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From 1600-1700

1701: More to come

26 January 1700: New research by 2007 indicates that on or about 26 January 1700, occurred (about 8.1 on the Richter scale) a major mega-thrust earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone of the North America Pacific North-West Coast / Washington coast area. This set up a tsunami much like the one afflicting Indonesia on 26 December 2004. This tsunami left tree-ring evidence on the American coast, and written records still available in Japan indicate the date was 26 January 1700 when the tsunami arrived to Japan. There is was called “an orphan tsunami”, which was the name the Japanese gave to any tsunami not otherwise connected to an earthquake they knew about. According to a documentary screened on ABC TV Australia on 8 March 2007.)

About 1700: Isaac Newton, interested in mathematics, physics, astronomy, optics, an official of the Royal Mint, FRS in 1672, vies with Liebniz for invention of calculus, "discovered gravity"; a touchy and difficult man with co-workers, he also paid attention to chronology and prophecy, and astrology as an adjunct to astronomy, and related, Biblical and ancient history. He attempted to relate mathematics to theology. (Physicists are doing it anew in the late C20th, cogitating on the physics of the Big Bang, the mathematics [of the day] of "the mind of God" [of the day]). Newton concluded from Biblical prophecy that prophecy does not enable us to foretell the future, but it outlines the workings of Providence. British historian Clark says, "The enlightenment of the C18th narrowed its field of vision when it rejected the notion of Providence, and it promoted to the rank of universal science the Newtonian physics which Newton himself regarded as a subordinate chapter in the explanation of the nature of things."

1700++: England, John Aubrey writes on Stonehenge and Avebury, as one of the founders of prehistorical archaeology. about 1700-ish? William Stukely, "antiquarian", focuses attention on the Roman Wall, Stonehenge and Avebury, sometimes making "fantastic errors" in his readings of evidence.
Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760. Oxford Clarendon Press. 1952., p. 370.

By the 1700s, larger cities than European cities existed in China, northern India and Central America.

1699: 14 January: William Dampier is appointed by English admiralty to command Roebuck and to make a voyage of discovery to North-Western Australia. He calls at Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Bahia in Brazil, Cape of Good Hope to Australia. He reaches Shark Bay by 26 July. He is sailing by New Guinea by 3 December and thence New Britain, establishing they are not joined. As his ship is deteriorating he then sails to Batavia, Indonesia, and sails from there for England on 17 October 1700. (Dampier died in March 1715.)

1699: William Dampier publishes another book, including "A Discourse of the Winds".

1698: More to come

1697: William Dampier publishes book New Voyage round the World.

1696: More to come

1695: More to come

1694: Dieppe, France: Most of Dieppe is destroyed by English and Dutch naval ships. Possible destruction or loss of valuable mapping records and histories?
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1693: More to come

1692 and 3 November 2001: Alleged witches cleared of charges posthumously: Relatives of witches hanged in 1692-1693 after the infamous Salem witch hunts of Massachusetts, are celebrating since the state governor (Jane Swift) has exonerated their ancestors, the last-remaining non-exonerated witches. Other harrassed "witches" have been exonerated earlier, as with Sara Wilders hanged on Gallows Hill near Salem and exonerated in 1711. In all, 24 witches males and female were hanged.

1692: The conducting of the "witch trials" in Salem, Massachusetts, that long later inspired Arthur Miller to write his famous play, The Crucible. See Arthur Miller, The Crucible in History and Other Essays. Methuen, 2000.

1691: More to come

1689: More to come

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1688: William III brings England its Glorious Revolution.

1687: Newton produces his Principia, a masterwork on mathematics, explaining how gravity works.

1687: Turks defeated by the Russians.

1686: First voyage (as a buccaneer) of William Dampier to coast of North-Western Australia, New Guinea and New Britain.

1685: France: Repeal of Edict of Nantes (on religious freedom/tolerance in France), inducing Protestants (Huguenots) to flee France.

1684: More to come

1683: Formosa (Taiwan) becomes Chinese territory.

1682: Founding of colony of Pennsylvania.

1681: More to come

1680: English apothecary, Thomas Sydenham, introduces Sydenham's Laudanum, a compound of opium containing sherry wine and herbs. Its potency as a pain killer makes it a popular remedy for many ailments. At the same time, the use of opium in China is spreading, as the Dutch merchants introduce the use of pipe for opium smoking.
From website: The Boodle Boys - website by R. A. Kris Millegan 2000; his mailto: roadsend@aol.com

1679: More to come

1678-1691: William Dampier takes part in various piratical voyages along west coast of South America and in the Pacific, returning eventually to England. During one of these voyages he visited near Australia, probably near Melville Island. Little is known of his next years

1678: Popish plot in England.

