64 A LETTER OF INSTRUCTIONS 



The thanks of the Society are clue to Mr. G. F. Warner, 



Keeper of Manuscripts, for permission to take a copy of this 

 letter which is now for the first time published. 



I have prepared some brief notes of the places, people and 

 things specified in the letter. These are given in alphabetical 

 order in an appendix. 



This manuscript appears to me to be interesting in two 

 respects ; firstly not so much on account of its contents as for 

 its purport to contain all that was then known in England of 

 this part of the world. Indeed when one sees that the letter 

 was written in 1614, more than a century after the Portuguese 

 had been in occupation of Goa and Malacca, it seems astounding 

 that the Directors of the East India Company (which had been 

 founded some fourteen years before the date of this letter) should 

 have so little information to give their principal agent in the 

 East. The reason that there is no reference to Goa, Malacca 

 or any other Portuguese possession is, of course, that the 

 British could not trade there. 



The document is interesting in a second respect as show- 

 ing how small a place in the early aims of tiie Honourable 

 East India Company, India itself occupied. In later years the 

 Company so much confined itself to India that one is apt to 

 think of India and the Company as co-extensive. 



But India at one time stood for nearly everything outside 

 Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor. Thus Marco Polo wrote 

 (A. D. 1298). " India the greater is that which extends from 

 Maabar to Kesmacoran (i.e. from Coromandel to Mekran) and 

 it contains thirteen great Kingdoms. India the Lesser extends 

 from the province of Champa to Mutfili (i.e. from Co2hin-China 

 to the Kistna Delta). Abash (Abyssinia) is a very great province 

 and you must know that it constitutes the Middle India." 



To this day each country calls by the name of India that 

 part of this vast area that it has acquired for itself : thus India 

 to us means British India, to the French it means Pondicherry, 

 to the Portuguese it means Goa, and to the Dutch it means the 

 magnificent possession of Netherlands-India. The ^Yest Indies 

 were so called because Columbus imagined that he had dis- 

 covered anew route to the " Indias " by sailing West instead of 



Jour. Straits Branch 



