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512 E. p. Cheyney the formation of a trading company, with its much more extended resources and its corporate life. The £40,000 which Raleigh spent on the six or eight expeditions he sent out nearly ruined him and his friends, while the East India Company spent more than i6o,ooo on its first voyage to the East alone. The true line of descent of the plan for the successful settle- ment of Virginia is through the early trading companies of the Old World, not through the early failures in the New. In fact the whole advance of English discovery, commerce, and colonization in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was due not to individuals but to the efl:'orts of corporate bodies. The develop- ment of such companies is a familiar story. It began almost an even half-century before the settlement of Jamestown. In 1553 a group of London merchants sent out an expedition to the north- east to seek a new outlet for trade. As a result a line of con- nection was formed with Moscow in the centre of Russia, and in 1555 a charter was given to the merchants engaged in the trade, forming them into the body that had a long and influential history under the familiar name of the Muscovy Company. " Muscovy House ", their hall, was long the customary meeting-place for ad- venturers interested in new trading movements. Twenty-five years later the merchants who were engaged in the trade with Scandinavia and the lands to the east of the Baltic Sea secured a charter guar- anteeing to them the monopoly of English commerce there, and became known as the Baltic or Eastland Company. From a time early in the century other merchants had been interested in trade with Venice and the eastern Mediterranean possessions of Venice. Now they proceeded to develop a trade with the possessions jf Turkey, in 1581 were chartered as the Levant or Turkey Company, and shortly afterward absorbed the smaller company trading to the northern Mediterranean. In the meantime a Barbary or Morocco Company had been formed. Then, as an Elizabethan chronicler says, " The search- ing and unsatisfied spirits of the English, to the great glorie of our nation, could not be contained within the banckes of the Medi- terranean or Levant seas, but that they passed far towardcs both the articke and anarticke Poles, enlarging their trade into the West and East Indies "} English trade with the west coast of Africa was resented by the Portuguese, and in 1561 Queen Elizabeth was induced to issue the following proclamation: Although we know no reasonable cause why our subjects may not saile into any country or province subject to our good brother, being in 'John Speed, Chronicle, II. 852.