1675: More to come

1674: William Dampier becomes under-manager of a Jamaican plantation owned by Helyars of Somerset, England. He has earlier been on a merchant or fishing voyage to Newfoundland.

1673: More to come

1671: More to come

1670: More to come

1669: Turks conquer Crete.

1668: Dieppe, France: About 10,000 people die from plague.

18 April, 1667: Holland and England: Treaty of Breda. The small Island of Run of the spice islands, Indonesia, source of nutmeg, is swapped for Manhattan. Manhattan later becomes a giant city, New York, and Run is forgotten, drops off maps, and is hardly noticed again until Giles Milton writes Nathaniel's Nutmeg.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000, p. 364.)

1666: Newton invents calculus. See also on calculus, re contributions of Liebniz.

1665: Great Bubonic Plague breaks out in London.

1663: More to come

1662: Dutch are driven from Taiwan (called Formosa by the Portuguese, meaning "beautiful").

1661: Bank of Stockholm issues world's first banknotes.

1661-1722: China: Reign of the Kangxi emperor in China; Chinese territory extended and books and scholarship developed.

1660: Prof. Croucher lists the official number of deaths by Great Fire of London at only six.

1660: Possible origins of The Hope Diamond, which is "possibly cursed". It came from the Golconda region of Andrha Pradesh, southern central India, into the possession of French adventurer, Jean Baptiste Tavernier. It was "bluer in colour", uncut, large and about 112-3/16th old carats, or 110.5 modern carats, about 22.1 grams weight. In 1668 Tavernier was granted an audience with Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, who bought about 1000 gemstones from the adventurer, including what became The Hope Diamond. It was stolen during the French Revolution, but turned up, recut, 20 years and one day after its theft in London, to then be "squabbled over by greedy British aristocrats". At one point it was held by London jeweller Daniel Eliason. In 1824 it was sold to Henry Philip Hope, heir to a banking fortune (from Hopes of Amsterdam, a firm bought out by Barings) who was born in Holland, and who renamed the diamond. His sister-in-law, Louisa Hope, would wear it at soirees she hosted. Hope died in 1839 and left the diamond to his three nephews, one of whom was Henry, a failed politician. In 1861, Henry's daughter Henrietta married the Earl of Lincoln ("he a gambler, and from a family of drunks, drug addicts, layabouts and the odd transvestite"). In 1884 the diamond went to the Earl's second son by Henrietta Hope, Lord Francis Pelham-Clinton Hope, a playboy-peer who by the 1890s was in serious debt. He married music hall actress May Yohe (Madcap May), daughter of a saloon keeper from Pennsylvania. She took up an affair with a US dry-goods millionaire, Putnam Bradlee Strong. Lord Francis's debts reached $5 million, but he had won a right to sell The Hope Diamond. It was bought by Simon Frankel, a New York dealer. Later it was perhaps in the hands of Selim Habib, a Paris dealer, then a French syndicate, then in 1910 it was sold to Parisian jewellers, Cartier Brothers. (May Yohe once starred in a silent movie serial, The Hope Diamond Mystery and produced a book, The Mystery of the Hope Diamond.) Cartiers sold The Hope Diamond to Evalyn Walsh McLean, a daughter of Irish migrants who'd struck it gold-rich in the 1890s Colorado goldfields. She married Ned McLean (d.1941), heir to newspaper, Washington Post, whose debts became so large the newspaper had to be sold. The diamond was found stuck in the back of Evalyn's bedside radio when she died, then stored in a bank vault. In 1949 The Hope Diamond was bought by New York jeweller, Harry Winston, who in 1958 donated it to Smithsonian Institute, which has had care of it ever since. (See recent book, Hope: Adventures of a Diamond. Simon and Schuster, 2003. Several other large and famed diamonds are the Sancy, Koh-i-Noor (Mountain of Light) and Star of Africa.)

1659: More to come

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1658-1707: India: Emperor Aurangzeb is the last great Moghul emperor; after 1707 empire begins to break up.

14 January 1657: Governor of English East India Company William Cockayne calls a conference on state of the Company, news is not good, and disaster is averted only since Cromwell and his men decide the Company needs to survive, be reordered more consistently, and be properly revived.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1657: Tokugawa Mitsukuni begins compilation of History of Japan.

