being so remote, could not be managed but by a joint and united stock. This movement led, after a delay occasioned by the prospect of a peace with Spain, to the grant by the queen, on the 3 1st of December, 1600, of a charter to a great number of gentlemen therein named, constituting them one body corporate and politic, by the name of "The Governor and Company of the Merchants of London trading into the East Indies;" Mr. Thomas Smith, alderman of London, one of the leading members of the Turkey Company, being appointed the first governor. The charter, among other privileges, conferred the exclusive right of trading, for fifteen years, to all parts of Asia, Africa, and America, beyond the Cape of Good Hope eastward as far as to the Strait of Magellan, excepting such countries or ports as might be in the actual possession of any Christian prince in amity with the queen. The new company lost no time in sending out their first adventure. Four ships, the best that could be found in England, although the largest was only of six hundred tons burden, the smallest of not more than two hundred and forty tons, and carrying in all four hundred and eighty men, having been put under the command of Lancaster, who was styled Admiral of the little fleet, and was invested by the queen with the power of exercising martial law, dropped down from Woolwich on the 13th of February, 1601, but did not take their departure from Torbay till the 22nd of April, and did not reach Acheen, in Sumatra, till the 5th of June in the following year. In consequence of the time thus lost Lancaster did not return home till after the death of Elizabeth, so that the history of all but the mere opening of the commerce of the English with India belongs to the next period.[1]
A beginning was also made in the latter part of the present reign in the attempt to effect settlements in some of the newly discovered parts of the earth, although the proper foundation of the colonial empire of England must be referred to a later date. In 1576 Sir Humphrey
- ↑ Macpherson's History of the European Commerce with India, 4to. 1812, pp. 72—82.
