The Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project - Updated 1 February 2010

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Timelines 1500-1600

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This file is devoted to presenting basic Timeline information for website readers. The items are often sketchy, and some have been extracted from other websites managed by Dan Byrnes. These Timelines will be added to intermittently, as new data and new e-mail arrives. Book titles will be entered according to the timeframes they treat. -Ed

From 1500 to 1600

In 1502 Gama went again to India with 20 ships, when he also tried to gain the submission of some African chiefs - by harsh methods. In 1524 he went back to India as a Viceroy but soon died. All this vindicated the discovery voyages of Bartholomew Diaz from 1487, suggesting that a large ocean lay east beyond the Cape of Good Hope.

At that time, ideas existed that a Great Southland existed south of Asia, called Jav La Grande. It did exist. It is now called Australia, but it was missed by the Hispanics, and "discovered" by the English in 1770.

Portugal after 1492 - when Columbus had discovered the Caribbean - by about 1510 - begins to develop aspirations of breaking the monopoly of Moslem traders on the spice trade to Europe. (The legend exists that by 1536, Portuguese mariners had discovered Botany Bay at what is now, Sydney, Australia - see Kenneth McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia, a discovery which was lost to history.) (By 1505, geopolitically, an important strategic hot spot was the entrance to the Red Sea - Aden - where Moslem trading ships sailed. The entrance to the Red Sea was also important to Moslems, since Indian Moslems sailed from Western Indian ports into the Red Sea and up to ports from where they travelled to Mecca. So the entrance to the Red Sea was important to Moslems for both religious and commercial reasons.

Meanwhile, as part of the operation of the Spice Trade, Moslem mariners had sailed as far south-east as the Spice Islands, or, the Malacca Straits, from where they could also deal with mariners from China (Canton).)

1500: Cabral discovers Brazil, "officially", though Portugal may actually have discovered it some years before. (McIntyre, Secret Discovery of Australia, p. 30, pp. 215-216ff).

1500: By now and due to the printing press, mariners are able to use printed seacharts for improved navigation.

1500 India: Fleeing king of Jaunpur dies in Bengal; Governor of Delhi revolts but is imprisoned; Cabral comes with 13 ships to Calicut, gets in way of a conflict, so bombards Calicut in return for assurances. Political rivalry in Malawa.

1500: 9 March: Six months after Da Gama has returned, Pedro Alvarez Cabral sails from Portugal with thirteen ships and 1200 men for India.

1501-1524AD: Reign of Ismail, first Safavid Shah of Persia.

1500-1502: World exploration: The Portuguese Corte-Real brothers sail about Labrador and Newfoundland. Did they are even earlier-working Portuguese survey other areas of the eastern North American coast?
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1502: Portugal: Cartographers produce a fine map of the world (now known as The Canino Map) which becomes prized by the Duke of Ferrara in Italy, who is a map collector and fascinated by the discovery work of the Spanish and Portuguese. The Duke employs Alberto Cantino as an agent to find a copy of this map from Lisbon. The map shows part of the coast of South America, including Brazil which was discovered only in 1500 by Cabral, plus the West Indies islands, known as "The Antilles of the King of Spain", and northwest of them, the Florida peninsula, which was not "discovered" by Spain till 1513 (?).
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1502 Europe-India: Papal Bull views Portugal's king as a "lord of trade" to India, Persia, Bijapur. Da Gama begins his third voyage of trade/discovery.

1503-1505: World exploration: Little-known voyage by French mariner inspired by Da Gama's voyage, backed by local merchants and shippers, Jean Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, from Honfleur in Normandy for the East. He got to an unknown tropical land and brought back a son, Essomericq, of the local king, who had a son who remained in France. The facts remain unknown. One possible destination named is Madagascar.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1503 India: First European fortress in India is Turumumpara, for Albuquerque.

1503: Portuguese sailors first reach Table Bay, South Africa, and later use it as a refreshment base.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1503 India: Sikander transfers the capital of Empire from Delhi to Agra; battles of succession in Kandesh.

1505: Portugal after 1492 - when Columbus had discovered the Caribbean - by about 1510 - begins to develop aspirations of breaking the monopoly of Moslem traders on the spice trade to Europe. (The legend exists that by 1536, Portuguese mariners had discovered Botany Bay at what is now, Sydney, Australia - see Kenneth McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia, a discovery which was lost to history.)
(By 1505, geopolitically, an important strategic hot spot was the entrance to the Red Sea - Aden - where Moslem trading ships sailed, human traffic re the pilgrimage to Mecca not unrelated. The entrance to the Red Sea was also important to Moslems, since Indian Moslems sailed from Western Indian ports into the Red Sea and up to ports from where they travelled to Mecca, and returned. So the entrance to the Red Sea was important to Moslems for both religious and commercial reasons.

Meanwhile, as part of the operation of the Spice Trade, Moslem mariners had sailed as far south-east as the Spice Islands, also to the Maldive Islands, or, to the Malacca Straits, from where they could also deal with mariners from China (Canton).)

1505: Portugal: Francisco de Almeida is made viceroy of Portuguese territory in India and sails with fleet of 21 ships to enlarge Portugal's chain of forts on Indian soil. Almeida's son Lourenco leads an expedition to the Maldives and Ceylon/Sri Lanka, a move which brings retaliation from the sultanate of Egypt and other Moslem states. In 1508, Lourenco's ships are trapped by an Egyptian fleet off Chaul on the central Western Indian coast. Lourencos is killed. His father in revenge destroys an Egyptian fleet and its local allies off Diu of Northwestern India. Later Almeida is then (in 1509) replaced in India by Afonso de Albuquerque. Almeida ends killed by South Africans near Table Mountain.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1505: European Ludovico Varthema sails in the East.

On the Order of Christ in Portugal:
An early master of the Order of Christ was Henry the Navigator (died 1460). Later, the heir of the King of Portugal, John II Capet, The Perfect (died 1495) was his wife's brother, also his cousin, Manuel Duke Beja, who was Master of the Order of Christ at the time. The (otherwise unexplained ) revenues of the Order of Christ at this time funded the Portuguese explorations of Africa. The Portuguese from 1505 via the Order of Christ explored the western coasts of Africa. At the same time, Almeida went to Cochin to invade Moslem trading areas, after earlier Portuguese voyages to the east of 1500.

1507 (and 1516): A world map - Carta Marear - A Portuguese Navigational Sea-chart of the Known Earth and Oceans - is drawn by German-born cosmographer Martin Waldeseemuller (c.1470-1518), the first ever to call a continent "America", and the first to chart latitude and longitude "with precision". The map is first owned by Nuremburg astronomer and geographer Johannes Schoner (1477-1547), later thought lost, but is found in 1901 in Castle of Wolfegg in Southern Germany. It remained there in obscurity till 2001, when US Library of Congress bought it from Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million. The map clearly shows the west coast of North America from modern Canada (near Vancouver Island) to the equator (Ecuador). This map's depiction of Florida and Caribbean seems to have been influenced by two earlier charts, the Cantino of 1502 (Alberto Cantino is agent of Duke Ercoli d'Este of Ferrara) and the Caviero Map on 1505. These maps also show the Great Bahamas Bank, but the Caviero also shows the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, which is not on the Cantino. Menzies in 1421 thinks all these maps were influenced by an even earlier map - Chinese in origin.
(Item from Gavin Menzies, 1421, The Year China Discovered the World. 2002 - hardcover edition)

1508: Maritime history: Voyages of Pinson and de Solis.

1510: May: Albuquerque is ejected by Moslems from his fort at Goa, India. He retakes it later in 1510, and then has ambition to take the Straits of Malacca (actions of 1511). As a conqueror he is "soaringly imaginative".
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1510: Invention of the watch in Nuremberg.

1511: Portuguese become first Europeans to set foot on (Indonesian archipelago) Banda Islands, spice islands, They do not return until 1529 when Portuguese trader, Capt. Garcia, lands troops on the Banda Island, principal island named Neira. The islands are so small they are in gunshot of each other, except for Run. There are stories of cannibalism and head-hunters. Previously, spices had reached the west from Venice, and before that, Constantinople, and before that, Arab mariners in the Indian Ocean. Now, the Venetian monopoly on the European spice market is broken.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1511: Maritime history: Albuquerque captures Malacca/Malacca Straits. That is, Melaka in what is now Malaysia.