1656: More to come

1600: Battle of Sekigahara, Japan; Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats rivals; takes power and the Tokugawa or Edo period begins.

1600-1614: English, Dutch, Danish, and French East India Companies founded.

1600s in Europe: The Tulip Craze, one of the oddest of financial bubbles known.

1650-1660s: Further incidence of Bubonic Plague in Europe. Some 300,00 people die in Naples, 50,000 in Amsterdam, and 70,000 die in the Great Plague of London. (Later, England's writer and dissenting Protestant, Daniel Defoe, writes a book, Due Preparations for the Plague.)

1653: More to come

1650: Year tea is first drunk in England as imported from China.

1649: Charles I of England executed after trial. See career of Cromwell.

1649: Recent laws fully establish serfdom in Russia, by when serfdom has virtually disappeared from Western Europe.

1632-1648: Shah Jahan builds Taj Mahal at Agra in India.

1647: More to come

1646: More to come

1645: More to come

1644: China: The Manchu state (led by Nurhaci), captures Peking-Beijing. Later, Nurhaci's son Abahai moves from being Khan of Manchuria to Emperor of China.

1644: Quing (Manchu) dynasty takes over in China.

1644: The last Ming emperor of China hangs himself. His apology: "Now I meet with Heaven's punishment above, sinking ignominiously below... May the bandits dismember my corpse and slaughter my officials, but let them not despoil the Imperial tombs nor harm a single one of our people".

1644: Abel Tasman cruises the north coast of Australia, sailing westwards and close inshore. though no journal of his voyage suvived.

1643: Evangelista Torricelli invents the barometer.

1643: Death of astronomer Galileo. See also:
Dava Sobel (Translator), To Father: The Letters of Sister Maria Celeste to Galileo 1623-1633. Fourth Estate, 2001, 381pp.

1638: On the movie The Man in the Iron Mask starring Jeremy Irons... to the movie's end, a voiceover suggests that Louis 14th was one of the greatest kings of his nation, France. The plot concerns the four Musketeers, D'Artagnan, etc, and a switch between two royal twins, Louis (twin one), and Philippe (twin two). Philippe in effect becomes Louis. Louis the 14th lived 1638-1715, Philippe lived 1640-1701. Their mother the wife of Louis 13th (who possibly had one wife and no lovers?) was Anne Maria Habsburg, 1601-1660, daughter of Philip III Habsburg, king of Spain (1578-1621). Philippe married Elisabeth Charlotte Guelf and also Henrietta Anne-Maria Stuart, of the royal house of Scotland. Louis 14th had about seven illegitimate children. The great-grandparents of Louis 14th came from the following noble (and multicultural) family lineages: Armagnac of France, Habsburg, Jagiello of Poland, Medici of Italy, Toledo of Spain, Wittlesbach.

1636: Dutch mariners Pieterszoon and Pool sail between Croker Island and Cape Van Diemen.

1635: More to come

1634: More to come

1633, Galileo recants his position on the actual movements of heavenly bodies due to Church pressure. It took until the late Twentieth Century for the Catholic Church to "apologise" for applying this pressure.

1633: Beginning of the staging of the Passion Plays in the southern Bavarian town of Oberammergau, as a means of fending off The Black Death. The performers have to be drawn from the village, which can encourage local theatrical rivalries.

1632: Shah Jahan begins building Taj Mahal in India, finished by 1654. A tribute to his beloved wife.

1632 circa: Incas of Peru, human sacrifice rare in Inca Empire, but is used at times of national crises - re illness of emperor, plague or famine, it is an empire of up to 12 million people. Victims were usually 10-year-old children with throats cut, or strangled.
(Reader's Digest, Last Two Million Years, page 201)

1631: Death of English poet John Donne (1572-1631).

1628: Harvey publishes a description of the circulation of the blood.

Circa 1628: Kingdom of Burma breaks up into small states.

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1628: Strange fate of a king's warship: The Swedish king launches a magnificent new warship, Vasa, which sinks in minutes. (Rather like the English Mary Rose in the previous century, sinking on a major voyage.) Vasa in late 2001 is on display in Australia.

1627: Manchus overrun Korea, which later becomes vassal state.

1626: Englishman John Speed - some 16 years before the voyage of Abel Tasman - produces a map which has legends claiming existing Spanish or Portuguese knowledge of continental land near New Zealand.

1620s: Beginning of Japanese national policy of restriction of contact with the outside world.

1625: The first census is taken of Virginia.

