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Merchants and Bankers
1575 - 1600

Trade - an international perspective

This website, produced by Australian historian Dan Byrnes, is a no-frills, text-based website designed simply to list historical and genealogical information on many notable merchants and traders of what is termed, the Western World.

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Reference Item:
Richard W. Unger, The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600. Montreal, 1980.

English traders from 1575-1600 - continued

Reference item: C16th: A good treatment of the impact of Spanish silver on European economies and other useful overviews are given in Fernand Brandel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 1. (Translated by Sian Reynolds) Sydney, Perennial Library, Harper and Row, 1960. (Post Crusades)

1551-1552-1603: Kennedy writes that to 1603, more so in Tudor times, the cloth merchants who backed maritime endeavour were pro-Spanish, matters had changed with the 1551-1552 cloth slump, and in 1552 arose some English hopes of finding a north-east passage. See Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. London, Allen Lane, 1976.

1575: Philippines: Spaniards of Manila engage and defeat a fleet of Chinese pirates who had damaged the coast of Fukien and the result is an invitation to talk to Chinese officials, to the envy of the Portuguese who had never received such an invitation. Though little came of this, really. See C. R. Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century. London, Hakluyt Society, 1953. From J. H. Parry, The European Reconnaissance: Selected Documents. London, Macmillan, 1968., pp. 255-256.

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1572: Birth of Anglo-Dutch merchant, Sir William Courteen (1572-1636). Goslinga writes: "The De Moor-Courteen House was an Anglo-Dutch company begun by William Courteen, a Fleming, who had lived in Zeeland before going to live in England. In London he developed a thriving trade which maintained connection in Zeeland. He became a great merchant, and his company soon enjoyed a remarkable position in the commercial world of the early seventeenth century. ... The Dutch were the preponderant partners in the company, and the books were kept at Middelburg." ... "Despite its association with the Groenewegen settlement in the Caribbean, the De Moor-Courteen House was to become far better known as the sponsor (with largely Dutch money) of the 1625 expedition to Barbados under Captain John Powell... a personal friend of Groenwegen, who continued a semi-official function as factor of the De Moor-Courteen House till the death in 1644 of Jan de Moor. Then Groenwegen became a servant of the Dutch West India Company.
Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 414-415ff.

1576: More to come

1577: Francis Drake leaves England on his world voyage.

Where did English mariner Sir Francis Drake make his Pacific landfall (Nova Albion?) on North American land. Did he leave a "Drake was here" plate at Campbell Cove, Bodega Head, California in the summer of June 1579 as he repaired his ship, Golden Hind? In 1997, writer Brian Kelleher of Cupertino began asking questions about such a site. Or was the landing spot at a Marin County Bay, or on the Oregon coast? Researchers including archaeologist Dr. Kent Lightfoot, at University of California may follow up Kelleher's suggestions. Drake's five-ship expedition was the second attempt to circumnavigate the world, following up Magellan. From the western Pacific coast, Drake sailed to Indonesia, then across the Indian Ocean, around Cape of Good Hope and home to England. (Reported 10 July 1999)

13 December 1577: Francis Drake begins a world voyage from Plymouth, England, in Golden Hind.

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1587-1629: Reign of Shah Abbas I (the Great) of Persia; he consolidates and expands territories.

1578: Blois van Treslong, famous Dutch sea-beggar, tries as early as now to interest merchants in a company especially to conquer the Spanish silver fleet. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 49.

1579: Netherlands proclaim independence from Spain.

1579: More maritime history mystery: Fresh controversy arises over whether history should be rewritten with the case of English pirate Francis Drake, and the Golden Hind voyage: did Drake discover Alaska? A new book, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, by Samuel Bawlf argues that Drake was forbidden from publicly reporting his discovery due to fear of the Spanish becoming aware of English moves. Working from study of maps and Drake's mention of a "frozen zone" where natives shivered in their furs and snow scarcely melted even in summer, Bawlf argues for a thorough rewrite of the history of Elizabethan discoveries. The English he said had an ambitious plan to find the North-West Passage and found an empire in the Pacific. Part of the problem is lack of information on Drake's whereabouts in the summer of 1579, a question long and hotly debated on the US' western coasts. Bawlf, a Canadian, believes Drake spilled details to his personal map-maker, Abraham Ortelius, who is said to have invented the atlas. Bawlf feels that a map showing four non-existent islands off the coast of California are the shapes of actual islands further north, including Vancouver Island. Sceptics are reportedly unconvinced, and some sceptics still believe that Drake went no further north on these West American coasts than Mexico. (Reported 16 August 2003)

1580: Spain annexes Portugal: Crowns of Spain and Portugal are united.

1579: Appearance of Saxton's Atlas of England.

1580: English merchants back a voyage into the Arctic (Kara Sea), to find any near-Russia North-East Passage to the East, perhaps by "a river near China".
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1580: After 1580, when Spain controlled the main sources of black merchandise within her realm, her government included these asientos on a much more regular basis. As a majority of the slave centres were located in West Africa, the Portuguese asentistas were the only people of that nation who willingly accepted Spanish domination. - Asiento chronology -

1580: English merchants back a voyage into the Arctic (Kara Sea), to find any near-Russia North-East Passage to the East, perhaps by a river near China.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

Item: "Guinea" is the north-west African coast generally.
Cornelis CH. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680. Assen, The Netherlands, Van Gorcum and Co., Dr., H. J. Prakke and H. M. G. Prakke, 1971.

1580: Some great English Merchant Adventurers who joined the Levant Co. were Richard Saltonstall, Middletons, Batemans, Ferrars, Henry Andrews. By about 1580, the Muscovy Company was led by Sir George Barne. Rowland Heywood tried for a north-east passage, sending a voyage led by Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman.

In 1581, Elizabeth granted charters to English companies trading to Spain and Portugal, the Eastland Co. to the Baltic, Levant Co. to Turkey and Raleigh planning a company in Virginia ended in disaster and finally the EICo chartered.

1582AD: Japan: Oda assassinated by Akechi Mitsuhide. Akechi was killed by a farmer. Oda's close follower Toyotomi Hideyoshi keeps the campaign and completes it in 1590. He never took the title of Shogun. He made a clear distinction between samurais and other classes. He monopolized foreign trade, confiscated the arms of the peasantry, drawing a sharp line between them and the samurai.

1582: Introduction of Gregorian Calendar in Italy.

1582: Reference item:
Elizabeth Story Donno, (Ed.), An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls. London, The Hakluyt Society, 1976.

Reference item: W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti: From the earliest times to the commencement of the Twentieth Century. London, John Murray, 1915.

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor of 1583 Sir Edward Osborne:
Descendants of Richard Osborne of Kent and sp: Jane Broughton
2. London Lord Mayor, Levant trader, Sir Edward Osborne (b.1530;d.1592) sp: Anne Hewett wife1
3. Sir Kt Hewett Osborne sp: Miss Notknown 4. Sir Edward Osborne, Bart sp: Anne Walmsley wife2
5. Thomas Osborne Duke1 Leeds Earl1 Danby (b.20 Feb 1631;d.26 Jul 1712) sp: Bridget Bertie (b.1629;m.1653;d.7 Jan 1703/1704) 6. Edward Osborne Visc Latimer (b.1655;d.Jan 1688/1689) sp: Elizabeth Bennet (b.1659;m.Mar 1676;d.1 May 1680)
7. Vice-Admiral Peregrine Osborne Duke2 Leeds Earl Danby (b.1659;d.25 Jun 1729) sp: Bridget Hyde (b.1662;m.25 Apr 1682) 6. Sophia Osborne wife3
sp: William Fermor Baron1 Leominster (c.1692) 7. Thomas Fermor Earl1 Pomfret (b.23 Mar 1698;d.15 Jul 1753) sp: Henrietta Louisa Lady Jeffreys Bedchamber-16915 (m.1720;d.17 Dec 1761) 6. Martha wife1 Osborne dr5 (b.1664;d.11 Sep 1689) sp: Earl2 Bath Charles Granville (b.Aug 1661;m.22 May 1678;d.4 Sep 1701 suicide)
4. Gov. Guernsey Sir Peter Osborne (b.1584;d.1653) sp: Dorothy Danvers 5. Dorothy Osborne (d.1694/1695) sp: Irish statesman, Sir William Temple (b.1628;m.31 Jan 1654/1655;d.1699) 6. Paymaster-General, Sec-of-War, John Temple (d.1689) sp: Mary Duplessis (Huguenot) 7. Elizabeth Temple 7. Dorothy Temple sp: Nicholas Bacon sp: Miss Notknown 4. Sir Edward Osborne, Bart 4. Gov Guernsey Sir Peter Osborne (b.1584;d.1653) 3. Ann Osborne sp: John Offley sp: Margaret Chapman wife2 (m.15 Sep 1588) 3. Alice Osborne sp: Sir John Peyton 4. Frances Peyton wife1 sp: Miles Hobart (d.Dec 1639) 5. Cromwellian, Sir John Hobart (b.1627;d.22 Aug 1683) sp: Mary Hampden wife2 (b.1630;m.1655) 6. Sir Henry Hobart, Bart4 (d.21 Aug 1698) sp: Elizabeth Maynard (m.9 Jul 1684) 7. Lord of Trade John Hobart Earl1 Buckinghamshire (b.1695;d.22 Sep 1756) sp: Judith Britiffe wife1 (m.1717) sp: Elizabeth Bristow wife2 (m.10 Feb 1727/1728) 7. Henrietta Hobart (Lover) (b.1688) sp: George Augustus Guelf, George II (b.1683;m.2 Mar 1705/1706;d.1760) sp: Charles Howard Earl19 Suffolk (b.1675;m.2 Mar 1705;d.28 Sep 1733) sp: Hon. George Berkeley (m.26 Jun 1735;d.29 Oct 1746) 6. Sir Henry Hobart, Bart4 of Co. Norfolk (d.21 Aug 1698) sp: Elizabeth Maynard (m.9 Jul 1684) 7. Lord of Trade John Hobart Earl1 Hobart (b.1695;d.22 Sep 1756) 7. Henrietta Hobart Lover (b.1688) sp: Philippa Hobart (d.19 Jan 1654/1655) sp: Philippa Sydney

1582: Gregorian calendar is adopted in Christendom.

1583: Sir Humphrey Gilbert founds first English colony in North America at St John's, Newfoundland.

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1583: Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten proceeds to the East Indies, and later writes five big book of fables which happen to contain information of great interest to merchants. He returns home in 1592, the year in which Plancius published his "world map" based on the work of Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

On the English family, Fenner, as a family of privateers see also, Kenneth. R. Andrews, 'Thomas Fenner and the Guinea Trade, 1564', The Mariner's Mirror., 1952, pp. 312-314. In 1584 Fenner went to see with pirate John Challice to plunder Portuguese shipping. One Thomas Fenner is a vice-admiral in England's expeditions of 1585-1587.

1584: Item:
Julian S. Corbett, Papers Relating to the Navy during the Spanish War, 1585-1586 - Cadiz Voyage - 1587. London, Navy Records Society, MDCCCXCVIII. (Copy at Griffith University, Brisbane, Nathan Campus.)

1584: Dies 1584, Timofeyevich Yermak; in 1579, he led an expedition to conquer Siberia for the Russian Empire. He fought with Kuchum, the Tatar warlord.

1585: Elizabeth backs more pirate voyages. (See Neville Williams, Elizabeth 1: Queen of England. London. Sphere, 1971.)

1585: Sir Walter Raleigh establishes the first English colony in Virginia. Raleigh's third attempt, "the famous lost colony of Roanoke" in 1587 with Gov. John White fell into difficulties re supplies in the year of the Spanish armada, but the second was more significant, in 1585, led by Sir Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane, eventually settled on Roanoke Island, Sir Francis Drake soon appeared there after raiding the Spanish.

1585: Sir Walter Raleigh establishes the first English colony in Virginia. (Mukherjee, p. 41.)

1586: Japan: Tenshoo shoonen shisetsu (Tenshoo Boy Missions) went to Europe and came back in 1590.

1586: Under threat from Indians, English colonists sail from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, dismally ending first English settlement in America.

1587: English colonists come ashore on Roanoke Island, attempting to establish the first permanent English settlement in the New World. It now seems that the colonists were confronted with the region's worst drought in 700 years, which caused mass starvation and made for aggravated tense relations with Native Americans. By 1590, the ill-fated settlers had vanished with little trace.

1587: At least three Dutch ships visit Brazilian port. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 79ff.

