The Cause Of This
Abandonment During The Sixteenth Century Seems To Have Been The Length And
Danger Of The Route;
For we are informed that one of the adventures would
have proved exceedingly profitable, had not their ships, on their
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across the Caspian, with Persian raw silk, wrought silks of many kinds,
galls, carpets, Indian spices, turquois stones, &c., been plundered by
Corsair pirates, to the value of about 40,000_l_. The final abandonment of
this route, in the eighteenth century, arose partly from the wars in
Persia, but principally from the extension of India commerce, which being
direct and by sea, would, of course supply England much more cheaply with
all eastern goods than any land trade. Beside the delay, difficulty, and
danger of the route from the Volga, already described, the route followed
in the sixteenth century, till the merchants reached the Volga, was
attended with great difficulty. The practice was to transport the English
goods, which were to be exchanged, in canoes, up the Dwina, from Archangel
to Vologda, thence over land, in seven days, to Jeroslau, and thence down
the Volga, in thirty days, to Astracan.
The Russians having conquered Narva, in Livonia in 1558, the first place
they possessed in the Baltic, and having established it as a staple port,
the following year, according to Milton, in his brief history of Muscovia,
the English began to trade to it, "the Lubeckers and Dantzickers having
till then concealed that trade from other nations." The other branches of
the Baltic trade also encreased; for it appears by a charter granted by
Elizabeth, in 1579, to an Eastland Company, that trade was carried on
between England and Norway, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, Prussia, Pomerania,
Dantzic, Elbing, Konigsberg, Copenhagen, Elsinore, and Finland.
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