1512: Arrives at Malacca a former apothecary (chemist) of the Portuguese court, sent by Albuquerque (who dies 1515) to examine on the medicinal properties of spices, Tome Pires. (Estensen, "Discovery, p. 45) Pires travels to Java and elsewhere in Indonesia and finally wrote Suma Orientale, (forgotten till 1937) a compendium for his King Manuel on economics and geography from Egypt east to Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). He recommended Timor for sandalwood. Pires was later sent as head of Portugal's first mission to China, where he was imprisoned. Absurd legends develop that Sumatra is "an island of gold".
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1512: Maritime history: Abreu and Serrao reach Moluccas (Malacca Straits) of Indonesia. Albuquerque in April 1512 sends to King of Portugal a locally-made pilot's map of Java, Indonesia got by Francisco Rodrigues. Later in 1512 Albuquerque sends Rodrigues under command of Antonio de Abreu with three ships and 120 men exploring further east of Melaka, to pre-empt likely Spanish moves. These Portuguese maybe got as far east as Mindanao in the Philippines. Rodrigues finally produces a book of navigational rules, tables and procedures, 26 charts of coastlines from Europe to China and 69 panoramic drawings depicting the northern Indonesia islands. (See Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land.

1513: Scottish Battle of Flodden.

1513: Maritime history: The Spaniard Balboa crosses the Isthmus of Panama. (Site roughly of present-day Panama Canal). (The area later remained vital in the views of English promoters of colonisation, since if it could be taken from the Spanish, it would provide an ideal foothold for further English activity in the Caribbean region, and against the Spanish, as happened much later.)

1516: First settlement of Timor island, Indonesia, by Portuguese.

1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 revolutionary theses to the door of Wittenberg University Church.

1519: Maritime history: Mariner Magellan sails from Spain. Mariner J. de Alburquerque sails from Portugal. Mendoca is sent from Lisbon as captain of a 14-ship fleet sailing from Lison to the East.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1519: Herman Cortes begins conquest of the Aztecs of Mexico. He takes their capital in 1521.

1519: Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, has a population of 200,000.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, lieut for Cortes, said of Aztec cities, "We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream."
(It is estimated that the indigenous population of Mexico shrinks from 25 million to one million in the first century of Spanish rule.)

1520-1618: Smallpox is introduced by the Spanish to Mexico, only three months after Cortes has laid siege to the Aztec capitol. The result is that the population is reduced from 20 million to 1.8 million. Later, South American suffers from waves of measles, typhus and influenza. The indigenous populations are reduced by up to 95 per cent according to some estimates.

1520: Portuguese governor at Goa, India, receives orders to discover "gold islands" south of Sumatra.

1520 Mexico: Hernan Cortes as he advances on Tenochtitlan is regarded as a god by the Aztecs, that is as an avatar of their supreme god, Quetzalcoatl.

1520-1566AD: Reign of Sulayman the Magnificent; Ottoman empire at its peak.

1521: Died 1521, Ferdinand Magellan, in the Philippines, where he attempted to convert local natives at gunpoint. He is killed by natives using iron-pointed bamboo spears and scimitars.
Magellan's crew once sold a cargo of 26 tons of cloves for 10,000 times its original cost - a good example of the mercantilist's hopes of buying cheap and selling dear. Magellan by now has discovered Tierra del Fuego, but it is not known for a century that the area is an island, not part of a major land mass.

1521-1522: New Zealand: Possible deposition of The Ruapuke wreck, reputed to be a New Zealand version of Australia's mahogany ship enigma at Warnambool. As referred to by K.G McIntyre in The Secret Discovery of Australia (pp. 281-284 of the original hardback edition) as possibly the second of Cristavao de Mendonca's caravels to come to grief in his venture of 1521-22. Evidence cited includes the Tamil Bell and the Wellington Helmet. Since the publication of Gavin Menzies' book 1421 on the claimed world-discovery trip of the Chinese, it is suggested that the Tamil Bell might be an artefact left by the Chinese, who were familiar with Ceylon at the time.

1521-1522: Ferdinand Magellan begins his expedition to make the first circumnavigation of the world.

November, 1521, Magellan's ships reach the Indonesian spice islands, the Moluccas. This severely annoys the already-resident Portuguese on the spice islands.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1521: Magellan rounds Cape Horn, on his way to the Moluccas Islands, Indonesia, which were far further west than he had imagined.

1522: Maritime history: Voyage of Cristovao de Mendonca with three ships leaving Malacca for a voyage south from the west coast of Sumatra. He returns with one ship only. (Legends exist that one or more of ships visited some coastline of Australia.) Later he is appointed governor of island of Hormuz in Persian Gulf region.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1524: Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano arrives in France to report on his New World discoveries, which include (what is later seen as) New York's bay.

1524: (Reported 30 July 2002: Mexico City: A manuscript dated 23 September 1524 has been found at Mexico's National Library of Anthropology and History, detailing the takeover of Mexico by Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes.

1524: Maritime history: Junta of Badajoz. Voyages of Verrazano and Loaysia.

1525: April: Spain: A fleet of seven ships under Garcia Jofre de Loaisa sails from La Coruna in Northern Spain. Flagship is Santa Maria de la Victoria. Sailing the Atlantic for Straits of Magellan and into the Pacific. One ship was wrecked on a shore. Another disappeared entirely. Another sailed home. Four ships got into the Pacific but never saw each other again. One ship got to the Philippines, where the crew was killed or enslaved. The flagship got to Tidore, where crew fought the Portuguese for eight years. In 1527, Charles V directed Cortes as governor of New Spain (Mexico), to send three ships to find Loaisa's ships or men. This 1527 expedition was commanded by Alvaro Saavedra de Ceron, to be lost near the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Saavedra attempted to return home to Mexico via the north coast of New Guinea, he died, and his crew returned to Tidore.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1525: The Portuguese governor of the Moluccas sends from the Indonesian island Ternate an expedition (for gold or for diplomatic explorations) led by Diogo de Rocha and pilot Gomes de Sequeira. They possibly reached the western Caroline Islands before homing to Ternate. Sequeira later sailed the Arafura Sea and possibly sighted the islands today known as Bathurst, Melville and Croker, the Coburg Peninsula, Wessel Island and Prince of Wales Island. If so, he was the first European discoverer of North-Western Australia.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1525: Maritime history: Two voyages of Gomes de Sequeira.

1526: Founding of the Mogul Dynasty in India.

1526: Europeans by now have sighted the northern coasts of New Guinea. Spaniard Capt. Alvaro de Saavedra Ceron who believes there exists an Island of Gold somewhere southwest of New Guinea in 1528 tries to find an eastward route (from the Malaccas?) across the Pacific (to Mexico?). Headwinds forced him back. He died at sea in 1529.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1527: Bristol merchant Robert Thorne, an English trader in Seville, Spain, writes secretly to King Henry VIII that it is possible to reach the Eastern spice islands via the North Pole.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1529: Portuguese Captain Garcia visits spice island, Neira.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1529: World exploration: French brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier sail from Dieppe in ships Pensee and Sacre and reach Sumatra, where they die of fever. Their pilot Pierre Crignon returns home with charts etc. Crignon's reports may have helped inspire a 1540 French map by Jean Mallard which shows a large promontory, Terre Australle, lying south of Malacca. Another member of the Parmentier expedition was Jean Rotz who in 1542 produced a world map noting Java La Grande (a French term), with an imaginary picture of "Australia". In 1544, a French mariner distrusted in his own lifetime, Jean Fontenau, claimed to have seen La Grande Jave. He married a Portuguese woman and was also known as Jean Alfonse - and thought that La Grande Jave extended south to near the South Pole. In any case, the Parmentier voyage seems to be the key to rising notions of the existence of Java La Grande as it was depicted in a series of maps produced in Dieppe, France.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1532: The Spanish arrive into Inca territory of South America. Within 50 years, about five million Inca have died. But mysteriously, this had been a tragedy long foretold. The Inca believed their ancestors had arrived from the stars (constellations). The stars then were their real home; the Inca supposedly were besotted by astrology. The Inca custom of child sacrifice with victims taken from various of their tribes was then a way of sending messengers "home". Views have arisen that various "cultural codings" used by the Inca were derived from older civilisations, perhaps as old as 13,000 years ago. About 1432 or so, the early Inca produced a prophecy that the Inca would fall after five rulers had been at their head, then all would fall. Disasters on earth would reflect disasters in the heavens, such as "heavenly disconnections". Such prophecies were so precise that it might well be asked: why did the Inca then bother to build an empire?
Some information/views here taken from TV documentaries various as screened in Australia after new research by archaeologists around Year 2000 or so.