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1587: Elizabeth authorizes Drake to take four of her ships and 16 privately owned ones to Spain, where he attacked Cadiz, Lisbon, and off the Azores took a Portuguese galleon worth a prize of 140,000 pounds, of which 40,000 pounds went to Eliz (who had come into her reign with very little money). (See Neville Williams, Elizabeth 1: Queen of England. London, Sphere, 1971.)

1587: Raleigh's third attempt, "the famous lost colony of Roanoke" in 1587 with Gov. John White fell into difficulties re supplies in the year of the Spanish armada, but the second was more significant, in 1585, led by Sir Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane, eventually settled on Roanoke Island. Sir Francis Drake soon appeared there after raiding the Spanish. (Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 20-21.)

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord mayor of 1587-1588 Sir George Bond
Senior Bond... 2. Founder Russia Co., William Bond of Somerset (c.1570;d.1576) sp: Miss Hill
3. Coloniser, London Alderman, William Bond (c.1566/1568) sp: Margaret Aldy, of Surrey 4. Sir Daniel Bond 4. William Bond sp: Margaret Gore 4. Anne Bond (d.9 Oct 1615) sp: London Lord Mayor William Whitmore (c.1631;d.8 Aug 1593) 5. MP Sir Kt William Whitmore (b.5 Nov 1572;d.Dec 1648) sp: Margaret Mosley wife1 6. Anne Whitmore (d.1666) sp: MP Sir Kt Edmund Sawyer sp: Dorothy Weld wife2 (d.1626) 6. MP Sir Thomas Whitmore, Bart1 (b.28 Nov 1612;d.1653) sp: Elizabeth Acton (d.1666) 7. MP Sir William Whitmore, Bart2 of Apley (b.8 Apr 1727;d.1799) sp: Mary Harvey Of London- (d.30 Jan 1710/1711) 7. MP Sir Kt Thomas Whitmore (c.1661;d.1685) 6. Richard Whitmore (b.21 Jun 1614;d.20 Aug 1667) sp: Catherine Deards 7. MP William Whitmore of Apley (c.1705;d.24 May 1752) sp: Elizabeth Pope sp: Anne Weld 7. MP William Whitmore Of Apley (c.1699;d.1725) sp: Miss Notknown 7. Richard II Whitmore sp: Miss Notknown sp: Miss Notknown 5. London Lord Mayor, Sir George Whitmore (c.1631/1632) sp: Miss Notknown 6. Margaret Whitemore Whitmore wife2-57573 sp: Sir Charles Kemeys, Bart2 (d.1658) 7. Sir Charles Kemeys, Bart3 (d.Dec 1702) sp: Mary Wharton 5. Elizabeth Whitemore Whitmore sp: London Lord Mayor Sir William Craven (c.1610;d.1618) 6. Whig of Carolina projects, William Craven Earl1 Craven (b.1608;d.9 Apr 1697) 6. Elizabeth Craven (b.7 Jan 1599/1600;d.8 Oct 1662) sp: Percy Herbert Baron2 Powis (m.19 Nov 1622;d.19 Jan 1666/1667) 7. Royalist William Herbert Earl1 Powis, Mqs1 Powis (b.1626;d.2 Jun 1696) sp: Lady of Bedchamber Elizabeth Somerset (m.Jul 1654;d.11 Mar 1690/1691)
7. Mary Herbert (b.Oct 1623) sp: George Talbot Lord Talbot (b.1620;m.Jan 1639;d.Mar 1644) 7. Urania Herbert sp: MP Coulson Fellowes (b.1696;d.1769) 6. John Craven Baron Craven of Ryton, died young (b.1643;d.1648) 6. Thomas Craven Died Young (b.1617;d.1637) 6. MP John Craven Baron1 Craven Of Ryton (b.1610;d.1648) sp: Elizabeth Spencer (b.16 Feb 1617/1618;m.4 Dec 1634;d.11 Aug 1672) 6. Mary Craven wife1 sp: Thomas Coventry Baron2 Coventry (b.1606;m.2 Apr 1627) 7. George Coventry Baron3 Coventry (b.1628;d.15 Dec 1680) sp: Margaret Tufton 7. Thomas Coventry Earl1 Coventry, Baron2 Coventry (b.1629;d.15 Jul 1699) sp: Winifred Edgecumbe wife1 (m.2 Apr 1627;d.11 Jun 1694) sp: Elizabeth Graham, (Grimes), spinster, wife2 (m.16 Jul 1695;d.1724) 5. Margaret Whitmore sp: Sir Kt Richard Grubham 5. Mary Whitmore wife2 sp: Sir Charles Montagu, of Cranbrook 6. Elizabeth Montagu (b.30 Dec 1672) sp: Christopher FRS Gov Guernsey Hatton Baron1 Hatton (b.Jul 1605;m.8 May 1630;d.4 Jul 1670) 7. Christopher Hatton, of Gretton, Visc Hatton sp: Frances Yelverton wife2 (m.1675;d.15 May 1684) sp: Cicely Tufton wife1 (m.12 Feb 1666) sp: Elizabeth Haslewood wife3 (m.Aug 1685) 6. Anne Montagu (b.1614;d.1 Feb 1680/1681) sp: Coloniser, Lord Keeper, Dudley North Baron4 North (b.22 Oct 1637;m.24 Apr 1632;d.24 Jun 1677) 7. Economist, Turkey merchant, Sir Dudley North (b.1641;d.1691) sp: Anne Cann 7.Lord Keeper, Francis North Baron2 Guildford (b.1638;d.5 Sep 1685) sp: Frances Pope (m.5 Mar 1671/1672;d.15 Nov 1678) 7. Charles North Baron1 Grey of Rolleston, Lord5 North (b.1634;d.Jan 1690) sp: Catherine Grey widow (m.6 Apr 1667;d.Jan 1694) 7. Prof John North Cambridge Univ. (b.4 Sep 1645) 7. Merchant, Montagu North 7. Lawyer Roger North (b.3 Sep 1653) sp: Mary Gayer 7. Anne North sp: MP Robert Foley (m.1674) 7. Elizabeth North (d.23 Jan 1730) sp: Sir Robert Wiseman (m.24 Sep 1672) sp: William Paston, Earl2 Y... (b.1653/1654;m.24 Sep 1672;d.25 Dec 1732) 7. Christian North sp: Sir George Wenyeve (m.1665) 7. Mary North wife1 sp: Sir William Spring, Bart2 6. Mary Montagu sp: Sir Edward Byshe 5. Frances Whitmore (has issue) (d.1656) sp: Sir Kt John Weld (d.1662) 6. Sir John Weld Kt Banneret (d.1674) sp: Hon. Mary Stourton (m.1648) 6. Humphrey Weld (d.1684) sp: Clara Arundell (m.1638) 7. Mary WELD sp: Mr Earl2 Carlingford (d.1690) 6. William Weld sp: Miss Notknown 7. William Weld sp: Elizabeth Sherburne (m.1672) sp: Miss Notknown 7. William Weld 6. Margaret Weld sp: Sir William Bowyer, Bart1 (b.1612;d.2 Oct 1679) 7. Sir William Bowyer, Bart2 (b.1639) sp: Frances Cecil 6. Humphrey Weld (d.1684) sp: Clara Arundell (m.1638) 7. Mary Weld sp: Robert King 4. Elizabeth Bond (c.1600) sp: London Alderman, Levant trader, merchant Henry Andrews (c.1634) 5. Miss Andrews sp: James Fenn (Venn) (b.1642) 5. Elizabeth Andrews sp: Samuel Mico 5. Daniel Andrews 3. London Lord Mayor Sir George Bond Sir (c.1587;d.1592) sp: Winifred Leigh 4. George Bond 4. Sir William Bond (c.1587) sp: Catherine Povey 2. John Bond (Navy) 2. Francis Bond (Navy)

1588: The Spanish Armada attempts to invade England but is repulsed.

1588: British sea forces under Sir Francis Drake destroy Spanish Armada in battle off France.

1588++: Dutchmen Steven van der Haghen is to become one of the founders of Dutch navigation to the East Indies - and is considering a new ship design - the flute or fluit - as built at Hoorn, which makes navigation in the Mediterranean and on the African West Coast more profitable. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 49.

1588: Elizabeth I gives a charter to some Merchants of Exeter to trade to Senegal and Gambia. See W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti: From the earliest times to the commencement of the Twentieth Century. London, John Murray, 1915., pp. 79-80.

1589: Japan: Persecution of Christians

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1589: Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris make expedition of 150 ships and 18,000 men to Portugal.

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor for 1590 John Hart
Descendants of Ralph Hart and sp: Miss Notknown
2. Levant trader London Lord Mayor Sir John Hart (c.1590;d.1604) sp: Anne Haynes
3. Jane Hart sp: London Lord Mayor Sir George Bolles (b.1538;d.Sep 1621)
4. Sir John Bolles (d.8 Mar 1648) sp: Catherine Conyers 4. Anne Bolles sp: London Sheriff Humphrey Smith (c.1629) 3. Miss Hart sp: London grocer Edward Cage sp: Miss Notknown 2. Levant trader, London Lord Mayor, Sir John Hart (c.1590;d.1604)

1591: London merchants petition Queen Elizabeth I for a licence to trade to the East Indies, then choose expedition commander, James Lancaster, who had captained a ship Edward Bonaventure earlier against The Spanish Armada. In late 1591 Lancaster sets sail with Edward Bonaventure, Penelope and Merchant Royal. The expedition is a failure.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1591: London merchants petition Queen Elizabeth I for a licence to trade to the East Indies, then choose expedition commander, James Lancaster, who had captained a ship Edward Bonaventure earlier against The Spanish Armada. In late 1591 Lancaster sets sail with Edward Bonaventure, Penelope and Merchant Royal. The expedition is a failure.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1592-1597: Japan: Hideyoshi attempts to invade Korea, as the first step to conquer the world (China), but fails. (diverts Samurai energies into Korean campaigns)

1593: Dutch mariner Barent Erikszoon is to become partly-responsible for opening Dutch trade on African West Coast. He had made voyages to Brazil with Portuguese, but struck trouble when he visited Portugal's centre, Principe, an island of the African West Coast. From Enkhuizen he organises a company to exploit West African trade. Erikszoon is closely followed by merchant-sailor Simon Taey, then Dirck Veldmuis - who did not return from his trip, as killed by the French. In 1593, Cornelis Freeksz Vrijer returned safely from Angola. In 1594, Cornelis Houtman made an exploratory expedition to trade with the area. By 1598 there are 25-30 Dutch merchantmen going to West Africa. Such early Dutch companies often had limited aims, sometimes intended for one voyage only. (In 1593, The Spanish capture ten Dutch ships along the coast of New Andalusia.) Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 51.

1593: London: Playwright Christopher Marlowe, also a spy, is killed in "a sordid pub brawl".

Circa 1593: John Spence, b.1550 Lord Mayor of London 1593 John Spencer, elected in 1594.
(Item, per Peter Western)

1594: Paris has population of 180,000 in 1594, two years before the invention of the water closet, which meant a reason for the import from China of toilet paper, invented there 1000 years before.

1594: A Dutch fleet, the first of three, leaves Texel for the spice islands under William Barents who thus became an arctic explorer. Voyage of the associated mariner Cornelis Nay, of the second Dutch fleet, led to Northern Russia once being called "New Holland", and he renamed the Kara Sea. By 1595, the second Dutch expedition was also blocked by ice. A third Dutch fleet sailed in 1596 under William Barents and Capt. Jacob van Heemskerck, to be trapped in ice. Barents died.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1594 Circa: Before the first Dutch arctic voyage, nine Amsterdam merchants meet in secret to discuss voyages to the East by the Portuguese route, the sale of pepper then controlled by a group of Fugger bankers, and in 1594 six Dutch merchants formed a Far Lands Company (Plancius invested in it), then settled to collecting information, as the brothers Cornelis and Frederik (sic) de Houtman had been sent to Portugal to collect what information they could, esp. on Moluccan spices; they returned in early 1594 after successful business-espionage, see Linschoten (sic) (Ton Vermeulen, Notes from European Voyaging towards Australia, pp. 34-35, edited by Hardy and Frost.)

1594: A Dutch fleet the first of three leaves Texel for the spice islands under William Barents who thus became an arctic explorer. The mariner Cornelis Nay, of the second Dutch fleet, led to Northern Russia once being called "New Holland", and he renamed the Kara Sea. By 1595, the second Dutch expedition was also blocked by ice. A third Dutch fleet sailed in 1596 under William Barents and Capt. Jacob van Heemskerck, to be trapped in ice. Barents died.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1595: Dutch introduce efficient 'fluyt' design for merchant ships.

