About the same time
the queen granted introductory letters to some adventurers to the king of
Cambaya; these men travelled through Bengal to Pegu and Malacca, but do not
seem to have reached China. They, however, obtained much useful information
respecting the best mode of conducting the trade to the East.
The first English ship sailed to the East Indies in the year 1591; but the
voyage was rather a warlike than a commercial one, the object being to
attack the Portuguese; and even in this respect it was very unfortunate. A
similar enterprize, undertaken in 1593, seems, by its success, to have
contributed very materially to the commercial intercourse between England
and India; for a fleet of the queen's ships and some merchant ships having
captured a very large East India carrack belonging to the Spaniards or
Portuguese, brought her into Dartmouth: if she excited astonishment at her
size, being of the burthen of 1600 tons, with 700 men, and 36 brass cannon,
she in an equal degree stimulated and enlarged the commercial desires and
hopes of the English by her cargo. This consisted of the richest spices,
calicoes, silks, gold, pearls, drugs, China ware, ebony wood, &c., and was
valued at 150,000_l_.
The increasing commercial spirit of the nation, which led it to look
forward to a regular intercourse with India, was gratified in the first
year of the seventeenth century, when the queen granted the first charter
to an East India Company.
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