1534: England splits with the Church of Rome.

Circa 1535:

Pizzaro an outright murderer: Australian researchers using refined new technology have examined a fragment of a letter with a beeswax seal written by a Jesuit in Inca territory, to find a date for the writing of the letter. A mystery of conquest may now be solved - Pizzaro and his few troops overwhelmed the Incas by the simple expedient of murdering their emperor and his general. (Reported in Australia 13 October 1999)
Pizarro is illiterate, but "experienced". In 1528 he sails along Inca coastlines to reconnoitre. He arrived in middle of a civil war. The Sapa Inca had been Huayna Capal, to 1525, he had two sons, Atahuallpa and Huascar, and Huascar lost the battle which broke out, Pizarro murders Atahuallpa. (Notes - the Incas were at Machu Picu.)
(Reader's Digest, The Last Two Million Years, p. 203) ... When Pizarro murders Atahuallpa, he also "eliminates" the 4000-strong leadership of the Inca Empire, from 1530. A TV documentary on Australian SBS on 29-7-2001, says that in the Spanish new world, the Pizzaros and the Orianas were two related large families who became deadly enemies in the New World over gold (?).

1536: Further on the destruction of the Inca Empire: From about 1432, the Incas had developed an astronomical/astrological system which allowed belief also in a dire prediction about the demise of what became their empire, more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy, after five rulers had exercised power. Disasters on earth would echo disasters in the skies/heavens, in conformity with the formula, "as above- so below". The time of disaster coincided with a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. As to disaster, the Inca Empire had a population of more than five million. Within 50 years of the arrival of the Spanish from 1532, five million Incas had died. But the tragedy had been long foretold, and during the lead-up to their demise, the Incas had tried to stave off or forestall disaster by engaging in child sacrifice (every fourth year, and/or at an annual solstice,. the victims aged 7-12), in a deliberate effort to rearrange earthly patterns so that the heavenly patterns became more congenial.
The idea was that the children, carefully selected from tribes which had their origins in certain constellations, would return as messengers to their heavenly home to plead for a rearrangement of circumstances on earth. In which case, human sacrifice was a ritual-of-last-resort. As to such beliefs, the questions arise: were the Incas here exercising an old belief system shared by other civilizations? Such as might have been exercised at Sumer? A belief system spread by maritime contact? From how long ago?
It also seems that this belief system was the major asset enabling the Inca Empire to grow and enjoy (or coerce) the co-operation of the diverse peoples in its mountainous territories.

1536: Spaniard Hernando de Grijalva, possibly on orders from Cortes, after going to Mexico from Peru, on returning home decides to turn his ship into the Pacific. Arises an obscure story, that his ship ran short of water and provisions, was blocked by strong northeasterly winds, his crew mutinied, killed Grijalva, and headed for the Moluccas. They were shipwrecked off New Guinea and probably killed except for a few survivors who were ransomed by some Portuguese.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1537: Spanish Conquistadors searching for "legendary El Dorado" reach Columbia and loot the burial places of Indian priests and chiefs, also ransacking gilt-lined temples and palaces. This is in the Great Lakes region of Columbia, location of the ancient Sinu sanctuaries. Today (March 2001), a tomb-looting indigenous tribe continue the looting, the Guaqueros, their chief named Jaunito. These looters either sell artefacts, or if no buyer can be found, melt them down. There is a legal artefact-manager in the country, the Gold Museum in Bogota - which evidently cannot stamp out looting. (From an article by Francois Guenet in The Australian Magazine, 3-4 March, 2001).

1537: Maritime history: Pedro Nunes discovers the Loxodrome.

1538: Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator publishes his map of the world. He adopts the view of Magellan, that about the area of Tierra del Fuego is a large land mass, a southern continent of unknown extent, terra incognita.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1539: Maritime history: Orellan's voyage down the Amazon River.

1540: Execution for treason of Thomas Cromwell, earlier chief adviser to King Henry VIII of England.

1540: Francisco Vasquez de Coronado takes 2000 men into the deserts north of Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, which legendarily had palaces and temples filled with gold and silver. In the present-day New Mexico. What was found was a humble Zuni Indian settlement.

1541: Dies in the Spanish New World: Francisco Pizzaro (c1471-1541). Discoverer and conqueror of Peru. He accompanied Balboa on discovery of the Pacific Ocean. In 1522 Pizzaro dreamed dreams of conquest to the south, and he sailed down the west coast of South America. He returned to Seville in Spain by 1828 and by 1829 was made governor and captain-general of New Castile. (The South American coast he had seen). Pizzaro is joined by his brother Hernando. Pizzaro in 1541 is assassinated by followers of his Spanish enemy, Diego de Almagro. Half-brother of Francisco was Gonzalo Pizzaro (C1505-1548), In 1539, an ex-miner at Potosi mines, Gonzalo becomes governor of Quito, later governor of Peru. He was executed by an enemy on 26 June 1546.

1541AD: Hungary: After the Turkish occupation of Buda in 1541, the region of the Great Plain becomes part of the great Ottoman Empire which stretches over three continents.

1542: France: Jean Rotz produces a manuscript, Boke of Idrography on hydrography and marine sciences, earliest of the major works of the Dieppe school of maps. Rotz, of Scots descent (Ross), presented his book to Francis I, but got no position at court, so he went to England to present it to Henry VIII, to be rewarded with post of Royal Hydrographer till Henry's death in 1547. Rotz had sailed to Guinea (West Africa) and Brazil in 1539. He may also have sailed with the Parmentiers to Sumatra in 1529-1530. In 1529 he seems to have been in the Western Pacific.

1542: Spanish Mexico: A fleet of six ships under Ruy Lopez de Villalobos leaves port of Navidad with orders from the King of Spain to colonise The Islands of the West, that is, the Philippines, and to seek gold, spices and other trade goods. Voyage across the Pacific took three months. Villalobos spent a year trying to found a colony about Mindanao but failed and resorted to the Moluccas where he died of fever. Spain did not try the Philippines again till 1565.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1543: Copernicus suggests the earth is not the centre of the universe and thus shocks the Catholic Church.

1546: The Compass improved: The Spanish improved on the Chinese invention of the compass by installing it within a set of gimbals. Gimbals invented by the Chinese about 100BC. (Source: James/Thorpe).

1546-1601: Life of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who produced systematic star maps.

1547: Death of Hernan/Hernando Cortes, Spanish conqueror of Mexico. He studied law, began at Hispaniola (Santo Domingo), as a farmer. In 1511 he went with Diego Velasquez on expedition to Cuba. In 1519, Cortes went to Yucatan, later to Tabasco. There he found a mistress, Dona Marina (Malintzin) who gave him a son, Martin. Cortes then founded Veracruz, then went inland at a time when nation of Tiaxcala is at war with Aztec ruler Montezuma of Mexico. Cortes entered Mexico City on 8 November 1519, and killed Montezuma. By 1521, Cortes had caused the fall of the Aztec Empire. Cortes returned to Spain and was made captain-general (of Mexico). Cortes' enemies grew, but Cortes did explore Lower California about 1535. Later he explored Honduras. Cortes again returned to Spain and died near Seville in 1547. See M. Collis, Cortes and Montezuma. 1955.
Encyclopedia Britannica item

1549-1551AD: Mission of Jesuit St. Francis Xavier to Japan.

From 1550: Islam spreads to Indonesia.

1500-1550: (From a website reviewing book on climate change by H. H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World): After a generally warmer interlude between 1500 and 1550, northern Europe turns much colder... there appears The Little Ice Age, which reached a peak in the 16th and 17th centuries, experienced temperatures that were as much as 1.5°C colder than the 20th century. Great hurricanes arose in the North Atlantic. (A gale whose winds exceeded the speeds of any modern tempest destroyed the Spanish Armada and changed history. Traces of this era of cold persisted until the mid-19th century.)