1595: The Dutch send their first fleet into Eastern Trade.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1595: Maritime history: Houtman becomes the first Dutchman in the East Indies. Second voyage for Mendana.

1595: Spring, The Dutchman Cornelius Houtman, a spy by temperament, leads an expedition to the East, in command of ships including Mauritius and Amsterdam. To Cape Verde Islands. Crew discipline frays badly. To the wealthy port of Bantam in Java, Indonesia.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1595: Soon after Sir Walter Raleigh's first voyage to the Guianas in 1595, the English explorer Captain Charles Leigh attempted to start a settlement on the Waiapoco (Oyapock) River, now the border between Brazil and French Guiana.

Year 1595: Treating Drake and piracy, variously.

1566: Elizabeth had a financial stake in John Hawkins' second voyage of plunder in 1566 undertaken in defiance of views of the Spanish. (See Neville Williams, Elizabeth 1: Queen of England. London. Sphere, 1971.)

1595: Dutch establish trade in Western Java.

1595: A well-known asiento was that given by Phillip II for the Caribbean to the Portuguese Pedro Gomez Reynal in 1595, agreeing for an annual delivery of 4250 slaves per year for nine years, for the Antilles, New Spain, Honduras, Rio Hacha, Margarita and Venezuela, possibly also Brazil. Gomez paid the crown 900,000 ducats for this concession. Demand for slave labour was such that other asientos were made. The figures in these contexts on numbers of slaves used does not include slaves in the hands of English, French and Dutch slave traders. (Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean, p. 339) - Asiento chronology -

1595: The Dutch send their first fleet into Eastern Trade.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1595: Spring, The Dutchman Cornelius Houtman, a spy by temperament, leads an expedition to the East, in command of ships including Mauritius and Amsterdam. To Cape Verde Islands. Crew discipline frays badly. To the wealthy port of Bantam in Java, Indonesia.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1596 Approx: Dutchman Cornelius Houtman batters Bantam in the spice islands with cannon, slaughters hundreds of locals, and trains his cannon on the king's palace.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1596++: The visionary de Moucheron, a protégé of Prince Maurits, interested in both the East and West Indies, hoping to create a chain of trade from Brazil to Africa, is destined to become one of the two most important founders of the Dutch colonial empire. In 1596 he unsuccessfully tried to place a castle on the West African coast, Elmina, to compete with the Portuguese trade port, Mina, In 1596, Pieter van der Haghen of Rotterdam planned an expedition to the West Indies, in a year when some ships from Guinea brought some Negroes (and some Portuguese pilots) back to Middelburg - and notably, a burgomaster, Ten Haeff, complained they had been deprived "of their natural liberty". A fresh Dutch trading expedition followed this Middelburg matter. Another merchant about now, Johan van der Veken, got licences to trade with Guinea, Peru, and the West Indies. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 52-55.

1596: About the time Raleigh (1596) publishes his book, The Discoverie of the Large and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, the Dutch have a trading post called Fort Orange about 20 miles up the Amazon, and seven miles further up, Fort Nassau. Gerrit Bicker by 1597 was one Dutch mariner wanting to go to the Amazon-Orinoco area. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 56.

1596 Approx: Dutchman Cornelius Houtman batters Bantam in the spice islands with cannon, slaughters hundreds of locals, and trained his cannon on the king's palace.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

Follows material on London Lord Mayor 1597-1598 Sir Richard Saltonstall.
Descendants of Gilbert Saltonstall of Yorks sp: Miss NOTKNOWN
2. Founder Spanish Company London Lord Mayor Sir Richard Saltonstall (c.1577;d.1601) sp: Susan Poyntz
3. Richard Saltonstall sp: Miss Gurdon
3. Elizabeth Saltonstall sp: Levant Company trader Richard Wyche (c.1605;d.20 Nov 1621)
4. London merchant, royal household, Sir Peter Wyche (d.Dec 1643) sp: Jane Meredith
5. Jane Wyche (d.3 Feb 1691) sp: John Granville Earl1 Bath Visc Granville (b.29 Aug 1628;m.Oct 1652;d.22 Aug 1701)
6. Carolinas Coloniser John Granville Baron1 Granville (b.12 Apr 1665;d.3 Dec 1707) sp: Rebecca Child (m.14 Apr 1703)
6. Grace Granville Earl1 Granville yst daughter, Countess Granville (b.1667;d.18 Oct 1744) sp: Whig, Sir George Carteret Baron1 Carteret (b.1659;m.15 Mar 1674/1675;d.22 Sep 1695)
7. John Carteret Earl2 Granville Visc Carteret (b.22 Apr 1690;d.2 Jan 1763) sp: Frances Worsley wife1 (m.17 Oct 1710) sp: Sophia Lady Fermor wife2 (b.29 May 1721;d.7 Oct 1745)
7. Philip Carteret Unm 7. Jemima Carteret Unm 6. Jane Granville dr1 (b.19 May 1675;d.7 Mar 1722/1723) sp: Sir William Leveson-Gower, Bart4 (d.1691) 7. John Leveson-Gower Baron1 Gower, Of Stittenham (b.7 Jan 1674/1675;d.31 Aug 1709) sp: Catherine Manners 7. Jane Leveson-Gower, a fortune (d.24 May 1725) sp: Tory MP Edward (Henry?) Hyde Earl4 Clarendon (b.1672;m.2 Mar 1691/1692;d.10 Dec 1753) 7. Notknown Leveson-Gower sp: Miss Notknown
6. Charles Granville Earl2 Bath, Suicide (b.Aug 1661;d.4 Sep 1701) sp: Martha Osborne wife1, dr5 (b.1664;m.22 May 1678;d.11 Sep 1689) sp: Isabella Nassau wife2 (d.30 Jan 1691/1692) 7. William Henry Granville extinct, Died Young (b.30 Jan 1690/1691;d.17 May 1711) 6. Catherine Granville sp: Craven Peyton 5. Ambassador to Russia Sir Peter Wyche Sir (c.1669) sp: Elizabeth Bolles 6. John Wyche Sir sp: Bethseda Savage 6. EICo trader at Surat, Barnard Wyche
6. Peter Wyche (b.25 Dec 1709) sp: Elizabeth Browne
5. Sir Cyril Wyche sp: Miss Jermyn
6. Jermyn Wyche Esq sp: Mary Hungerford
4. Elizabeth Wyche sp: London wine merchant Job Harby (c.1650)
3. Hester Saltonstall wife1 sp: London Lord mayor, privateer, Sir Thomas Middleton (b.1556;m.Oct 1585;d.1631) 4. son2 Myddleton Middleton 4. Thomas (Myddleton) Middleton
3. Miss Saltonstall sp: London MP Robert Myddleton merchant
3. Coloniser, merchant Sir Samuel Saltonstall sp: Miss Notknown
4. Wye Saltonstall, Writer (c.1625) 3. Peter Saltonstall
3. Mary Saltonstall sp: Richard Sunderland (m.28 Jan 1629) 4. Mary Sunderland (d.16 Jan 1673) sp: Edward Parker (b.3 Aug 1602;m.28 Jan 1629;d.1667) 5. Thomas Parker (b.1631;d.1 Aug 1695) sp: Margaret Assheton

1598: France: Edict of Nantes.

1598: One date for first documented minutes of a Masonic Lodge in the British Isles.

1599: Or earlier: The little-known Englishman and vicar, Samuel Purchas, publishes his book, Purchas, His Pilgrimes, which is to inspire London's merchant adventurers, somewhat based on reports of Magellan's voyages.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

24 September, 1599: London. About eighty English merchants meet to discuss the formation of an English East India Company. Including, Richard Staper (Levant Co), Thomas Smythe (Levant Co), Sir John Hart, Richard Cockayne, Lord Mayor Sir Stephen Soane, James Lancaster mariner, John Davis mariner, Francis Pretty a friend of Thomas Cavendish, some of a crew of Sir Francis Drake, William Baffin arctic explorer, and brothers John, Henry and David Middleton. Another meeting follows on 16 October, 1599. Also, on 23 September, 1600. The crucial document permitting the East India Company to operate for the next 15 years was signed by Elizabeth I on 31 December, 1600.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

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1599: Dutchman Jacob van Neck returns to Amsterdam from voyage to the East with great wealth and spices from Bantam for his merchant masters.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1599: Netherlands, Merchants of Rotterdam and Zeeland confront Amsterdam by sending their own fleet to the East for spices. Amsterdam ordered its operators to toughen trade conditions. This attitude was resisted by attorney-general of Holland Johan van Oldebarnvelt, who realised the need for an organised monopoly, which by 20 March 1602 became 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.)

1599: March: Dutchman Jacob van Heemskerk, who had some years earlier tried and failed to find an Arctic Route to the East Indies, arrives at Banda Islands in the Moluccas to trade for spices. On the way, Heemskerk had named Mauritius. On the Banda Islands, Heemskerk left behind 22 Dutchmen to stockpile nutmeg and wait for the next Dutch ship. Heemskerk arrived home in 1600 with much nutmeg. (These 22 were later murdered by local people.)
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1599: The very first meeting of EICo Adventurers was London 24 September, 1599, trade of members on an individual basis, no joint stock. (Bankey Bihari Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773-1834. Manchester Univ. Press. 1959., p. 407. copy NSW State Public Library.)

1599: Robert Savage an English merchant a Baltic mast contractor. (Albion, Forests and Sea Power, p. 195. See 1540 previous on timber.)

1599: In 1599, under auspices of Merchant Adventurers, an association formed, 101 shares, asking the queen for a warrant to fit out three ships, a charter of privileges and export bullion. but might this break the peace with Spain and Portugal? the Queen was persuaded to send an agent, merchant John Mildenhall, on an embassy to the Great Mogul via Constantinople, he did not arrive till 1603 at Agra, got home overland by 1607 with permission for the English to trade. (From Mukherjee, p. 65.)

1599: Dutchman Jacob van Neck returns to Amsterdam from voyage to the East with great wealth and spices from Bantam for his merchant masters.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1599: March: Dutchman Jacob van Heemskerk, who had some years earlier tried and failed to find an Arctic Route to the East Indies, arrives at Banda Islands in the Moluccas to trade for spices. On the way, Heemskerk had named Mauritius. On the Banda Islands, Heemskerk left behind 22 Dutchmen to stockpile nutmeg and wait for the next Dutch ship. Heemskerk arrived home in 1600 with much nutmeg. (These 22 were later murdered by local people.)
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1599: Netherlands, Merchants of Rotterdam and Zeeland confront Amsterdam by sending their own fleet to the East for spices. Amsterdam ordered its operators to toughen trade conditions. This attitude was resisted by attorney-general of Holland Johan van Oldebarnvelt, who realised the need for an organised monopoly, which by 20 March 1602 became 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.)

24 September, 1599: London. About eighty English merchants meet to discuss the formation of an English East India Company. Including, Richard Staper (Levant Co), Thomas Smythe (Levant Co), Sir John Hart, Richard Cockayne, Lord Mayor Sir Stephen Soane, James Lancaster mariner, John Davis mariner, Francis Pretty a friend of Thomas Cavendish, some of a crew of Sir Francis Drake, William Baffin arctic explorer, and brothers John, Henry and David Middleton. Another meeting follows on 16 October, 1599. Also, on 23 September, 1600. The crucial document permitting the East India Company to operate for the next 15 years was signed by Elizabeth I on 31 December, 1600.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

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1600: Formation of English East India Company.

1600: Active about 1600, Lord Mayor of London, Ralph Freeman, of the East India and Levant companies, who in 1620 reputedly "paid" the East India Company for the entire trade of the Russia Company.
( Freeman from 1624 was associated with the Rich faction by then in control on the Virginia Company.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 73-79, p. 103.)

1600: Capt. Charles Leigh, colonist of the Amazon area, about 1600. He possibly tried to settle on the border of Brazil.
Lorimer, Amazon, p. 149. Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously.

1600: Raleigh becomes governor of Jersey. In 1600 he sits as MP for Penzance in Elizabeth's last Parliament.

