THE OPENING OF THE EAST 



The Dutch in the East. 



To begin with, the Dutch attempted to find a North-East passage 

 to the Orient as so many others had done, but the efforts of Jan Huygen 

 van Linschoten, a Dutchman who had the enterprise to attach himself 

 to the Portuguese for some years and learned as much about the East 

 as they knew themselves, changed the course of things. Profiting by 

 his knowledge a Dutch expedition of four ships went round the Cape in 

 1595 under Cornells Houtman and in two years returned with the 

 foundations of the Dutch East Indian Empire firmly established. They 

 lost no time in digging themselves in and taking steps to keep out foreign 

 competitors, especially the English. 

 Master Robert Thome. 



One of the first people to get round the precautions of the 

 Portuguese was one Robert Thorne, an English merchant resident in 

 Seville, who not only kept his ears very wide open but invested a con- 

 siderable sum in an expedition to the spice countries in order to permit 

 two of his men to sail with it. These two men had a good working 

 knowledge of cartography, and his main object was to obtain for 

 Henry VIII a groundwork of knowledge of the new lands in the East, 

 about which we had troubled ourselves remarkably little. For one 

 thing it must be remembered that although English ships were already 

 superior to those of Spain and Portugal in many respects, these countries 

 were far ahead of us in the science of navigation. 

 Fenton's Expedition. 



The first British expedition which set out with this purpose in view 

 was commanded by Edward Fenton and sailed in 1582 with the bless- 

 ing of Queen Elizabeth. The flagship was the 400-ton Leicester, with 

 the Edward Bonaventure and the little Francis and Elizabeth. Two 

 hundred men sailed with the expedition, including the factors who were 

 to remain at the stations they established, and a number of gentlemen. 

 Their instructions were to find their way to the Moluccas by way of the 

 Cape of Good Hope and they had strict orders not to take anything 

 from any Christian without paying for it. The expedition was well 

 planned and should have succeeded, but Fenton was the wrong man 

 for the command and immediately he heard that Spanish ships of war 

 were round Cape Horn he turned back, although he had no need to go 

 anywhere near them. His failure retarded the work for some time, but 

 meanwhile wonderful stories of the East were beginning to come in from 

 travellers who had followed the Overland Route. The voyage which 

 Cavendish made westabout gave us further information and allowed us 

 to correct the Portuguese charts which we had somehow obtained. 

 The North-East Passage. 



Meanwhile Charles Jackman, who had sailed with Frobisher. 

 attempted to find the North-East passage once aJlain and in 1580 sailed 

 with two ships, the George and the William. They got as far as the 

 Kara Sea where they were stopped by the ice and in trying to get back 

 the William foundered between Norway and England. 



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