1550: Portuguese settlement of Nova Scotia. (Canada)

22 April, 1550: The first encounter between Europeans and South American Indians/Brazil, as recorded by Pero Vaz de Caminha, an official scribe for a Portuguese flotilla that accidentally arrived on the coast of Brazil, off-course for a voyage to India. The Indians were given a red beret, a linen hood and a black hat. In return, the Indians gave a headdress of bird feathers, a necklace of white beads. Not so long later, the Portuguese enslaved the Indians. At the time of first contact, there were about five million Indians in 1400 tribes speaking 1300 languages. In April 2000, a 500th anniversary was observed at Porto Seguro, a small coastal town. Today, DNA research reveals that about 45 million Brazilians, about a third of the population, share some indigenous DNA levels. Brazil still has about 30 pockets of Amazon jungle where so-called Stone Age tribes live, of about 100-300 people. Land rights remain a serious issue for Brazil's indigenous people.

1551AD: Bayinnaung inherits the Burmese throne and overruns Thailand.

1553: On 23 June 1553 sets sails the voyage under Englishman Richard Chancellor, adopted son of Henry Sidney, for The Mystery, Company and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands, Chancellor on ship Edward Bonaventure. Also sailing with two other ships, Bona Esperanza, and Confidentia. Also sailing is Sir High Willoughby. The ships reach Barents Sea, and end 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle, worried by pack ice. Some of the ships crew had written wills dated January 1554. Willoughby and his men froze to death. Chancellor had gone into the White Sea near today's Archangel, and gone overland to Moscow. Chancellor meets Grand Duke of Russia, Ivan Vasilivich, also Emperor, who is impressed enough to grant trade rights, which thus begins the English Muscovy Company.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1553: Sir Hugh Willoughby's "fateful expedition to the Arctic".
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1556-1605AD: Reign of Mogul emperor Akbar in India.

In 1553 and 1555 Englishman Richard Eden publishes his Treatise of the New India and Decades of the New World or West India. There arose by 1555 a "fruitful co-operation" in Elton p. 334, of merchants, sailors and moneyed gentry including a few members of court and council. from 1551 the first trade contacts grew with Africa. See 1551.

1558: From Brussels, Oliver Brunel advertises that he has travelled on the coasts of northern Russia, and might soon find a North-East Passage to the Indies. He would soon take a Russian ship to the spice islands. (This might reduce a year's sailing time?) This information caused great pain to London merchants, so they denounced Brunel to the Russians as a spy and he is imprisoned for 12 years.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1559: First cultivation of tobacco starts in Spain.

1559: Queen Elizabeth I sends aid to Scottish lords to drive French from Scotland.

1561: Dieppe Map by Desliens displays Portuguese flags on Java La Grande, and the same in 1566 and 1567.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1561-1562: The French Wars of Religion: "Throughout France, members of the rival creeds (Catholic and Huguenot) attacked each other, killing, burning, raping, torturing, and looting. The atrocities were as outrageous as they were cruel. In a frenzy of Protestant iconoclasm, churches were desecrated and their clergy hunted down like vermin; one Huguenot captain wore a necklace of priests' ears while the infamous Baron des Adrets made Catholic prisoners leap to their death from a high tower. Even the dead were attacked; at Orleans a Reformist mob burnt the heart of poor Francois II and threw Joan of Arc's statue into the river. The Counter-Reformation was not yet in evidence so Papist fanatics were rare but nonetheless Catholics were goaded into fury. At Tours two hundred Huguenots were drowned in the Loire while the bodies of those slaughtered at Sens came floating down to Paris. That grim old soldier Blaise de Montluc made Protestant captives jump from the battlements and remarked with satisfaction that all knew where he had passed by the trees which bore his livery - a hanged Huguenot; on one occasion he strangled a pastor with his own hands." As Pascal said a hundred years later, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as they do from religious conviction."
From: Desmond Seward, The First Bourbon: Henri IV, King of France and Navarre. London, Constable, 1971., p. 143

1562: Maritime history: Legazpi sails in Philippines area.

1563: Stress of urbanisation: French parliament begs the king to prohibit vehicles from the streets of Paris.

1563: Spanish navigator Juan Fernandez amazes his associates by sailing from Callao, Peru to Valparaiso, Chile in 30 days instead of the usual 90. Then sailing west into the Pacific he discovered a number of islands which now bear his name. He was possibly trying to find any eastern coast of any Great Southland. By legend he got to New Zealand but this seem highly unlikely.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1565: April: Spain tries again (after 1542), to found a colony of the Philippines. Miguel Lopez de Legazpi leaves from Acapulco in Mexico and founds colony on Cebu with three ships and 300 men. Spanish administration six years later was transferred to Cebu on Luzon Island. With this 1565 expedition was Miguel de Urdaneta, now a monk, who had been asked to help establish a useful return route home from the Philippines. Sensibly, Urdaneta wanted to go about new Guinea to establish its proximity to any Great South Land, then to possibly examine just where the Great Southland lay. This went far beyond Legazpi's brief to found a colony and establish a route home. On 1 June 1565, Urdaneta (died 1568) sailed from Cebu and went north, overshooting on the West North American coast, then south, which brought him to California, then to the port of Navidad of Mexico.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1566: Maritime history: Mendana's first voyage.

1567: November: The viceroy of Peru permits controversial mathematician, scientist and adventurer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa to take two ships from Callao to settle "the great southern continent". Sarmiento captains one ship but has to answer also to a 26-year-old, Alvaro de Mendana, a nephew of the viceroy. Both however belief in lands of gold to the west. After 80 days sail they found an island, possibly Nui of today's Tuvalu. By early 1568 they were at the Solomon Islands, where the local people resented them, so the expedition went to today's Honiara on Guadalcanal, where it was again resented, so it went to San Cristobal. It finally returned home dismal with failure. Young Mendana however is convinced he has found outlying islands of the Great South Land. He tried again in 1595.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1568: Spain: Muslims are forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain.

1570: Geographer and mapmaker Abraham Ortelius publishes his world map and following Mercator depicts an unknown great southern land, modifying its name from terra incognita to Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, or Southern Land Not Yet Known.
1570: Ortelius produces a world map which shows New Guinea as separate from the conjectural land south of it called Terra Australis. Cornelis de Jode's map of 1593, Speculum Orbis Terrae shows much the same re New Guinea. But in 1594, Plancius on his map shows New Guinea joined to the Great South Land.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1571: The Battle of Lepanto; 117 Turkish galleys taken and 80 lost, only 12 Christian vessels are lost.

1571: Foundation by Spanish of city Manila, the Philippines.

1572: France: 3000 Protestants are killed in St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, one of the bloodiest incidents of a series of religious wars.

1572: Mapmaker Ortelius issues his atlas, which amongst other legends speaks of King Solomon's ships sailing for (mythical) Ophir, where they gather 420 talents of gold.

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

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)

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 geographer, 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.

1580: Crowns of Spain and Portugal are united.

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.)

1582: As France suffers a civil war, historian and cartographer Lancelot du Voisin, Seigneur de La Popellinere, translates the Latin of Hondius' atlas and argues in a treatise, Les Tres Monde, that the French can still catch up with the discoveries of Portugal and Spain by settling The Great Southland. No one takes any notice.

1583: Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten proceeds to the East Indies, and later writes five big books 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.)

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

1586-1587: Under threat from Indians, English colonists sail from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, dismally ending the first English settlement in America. English colonists had 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 tense and aggravated relations with Native Americans. By 1590, the ill-fated settlers had vanished with little trace.

1587: Mapmaker Rumold Mercator, son of Gerard, issues his map of the world which amends the name of the so-called Great Southern Land to terra australis, which his father had called terra incognita. This imagined land encircles the entire Southern Hemisphere. It supposedly has various regions, some of which are Maletur, Lucach and Beach - thought to be either gold-producing or overflowing with interesting spices. These odd words and ideas are due to poor translations of words used by Marco Polo for his descriptions of today's Malaysia and Indochina. Beach was taken to be southwest of the Straits of Magellan.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

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.