An English heritage - essay section

Dampier and the earlier eastern travels of Ralph Fitch:

This section began with an overview of England's trading in the sixteenth century. This overview sees events not in terms of any point of view relating to the seat of power, London, it seeks to concentrate information found on the fringes of what became an empire. By 1640, one of those fringes, seen only faintly in the eyes of the Anglo-Dutch financier, Sir William Courteen Senior, was Australia, or, terra australis incognita.
(Material used for the preparation of this chapter include: E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485-1583. London, Methuen, 1930. R. G. Lang, 'Social Origins and Social Aspirations of Jacobean London Merchants', Economic History Review, 2, V, 27, 1974., pp. 28-47. Thomas S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade. Manchester University Press, 1959. Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585-1603. Cambridge at the University Press, 1964. J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance. New York, Mentor/New American Library, 1963. Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company: A Sociological Appraisal. Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1973., pp. 62-64. Citations on Ralph Fitch include: Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Cambridge University Press, 1993., p. 20, pp. 168ff. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984., pp. 168ff. Information on Michael Lok's family is found in James A. Williamson, The Age of Drake. London, Adam and Charles Black, 1938., pp. 153-159; Who's Who /Shakespeare, pp. 153ff. . P. W. Hasler, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1558-1603. Vol. 1, 2, 3. London, The History of Parliament Trust, 1981., p. 485. James A. Williamson, The Age of Drake. London, Adam and Charles Black, 1938., pp. 28ff. Alderman William Lok of London was a player in the Spanish trade by the 1560s, and he evidently gave Michael his entre to trade. Hasler, The History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 350, entry for Sir John I Savile, MP, d.1607. On Sir Christopher Hatton, p. 109 of Who's Who /Shakespeare. G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors. London, Methuen, 1955. DNB entry on Anthony Jenkinson. W. Foster, England's Quest of Eastern Trade. London, 1933., on Fitch, pp. 79-109. Jonathan Israel, (Ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact. London, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ian R. Christie, British `non-elite' MPs, 1715-1820. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995. Sir John Clapham, The Bank of England: A History. Two Vols. Cambridge University Press, 1944. A. Jessopp, (Ed.), Roger North, The Lives of the Norths. Vols. 1-3. London, Greg International Publishers Ltd., 1972., Vol. 3, p. 180. Oskar H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan. Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1979-1988. Vol. 1, The Spanish Lake. Vol. 2, Monopolists and Freebooters. (1983) Vol. 3, Paradise Found and Lost. (1988). H. R. Fox Bourne, English Merchants: Memoirs in Illustration of the Progress of British Commerce. London, Chatto and Windus, 1886. Ian Bruce Watson, Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659-1760. New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1980. In following merchant careers, the maritime history of English expansionism, and links between aristocrats and merchants, I have relied on some of the following titles, especially for genealogical material, apart from Brenner, Merchants and Revolution. Joyce Lorimer (Ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1555-1646. London, The Hakluyt Society, 1989. Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1967. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. London, Jonathan Cape, 1973.)

But it is not easy to implant Courteen's career in a narrative of Seventeenth Century English commercial history. To set the scene, it is convenient to outline a different view of the origin of Capitalism, modern capitalism which utilises a scientific outlook... and a view which did not occur to Karl Marx. The proposition is: that as a prerequisite, modern capitalism required exercise of the institution of slavery. This implies, that the study of economics, today, has been divorced from the history of the development of slavery, especially in respect of the price of the input of labour. Economics, as a matter of study, world-wide, remains a dismal science since the historians of economics-as-a-discipline have overlooked an ubiquitous economic institution - slavery. Failure to examine this matter is partly the result of historians paying insufficient attention to linkages between the trading history of the East India Company, the development of the Company's repertoires of financial sophistication, and Englishmen involved in various ways in slavery.

Though it is difficult to illustrate, it can be demonstrated, genealogically, that many Englishmen, and/or their families, and/or their associates were involved in both East India trade, and various sets of activities linked closely to... slavery. Often, in terms of individual commercial careers, an individual man, and his associates or relatives were involved in either/both kind of trade.
(Here I have in mind works such as: Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1967. E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485-1583. London, Methuen, 1930. Lists of merchant names are also found in R. W. K. Hinton, The Eastland Trade and the Common Weal in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1959.)

Such a proposition might tend to harrass histories which treat slavery and East India trade separately. It is rather as though the very activity of studying economic history (as a numbers game) has distracted economists and historians from genealogical matters which were noticed by both academic and popularistic English historians working until about 1939, or, World War Two... the extent of the linkages between business activity and family careers in English commercial life, and following, the history of English expansionism, that is, maritime life, from about 1540. Willan's work treated this, for example, but the themes became lost.
(Thomas S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade. Manchester University Press, 1959.) Perhaps, in the 1950s and 60s, British sensibilities about empire were too torn-up by loss of Empire for objective work to be done on the origins of that Empire?)

Willan's work on Elizabethan foreign trade in particular claims that many London-based cloth exporters became interested in "Barbary trade", in particular in importing sugar. But it is not explained if the sugar in question was grown in Morocco (using Negro slave labour?), or had come through Arabic trade routes from, say, India (Bengal)? Nevertheless, there arose a complex set of linkages between aristocratic families and merchants interested in foreign trade and in promoting marine endeavour. From the 1580s, it becomes notable how many English aristocratic families had a twin interest - in their family members promoting trade (including maritime endeavour), particularly in respect of Caribbean sugar islands, and in governing (or, suppressing) Ireland.

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This book began with such observations along such lines, and so I have abandoned more modern perspectives on the rise of English trade in search of what arises when the preoccupations of earlier writers are re-explored. Where these preoccupations are linked to genealogical inquiry, the reader will find that the lists placed in these files of English merchants interested in Barbary, or Moroccan trade, especially in sugar, will name some names which have genealogical persistence in narratives of English commercial life - sometimes, persistence for centuries. There is another point. I assume that where families became interested in maritime endeavour, this resulted in later generations retaining information and documents, telling stories, passing on a set of traditions. Much of these traditions became the cultural heritage of Anglo-Australia. But a heritage somewhat misunderstood.

An argument as to Capitalism begins thus:

Origins of modern capitalism in sugar and slavery:

Medieval sugar industries are noted on Malta, Rhodes, Crete and Cyprus. Later, sugar production arose in the Canary Islands (we have already noted the interest of the English Hawkins' in the Canary Islands from 1562 if not earlier) and Madeira, involving Negro labour. Those production areas were overtaken by Brazilian and West Indian production.
(Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York, Viking, 1985., p. 36. On the importers of sugar to England from Antwerp by 1556 and later, see Thomas S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 95., p. 159, being William Garrard, John Hopkins, Sir Thomas White, Edward Jackman and others, some of them noted cloth exporters. William Chester and John Gardener were two pioneers of sugar refining in England.)

Mintz, a very insightful writer on the marketing of sugar to Europe, is nevertheless surprised by mention from K. G. Davies, the historian of the English Royal Africa Company, of sugar production on Java and in Bengal. With the history of sugar and its role in the history of the enslavement of Africans, one problem is to decide why Europeans did not import sugar in bulk from Bengal, India, and preferred to take it from islands in the Atlantic or Caribbean? Presumably, from the origins of the English East India Company, 1600, sugar was not in ship management terms a cost-effective cargo to return to England from India?

It is here that Willan's failure to mention the actual source of Moroccan sugar becomes intriguing. Encyclopedias may convey: Sugar was cultivated in India between 500-350BC, but its use did not reach Persia till about 500AD. Its use was shifted west by the Islamic movement.

Should Mintz have read Willan and placed more pressure on available histories of English merchant families? As we will find, the lists given here of London-based merchants and politicians set up reverberations which had long genealogical persistence. This concentration on genealogy removes romance from the history of improvements in navigation and exploration, and enhances appreciation of that history in terms of commercial life - so that we find how sea lanes twisted and turned until finally, Australia grew into the consciousness of the world. Not so far, actually, from the supposed origin of sugar-cane - Irian Jaya/West Papua New Guinea. It is possible that Dutch East India Company interests had thought that too much dependence on Eastern sources for sugar was too dangerous, unprofitable, that the supply line was too thin, and that it was better to deal with the Americas and the West Indies for sugar. In turn, perhaps the British agreed with the Dutch in this?
(Mintz, Sweetness, p. 235.)

It is useful to place at the head of the list, Elizabeth I's famous favourite, Leicester, or, Dudley. Leicester's main interest seems to have been in allowing English merchants to step into a power vacuum once the Portuguese had been forced to quit Morocco. English mariners sailed also to "the Guinea coast". Naturally, some English commercial tendencies entwined with Portuguese interests, during and while England became a larger maritime power. Here, then, the list:

English merchants and others interested in Barbary (Morocco) trade, 1540-1680

Thomas Wyndham, dealing in sugar by 1551.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 81. Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 100. Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 14ff.)

A co-founder of the Russia or Muscovy Company, Francis Bowyer.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 14, pp. 72ff.)

Robert Dudley (1534-1584/88), Earl Leicester.
(Taylor, Tudor Geography, p. 26. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 28ff. Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 172, p. 184, p. 225. Ida Lee, 'The First Sightings of Australia by the English', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. XX, Part V, 1934, pp. 273-280. Note: Issues of Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society between 1930-1936 are studded with articles on world navigators of various eras from various countries.)

Mariner Sir Martin Frobisher (1553-1594), a nephew of John Yorke, Russia merchant and an originator of the English-Guinea trade.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 20. Taylor, Tudor Geography, p. 37.)

London Lord Mayor, Sir James Harvey.
(Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 164. R. G. Lang, `Jacobean London Merchants'.)

London Lord Mayor Sir George Bond, active 1587.
(Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 220. R. G. Lang, `Jacobean London Merchants', pp. 28-47. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Leigh of Stoneleigh, Bond of Peckham, p. 70.)

Nicholas Stile (died 1615), as part of an extended family operation.
(Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 208.)

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Privateer Henry Colthurst, engaged in Morocco and Mediterranean trades, associated with the Stile family, who were linked to Simon Lawrence, who traded cloth to Hamburg.
(Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, pp. 205ff. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, pp. 100ff.)

Roger Oldfield, part of a family operation, about 1584.
(Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 195.)

Somerset man, Sir John Luttrell.
(Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 14ff. Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 97.)

London Salter and sugar importer, Robert How. Privateer George Henley of Somerset.
(Noted in Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade. Henley is noted in Brenner, Merchants and Revolution.)

Gerard Gore the Elder, a Portugal trader, with sons becoming early members of the East India Company. (Long later, the pastoralists Macansh of Queensland, Australia, would be descendants). London Lord Mayor Sir John Gore (died 1636), and London alderman c.1641 William Gore. John Swinnerton, a factor in Morocco, dealing in cloth-sugar for Gores by the 1580s.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 385. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Temple of Stowe, p. 2393. Burke's Landed Gentry for Elwes of Roxby. Willan, Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 213. R. G. Lang, `Jacobean London Merchants'. The Australian connection: Macansh: See L. M. Mowle, A Genealogical History of Pioneer Families of Australia. Fifth edition. Sydney, Rigby, 1978., p. 106.)

Thomas Cordell (died 1612).
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 18. Rabb, Enterprise, p. 111.)

By the late 1630s, London customs farmer, Sir Nicholas Crispe (1599-1666), the founder of the English slave depot and refreshment base for East India shipping on the African coast, Kormantin, whose faction sought a royally-backed monopoly on Moroccan trade.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 174. K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company, p. 9.)

Crispe's faction was resisted by Maurice Thompson (Thomson), who is treated at length in later chapters, as are Thomson's probable allies in resisting Crispe, the Anglo-Dutch entrepreneur, Sir William Courteen Snr. (1572-1636) plus Samuel Bonnell.

(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 12, pp. 170ff.)

About 1650, John Penn, "an old Morocco hand", the grandfather of the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn.
(Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 171.)

A noted figure in seventeenth century power struggles over the proprietorship of English Caribbean islands, Francis Willoughby (1613-1666), fifth Baron Willoughby of Parham, in 1660 a grantee of the "Morocco Company".
(Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. London, Jonathan Cape, 1973., p. 50.)

Some of these names are referred to in earlier files, other names will ring through following chapters.

If we might consider Barbados here from 1625-1628, we might also briefly consider sugar imports into Britain, rather than "gold and slaves", since the economic inter-linkages involved in trade in cloth and sugar required long-term investment in genuinely productive capacity. But here we can also notice, that in the way they treat European-Asian trade between 1600 and 1900, economic historians mostly treat commodity gathering (such as pepper or tea) and exchanges of partly or fully-finished goods, plus bullion. Topics treated less effectively are the military and other costs of protecting trade routes, the costs of maintaining distribution pathways once cargoes reached European ports, and the interests of European consumers, down to the housewife sprinkling spices on a newly-baked cake. What genealogical inquiry does, is press us to ask more questions about the English families involved in trade - down to their social history, and the way they shared their history with their contemporaries.

