138 TRADE AND MARKETS. 



There can be no doubt that Drake's voyages had their 

 effect in a generation or two afterwards on English enterprise, 

 because they showed what could be effected. But Drake was 

 a mere buccaneer, and the immediate effect of his expeditions 

 was to make the trade with India more remote and difficult. 

 The true pioneers of the trade of England with India were the 

 Dutch, who insisted, for excellent reasons, in carrying on trade 

 with the subjects of a sovereign from whom they had revolted. 

 Indeed the only attempts really made to establish distant 

 English interests were those of Raleigh and his associates in 

 the colonisation of the American plantations. The Dutch 

 doubled the Cape in 1595. 



The actual outbreak of hostilities between England and 

 Spain, and the success which the Dutch and English had in 

 their conflicts with Spanish vessels, undoubtedly assisted in the 

 development of English naval enterprise. It is said by Mac- 

 pherson that the first ships which sailed from England to 

 Hindostan made the voyage in 1591, though even here the 

 object was rather privateering than commerce, Spain having 

 acquired the Eastern possessions of the Portuguese kingdom. 

 Two years after the Queen gave a charter to a Levant Company. 

 But for some time the Company was unprosperous. In 1597 

 the ancient settlement of the Hanseatic League in London was 

 suppressed. 



On the last day of the sixteenth century, December 31, 

 1600, Elizabeth granted her charter to George Clifford, Earl 

 of Cumberland, a great privateer of her time, and to many 

 others, creating them a corporation, under the style of 'The 

 Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the 

 East Indies.' The charter gives a monopoly of trade to those 

 who had obtained it. This is the Company which claimed 

 and exercised, though under much opposition, the sole right of 

 trading to India, till in 1698 Montague established a new Com- 

 pany by Act of Parliament, under the name of the English 

 East India Company, which for ten years was the rival of 

 the old Company, and finally in 1708 was united with it. 