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

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: Dutch mapmaker Pieter Plancius publishes a large world map which seems to be based on information from Portuguese hydrographer Bathrolomeu Lasso. Also in 1592, Dutch merchant brothers Cornelis and Frederick Houtman visit Lisbon as agents for Dutch trading houses and are caught trying to steal secret Portuguese maps of trading routes to the East. They were imprisoned for three years but returned home with 25 of Lasso's nautical charts which they presumably used on their later voyages East.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

1593: Cornelius de Jode issues a map depicting New Guinea, with the belief that south of New Guinea is the great "Austral land", so large it may form a fifth part of the world. By 1597, Cornelius Wytflet in his atlas with a factually-uninspired guess suggests that the Austral land begins at two or three degrees below the equator.

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.)

1595: Netherlands: Cornelis and Frederick de Houtman return to Amsterdam from their map-thieving visit to Portugal just as adventurer Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, who had been some 14 years in the Portuguese East, published on his travels, partly basing on the work of a cosmographer for the Spanish Crown, Luis Teixeira. A group of Amsterdam merchants are willing to form a consortium to trade with the East Indies. In spring 1595 they sent four ships under Cornelis de Houtman about Cape of Good Hope, to Goa, then the Indonesian Islands, returning in mid-1597. Other companies formed and other Dutch voyages followed.
(Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land)

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: Spaniard Mendana sails with four ships from the Peruvian port of Paita for the Solomon Islands which he has visited 30 years previous, again trying his dream of colonising the Great South Land and finding its gold. He has 280 soldiers and sailors plus 378 men, women and children colonists. Chief pilot of the expedition is Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, a Portuguese navigator aged about 30. This expedition discovers the Marquesas Islands, then misses its mark and gets to the Solomons, though not near to Guadalcanal and other areas already settled by Spanish. Mendana tried a colony at Santa Cruz. Matters failed, the survivors went to Manila. Quiros meantime had adopted Mendana's dream of finding terra australis and spends near a decade seeking support from the Pope and the King of Spain for a new expedition. Quiros' next expedition did sail 1605-1606.

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

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

1518: Origin of the Spanish asiento [contract giving the holder an exclusive right to supply slaves for the Spanish New World]: King Charles I of Spain with papal sanction authorizes the supply to Spanish America of 4000 Africans as bond-labourers. The contract (Asiento de negros) for this was awarded to one of hs favourites. Between 11-15 million Africans are estimated to have been sent to the New World under the terms of the asiento. (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. New York, Verso, 2002., pp. 8-9)

1550++: On the development of attitudes of whites to blacks, regarding the rise of slavery, see also W. D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,1550-1812. (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York, Verso, 2002.)

1550: Islam begins its spread to Indonesia.

1550: Portuguese settlement of Nova Scotia. (Canada)

1550: Portuguese settlement in Nova Scotia, first European settlement in North America. (McIntyre, Secret Discovery of Australia, pp. 215-216.)

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor of 1550, Sir Andrew Judd
Descendants of Coloniser and Muscovy Co. merchant, London Lord Mayor, Sir Andrew Judd (c.1551/1553) and sp: Joan Mirfyn
2. Elizabeth Judd sp: Sir William Morgan (b.1542;d.1583) 2. Alice Judd (b.1538;d.1563) sp: London customs receiver Sir Thomas Smythe (b.1522;m.1554;d.7 Jun 1591)
3. Sir John Smythe of Kent (c.1620) sp: Isabella Rich (c.1648)
4. Isabella Smythe wife2 (b.1648) sp: John Robartes Earl1 Radnor
5. Leatitia Isabella Robartes sp: Charles Moore Visc4 Drogheda, Earl2 Drogheda (m.28 Oct 1669;d.18 Jun 1679) sp: Dramatist, William Wycherley (m.1680) sp: Customs Commr, MP Charles Cheyne Visc1 Newhaven (b.Oct 1625;m.8 Jun 1688;d.30 Jun 1698)
3. Miss Smythe sp: Dir EICo, Alderman Robert Johnson merchant (c.1630)
4. Miss Johnson sp: London merchant tailor Nathaniel Knightley
3. Sir Thomas II Smythe Sir (b.1558;d.4 Sep 1625) sp: Sarah widow Blount wife2 sp: Judith Culverwell wife1 sp: Joan Hobbs
3. Catherine Smythe wife2 (b.1564) sp: Coloniser, London Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward (b.1520;d.5 Dec 1593)
4. Sir John Hayward 4. Susan Hayward wife1 (d.1592)
sp: MP Henry Townshend (b.1537;d.1621) 5. MP, journalist, Hayward Townshend (b.1577;d.1603) sp: Francasina Neville Illegit 4. Elizabeth Hayward sp: MP Richard Warren (b.1545;d.1598) sp: Thomas Knyvett Lord Knyvett Baron Knyvett of Escrick (b.1548;m.1597;d.1622) 4. Alice Hayward sp: MP Sir Richard Buller 5. Francis Buller sp: Thomasine (Honywood) Honeywood 6. Francis Buller sp: Miss Notknown 7. John Buller sp: Anne Coode sp: Miss Notknown 7. John Buller 5. Thomasine Buller sp: Josias Calmady 4. Joan Hayward sp: John Thynne
5. MP Sir Thomas II Thynne (b.1578;d.1639) sp: Catharine Howard wife2 sp: Maria Audley wife1 (m.1601)
4. Widow, Catherine Hayward wife2 (d.1632) sp: Sir Richard Sondes (b.1571;m.1609;d.1645) sp: Sir John Scott (c.1599)
3. Sir John I Smythe of Kent, (b.1556/1557;d.29 Nov 1608) sp: Elizabeth Fineux (m.Jan 1577) 4. Sir John Smythe sp: Miss Notknown
5. Sir Thomas Smythe
4. Thomas Smythe Visc1 Strangford of Kent (b.1599;d.30 Jun 1635) sp: Lady Barbara Sydney (b.28 Nov 1599;m.1621;d.1643) 5. Philip Smythe Visc2 Strangford (b.23 Mar 1623/1624;d.Aug 1708) sp: Mary Porter wife2 6. Endymion Smythe Visc3 Strangford sp: Miss Notknown 7. ? Smythe Visc4 Strangford sp: Miss Notknown 6. Catherine Clare Smythe wife1 (b.1683;d.1711) sp: Henry Roper Baron8 Teynham, (suicide) (b.1676;d.16 May 1723) 7. Henry Roper Lord10 Teynham (b.1708;d.29 Apr 1781) sp: Miss Notknown sp: Catherine Powell wife1 (b.18 Sep 1709;d.22 Sep 1765) sp: Anne Brinckhurst wife2 (d.16 Jan 1771) sp: Elizabeth Newport wife3, widow sp: Miss Notknown 7. Philip ROPER Unm Died Young (d.13 Jun 1727) sp: Isabella cousin Sydney wife1 (b.1634;m.22 Aug 1650;d.Jun 1663) 3. Richard Smythe MP (b.1563;d.1628) sp: Elizabeth Scott wife1 (m.Sep 1589) 3. Mary has issue Smythe wife2 (d.1621) sp: Robert Davy MP (d.1599) 3. Joan Smythe wife2 (d.1622) sp: Exchqr Remembrancer Thomas Fanshawe (b.1533;m.1578;d.1601) 4. MP Thomas II Fanshawe (b.1580;d.1631) sp: Anne Babington (m.1604;d.1638) sp: Mary Mathew wife2

Item:
Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. London, Allen Lane, 1976. (Here, Hawkins is indexed but Sir William Winter is not indexed.) Ch 1 says, to 1603, and for Tudor times the cloth merchants who backed maritime endeavour were pro-Spanish; matters changed with the 1551-152 cloth slump, and in 1552 arose some English hopes of finding a north-east passage to fabled Cathay (China).