Amongst the main supply-line factors providing broad connectivity were - sugar and slavery. Antwerp merchants were refining sugar by 1508. English merchants, likewise by 1544. When Spain sacked Antwerp, sugar bakers migrated to London, providing expertise, and probably, various linkages between Dutch capital and expertise.
(G. G. Birch and K. J. Palmer, Sugar: Science and Technology. London, Applied Science Publishers Ltd., 1979. The first Englishman to actually process raw sugar was Colonel Holdip on Barbados in 1641.)

In Mintz's book on the history of the consumerism of sugar is given a revised appreciation of the origins of modern capitalism, in terms of a capitalism that relies on scientifically predictable outcomes. This is an origin of capitalism that escaped the attention of Karl Marx, who was little interested in science and technology; but an origin of capitalism that fits well the history of technology and science, generally - including the history of sugar-growing and the history of the rise of navigation. As the history of Barbados shows for the English case, this capitalism began in the early seventeenth century, and relied on slavery.
(In Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, p. 111, it is noted that London alderman Thomas Cordell (died 1612) was Master of Mercers, a director of the Spanish, East India and Levant companies, an investor in privateering, in Ireland and in Virginia, "and a pioneer in sugar refining in England".
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 18; Rabb, Enterprise, p. 111; Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, pp. 76ff.)

In this sense, there is traceable one of the distinguishing characteristics of modern capitalism, which is - the capitalist's resentment at paying workers a living wage - call this matter, equity - although capitalists surely appreciate a profit. This resentment existed, and exists, because of early-modern capitalism's reliance on slavery in the Caribbean. Particularly, the resentment of the English capitalist.

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This form of capitalism, criticised by Karl Marx, and memorably identified by Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, was of course translated to the first British colony in Australia, after forms of semi-slavery, convictism, had been planted there.
(R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study. Ringwood, Victoria, Pelican, 1966.)

Yet any forms of semi-slavery in Australia, convictism, were distinct from the slavery of Negroes at the time, from 1788, because of the legislation backing convict transportation to Australia. European Australia escaped the worst excesses of slavery, although to 1830, many notable figures influencing life in the colony of New South Wales had exposure to slavery as seen in the Caribbean, as an inspection of Australian Dictionary of Biography quickly reveals.

The distinguishing characteristics of this form of Capitalism, as outlined by Mintz, included:
(1) concerted investment at the outset in property and productive facilities;
(2) regular production by a trained work force;
(3) regularly applied accountancy;
(4) with production, some reliance on a scientifically predictable outcome relating to rates of production and a capacity to make reliable future projections;
(5) a growing market for product.

Given the period, from 1600, people's views of physical time, "agricultural time" and a changing human sense of time should also be measured. Europeans began to rely on time measured into various packets, as by a clock, as historians of the Industrial Revolution generally point out. Mintz sees all these necessary characteristics evident earlier than the Industrial Revolution in so-called agricultural operations, sugar plantations of the Caribbean, decades before they were seen in the factories, the "dark satanic mills", of England's industrial revolution, which required new working practices.

In particular, where the sense of time, and the production of a predictable outcome are concerned, Mintz draws attention to the way sugar slurries were crystallised. This was a heat-using and seasonal process where timing was crucial. As a post-agricultural phase of production, it was managed for longer than all-night sessions by skilled slaves. The process was crucial, since it reprocessed much of the year's production. If this process was not successful, the plantations year became a financial disaster.

It was to this part of the "capitalistic production process" that the best of the science-of-the-day could be applied. So in this sense, the sugar industry rapidly absorbed new science and technology and harnessed them to old-fashioned forms of labour, including the use of slavery. With all this, the history of a small Caribbean island, never before inhabited till whites arrived, Barbados, allows us to see how sophisticated urban financiers, writers and commentators, the managers of royal monopolies, small planters, ship managers, all worked to apply science to redevelop an agricultural pursuit, producing... Capitalism. Capitalism, for example, as still seen in agrarian Virginia after the American Revolution in the income flows of a founder of the modern United States, Thomas Jefferson.

As the English East India Company grew from 1600, and expanded operations in India, Bengal sugar was not profitable-enough a cargo at the time, and was only consumed by the upper classes of Europe. Gradually, the consumption of sugar was democratised. My argument above is owed to Mintz's excellent book, to which I would add several points.
(1) Genealogically, many descendants can be identified, of Englishmen involved in this elaboration of slave-based capitalism in the seventeenth-century Caribbean - including Duncan Campbell (1726-1803) the subject of a later portion of this series of books. Including, William Bligh "of the Bounty".
(2) In English economic history, what historians have missed is a recurrent flip-flop of capital between "slavers", or, those involved in the sugar industry, and men usually seen as involved with the English East India Company. Usually, historians see England's slave-based enterprises as distinct from East India Company business, and so they treat the two sorts of enterprises separately. This is chimerical, as I will demonstrate.

The nexus of this recurrent "flip flop of capital" between these large-scale, capitalistic enterprises, sugar-slavery and East India business, was the City of London, or rather, the dealings of financiers in the City. Genealogy can be helpful with illustrating how this happened. The history of Barbados helps us to unfold these dismal aspects of modern capitalism.
(In outlining Mintz's perceptions here, I have relied also on material in the following titles in respect of relevant English history. James A. Williamson, The Age of Drake. London, 1938. On West Indian privateering, Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585-1603. Cambridge, England, 1964. Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630. Cambridge Massachusetts, 1967. Here, Rabb, especially, has lists of over 6000 persons investing in overseas commercial ventures about the 1630s. Dunn finds some interesting names are not on this list, such as Thomas Modyford. Also helpful is Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 11, p. 58. On English anti-Spanish activity see Arthur Percival Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans: The Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain. New Haven, Connecticut, 1914.)

An early question to be answered, necessarily, is: Why did England's East India traders not deal in sugar from Bengal after 1630 or so? Initially, after 1600, the English East India Company found it difficult to gain hegemony in India's eastern ports. By the time the English could have exported Bengal sugar, England was so committed to Caribbean interests that there was little point. The turning point took effect from the 1640s, when Barbados was turned over from more diversified agriculture to sugar - and slavery - as Cromwell's power took hold at home. And it was between the 1650s and 1718 that the transportation of English convicts came to be intensified - with felons sent to work in areas where slavery of Negroes was already common. That is partly how the transportation of English convicts came to be linked with slavery. Later, economies devoted to tobacco production were dependent on slavery.

Sugar cane originated in western New Guinea (although, there is a botanists' debate about this). Gradually, the use of sugar made its way west, and sugar was produced in Bengal, as Europeans noted. The English found it uneconomic to import Bengal sugar. By 1660, the English found it profitable to ship sugar from the Caribbean. By the time of Cromwell's Western Design, the 1650s, England's East India traders still had relatively little experience in investing in sugar-based enterprise. What, if anything, changed this situation? It also seems, that from about 1627, the first West Indian ventures in sugar were supported by Dutch capital, with the English following Dutch inspiration.
(Mintz, Sweetness, p. 53.)

Most reviews of world exploration, and especially of the explorers of Australia and the Pacific, avoid questions of the development of the slave trade. In this book however, specific links between England's first notable mariners, the East India Company and English slaving interests are explored due to necessities arising from a review of the career of the "first English explorer of Australia", William Dampier.

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For centuries, European Mercantilists preferred to deal with large and thriving populations, with industrious peoples inhabiting regions rich in resources, such as India or Indonesia, and later, China. Thinly-populated Australia could not be seen this way. Australia's low population density is one reason - perhaps the main reason - why Australia was settled so late in world history. When Dampier after 1700 reported negatively on the prospects of north-western Australia, he implicitly encouraged Mercantilists, from any European power, to ignore the mysterious Australian continent. But why was Dampier, mostly regarded as a "pirate" of the Caribbean, or South America, ever in the Australasian region in the first place?

How Dampier followed up Ralph Fitch:

After 1700, when Dampier went to "the East", and on his way reporting negatively on north-western Australia, he retraced the steps of an Englishman working in the 1580s, Ralph Fitch.
(C. R. N. Routh, Who's Who in History. England: 1485-1603. Vol. Two. London, Basil Blackwood, 1964. On matters genealogical in general here, see variously: John Burke and John Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies of England, Ireland and Scotland. Second edition. London, John Russell Smith. [Facsimile of the 1964 edition]. Hereafter, Burke's Extinct Baronetcies. Vicary Gibbs, (Ed.), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. [Extinct, extant or dormant]. London, St. Catherine's Press, 1910. [Hereafter, and as usual form of citation, GEC, Peerage, given name of title(s), or surname(s), page references] W. A. Shaw, The Knights of England. Two Vols. London, Heraldry Today, 1971. Burke's, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry. London, Edn. 18., Burke's Peerage Ltd. Patrick Montague-Smith, (Ed.), Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage. (Australasian edition) London, Debrett's Peerage, 1980. Also, Charles Kidd and David Williamson, (Eds.), Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage. London, Macmillan's/Debrett's Peerage Ltd., 1985. R. G. Lang, `Social Origins and Social Aspirations of Jacobean London Merchants', Economic History Review, 2, V, 27, 1974., pp. 28-47.)

Ralph Fitch in his own day was racing to compete with the Dutch, and so Fitch was a kind of economic espionage agent. Dampier in his own day was assisting England's "New" East India Company as it tried to infringe on the operations of the "Old" East India Company, which had begun operations in 1599-1600. In this, Dampier stepped out of his usual role of "pirate" and more resembled Fitch, a scout for London's merchant interests. One historian, Routh, considers Fitch one of the greatest of England's merchant adventurers. If so, we would be unwise to overlook Fitch. So we need now to consider first some of the active promoters of London's commercial life, for they did much to inspire maritime activity and exploration.

In the 1690s, before William Dampier travelled East to scout areas that the Old (English) East India Company had not yet exploited successfully, or where the company had experienced difficulty in maintaining its influence, the reasons for his mission fulfilled a long heritage of commercial infighting in the City of London that can be traced back to Tudor times. Many Lords Mayors and aldermen of London were shrewd traders. The intermarriages between them, or their children or relatives, and members of the English aristocracy, have been traced in insufficient detail, and so it is necessary to mention genealogical groupings of noted figures in London's life from era to era. A notable person in the narrative, mentioned earlier, is Anne Boleyn, the executed wife of Henry VIII. The lives of the genealogical cast of characters demonstrate all the themes needing to be discussed, from the development of slavery, to the English government of Ireland, to the increasingly sophisticated financial powers of the East India Company and the City of London. Various connections between Englishmen and English institutions, and Dutch interests, of course culminated in 1688 with the installation of William III of England as King of England.
As noted in an earlier file: the wife of London Lord Mayor Geoffrey Boleyn (died 1463) was Ann Hoo, the daughter of Thomas Hoo, first Baron Hoo. Hoods titles became extinct. Ann's sister Eleanor married one James Carew, but it remains impossible to connect him with the name Carew as connected to Sir Francis Drake.
(GEC, Peerage, Hoo, pp. 561ff.)

Amongst the many descendants of Geoffrey and Ann Boleyn and their extended families are many figures notable in English expansionism, or, maritime history, including:
Sir Thomas Boleyn (died 1538) the first Viscount Rochford and eighth earl of Ormond;
Henry Carey (1525-1596) a noted figure in maritime history, first Baron Hunsdon;
(GEC, Peerage, Hunsdon, pp. 625ff; Wentworth, pp. 508ff; Effingham, p. 10; Rochford, p. 52.)

Abigail Cokayne who married John Carey (1608-1677) second Earl Dover.
(GEC, Peerage, Rochford, p. 52; Hunsdon, p. 630.)
Abigail's father was Sir William Cokayne (1561-1626), Lord Mayor (1619-1620), son of a prominent merchant tailor, married to a second wife, Mary Morris, promoter of the ill-fated Cokayne project. He was responsible for the Corporation of the City of London for their lands in Ireland; so he was the technical founder of Londonderry. His daughters married several aristocrats, his son Charles became first Viscount Cullen.
(Rabb, Enterprise, p. 206. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 2, p. 345. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, on "Cokayne's Project", p. 59, p. 78, p. 87. GEC, Peerage, Cullen, p. 561; Campden, p. 516; Leeds, p. 509; Kilmorey, p. 261; Lindsey, p. 20; Holdernesse, p. 534; Nottingham, p. 789.)