1625: The Dutch found New Amsterdam, later New York by 1664.

1625-1627 Barbados: After 1625, Barbados suffered from early mismanagement. Sir William Courteen a wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant, already experienced in the Caribbean trade, gets together a syndicate sponsoring first settlement in 1627, sending two shiploads of colonists under command of John and Henry Powell. Courteen syndicate sank about 10,000 pounds into the venture, hoping for similar returns as the backers of privateers got in the 1590s. (Notes, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 50). But as Dunn writes, unhappily for Courteen, an influential courtier, Earl of Carlisle, challenged Courteen's control of the island [in 1627] [although Dunn does not say what those grounds were], and both Carlisle and Courteen had royal patents for Barbados and both sent out governors, settlers, supplies, and both their agents were banished for seized, one governor was executed, Carlisle did very little to advertise the island, Carlisle expected to distribute land to settlers who paid to set themselves up, nearly 40,000 acres went to 250 colonists from 1628 to 1630, some grants very generous, Gov Hawley had no arable land left after ten years, eg to Edward Oistin (a fishing village remains on Barbados named Oistin), William Hilliard (who later sold half share of an estate to Thomas Modyford for 7000 pounds, but many grants of 30-50 acres to the poorer folk, (Notes, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp 49ff, p. 81). Modyford was a kinsman of the duke of Albemarle son of a Mayor of Exeter, and he came to Barbados as a young man in 1647 with money, connections and losing the fight in the civil war, he could pay 1000 pounds down and pay 6000 in next three years, operating with his brother in law, Thomas Kendall a London merchant, and Modyford soon muscled in on local politics., in 1660 he engineered himself with the Commonwealth as a governor of Barbados, but as he took office, Chas II restored, so he reverted to royalism but later lost his govship of Barbados, see 1664. (Sir William Courteen, Financier, death 1636.)
See Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, Univ. Minnesota Press, 1976.

1623: Herman van Speult, Dutch governor of Amboina in the Spice Islands, prepares two ships for an expedition to islands near New Guinea, to map more of New Guinea, and to explore for "the South Land". The ships are Arnhem Capt. Dirck Melisz and Pera Capt. Jan Carstenz. Also on the trip is Willem Joster van Colster. Dutch crew were killed by fierce Irian Jayans. The ships had difficulties with shoals at the western entrances to Torrest Strait. They turned somewhat south, and ended on the western side of Cape York Peninsula, to areas near where Jansz had already been. Soon they had gone further south into the Gulf of Carpentaria. (To 24 April, 1623.) The captains of the two ships came into dispute and parted company, although both went back to Dutch spice islands by June. Carstenz' view of the country was negative - he thought it was monotonous and unproductive, inhabited by a primitive people who had no knowledge of metals or spices. Colster seems not to have encountered Maccassarmen from Indonesia visiting this Australian coast at this time.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1619-1624: Dutch establish virtual monopoly of spice trade in Moluccas and other Indonesian islands.

1623: A ship named New Netherland sails from Texel with Dutch settler families for the Hudson River area of North America.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1622: At Batavia, Indonesia, two ships Haringh and Hazewint, under the command of Jan Vos, are prepared for yet another expedition for discovering the South Land and taking formal posession of it. Warning were issued about the recent wreckage of the English ship Trial on what is today called the West Australian coast. A survey would be taken from between 45 degrees S and 50 degrees S, with coasts mapped and landings made. Vos' vessels sailed in September 1622 but the expedition ended in being postponed.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1622: Invention of graphology by Camillo Baldi.

1622: Salvage treasure: A seventeenth-century Spanish galleon, Santa Margarita in the Gulf of Mexico has yielded artefacts worth about Aust $100 million. The ship was one of seven wrecked in a 1622 storm, but only two ships are salvaged so far. Rod Hartley is chairman of Maritime Archaeological Investments, a leader in the project. The group hopes to salvage the Pilar, a Manila galleon sunk off Guam in June 1690, with cargo now worth Aust$1 million. (Reported late 2000 in Australia)

1621, France, Huguenot Protestant revolt.
1620: Voyage of the ship Mayflower to America, with Puritan colonists.

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1619: The first non-white (Negro) workers land in Virginia, African slaves robbed from a Spanish slave ship. The slaves are traded for supplies, and regarded in Virginia as indentured workers to work on tobacco crops. Indentured workers then enjoyed a system of freedom dues on finishing their work time. Blacks in Virginia may be free and own property to the 1650's. "Slavery" began in American colonies in Massachusetts in the 1640s, and from 1650 to 1664 in other colonies including New York and Connecticut. The bias against blacks tightened from 1640.

