The Colony Of Pennsylvania Was Not Settled By Pen Till The Year 1680:

He found there, however, many English families, and a considerable number of Dutch and Swedes.

The wise regulations of Pen soon drew to him industrious settlers; but the commerce in which they engaged did not become so considerable as to demand our notice.

III. The commercial intercourse of England with India, which has now grown to such extent and importance, and from which has sprung the anomaly of merchant-sovereigns over one of the richest and most populous districts of the globe, began in the reign of Elizabeth. The English Levant Company, in their attempts to extend their trade with the East, seem first to have reached Hindostan, in 1584, with English merchandize. About the same time the queen granted introductory letters to some adventurers to the king of Cambaya; these men travelled through Bengal to Pegu and Malacca, but do not seem to have reached China. They, however, obtained much useful information respecting the best mode of conducting the trade to the East.

The first English ship sailed to the East Indies in the year 1591; but the voyage was rather a warlike than a commercial one, the object being to attack the Portuguese; and even in this respect it was very unfortunate. A similar enterprize, undertaken in 1593, seems, by its success, to have contributed very materially to the commercial intercourse between England and India; for a fleet of the queen's ships and some merchant ships having captured a very large East India carrack belonging to the Spaniards or Portuguese, brought her into Dartmouth: if she excited astonishment at her size, being of the burthen of 1600 tons, with 700 men, and 36 brass cannon, she in an equal degree stimulated and enlarged the commercial desires and hopes of the English by her cargo. This consisted of the richest spices, calicoes, silks, gold, pearls, drugs, China ware, ebony wood, &c., and was valued at 150,000_l_.

The increasing commercial spirit of the nation, which led it to look forward to a regular intercourse with India, was gratified in the first year of the seventeenth century, when the queen granted the first charter to an East India Company. She seems to have been directly led to grant this in consequence of the complaints among her subjects of the scarcity and high price of pepper; this was occasioned by the monopoly of it being in the power of the Turkey merchants and the Dutch, and from the circumstance that by our war with Portugal, we could not procure any from Lisbon. The immediate and principal object of this Company, therefore, was to obtain pepper and other spices; accordingly their ships, on their first voyage, sailed to Bantam, where they took in pepper, to the Banda isles; where they took in nutmeg and mace, and to Amboyna, where they took in cloves. On this expedition the English established a factory at Bantam. In 1610, this Company having obtained a new charter from James I., built the largest merchant ship that had ever been built in England, of the burthen of 1100 tons, which with three others they sent to India.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 328 of 524
Words from 170700 to 171232 of 273188