22 April, 1550: The first encounter between Europeans and South American Indians/Brazil, as recorded by Pero Vaz de Caminha, an official scribe for a Portuguese flotilla that accidentally arrived on the coast of Brazil, off-course for a voyage to India. The Indians were given a red beret, a linen hood and a black hat. In return, the Indians gave a headdress of bird feathers, a necklace of white beads. Not so long later, the Portuguese enslaved the Indians. At the time of first contact, there were about five million Indians in 1400 tribes speaking 1300 languages. In April 2000, a 500th anniversary was observed at Porto Seguro, a small coastal town. Today, DNA research reveals that about 45 million Brazilians, about a third of the population, share some indigenous DNA levels. Brazil still has about 30 pockets of Amazon jungle where so-called Stone Age tribes live, of about 100-300 people. Land rights remain a serious issue for Brazil's indigenous people.

1551AD: Burma: Bayinnaung inherits the Burmese throne and overruns Thailand.

1551: Capt. 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.)

1551: And earlier: Already under Henry VIII, Hawkins makes made several voyages to Liberia [Grain Coast], gets pepper, ivory but no gold. Whyndham's syndicate (now also with Sir George Barnes) has idea re Gold Coast, with Portuguese pilot Antonio Pinteado (sic). Whyndham sails with 140 men including young Martin Frobisher (a kinsman of Sir John Yorke), and only 40 survived.

1551-1552: Thomas Wyndham sails to Barbary Coast, the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in 1553 to Guinea Coast into Benin Bay; he died on his last voyage, but his crew brought back enough gold to enrapture London.

1549-1551AD: Mission of Jesuit St. Francis Xavier to Japan.

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.

1552: Rise of Londoner merchant and noted customs receiver, hence the name "Customer" Smythe, Thomas Smythe, born 1552.

1552: Birth near Budleigh, Salterton Bay, of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618). Son of Walter Raleigh of Fardell and Catherine, daughter of Sir Philip Champernowne of Modbury. See 1578:

1552: (Lord/Earl) Northumberland forms joint-stock company to carry out John Dee's plan re north-west passage. Northumberland's company which included 200 "capitalists" sent out an expedition led by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor. Willoughby died with all his crew trying to winter on the coast of Lapland, but Chancellor entered the White Sea, found village of Archangel, established contact with Czar/Ivan the Terrible.

1551-1553: London Lord Mayoralty period for colonist, Andrew Judd, co-founder of the Muscovy Co. Spouse Names wife1 Joan Mirfyn and wife2 Mary Mathew.
http on Winter naval family. (Hasler, The House of Commons, 1558-1603, p. 403 on John I Smythe d.1608.) Seen as alderman in Hasler, p. 97 on Sir Wm Morgan d 1583. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 231. Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 14ff. GEC, Peerage, Strangford, p. 358.

1551: And earlier: Already under Henry VIII, Hawkins makes made several voyages to Liberia [Grain Coast], gets pepper, ivory but no gold. Whyndham's syndicate (now also with Sir George Barnes) has idea re Gold Coast, with Portuguese pilot Antonio Pinteado (sic). Whyndham sails with 140 men including young Martin Frobisher a kinsman of Sir John Yorke, and only 40 survived.

1551-1553: London Lord Mayoralty period for colonist, Andrew Judd, co-founder of the Muscovy Co. Spouse Names wife1 Joan Mirfyn and wife2 Mary Mathew.
http on Winter naval family. Hasler, The House of Commons, 1558-1603, p. 403 on John I Smythe d.1608. Seen as alderman in Hasler, p. 97 on Sir Wm Morgan d. 1583. Who's Who / Shakespeare, p. 231. Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 14ff. GEC, Peerage, Strangford, p. 358.

1551: From 1551, Thomas Gresham restored financial stability to the royal purse. As the crown's financial agent, he required merchant adventurers to give him in Antwerp a large part of proceeds in foreign currency, from cloth sales, to be repaid in sterling at a fixed rate of exchange, which was usually more than what was available in Antwerp. The crown then had source of short-term loans, and this also forced up the price of sterling on the international market. This system remained in use for 20 years. In 1558 the English crown raised customs rates to increase revenue. Merchants in return were given gained extra privileges, including the hampering of non-English merchants in London, the Hanse men, Italian and Flemish merchants.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 55-56.

1551: English syndicate of merchants, with Sir John Lutterell, and Henry Ostrich equip ship for Morocco, area frequented by both Portuguese and Spanish. Ostrich is Sebastien Cabot's son-in-law. Promoters suffer disaster. Fever rages in London. Lutterell, Ostrich and others died as did other members of syndicate. New-found captain is Thomas Whyndham, a naval officer and vice-admiral of a fleet employed by Protector Somerset in Scottish campaign of 1547. Whyndham trades at Santa Cruz, so in 1552 another voyage backed by Sir John Yorke, Sir William Gerard, Sir Thomas Wroth, Francis Lambert, with three ships. Wyndham also to Canary Islands, but found no new commerce.

The early 1550s: William Winter is far too busy with conspiracies to deal with, eg., Muscovy or Levant companies.

1552: More to come

1553: Sir Hugh Willoughby's "fateful expedition to the Arctic".
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1553: On 23 June 1553 sets sails the voyage under Englishman Richard Chancellor, adopted son of Henry Sidney, for The Mystery, Company and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands. Chancellor on ship Edward Bonaventure. Also two other ships, Bona Esperanza, and Confidentia. Also sailing is Sir High Willoughby. The ships reach Barents Sea, and end 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle, worried by pack ice. Some of the ships crew had written wills dated January 1554. Willoughby and his men froze to death. Chancellor had gone into the White Sea near today's Archangel, and gone overland to Moscow. Chancellor meets Grand Duke of Russia, Ivan Vasilivich, also Emperor, who is impressed enough to grant trade rights, which thus begins the English Muscovy Company.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1553: In 1553, Capt. Thomas Windham and Antonio Anes Pinteado (from Oporto, Portugal), with three ships and 140 men to sail to Brazil, Guinea Coast - Gold Coast, went to Benin for Guinea pepper, Windham died.
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., p. 60.

1553: On 23 June 1553 sets sails the voyage under Englishman Richard Chancellor, adopted son of Henry Sidney, for The Mystery, Company and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands. Chancellor on ship Edward Bonaventure. Also two other ships, Bona Esperanza, and Confidentia. Also sailing is Sir Hugh Willoughby. The ships reach Barents Sea, and end 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle, worried by pack ice. Some of the ships' crew had written wills dated January 1554. Willoughby and his men froze to death. Chancellor had gone into the White Sea near today's Archangel, and gone overland to Moscow. Chancellor meets Grand Duke of Russia, Ivan Vasilivich, also Emperor, who is impressed enough to grant trade rights, which thus begins the English Muscovy Company.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1553: Sir Hugh Willoughby's "fateful expedition to the Arctic".
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1553: Lord High Admiral (1553-1557), William Howard (1510-1572-1573), son of Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk, and mother, Agnes Tilney, wife 2; he married Katherine Boughton wife1, then to Margaret Gamage, wife2.
GEC in The Peerage says it was "to him above all other Englishmen" that Elizabeth 1 owed her throne.
GEC, Peerage, Effingham, p. 9.

1553: 3rd February: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Kentish men march from Deptford to London, and entered Southwark where they wait till 6 February but cannot enter London. Wyatt is aged 23; his fellow-conspirator Winter, commands a fleet which brings him ordnance to his headquarters.
Cassell's History of England, p. 359). From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

To 1553: English voyages to Morocco. Chancellor-Willoughby voyages for a north-east passage of 1553. First steps in English expansionism. Developing connection of Spanish-Morocco trades, latter taps sources of sugar and gold. Trade pioneers begin to import sugar to England, then refine it. Some voyages began in 1551-1552, eg., ship Bark Anchor as reported by Hakluyt. Aboard is Richard Chancellor.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 12-13.

1553: Decay of English Levant trade and rise of the Muscovy Co's Persian links. William Jenkinson initiates overland route with Persia for the Muscovy Co., through Ottoman Empire, dealing with Suliman in Aleppo.

1553: Some men in both the Merchant Adventurers earlier exporting cloth, and the new rising trades were Edward Jackman, Francis Bowyer, William Allen and William Garrard. in 1553 began some merchant syndicates seeking direct trade with Guinea, and here were involved some Spanish merchants who were developing the Morocco trade.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 14.

1553: Anthony Jenkinson: is at Aleppo, gets licence to trade from Suliman the Great.