1618-1648: Europe: Period of The Thirty Years War, during which starvation and disease reduce population from about 16 million to 6 million.

1618: December: From texel, Frederik de Houtman commands a fleet of 11 Dutch trading ships for the East. In mid-July 1619, Houtman's ship got somewhat lost in the Indian Ocean and found land they thought was Beach, a part of The Great Southland, otherwise terra australis. It was actually an area near modern Perth, Western Australia, south of the Swan River. Houtman evidently saw Rottnest Island. It took his ship till September to get to Batavia, Indonesia.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1618: Java: After some battle with both the English and some Javanese, the Dutch (VOC) governor-general in the Indies, Jan Pieterzoon Coen, captures port of Jacatra (Jakarta) and builds a fortified town, Batavia, which becomes a centre for Dutch activity in the East. (Batavia being the name of an original Germanic tribe which had settled the Netherlands area long before.)
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1618: France: Cardinal Richelieu is ordered into exile in Avignon for intriguing with France's Queen Mother, Marie de Medici.

1617: Death of John Napier, Scottish mathematician who invented the concept of logarithms.

1616: World exploration: Expedition of William Schouten and Jacob Lemaire from Netherlands to discover new/unknown countries. They get far south enough in the South Atlantic to see ice-bound cliffs, which they assume are part of a southern continent. They surmise it might be part of the area Magellan had taken to be part of terra australis (Magellanica?)
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1616: Dutch interests again consider "the great Southland". Mapreaders reconsider the blank spaces near the Cape York area found by Jansz. Reael on Ternate speaks to Jacob Lemaire and on 8 October 1616 Reael issues two ships to be prepared for a voyage of discovery, which was to be commanded by a VOC official Cornelis Dedel. Dedel died and had anyway beforehand been distracted by trying to stop two English trading ships. Meantime, Jansz' confusion about Cape York and what lay near it meant that Dutch map makers from 1622 mistakenly regarded New Guinea and the Great South Land as part of a single land mass.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1616, Death of English playwright, William Shakespear.

1615: Coffee is introduced to Europe.

1615: Englishman George Cockayne writers to directors of English East India Company from Macassar, Indonesia, on 16 July 1615, that the first-ever junk from China has visited Macassar (for the trepang trade?).

1615: Spaniard Quiros, still searching for The Great Southland, has obtained permission for a new expedition into the Pacific, but he died in April 1615 at Panama on the eve of starting his third expedition. About 25 books on Quiros' voyages were published in Spanish, Latin, French, English, Dutch and German. When Dutchmen Willem Schouten and Jacob Lemaire set out in 1615 to search for the Great South Land, they had read on Quiros' works. On some later maps, Vanuatu (Espiritu Santo) began to appear as an eastern edge of terra australis.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1614: Dutch establish colony of New Amsterdam (later New York).

1614: Netherlands: Amsterdam merchant Isaac Lemaire founds a company called The Australian Company, or Southern Company, with ideas being "to discover great and rich Countries, where they (the company) might lade their ships with rich wares and merchandise." Lemaire had read on Quiros and felt sure Quiros had found a great southern continent. There followed a two-ship expedition led by Willem Cornelisz Schouten and assisted by Jacob Lemaire's son, Jacob, acting as a merchant. The ships (Hoorn and Eendracht) were forbidden by charter from using existing Dutch ports. They sailed south of the Straits of Magellan into the Lemaire Channel, naming Staten Island (Estados Island). Oddly, this island later appeared on maps as part of the Great Southland. (Three years later, two Spanish ships under brother Bartolome and Gonzalo de Nodal sailed the same route.) But Schouten sailed too far north as he crossed the Pacific, though he ended safely at Ternate, where there were werangles about taking cargo. Isaac Lemaire lost out badly on his investment. (Estensen, Discovery, pp. 124-125.)

1613: Since 1557, Manuel Godinho de Eredia, the Eurasian son of a Portuguese hidalgo and a Bugis princess, writes three major works on regional conditions around "the Indies", though he mistakenly believed that Marco Polo had described a visit to large lands south of Java, so Eredia promoted the idea of explorations of terra australis.

1613: Approx: Year playwright William Shakespeare retires and returns to his home town, Stratford-on-Avon, now a man of money and substance, and he fails to leave useful information on his life and career. (He dies on St George's Day, 23 April, 1616.) It's said that he lifted a good many of his plots from Raphael Holinshed's book, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland.

