TRADE AND MARKETS. 139 



The first voyage of the new Company to India was 

 made in 1601, with five ships, the whole being of 1530 tons' 

 burden. The vessels returned safely to England, after the 

 queen's death, their voyage having occupied two years and 

 nine months. In its early days the East India Company pro- 

 voked the jealousy of the Turkey Company. It appears that 

 Turkey or some of its subjects had succeeded to some extent 

 in restoring that trade, which was destroyed by the conquest 

 of Egypt in the beginning of the century, and that the spice 

 trade with Turkey was imperilled by the success of those 

 voyagers, who doubling the Cape of Good Hope, could deal 

 directly with the countries in which these articles were produced. 

 In the last year of Elizabeth's reign, all the Dutch East 

 India traders were also amalgamated into that one Company, 

 which had so distinguished and imposing a career, but in 

 the end succeeded in reducing the great Bank of Amsterdam 

 to bankruptcy. The capital of the Dutch Company was about 

 .600,000 sterling; that of the English was only 72,000, less 

 than an eighth of the Dutch venture. But the Hollanders 

 chiefly sought to trade with the islands, and establish factories 

 in them. 



It was most unfortunate that, from the beginning, there 

 sprung up a bitter feeling between the English and the Dutch 

 traders in the Eastern seas. There was room enough for 

 both, but very soon the two nations began to quarrel. It 

 very hard, and remained very hard for a whole century, 

 for the English to break themselves of those buccaneering 

 habits which constituted, as I have said, much of the daring 

 courage and activity of Drake. Besides, both the English and 

 the Dutch Companies went the wrong way to work with their 

 officials in the East. They seemed to think that they could 

 hire the services of agents in the tropics at the wages earned 

 by clerks in London or Amsterdam. As a consequence, they 

 c ill-served. The men who had lost character in Europe, 

 or could not get employment here, were drafted off to these 

 tropical factories, where they were put into "offices of trust, 