In 1614, James I appointed Cokayne controller of the king's Merchant Adventurers, a company with a monopoly to sell dressed and dyed cloth to the Baltic. "Cokayne's Project" was designed to steal such trade from the Dutch, but it folded. Cokayne was also interested in Nova Scotia.

Catherine Carey (died 1602) the wife of Charles Howard (1536-1624) second Baron Howard of Effingham. He maintained a set of stage players (in "Shakespeare's world of theatre") and jointly-commanded English moves against the Spanish Armada.
(Who's Who /Shakespear, p. 123, p. 140. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 2, p. 344, and p. 422. GEC, Peerage, Norfolk, tabulations; St John, p. 335; Nottingham, p. 782; Effingham, p. 10; Kildare, p. 240; Monson of Bellinguard, p. 68; Mordaunt, p. 200; St John, p. 335; Tyrconnell, p. 113; Northumberland, p. 726; Willoughby, p. 692; Galloway, p. 604.)
Howard had licences to export woolen cloths and in 1598 to trade with Guinea. His titles became extinct. Charles' father, the first Baron Howard of Effingham, William (1510-1572/73), Lord High Admiral (1553-1557) is said to have been greatly instrumental in Elizabeth I gaining her throne.
(Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 224. GEC, Peerage, Dudley, p. 482; Effingham, p. 9. Bath, p. 19. Nottingham, p. 782. Information on an earlier period can be found in Gordon Connell-Smith, Forerunners of Drake: A Study of the English Trade with Spain in the early Tudor Period. London, Longmans Green and Co., 1954.)
Mary Cokayne (1598-1650) the sister of Abigail above, and wife of third Baron Howard of Effingham, Charles Howard, the son of Charles Howard and Catherine Carey above. (1579-1642);
(Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 343. GEC, Peerage, Nottingham, p. 788; Effingham, p. 10.)

The privateer Sir Richard Leveson, who married a daughter of Mary Cokayne above; (He was son of the vice-admiral of Wales.
(Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 29.)

The privateer and vice-admiral of Norfolk and Suffolk, Sir Robert Southwell (1563-1598);
(Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 422. GEC, Peerage, Carrick, p. 60; Willoughby, p. 692; Northumberland, p. 727. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 236. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 29.)

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An anti-Spanish rear-admiral, who sailed under Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Francis Drake in 1578, Sir Francis Knollys (1550-1648); he was son of the Puritan and statesman, Sir Francis Knollys (1512/14-1596) who married Catherine Carey (died 1569), daughter of William Carey and Mary Boleyn, the parents of Henry, first Baron Hunsdon.
(Hasler, History of Parliament, pp. 408-409. GEC, Peerage, Northumberland, p. 734; Paget, p. 284. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 141. J. Shakespear, John Shakespear of Shadwell and his Descendants, 1619-1931. Self-published, Newcastle UK, 1931., tabulations, pp. 80ff and notes thereto.)

Walter Devereux (1539-1576), second Viscount Hereford, who married Lettice Knollys, daughter of Catherine Carey and Sir Francis Knollys above; the colonisation of Ulster cost him 25,000 pounds.
(GEC, Peerage, Hereford, p. 479; Northumberland, p. 734; Southampton, p. 130; Carlisle, p. 32; Essex, pp. 140ff; Percy, p. 470; Ferrers, pp. 329-332.)

The colonist and Republican Robert Sydney (1595-1677) who married Dorothy Percy (1564-1659);
(His own DNB entry. GEC, Peerage, Sydney of Chiselhurst, St Leonards and Scadbury, p. 591; Romney, p. 83; Halifax, p. 243; Strangford, p. 359. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 177, p. 190. Dorothy Percy was daughter of the third Earl Northumberland, Henry Percy (1564-1632) and Dorothy Devereux.)

The republican hanged for his views, Algernon Sydney (1640-1683), an ancestor of Thomas Townshend, first Viscount Sydney, a major planner of Britain's first convict colony at Sydney, Australia.
(Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia. Vol. 1, The Beginning. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1997. Here, Algernon Sydney is noted as an ancestor of Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, p. 51.)

James Hay, ambassador, much in favour with Charles I, first Earl Carlisle (1580-1636), "proprietor of the Caribbean".
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 30. Also, Arthur P. Newton, (Ed.), The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, Black, 1933. Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990., p. 33 and p. 67.
This earl of Carlisle spent 400,000 pounds in his lifetime, died debt-entangled, and left nothing for his heirs. Charles I made him a proprietor of the Caribbean Islands.
(GEC, Peerage, Carlisle, pp. 32ff; Denny, p. 187; Norwich, p. 769.
Hay eloped with his second wife, Lucy Percy (1599-1660), daughter of Henry Percy, third Earl of Northumberland. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest. Vol. V. Anne of Denmark queen-consort of James the First, King of Great Britain and Ireland. Bath, Cedric Chivers Ltd., 1972. Also, Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest. Mary II, Queen-Regent of Great Britain and Ireland, consort of William III. Vol. VII. Bath, Cedric Chivers Ltd., 1972.; Vol. 5, p. 284. Who's Who /Shakespeare. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. London, Jonathan Cape, 1973. maps, p. 49 and Note 10; pp. 50, 55. Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660. The Oxford History of England. Oxford University Press, 1959., p. 326.)
This earl Carlisle's commercial associates were Marmaduke Roydon, William Perkins and Alexander Bannister, of whom little is known. His son by Honora Denny, James Hay (1605-1660), second earl Carlisle, by 1639 had hereditary rights to Barbados, but his line became extinct.

The daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham (1532-1590) and Ursula St Barbe, Frances Walsingham (1567-1631), who became the wife successively of Richard De Burgh, first Earl St Albans, Philip Sydney (1554-1586), promoter of International Protestantism, first Earl Leicester and Robert Devereux (1566-1600).
(On Walsingham and Ursula St Barbe: GEC, Peerage, Clanricarde, p. 231; Nottingham, p. 235; Essex, p. 142; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Worsley, p. 580. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 574, calls Ursula "shadowy to posterity", and it is difficult to find if her father is named Henry or John.)
( Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 30. Also, Arthur P. Newton, (Ed.), The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, Black, 1933. Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, Manchester University Press. 1990., p. 33 and p. 67. This earl of Carlisle spent 400,000 pounds in his lifetime, died debt-entangled, and left nothing for his heirs. Charles I made him a proprietor of the Caribbean Islands.
(GEC, Peerage, Carlisle, pp. 32ff; Denny, p. 187; Norwich, p. 769. Hay eloped with his second wife, Lucy Percy (1599-1660), daughter of Henry Percy, third Earl of Northumberland. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest. Vol. V. Anne of Denmark queen-consort of James the First, King of Great Britain and Ireland. Bath, Cedric Chivers Ltd., 1972. Also, Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest. Mary II, Queen-Regent of Great Britain and Ireland, consort of William III. Vol. VII. Bath, Cedric Chivers Ltd., 1972.; Vol. 5, p. 284. Who's Who /Shakespeare. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. London, Jonathan Cape, 1973. maps, p. 49 and Note 10; pp. 50, 55. Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660. The Oxford History of England. Oxford University Press, 1959., p. 326.)

Ursula St Barbe evidently inherited Walsingham's premises in Seething Lane, London. (The Seething Lane site had earlier been "headquarters" of the navy in the time of Sir William Winter, noted in earlier files.) So that Frances inherited the site.

Later Robert Devereux (1590-1646) was born there, as his grandmother was Frances. This Seething Lane address, probably the one becoming No. 33, evidently stayed with the St Barbe family, for after the 1770s, No. 33 Seething Lane was the address of the whaler and convict contractor interested in the Pacific, John St Barbe, of whom we hear more later. Unfortunately, the St Barbe genealogy is broken between 1710-1770, so it is impossible to unequivocally explore this possibility.

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Robert Devereux (1566-1601), the executed favourite of Elizabeth I, nineteenth Earl Essex and third Viscount Hereford, executed as a rebel, once took part in an expedition against the Azores.
(GEC, Peerage, Essex, pp. 141-142; Southampton, p. 133; Ferrers, pp. 329-332; Somerset, p. 73; Burlington, p. 431; Bouchier, p. 250; Clanricarde, pp. 230ff; Winchilsea, p. 778.)

Robert Rich, first earl Warwick, (1559-1618), whose son Robert (1587-1658), the second Earl of Warwick was to become an extraordinarily influential figure in promoting both privateering provocation of the Spanish, and Caribbean and North American trade. (Their forebear First Baron Rich is noted in earlier files here.)

The privateer George Carey (1541-1616), who married Lettice a daughter of the first Earl of Warwick, above. He was once to be treasurer in Ireland. He invested money in voyages by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Thomas Cavendish.
(Hasler, History of Parliament, on Careys, Vol. 1, p. 546.)

And Anne Boleyn (1500-1536), the beheaded wife of Henry VIII, the mother of Elizabeth I. The implications are that Elizabeth I was surrounded by relatives, including a great number of aristocrats, who were powerfully interested in provoking the Spanish, expanding English trade internationally, in creating colonies and developing sea power, and as a corollary, ensuring that Ireland remained no threat to England, since it would remain occupied by England. In this, Elizabeth had few choices, she could not deny such people, and in many ways, histories of English sea power which emphasise the maritime exploits of Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh, under-emphasise these thematic aspects seen in and around the genealogy of the Boleyn family. What the great Boleyn family did was help to create a model for activity, in society generally, that became a Puritan-dominated social movement in England, particularly for families from England's south-western areas, especially Devon and Somerset, the areas from which Drake and Raleigh and many of their comrades were recruited. A poem written long-later celebrates such adventurism:

Drake he's in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?,
Slung between the round shot, listenin' for the drum,
An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade's plyin' and the old flag flyin',
They shall find him ware an' wakin', as they found him long ago!
(I am grateful to Michael Sharkey for drawing this anti-Spanish poem to my attention. Drake's Drum. Third and fourth stanzas. From, Henry Newbolt, Poems: Old and New. London, John Murray, 1917.)

This social movement was powerfully anti-Catholic, and it helped set the seeds for the development of English capitalism, inasmuch as modern historians' associations between Puritanism and the rise of capitalism remain useful commentary.
(R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.)

This was also, incidentally, Shakespeare's England, but the focus in what follows will be on the fringes of a developing empire. This social movement ended in giving to the world - the continent of Australia.

The London backers of Ralph Fitch's travels:

London Lord Mayor, Sir Edward Osborne (1530-1592), was a co-founder of the Spanish Company and the Levant Company. He was born a first son in 1530, and was commercially active by 1577. His father was Richard Osborne of Kent, spouse of Jane Broughton, and Edward's own spouses were firstly Anne Hewett, and secondly Margaret Chapman (by 15 September 1588). Osborne was a clothworker who became a financier and international merchant, earlier an apprentice of his father-in-law, Lord Mayor Sir William Hewett.
(GEC, Peerage, Leeds, p. 507. Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company. London, Frank Cass, 1964.)

Osborne traded with Spain and Portugal, also the Levant, and re-exported cloth to the Baltic. In 1575 he and Richard Staper sent agents to Turkey to reconnoiter before signing a treaty. Osborne also became governor of the Levant Company, and he and Richard Staper personally financed the travels of Ralph Fitch and John Newbury to the East when England was first considering developing international trade by sea, not by overland routes.

It has been noted, in the context of Osborne helping to finance Fitch's travels, "It was apparently Fitch's report, on his return, that led the Levant Company merchants to seek the inclusion of the overland route to the East in their renewed monopoly charter of 1592".
(Routh, Who's Who in History, pp. 435ff on Ralph Fitch and John Newbury. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 157 for Sir Edward Osborne (1530?-1592), London Lord Mayor in 1583, who helped finance Fitch's activities. W. Foster, England's Quest of Eastern Trade. London, 1933., on Fitch, pp. 79-109. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 20ff. Also, there was a Thomas Fitch, active by 1641, intended to be deputy-governor of the Puritan-inspired Providence Island operation intended to harass the Spanish. (Providence Island was off the Nicaraguan coast). (Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 304ff).

So, by about 1581, England had set up four merchants, only, to trade to Turkey, but soon London saw to the origin of the Levant Company, incorporated in 1592 as the Turkey Company, involving twelve merchants. Meanwhile, Elizabeth I became a leading shareholder of the Venice Company.

