Spain; the States-General indulged in no illusions regarding Philip II and had got beyond hopes or fears. Moreover England had rival interests – the Muscovy Company with its old route through Russia, and the Turkey Company with its new charter for trade to India by the Levant; for Holland the question was the Cape route or none. During Lancaster’s absence in the Asiatic seas Elizabeth heard from Seville that, rather than let the English trade with the Indies, the Spaniards “will sell their wives and children.”

However, in 1596 she consented to an expedition of three ships, mainly at the charge of Sir Robert Dudley, and gave it a letter to the Emperor of China. The little squadron under Captain Benjamin Wood was obscurely heard of in 1598 as having captured two Portuguese treasure-ships on their way from Goa to China, but not a single man returned to England to give an account of its fate. The English crews were killed off by sickness till only four men remained, and they were cast ashore on a small island near Puerto Rico. Of this miserable remnant, three were murdered by Spaniards for the sake of the treasure they had with them. The fourth, after relating his sad story to the Spanish officers of justice, was poisoned. The loss of this expedition hung like a cloud over the English merchants, while the Dutch were drinking deep to the Indian treaties and rich cargoes of Van Neck.

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“Thus perished,” wrote a despondent British chronicler, our “attempt to open a passage into India.”

The check was only for a moment. In 1598 the English translation of Linschoten’s Itinerario made the London merchants realize afresh the splendour of the prize and the certainty that it was about to pass from the Catholic South to the Protestant North. The report that the Dutch had bought up ships in England for a new voyage stung English national pride. In 1599 the London merchants gave counter-check by an enthusiastic subscription of £30,133 for an East Indian voyage, and begged the queen’s royal assent to the expedition “for the honour of our native country, and for the advancement of trade of merchandise within this realm of England.” The commercial rivalry between Holland and England – that rivalry which was to outlast generations, to affect profoundly the European policy and national antipathies of England, to burn British ships in the Medway, and to stamp the tragedy of Amboyna in letters of blood upon England’s Asiatic history – now stood revealed.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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