1553: A voyage allowed by Northumberland (sailed a month after Edward VI succeeded Queen Mary). Two of Whyndham's ships are loaned by Navy. 1553 circa, Whyndham dies. Northumberland now ambitious to go to Asia via North-West Passage. Some backers include: Sir George Barnes, Sir William Gerard and Sir John Yorke already in Africa trade; Sir Andrew Judde, Rowland Hayward and Miles Mordeyne, who promoted later Africa voyages; Marquis Winchester, Earls of Arundel, Bedford and Pembroke, Lord William Howard the Lord Admiral and Sir William Cecil, plus Sir Thomas Gresham acting for a govt interest; all in a joint-stock company. Gov. of this Co. is Sebastian Cabot "for life". He knew English cloth needed a market in cold climates, not China and the Moluccas.
Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 14-19.

1553: Winter took part in Dudley's plot to place a Protestant queen, Jane Grey (1537-beheaded 12 Feb. 1554, for nine days queen of England 6 July 1553 ).

1553: 3rd February: Sir Thomas Wyatt and some Kentish men march from Deptford to London, and entered Southwark where they wait till 6 February but cannot enter London. Wyatt is aged 23; his fellow-conspirator Winter, commanded a fleet which brought him ordnance to his headquarters.
(Cassell's History of England, p.359). From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1553: In the first year of the reign of Philip and Mary (1553), William Hawkins' partner, a naval officer, Thomas Wyndham of Norfolk, and Antonio Anes Pinteado, a Portuguese sailed to Guinea and Benin and although Wyndham died on his first voyage to Gold Coast; his ships brought back gold, pepper and ivory.

"The first voyage (for William Winter) was to Guinea and Benin - In the year of our Lord 1533, the twelfth day of August, sailed from Portsmouth, two goodly ships, the "Primrose" and the "Lion" with a pinnace called the "Moon." Thus sailing forward on their voyage, they came to the Islands of Canary, continuing their course from thence until they arrived at the island of St. Nicholas where they victualled themselves. From hence, following on their course, they came at length to the first land of the country of Guinea, where they fell with the great river of Sestos where they might for their merchandise have laden their ships with the grains of that country, which is a very hot fruit and much like unto a fig as it groweth on the trees. For as figs are full of small seeds, so is the said fruit full of grains which are loose within the cod, having in the midst thereof a hole on every side. This kind of spice is much used in cold countries". ("The first voyage to Guinea and Benin" - Anonymous report Hakluyt's "Voyages").
Per Winter family website.

1553: 3rd February: Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Kentish men march from Deptford to London, and entered Southwark where they wait till 6 February but cannot enter London. Wyatt is aged 23; his fellow-conspirator Winter, commanded a fleet which brought him ordnance to his headquarters. (Cassell's History of England, p. 359).
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1554: In 1554 Capt. John Lok sails from the Thames with three ships to Cape Coast and Kormantin. 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., p. 64.

1554: Another venture for gold and ivory to Africa by John Lok (sic).

1554: Englishman Capt. John Lok sails from the Thames with three ships to Cape Coast and Kormantin. 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. 60-64.
1554: Martin Frobisher voyages with John Lok, captured by Negroes and given to the Portuguese at Elmina, later sent to Europe and released.

1553-1555: London men interested in opening a direct route to the far East, and in 1555 the Muscovy Co. charter claimed right to control all voyages of discovery to east by way of any north-east or north-west passages. See 1556.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 20.

1553-1555: Muscovy Co. established for discovering a north-east passage. this evolved into the Muscovy Company of 1555. Muscovy Co. idea to open a route for gold and spices of the Far East, free from Portuguese interference. new direct trade with Russia for furs and naval stores. (Interference for Mediterranean trade from rise of Turkish and Barbary naval power.
T. S. Willan, `Trade between England and Russia in the second half of the C16th, HER, 63, 1948., pp. 308-309.

1553-1555: Russia Co. is formed, two years later receives monopoly. First English company to employ joint-stock and own ships corporately. Co's captain Chancellour (sic) laid the foundation of its trade.
Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company: A Sociological Appraisal. Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1973. [Also, New York, 1974]., p. 25 and p. 41.

1554: In England, in October, English trade effort by Sir John Yorke, Sir George Barnes, Thomas Lok, Anthony Hickman (traded to Canary Islands and maintained factors there), Edward Castlyn (traded to Canary Islands and maintained factors there), sent another expedition to the Gold Coast (maybe had no official authorization). A second Gold Coast expedition for John Lok as representative of City and Court interests . John Lok (son of Sir William Lok, merchant and alderman of London) has brothers Thomas and Michael. John Lok returns in 1555 with good lading plus 400 lbs of gold.
Williamson, The Age of Drake, pp. 28ff.

1554: 20 February: Conspiracy: A group is sent to the Tower: William Winter, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton (one-time Elizabeth's ambassador in France) and William Thomas. The conspirators wanted Courtenay, a Yorkist heir descended from Sir William Courtney who married Catherine Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, to marry Elizabeth. on 7 April, 1544 the Lord Mayor found against Throckmorton, Crofts, Arnold, Carew, Pickering, Rogers, Winter and Warner who were charged with conspiring with Wyatt, Harper and others in London on 16 November 1553, with seizing the Tower and levying war against the queen to deprive her of her royal title (KB. 329 R.2 Controlment Rolls of the Courts of the King's Bench). Winter, Warner, Rogers and Arnold were never brought to trial. Winter was pardoned on 10 November 1544. The Duke of Suffolk was tried and executed, so was his brother Thomas Grey. Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Boleyn's cousin was executed on 15 March, 1553. Winter was sentenced to death but pardoned in November 1554; he retained his Surveyorship of the Navy and even escorted Philip II on his return to Spain.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1554: 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 a 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.
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.)

1554: 20 February: Conspiracy: A group is sent to the Tower: William Winter, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton (one-time Elizabeth's ambassador in France) and William Thomas. The conspirators wanted Courtenay, a Yorkist heir descended from Sir William Courtney who married Catherine Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, to marry Elizabeth. on 7 April, 1544 the Lord Mayor found against Throckmorton, Crofts, Arnold, Carew, Pickering, Rogers, Winter and Warner who were charged with conspiring with Wyatt, Harper and others in London on 16 November 1553, with seizing the Tower and levying war against the queen to deprive her of her royal title (KB. 329 R.2 Controlment Rolls of the Courts of the King's Bench). Winter, Warner, Rogers and Arnold were never brought to trial. Winter was pardoned on 10 November 1544. The Duke of Suffolk was tried and executed; so was his brother Thomas Grey. Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Boleyn's cousin was executed on 15 March, 1553. Winter was sentenced to death but pardoned in November 1554; he retained his Surveyorship of the Navy and even escorted Philip II on his return to Spain.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1555: Sailed for the Guinea Coast, Englishman Capt. William Towrson (Towerson), Towrson in 1556, three ships on a second try, with one John Davis. In 1558 is Towrson's third voyage with four ships.

1555: The English Muscovy Co. continued the trade with Persia, sending six voyages 1557-1579 till the Turks cut the Persia-Russia route in 1580.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 13.

1555: Creation of the Muscovy Co. charter; 22 of the men named were part of the 34 merchants interested in the 1558 voyage to Guinea. Many of the 1550s Merchant Adventurers were leaders in the Muscovy, Morocco and Guinea ventures of the 1550s.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 14.

1555: Muscovy Co. continues to trade with Persia, sending six voyages 1557-1579 till the Turks cut the Persia-Russia route in 1580.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 13.
1555: Chancellor gets home in 1554 and in 1555 the Muscovy Co. forms to take advantage of new contacts. Chancellor later voyages with Stephen Borough to disaster. Chancellor fails to return in 1557, but England had found an outlet for its cloth trade, and could now break the Hanse's monopoly on shipping timber, cordage, and pitch as maritime supplies. (See 1566 re Sir Humphrey Gilbert.)
G. R. Elton, Tudors, pp. 331ff.
1555: Russia Co. successful in negotiating agreements with Russian Tsar, by White Sea route, see re Anthony Jenkinson in 1557. Co. sent an employee to Persia and Bokhara. Further rights in area granted in 1567.
Mukherjee, Rise and Fall of the East India Company, pp. 25ff.