Another Lord Mayor (in 1590), and a Puritan, Sir John Hart (died 1604) was a grocer, moneylender, a member of the Levant and Muscovy companies.
( Michael Lok's brother John was with the Guinea expedition of 1554. Loks, engaged in the Levant trade, were disappointed by Barbary piracy and so became interested in any plans to find north-west passage to Cathay. Michael Lok became a member of the Muscovy Company (founded in 1555), and in 1574 with the patronage of the first Earl of Warwick helped promote Frobisher's voyage, inspired by Sebastian Cabot's earlier voyages; but Frobisher's failures led to Lok's ruination. Zacariah, an MP who died in 1603, son of Michael Lok, was in the service of Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon, noted elsewhere here.)

Hart's spouse was Anne Haynes, his father was Ralph Hart. (Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Bolles, p. 69.) Hart was often governor of the Muscovy Company between 1583 and 1600. He was a friend of Humphrey Smith of the Grocer's Company, of which he was a member. As a Puritan, Hart hoped in his will to be "of the elect". By 1602 he was an investor in the East India Company.
(Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 2, p. 264. Burke's Extinct for Bolles, p. 69.)
(Hart worshipped at St Dionis Backchurch, London. From 1583, he and Richard Staper helped Fitch's travels. (GEC, Peerage, Leeds, p. 507. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 18, p. 72. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 2, p. 264, Vol 3, pp. 156ff.)

In all, the linkages between merchants of the Levant and Muscovy companies were genealogically complex, a factor which flowed into the character of the East India Company from 1600. And so it seems, that the East India Company was greatly influenced by merchants who were already experienced in conducting the international trades of their day. Ralph Fitch's travels should be seen in this light - he was intended to expand horizons for London's international traders - many of whom were intermarried.

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Fearing the Portuguese maritime hegemony at the Cape of Good Hope, the Levant Company in February 1583 sent men out via Syria and the Persian Gulf to find what could be bought and sold in Asia, and to visit Akbar, the great Mogul emperor of India. The travellers included Ralph Fitch and a jeweller, John Newberry (Newbury), Leeds, and Storey. (John Newberry (Newbury), via Aleppo, of the Turkey Company, was active by 1580 (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 20.). A jeweller, Leeds, and Storey, who went to India, were arrested by the Portuguese as heretics and were given to the Inquisition at Goa, but they escaped with help of a English Jesuit. A related story is that an English priest in India (Goa) sent information back to his father, a London merchant, and that this information helped stimulate trade interests.

They escaped anyway with help from an English Jesuit. Some of these English however did manage to inspect the Mogul splendour of northern India. During 1584, Fitch went down the Hugli River of Bengal, then to Chittagong (present-day East Pakistan), then by boat to Pegu in Burma, then to Rangoon, then to Chiengmai in northern Siam. These were all territories which possessed little naval power, or, if they possessed it, they did not emphasise it, a situation which would continue.

1583: Edmund Fenton of the Muscovy Company (who had married Thomasine, daughter of Benjamin Gonson the naval administrator of England) was also active by 1583, and he visited the Moluccas and the Spice Islands, although Houtman for the Dutch was the first European to exploit Sumatra successfully. Fenton made a voyage partly of discovery, partly of plunder, with the backing of the first Earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586 who was married to Frances daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham) and Secretary of State, William Cecil (1521-1598), Lord Burghley.

The Muscovy Company as a body had provided a large direct investment. Fenton's supporters included Thomas Pullyson, William Towerson, Thomas Aldersey, Thomas Starkey (all Spanish Company directors) plus Sir George Barne (died 1593), a founding Spanish Company director and a co-founder of the Turkey Company. (Barne's father was deep in the Spanish trade from the 1560s.
(On Barne, Governor of the Muscovy Company in 1580 and 1583: Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 18-20, p. 63. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Garrard, p. 214, and , p. 446. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 571 for his daughter's marriage to Walsingham. Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth. Vol. 3, Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press., pp. 425ff. Valerie Hope, My Lord Mayor: Eight Hundred Years of London's Mayoralty. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson in association with the Corporation of the City of London, 1989.)

Also, Martin Calthorpe, and the powerful trade overseer Sir John "Customer" Smythe (1558-1625), Sir Richard Martin (Turkey Company founders) and Thomas Cordell, a co-founder of the Venice Company. Also, Robert Sadler was a co-founder of the Venice Company.
( The third governor of the Levant Company, from 1600, was Sir Thomas Smith, whom I cannot well identify genealogically.)
(Wood, Levant Company, Appendix IV). Some confusion exists on the genealogy for Smythe (one individual has dates 1556-1608), which is unfortunate as his family was notable in customs collection. Sadler was a co-founder of the Venice Company. As privateer-merchant of the Levant Company of the 1590s, Sadler backed ventures by Drake and Fenton; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 20-21. Rabb, Enterprise, p. 112.)

It is difficult not to see Fitch's and Fenton's travels as coordinated in London. Making a thorough survey, Fitch had moved on to Malacca near Singapura, or, the later Singapore, and noted the vital strategic role of the Straits of Malacca. Then he turned back, going to Pegu, then Ceylon, up the west coast of India to Cochin, then to Goa, then Basra, Babylon, Mosul, Aleppo, and back to London. (Newberry meantime on his way home died in the Punjab area.) In all, Fitch was away eight years. Except for the mention of Ceylon, it would appear that Fitch mostly used local, coast-hugging ships. Over a century later, William Dampier visited some of those same areas, merely tacking the north of Western Australia (and the Philippines) on to Fitch's list of more southern South-East Asian destinations. Fitch had thought some the countries he saw were much wealthier than his own, which was doubtless correct. Pegu was bigger than London! More importantly, it is said, Fitch's information was sifted by merchants and led later to the creation of the East India Company. Long later, Imperial Britain ruled many of the areas Fitch had visited.

Fitch's backers had assumed land power, but were interested in developing sea power. After 1700, Dampier's backers urbanely assumed sea-power. In 110 years, the balance had changed dramatically, due to Caribbean sugar island and South Sea English piracy, and the more sedate operations of the East India Company. Unfortunately, historians who have tended to treat English piracy - which via the careers of Drake and Raleigh becomes part of the history of English navigation, and of the exploration of the Pacific - separately from the apparently more sedate operations of the East India Company. But when both topics are treated together, it is then one realises how regularly capital was flip-flopped between Caribbean (or African-slaving interests) and East India interests. This happened in the intimacies of the City of London, with merchants who are readily identifiable, genealogically involved.

Some of these merchants of the seventeenth century are:

Thomas Crisp (Crispe), associated with England's acquisition of Cape Coast Castle for the Guinea Company, and thus an associate of the ubiquitous Maurice Thompson (Thomson) of the Rich faction, that is, the faction managed by the second Earl of Warwick.
(K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 69, p. 231. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 191. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, on Crispe, pp. 143-144.)

Captain Robert Jenkins, the Jenkins of "the war of Jenkins' ear", an "East India captain" taking slaves from Madagascar to the Malabar Coast of India. Was he perhaps the first captain to ship coerced labour between Southern Africa and India on a large scale?

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Royal Africa Company investor, Sir Benjamin Bathurst. (He was governor of the East India Company 1688-1689 and treasurer to Princess Anne of Denmark.
(GEC, Peerage, Bathurst of Battlesden, p. 28. K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company.)

George Berkeley, ninth Baron Berkeley, first Earl Berkeley (1627-1698), probably an investor in the Royal Africa Company, was on the committee of the East India Company 1660 till his death. He was once Master of Trinity House and as a peer declared for William III.
(Amongst Berkeley's later genealogical linkages were the first of the Scots tobacco merchants and bankers, Coutts, in the nineteenth century, and the bankers Grenfell. Also, Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley (1753-1818), who sailed with James Cook about Canada.)
(GEC, Peerage, Berkeley, p. 139 and table, p. 146; Burlington, p. 431; Tankerville, p. 633. K. G. Davies, Royal Africa Company.)

Further notes on merchant history of the English-speaking world since 1550:

Further views on English trade:

Oddly enough, of all the merchant-expansionist groups, the aspiring exploiters of the Amazon area are the most revealing in terms of merchant-aristocracy linkages, genealogically. Another reason to emphasise genealogical connections is in view of a peculiar English reticence about discussion of engagement in trade, which used to surface in debates between English historians. By 1926, H. R. Wagner had expressed a view that England's "orgy of piracy" had engendered "a profound disdain" amongst the gentry for legitimate [ie, commercial] activity, after Elizabethan times. By 1967, Theodore Rabb as a student of merchants thought Wagner seemed wrong. We can agree here with K. R. Andrews' thesis, that privateering played a vital role in the formative years of England's expansion, as "resoundingly" confirmed [by Rabb's work].
(Rabb, Enterprise, p. 80, Note 106. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, variously.)

It often appears that Wagner's view has won the day in English historiography - and it is taken that aristocracy had little direct engagement in English trade. So, I have taken pains to discover genealogical connections between English aristocracy, commercial adventurers, and the upper echelons of England's commercial sector, particularly the Lords Mayor and aldermen of London, plus financiers and other notable names.

Computerisation of data of course is helpful. Before 1967, working on merchants, Rabb had originally intended to treat genealogical data, but as his project was already complex, he ceased work on family relationships.
(Rabb, Enterprise, p. 97, Note 131. Rabb, discusses his methodology as he began using computerised techniques, p. 133; also see p. 102 and p. 210.)

This meant that scholars have had to wait for Brenner's work (published 1992-1993) for more than an inkling on the networks focused in London, of family relationships, commercial relationships and activity, and the involvements of aristocrats or members of their families. Rabb himself notes the striking attachment of commercial men to the Middle Temple, London. Attention can be drawn to just one parish in London, St Dunstan's in the East, since my own genealogical research suggests that a great many names had links to that parish, which was a stronghold of radical-Puritan commercial, and maritime, endeavour.

Rabb also notes that the phrase applied to the evolution of the British Empire, a phrase sometimes applied to the argument about Britain's reasons for settling Australia, that the Empire was developed in a "fit of absence of mind", was first used by J. R. Seeley in The Expansion of England. (London, 1883.) (An argument against any view of Australia being settled in a fit of absence of mind is found in Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia.
(Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. 1, variously.)

Rabb and Andrews seem correct, Wagner wrong, but as Brenner shows, the greater problem is in organising information on merchant groupings, family networks, and then merchant linkages to aristocratic families. Meanwhile, Rabb says a plague in 1603 "virtually brought London's trade to a standstill"; in the first decade of reign of James I was an economic boom, and, the foundation of the Virginia Company in 1606 proved a watershed once peace with Spain presented other and less-threatening implications. From 1601, Parliament saw battles over royal monopolies, and again in 1604. Should all comers have privileges in foreign trade, should trade be open to all upon payment of a fee, or not? Sir Edwin Sandys opted to promote free trade, and made an attack on the "200 families" which by Stuart times more or less ruled the English economy.
(Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company: A Sociological Appraisal. Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1973., p. 73.)
(Here, we should note that by the 1960s, it was thought by English Marxists that between Stuart times and the 1960s, the number of families "ruling England" had grown to 400 or more). So, I have opted to simply trace linkages and let the reader make up their own mind.

In 1601, London men sought to find a north-west passage to sell more English woolens in colder areas, especially, China.
(A. N. Ryan, `"A New Passage to Cataia": The Northwest Passage in Early Modern English History', pp. 299-317 in John B. Hattendorf, (Ed.), Maritime History Vol. 1: The Age of Discovery. Malabar, Florida, Krieger Pub. Co., 1996.)

Many trading scenarios arose due to lack of Indian/Asian demand for European manufactures including woolens. Dunn suggests that between 1560 and 1630, it is probable that English merchants put more investment money into privateering than any other enterprise, including the East India Company, but of course, in 1559, the Spanish had refused to surrender their "right" to exclude foreigners from the Indies, about which England failed to agree, so disagreements took place away from home. About 1604, English privateers captured hundreds of enemy ships and took home about 100,000 pounds in sugar, hides, logwood, indigo, silver, gold and pearls.
(Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 10-11.)

Amazon adventurers:

With any genealogical unity notable amongst and between England's notable traders, explorers, mariners and colonists from before 1600, we find that cloth traders and their associates were conspicuous - although, somewhat under-rated in maritime history. Logwood, as the English called it, sometimes called redwood, was a source of dyes for the cloth trade. It was gained from near-Caribbean areas where the English had less influence than the Spanish and Portuguese. The earliest English exploration of the Amazon River area took place between 1553-1608; the first English and Irish settlements were made there, 1604-1620.