1612-1639: Japanese persecute Christians.

1611: Denmark's King Christian IV declares war on Sweden.

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1611: Dies Henry Hudson, after a futile search for the North-West Passage. His crew mutinies and set him adrift in an open boat to freeze. The mutineers who return home are found not guilty of mutiny.

1611: Dutchmen begin living on the entrance to Hudson's River, near Island of Manhattan.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

28 October 1610: Leader of the newest East India Co. fleet Sir Henry Middleton rows ashore at Red Sea port of Mocha. Various unpleasant incidents follow.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1610, 19 July, Death of Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

1610: Arrival of tea in Europe from China. Galileo also records rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter.

1610: The Christianization of China: Death in 1610 of Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, missionary in China 1601-1610 and a man interested in China's early encounters with European sciences and technology. He with up to 62 other Jesuits had tried to Christianize China. Ricci was buried in what is now a corner of the Beijing Communist Party Academy. Ricci's grave has twice been attacked, in the C19th by nationalistic Boxers, and in the 1960s by Red Guards.

1609: Johannes Kepler discovers the laws of planetary motion.

30 December 1609: James I sees the departure of new East India Co. fleet from Deptford. Ships are Trades Increase, Peppercorn and Darling. At a dinner, James I slips a great gold honorary chain around neck of EICo chairman Sir Thomas Smythe. Fleet actually sails in April 1610 under Sir Henry Middleton.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

13 November 1609: Mariner Nathaniel Courthope is hired by East India Company to go to the spice islands, especially the Island of Run. Courthope is the hero of Milton's book as follows.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1609: 12 September, English explorer Henry Hudson sails into the New York river that now bears his name.

1609: August: Henry Hudson's ship Half Moon sees the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Later Hudson got to Coney Island at the mouth of the Hudson River. (The Hudson River had been discovered 85 years before by Giovanni da Verrazano in the service of the French, searching for a way to the East Indies.) Hudson's findings (eg about Manhattan Island) generate different views in Holland versus England. The Dutch are not interested, the English are.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: Christmas: William Keeling's ships in the Spice Islands sail home for England via the Banda Islands, only to be interrupted by arriving Dutch ships. Even more Dutch ships on a seriously commercial-military mission under Peter Verhoef, with 1000 Dutch fighting men and Japanese mercenaries. Verhoef proposed to build a fort on Neira Island, to defend the Dutch from the Portuguese, which locals found outrageous. This fort was built on the foundations of an old fort abandoned by the Portuguese about 100 years earlier. A massacre followed, perhaps co-organised by Keeling. The Bandanese massacred 42 Dutchmen. Dutch command went to Simon Hoen who demanded revenges, but signed a peace treaty by 10 August 1609 which gave Neira to Dutch power. But the Dutch ended killed by the locals including dyak head-hunters, so that when David Middleton arrived, he had great complexity to deal with. Encouraged by Middleton, the islanders killed even more Dutch. In London after Middleton got home, the East India Co. directors began to look at maps and the island of Run.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: By 1608, reports are that Henry Hudson (an Englishman) has sailed to within ten degrees of the North Pole. He has also touched the eastern coast of Greenland. English merchants are interested, the Dutch also. Hudson arrived in Amsterdam in 1608 to meet the Dutch East India Co., to have his navigation theory questioned by Petrus Plancius. The seventeen of the Dutch East India Co. failed to accept Hudson's plan, so Hudson was approached by the French (King Henry IV) via dissident Dutchman Isaac Lemaire. The Dutch found out and recalled Hudson for an expedition for 1609.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: Champlain founds Quebec for France in Canada.

1607: Confucianism begins to be main force in Tokugawa politics and society.

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1607: William Hawkins is sent on ship Hector by English East India Company to negotiate with Moghul Emperor of India, Jehangir for creation of an English factory on India's western coast at Surat. Hawkins had the bad luck to encounter the Indian owner of a ship that had earlier been pirated by Sir Edward Michelbourne. But Hawkins had luck in getting on well personally with Jehangir (a binge drinker and opium taker), speaking in Turkish. Hawkins became a member of the Moghul inner court, and ended up married to an Armenian woman. Hawkins finally died on his way home and his Armenian widow married East India trader Gabriel Towerson, who took her back to the East. (Towerson once kidnapped a Negro named Coree of the Table Bay area, took him back to London, to be met by Sir Thomas Smythe. Coree was cheered up by a present of some chain mail, which he often wore, then taken back to South Africa.)
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1607: English colony of Virginia founded.