Some of the names of interest in the context of English expansionism generally were: Sebastian Cabot, who warned of Portuguese interest in the area by 1553; Hakluyt the commentator on English maritime expansionism; Sir Walter Raleigh, inspired by tales of gold, by 1595, and his backers Myddleton.
(GEC, Peerage, Dacre, p. 12. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 201. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 26. A. L. Rowse, Raleigh and the Throckmortons. London, Macmillan, 1962., pp. 129ff notes Raleigh, and also that the Throckmortons had been in the service of the Earls of Warwick, who captured the loyalty of many large families. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 67: Fulke Greville (1554-1628), the first Lord Brooke, naval treasurer, was an intimate friend of Sir Walter Raleigh and interested in his colonisation schemes. Brooke also published Sidney's political tract, Arcadia. (On Brooke: Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 98, GEC, Peerage, Brooke, pp. 331ff; Willoughby, p. 690). Lorimer (Ed.), Amazon, p., 293 notes Raleigh's son, Carew (1605-1666). Backers of Raleigh or others of Raleigh's circle included Hugh Middleton (1580-1627, brother of Thomas below), Sir George Carey, keeper of the Privy Purse Henry Seckford, the great London merchant and privateer, Lord Mayor Thomas Myddleton (1556-1631), Lord Charles Howard the Lord High Admiral of England, Baron Effingham. Raleigh was a half-brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert; Raleigh's father was a privateer, and Raleigh began his career working with a London merchant-privateer, Alderman Watts. Raleigh's cousin, Charles Champernowne was a privateer. Michael J. G. Stanford, `The Raleghs take to the Sea', The Mariner's Mirror, Vol. 48, No. 1, February 1962., pp. 18-35. On the Myddletons and their families, Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 164; Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, pp. 113ff. Lord Mayor Thomas Myddleton, a Puritan, had a brother, Robert, who was an MP and an East India Company investor. Thomas traded from the Elbe River in cloth, mercery, sugar and spices, and reported to Sir Francis Walsingham on customs farms matters. He was in partnership with Raleigh, Drake and Hawkins, and had a sugar refinery in Mincing Lane.).

( Matters do not confine themselves just to the name Myddleton. The founder of the Spanish Company was Sir Richard Saltonstall (1577-1601). His daughter Elizabeth married Levant Company merchant, Peter Wyche (died 1643), and their daughter Jane married John Granville, first Earl Bath. The Wyches form a separate and interesting line in matters commercial (see Wood as historian of the Levant Company). Elizabeth's sister Hester Saltonstall married Sir Thomas Myddleton, her brother, Sir Samuel was an MP and "colonist", and yet another sister married Thomas' brother, the MP and merchant, Robert Myddleton.)
John Ley, died 1604;
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 20ff, p. 149. GEC, Peerage, Marlborough, pp. 488ff.)
Robert Dudley, who married Anne Cavendish of a mariner family, (He was the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley by lover Douglas Sheffield. Robert in being married to Anne was brother-in-law of Thomas Cavendish, mariner and MP, and perhaps, brother- in-law of the writer on navigation, Richard Hakluyt, 1552-1616.
GEC, Peerage, Northumberland, pp. 722ff. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 28-29 and p. 30, Note 2. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 68. Gwenyth Dyke, `The Finance of a Sixteenth Century Navigator, Thomas Cavendish of Trimly in Suffolk' , Mariner's Mirror, Vol. 44, 1958., pp. 108-115. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 42.), the grandson of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland; Sir Thomas Roe (1581-1644) visited Guiana in 1610-1611.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 38. Roe's father was Robert, of Low Leyton, Essex, son of Thomas Roe, merchant tailor, Lord Mayor of London in 1568. A family member, William Roe, was Lord Mayor in 1590, Henry Roe was likewise in 1607, Lord Mayor. In May 1609, an Oxfordshire gentleman, Robert Harcourt, had links to Edward Gifford and Edward Harvey when he became interested in the Amazon area.
(K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge University Press, 1989., pp. 86-87, p. 147.)
Roe was an associate of Arundel; Mary F. S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Cambridge University Press, 1921. Kraus Reprint, New York, 1969., Chapter 20. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 26. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 300.

Sir Thomas Roe had commercial links with Emanuel Exall, John Rizelye, William Stannarde, John Wightman, Peter Sohier and Robert Smith. Roe explored the swamps of Wiapoco and Cuyuni with several Virginia pioneers.

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Roe, also an emissary to the Mogul Emperor, was a protégé of the sister of Charles I, the Electress of the Palatinate, Elizabeth. By 1636-1637 Roe wanted a voluntary war in the West Indies.)

Also, Sir Walter Raleigh; Robert Rich, second Earl Warwick; Robert Harcourt; Roger North.
(GEC, Peerage, North, p. 655, Note f. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 109ff. Lorimer, Amazon, p. 60, Note 2. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 27.

Roger North's backers included his eldest brother; Ludovic Stuart (1574-1624) the second Duke of Lennox), the earls of Arundel (being Thomas Howard (1585-1646) Earl 14 Arundel, the earls of Warwick, Dorset (being Treasurer Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) Earl1 Dorset, whose mother Winifred was daughter of Lord Mayor Brydges); and Clanricarde (being Richard De Burgh (1572-1635), fourth Earl Clanricarde, who married Frances the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham and Ursula St. Barbe); and "the great part of the council", or, the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Pembroke, Southampton, Hamilton, and the Marquis of Buckingham.

Thomas Warner accompanied North to areas of Spanish hegemony, Guiana. In 1618, Arundel with the Earl of Warwick proposed a scheme to colonize Guiana/the Amazon River.

Thomas Warner (1575-1649) later governor of Antigua;
(On Thomas Warner of St Kitts, Barbados and Antigua. Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York, Facts on File, c.1992., p. 76. Richard B. Sheridan, `The rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua, 1730-1775', Economic History Review, Series 2, Vol. 13, 1960-1961., pp. 342-357., here, p. 346. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 27. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 184.

By 1635, John and Samuel Warner were in the Virginia tobacco and provisioning trade. Thomas Warner was about 1622-1625 backed commercially in London by Ralph Merrifield (an associate of the Earl of Carlisle), who was interested in the West Indies.)
Peter Courteen of Cologne (1581-1631) a brother of Sir William Courteen Senior;
(This Peter Courteen (1581-1731) of Cologne, son of tailor William Courteen and Margaret Casiere, was unmarried. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530-1630. London, Yale University Press, 1978., p. 233, pp. 244ff.)
Sir Nathaniel Rich (1585-1636), was second-in-command in commercial matters for the second Earl of Warwick. Sir Thomas Somerset (1579-1649) Viscount Somerset.
(Colonist Sir Nathaniel Rich (1585-1636). He was a grandson of illegitimate descent of Richard, first Baron Rich. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 195, Note 1. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 242 and disputing the content of the DNB entry.

Nathaniel's brother Robert was wrecked with Somers on Bermuda. Nathaniel, knighted in 1617, was an investor in the Bermuda Company in 1615, the Virginia Company in 1619, in the New England Company in 1620, and the Providence Island Company in 1630. His own DNB entry.)
(Later, by 1626-1627 arose the Guiana Company.
(Robert, first Earl Warwick (1559-1619), married Penelope Devereux and Frances Wray; and (Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 192ff), had a 1619 patent to go the Amazon/ Waiapoco area as an adventurer with the Earl of Arundel, Edward Cecil, Dorset, Clanricarde, Jo. Danvers and Thomas Cheek. This Earl Warwick was the most powerful landowner in Essex.
(Hasler, History of Parliament, for Careys, Vol. 1, p. 546. GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 539ff; Warwick, pp. 404ff; Newhaven, p. 539. See also, Robin Law, `The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634-1639', The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. LXXVI, No. 202, October 1997., pp. 185-202.)

In the Caribbean before 1625, the Englishman Roger North was associated with a company founding plantations and trading stations on the delta of the Amazon River.
(Some notables interested in the Guiana area included: the Courteens, Daniel Elfrith about 1619, Sir Thomas Warner of Barbados fame, and the mariner Roger North. Sir Thomas Roe (died 1644). Sir Christopher Neville (died 1649). William Herbert Earl3 Pembroke and Anne Clifford, Baroness Clifford, wife of Philip, fourth Earl Pembroke. Treasurer of the Guiana Co., Sir Henry Spelman. Amazon Colonist Robert Harcourt. Sir Thomas Mildmay (died 1625-1626). Rich, The second Earl Warwick. Thomas Finch second Earl Winchelsea (died 1639). George Villiers, first Duke Buckingham. Dudley North, fourth Baron North (died 1677). Sir Arthur Gorges (died 1661). Henry Grey Earl1 Stamford (died 1673). Cromwellian Sir John Hobart (died 1683).)

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(Soon after Sir Walter Raleigh's first voyage to the Guianas in 1595, the English explorer Captain Charles Leigh attempted to start a settlement on the Waiapoco (Oyapock) River, now the border between Brazil and French Guiana).
(Thomas Roe, an English explorer of Amazonia, later an emissary to the Moghuls of India. See Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660. The Oxford History of England. Oxford University Press, 1959., pp. 335ff.)

From 1609, various English syndicates had been interested in Guiana, and in 1619, Roger North was backed by the "great colonizing connection" around Rich, second Earl of Warwick, and raised money. The 1619 Guiana venture required some 60,000 pounds. Massive follow-up funds however did not appear.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 109, p. 125.)

The Amazon Company of 1619 organized by the Earl of Warwick and Captain Roger North put men at the head of the Amazon delta. The Spanish however did not agree. That led to the later first permanent English settlement in the West Indies. Left alone after the failure of the Amazon venture was (Sir) Thomas Warner, son of an old, landed but non-wealthy East Anglian family.

But we are here considering two different strands of commercial endeavour, eastern/Asian and southern, in that the first East India Company investors (1599-1601) were commercial men who did not want the co-operation of "gentlemen", that is, aristocrats. As the East India Company began, following up on the travels of Ralph Fitch, the "gentlemen", some as listed above, were attempting to exploit the Amazon area. In fact, more genealogical unity can be found concerning Amazon adventurers between 1580-1630 than concerning the first East India Company merchants; not that English histories necessarily give this impression.

Many of the descendants of England's "Amazon adventurers" maintained their interest in the Caribbean and nearby areas, including Virginia. They often expressed anti-Spanish sentiments, they elaborated their interests through layers of merchant, not aristocratic, connections. Interests in slavery were maintained. And strangely enough, they often left the East India Company alone, sans "gentlemen".

The descendants of the Amazon adventurers dealt with the East India Company by linkages in the City of London, by financial intermediation. This is partly how it occurred that there was more regular "flip-flop" of capital between slaving and East India Company interests than historians have thought. And how is the proof of this provided? By tracing the long Seventeenth Century infight between certain English aristocratic interests, and their commercial underlings over control of the Caribbean. This history is greatly dogged by the distractions of the English Civil War, and of matters Cromwellian, as well as by narratives of conflict with French, Dutch or Spanish interests. In retracing matters, the mysterious image of "the Great Southland", and the rather neglected role of the investments of the Anglo-Dutch merchants, Courteens, need new explanation. (Some of the history of the English interest in producing sugar has been outlined earlier in these files.)

On the origin of the English East India Company:

The East India Company first began operations in 1600 in England, "lured by spices and peppers". The earliest voyages were to the islands of the Far East, not India, but later, English interest concentrated at Surat, India, partly to avoid annoying the Spanish-occupied territories. The Dutch meanwhile pushed on to the Moluccas and Java. By 1600, the Dutch with their monopoly of the pepper-trade had annoyed England by sharply increasing the price of their product - Londoners reacted by chartering their East India Company, so it is said.
(Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 101.)

Historians disagree even here. From 1599, it is also said, the legend is incorrect, that England was annoyed as the Dutch raised their pepper price from 3/- to 8/6d per pound. Foster for example feels the English East India Company were more interested in exporting woolens.
(Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-1842. Cambridge University Press, 1951.)

Why English woolens would be needed in tropical and semi-tropical countries is an interesting question. (?) But more interesting is why England needed dye for cloth, and spices and pepper for the improvement of a bland diet? The role of Englishmen in the cloth industries is paramount, as shows in collections of genealogies.

The East India Company established itself to take over the commerce of the Levant Company men in far eastern commodities by developing a direct sea-route with India and the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope. Some of the same group were trying to pry open the valuable import markets of the Portuguese empire in South America.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 19.)

Just which men were involved in which scenarios is crucial to an argument. In 1599, under the auspices of Merchant Adventurers (who were little interested in shipping woolens), an association was formed, with 101 shares, asking the queen for a warrant to fit out three ships, a charter of privileges and permission to export bullion. But might this break the peace with Spain and Port