1607: Dutchman Jan Pieterszoon Coen sails to the East Indies/spice islands. Early in his career, Coen finds some Dutchmen there have been massacred, possibly with English planning. Coen sails for East Indies again in 1612.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1606: Sir Edward Michelbourne arrives home to England from his piratical voyages to the Indonesian spice islands to retire to disgrace. Meantime the English East India Company realised that after sending three fleets to the East Indies, and about 1200 men, they had lost 800 lives, mostly by disease. The Dutch were about sending 14 fleets made of 65 ships. So the English East India Co. decided to send out a Turkish-speaking Englishman, William Hawkins to negotiate with the Moghul Emperor of India, Jehangir, from 1607 for larger adventures.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1606: England: Execution of Guy Fawkes, chief plotter of attempt to blow up Houses of Parliament with gunpowder.

1606 Spring: Middleton arrives back to England after voyage to the East Indies/spice islands of the Moluccas, with little cargo due to the depradations of not the Dutch or Portuguese, but of Englishman ("gentleman adventurer") Sir Edward Michelborne. Michelborne had earlier sweet-talked James I, who scarcely grasped the issues about trade, and the necessity for a properly-backed monopoly against the powers of the Portuguese and Dutch, into permitting a Michelbourne expedition to the East Indies with Tiger and Tiger's Whelp departing Isle of Wight on 5 December 1604.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1606: The voyage of Don Diego de Prado y Tovar through Torres Strait. The earliest documented account of the European discovery of Australia. Prado's 32-page manuscript was not produced till 1614-1615 after Prado returned to Spain, to become a monk of St. Basil in Madrid. Prado was second-in-command for the expedition led by Fernandez de Quiros, a Portuguese, to discover The Great South Land and to convert the heathen. Prado had been on Quiros' ship but changed to the second ship, captained by Luis Vaez de Torres at Vanuatu (which Prado called Australia del Spiritu Sancto). The two ships were storm-separated, Torres went through what is now the strait named for him, Quiros sailed for South America, forced to do so by a mutinying crew. The Prado manuscript came to light when the British sacked Manila in the 1760s. The Spanish had deliberately suppressed news of existence of Torres Strait to harrass their commercial rivals. Torres Strait however was named by the British hydrographer of the later eighteenth century, Alexander Dalrymple. (From Sydney Morning Herald, 16 August 1997)

1606: Spain sends a military expedition to take the spice islands of Ternate and Tidore, which have lately fallen to the Dutch. The Spanish also take the Caroline and Mariana islands, colonise on Guam, colonise at Jilong on Taiwan and have alternating war and treaties with Cambodia and Thailand (Siam).
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1605: Quiros returns to Peru after gaining permission from Spain to search again for "The Great South Land". The viceroy of Peru orders up two ships, San Pedro y San Pablo and San Pedro(Capt. Luis Baez de Torres) , plus a small tender. The three vessels left Callao on 21 December 1605. Tempers flared often, but the ships met the Santa Cruz Islands - Duff Group. By 1 May 1606 Quiros thought that he had found the entire Great South Land, that he was at Australia del Espiritu Santo, in fact at the largest island of present-day Vanuatu. Conflict broke out with the indigenous people. From early June, Quiros returned to Mexico. Torres was now commander of the remainder of the expedition, and he soon established the location was merely an island. He searched vainly for a coast of any Great South Land, and ended at the eastern end of New Guinea, then sailed to the west through what is now called Torres Strait. He then turned north to Ternate, then headed for Manila, the Phillipines, arriving there 1 May 1607. It is still unknown whether Torres had any awareness he was sailing near the northern coast of the actual Great Southland. His accounts delivered to Spain were put in the archives, not to emerge for 175 years. Torres disappeared from history after June 1608. The next navigator to sail Torres Strait from east to west was James Cook.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1605: First Dutch sightings of Australia. Jan Willemsz Verschoor, director of the Dutch factory at Bantam, orders a ship Duyfken (Little Dove) refitted to explore lands beyond the present Dutch trading horizons, especially to inspect New Guinea and any lands to its east or south-east. Captain would be Willem Jansz. She sailed in November 1605 from Bantam. Englishman Capt. John Saris saw her sail out and noted she was heading for New Guinea and its "great store" of gold. Jansz sailed first to the Bandas, south-east of Ambon, then to the Aru Islands, then to western New Guinea-Irian Jaya. Then he sailed further south-east, to find eight crew killed by local people. Then Jansz set a course heading for Cape York, where he found the mouth of today's Pennefeather River. (The first documented discovery of a part of Australia.) He then sailed 200km into the Gulf of Carpentaria, believing he was seeing extensions of New Guinea. One more man was killed by Aboriginals when a landing was made. Jansz returned to Banda. Jansz was unaware he was in a strait, although he sailed the same year Torres sailed the strait.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1605: Spaniard Luis Baez de Torres sails east-west in Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. Off Irian Jaya (west of New Guinea), Torres finds Chinese artefacts such as iron and bells. (Estensen p. 40 in "Discovery" says he makes this sail in October 1606.) There have been reports by late C16th-early C17th of Chinese trade goods found about Irian Jaya. Torres has sailed from Callao in Peru across the Pacific and through his strait to Manila, Philippines. His report to his King was no acted on and consigned to the state archives, to lie neglected till rediscovered in 1782 by Spanish historian Juan Bautista Munoz, 12 years after Cook had been through Torres Strait and claimed it for Britain as part of "eastern Australia", that is, New South Wales.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1602-1605: English mariner George Weymouth explores America's northern coastline, reaching the entrance to (what became) Hudson's River. Weymouth's information fell into the hands of the Dutch East India Co.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1605: Time of troubles in Russia.

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1604: 5 December: James I has permitted an expedition by Sir Edward Michelbourne to the East Indies with Tiger and Tiger's Whelp departing Isle of Wight on 5 December, 1604, and with aboard the highly-experienced John Davis, who had sailed with James Lancaster. Davis had been bad-mouthed by Lancaster to the East India Company re dealings at Achin concerning Davis' views on availability of pepper at Achin, and prices. On this voyage, Michelbourne behaved like an unprincipled pirate in regard to local and Dutch shipping. A Japanese pirate junk which had already worked the coasts of China and Cambodia, Borneo, quietened Michelbourne down - and killed John Davis. Michelborne had to shoot cannon through the interior of his own ship to get rid of the Japanese. Michelbourne got home to England in 1606.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1603: Japan: Tokugawa Shogunate begins. In 1633, Japanese are forbidden to travel overseas.

1603: London's Globe Theatre is razed during a production of Shakespeare's Henry IV.

1602: The new Dutch East India Company (VOC), quickly sends three ships under Sebald de Weert and Wybrand van Warwyck for Java, Sumatra, Ceylon and the spice islands. Warwyck was to visit China coasts and establish trading bases. The Dutch eventually got a world monopoly on the supply of cloves and in theory, on nutmeg also. This was soon abridged by a new fleet of English to the spice islands.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1602: 20 March: Organisation by attorney-general of Holland, Johan van Oldebarnvelt, who realised the need for an organised monopoly, which becomes the Dutch East India Company. (VOC, or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, run by a council of 17 men).
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1602: Formation of Dutch East India Company.

About 1600: A physicist William Gilbert uses the word, "electric".

1602: Spain re world exploration": Duke of Sesa y Vaena assures King Philip II of Spain that the so-called South Land is "very densely inhabitated", which tends to contradict the view of Englishman Sir Walter Raleigh that any Southland would be thinly populated.

February 1601: Lancaster's five East India Company ships proceed down the Thames River. The crowd would not be repeated in size till 1610 when Nathaniel Courthope sailed for the East. Among the 1601 ships are Susan, Hector, Ascension, Red Dragon. The ships reached Table Bay by 9 September 1601, later to Madagascar. The Nicobar Islands. By 5 June 1602 to Achin, a port of Sumatra. When Lancaster arrived, he saw ships already there from Gujarat, Bengal, Calicut, and the Malay Peninsula. Lancaster departed Achin after various adventures in November 1602. Lancaster left for England in February 1603, arriving home in September 1603, when London had been victim to plague. There followed another English East India Co. voyage under Henry Middleton, with ships Susan, Hector, Ascension, Red Dragon.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1601: Maritime history: Eredia claims to have discovered Nuca Antara.

***********Finis********

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Stop Press: For late entries

1607: Scientists now believe that a tsunami could have caused the 1607 flood in Southern England which killed about 2000 people. Earlier it has been thought the flood was caused by high tide and severe storms. Eyewitnesses reported “huge and mighty hills of water” moving “faster than a greyhound can run”. Area affected were 520sq km of South Wales and Southwest England, and the Severn estuary. The flood took 10 days to subside. (Reported 9 April 2005)

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