1555-1570: Noted merchant adventurers 1555-1570 included Richard Malorye, Richard Champyon, Roger Martyn, Richard Foulkes, Thomas Rowe, William Allen, Humphrey Baskerfeld, Richard Chamberlyn, Rowland Heyward, Edward Jackman, Richard Lambert, William Beswick, alderman Lionel Duckett, John Ryvers, Henry Beecher, William Bond, Richard Pype and Alexander Avedon.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 81.
1550s: Date? : Merchant Adventurers send Hugh Willoughby to find China and lost two or three ships.
1555: Anthony Jenkinson admitted to membership of Merchants' Co., and in 1557 appointed by Muscovy Co. as Captain-general of their fleet sailing to Russia. Russia matters by 1557, diplomat to an indecisive Czar. Goes to Bokhara, Caspian area.

1555: Sails Capt. William Towrson (Towerson), for the Guinea Coast. Towrson in 1556, three ships on a second try, with one John Davis. In 1558 is Towrson's third voyage with four ships. 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. 64-73.

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor of 1555-1556 William Garrard. This material also points to other families of other Lords Mayor
Descendants of London grocer John Garrard and sp: Miss Notknown
2. London Lord Mayor Sir William Garrard (c.1555;d.1571) sp: Isabel Nethermill
3. Sir William Garrard (d.17 Nov 1607) sp: Elizabeth Rowe
3. Anne Garrard sp: London Lord Mayor, Spanish Co. merchant Sir George Barne (c.1587;d.2 Jan 1593) 4. William Barne sp: Miss Sandys 4. John Barne son2 sp: Miss Notknown 5. Mary Barne dr1 sp: Francis Roberts of Willesdon, Esq 6. Barne Roberts (d.30 Jan 1610/1611) sp: Mary Anne Glover 7. William Roberts (b.21 Apr 1604;d.19 Sep 1662) sp: Eleanor Atty (b.4 Jun 1608;m.22 Feb 1623/1624;d.22 Nov 1678)
4. Anne Barne wife1 (d.1564) sp: Sec. of State, Sir Francis Walsingham (b.1532;m.1562;d.6 Apr 1590) 4. Elizabeth Barne sp: London Lord Mayor Sir John Rivers (b.1574) 5. Alice Rivers sp: MP Richard Inkpen (d.1577) 6. Elizabeth Inkpen sp: Mr Anderson 5. MP George Rivers (b.1553;d.1630) sp: Frances Bowyer sp: Sir Matthew Carew 5. Thomas Carew Poet 4. John Barne son2 sp: Miss Notknown 5. Mary Barne dr1 3. London Lord Mayor Sir John Garrard (c.1592;d.7 May 1625) sp: Jane Partridge (d.24 Jan 1616) 4. London Lord Mayor Sir Samuel Garrard (c.1709) sp: Miss Notknown 5. Robert Halesfoot Garrard (d.1785) sp: Miriam Richards (d.1801) 6. Samuel Garrard (b.1757) sp: Miss Walker 7. Robert Garrard (b.1793;d.1881) sp: Esther Whippy sp: Miss Walker 7. Robert Garrard (b.1793;d.1881) 6. Goldsmith Robert Garrard (b.1758;d.1818) sp: Sarah Crespel 7. Henry Garrard, to Australia sp: Mary Mortimer sp: Miss Notknown 5. Robert Halesfoot Garrard (d.1785) 4. Sir John Garrard (d.1637) sp: Elizabeth Barkham wife1 (c.1611;m.1611;d.17 Apr 1632) 5. Jane Garrard sp: Sir Justinian Isham 5. Sir John Garrard, Bart2 (d.1685) sp: Jane Lambard 6. Sir John Garrard, Bart3 (d.Jan 1700) sp: Katherine ?ENYON 7. Jane Garrard (d.1724) sp: MP Montague Drake 6. Elizabeth Garrard (d.1683) sp: MP Sir Nicholas Gould, Bart1 (d.1664) 6. Sir John Garrard, Bart3 (d.Jan 1700) sp: Katherine ???? 7. Jane Garrard (d.1724) 4. Benedict Garrard (c.1629) 3. George Garrard sp: Margaret Dacres 4. Anne Garrard 4. Frances Garrard sp: Thomas Howard Earl3 Berkshire (b.1619;d.12 Apr 1706)

In 1553 and 1555 Englishman Richard Eden publishes his Treatise of the New India and Decades of the New World or West India. There arose by 1555 a "fruitful co-operation" in Elton p. 334, of merchants, sailors and moneyed gentry including a few members of court and council. from 1551 the first trade contacts grew with Africa. See 1551.

1556: Portuguese establish a trading factory at Macao, China.

1556: Agricola's De Re Metallica synthesizes knowledge of metals.

1556: Stephen Borough; Explorer for the Muscovy Co. And his more famous brother, William. In 1556 the Muscovy Co. sent Stephen to Russia, following up Chancellor's earlier visits. Stephen's daughter married into the Huguenot family of London alderman John Vassal, which family later became noted as planters/slavers in the Caribbean. This John Vassal was connected with the ship Mayflower, the famed ship bringing New England colonists to America; his daughter married Peter Andrews, said to be captain of Mayflower. Vassal fitted one or two of his own ships to fight against the Spanish Armada. He was later with the Virginia Company.
Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 58, p. 193, Note 22.; J. C. Brandon, Genealogies of Barbados Families, conveyed by email by Chris Codrington.
Taylor, Tudor Geography, variously. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 20, p. 134ff. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 58. Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 26.

1556: In 1556-1557 the Muscovy Co. sent out first Stephen Borough then Anthony Jenkinson to test for north-east passages. In the 1550s, Martin Frobisher, who is a nephew of Muscovy Co. leader John Yorke, participates in first voyage or so to the Guinea trade. In 1576-1578, Frobisher led three ventures to establish trade routes to the Indies by way of a northwest passage with license from Muscovy Co. Frobisher's voyages had both court and merchant backing re Russia, Spanish and Morocco trades.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 20.

1556: Lord Mayor of 1537, Richard Gresham, father of the founder in 1566 of the Royal Exchange, Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579). (Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Gresham, p. 227. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 55. R. G. Lang, 'Social Origins and Social Aspirations of Jacobean London Merchants', Economic History Review, 2, V, 27, 1974., pp. 28-47. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Bacon, regarding ancestors of the Lords Townshend.)

1556-1605AD: Reign of Mogul emperor Akbar in India.

Sebastio (Aviz), King Portugal 1557-1578.

1558: From Brussels, Oliver Brunel advertises that he has travelled on the coasts of northern Russia, and might soon find a North-East Passage to the Indies. He would soon take a Russian ship to the spice islands. (This might reduce a year's sailing time?) This information caused great pain to London merchants, so they denounced Brunel to the Russians as a spy and he is imprisoned for 12 years.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1558 and later: By Elizabeth's reign (from 1558) English ships were unloaded at the English factory at San Lucar de la Barrameda (the only port allowed to trade with the Americas from 1492-1717) and Cadiz. English merchants from London, Southampton, Bristol and the West Country resided in Seville where the Casa de las Indias was situated. The English in Spain became hispanized and the Spanish in England anglicised; the English family of Castlyns or Castelyn were perhaps of Spanish origin. Hugh Tipton, an important English merchant in Seville, was John Hawkins's agent to whom he sent cargoes.
(According to Spanish sources, John Hawkins was even knighted by Philip II whom he served when he was king of England and referred to him as his master during the Ridolfi Plot. (?)

1558: Calais falls from English control.

1558: Sir William Winter was in the fleet under Edward Fiennes de Clinton, earl of Lincoln, which burned Conquet in 1558. In 1559 he has instructions to sail north with 14 royal ships taking artillery and supplies to Berwick and to deal with the French. He kept his fleet intact.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1558: Anthony Wilkinson of the Russia Co. goes into Persia for trade. [Could this be a misprint in a book re Anthony Jenkinson?]

1558: January 1558, William Towerson set out on a third voyage from England. His squadron has two navy ships, evidence the Lord Admiral had connived at such business. Towerson had gone first to Gold Coast, and he and others built trade on success with that. Some fell out of the business; Portugal claimed rights in the area, rights which Towerson did not respect.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 31.

1558: Sir William Winter was in the fleet under Edward Fiennes de Clinton, earl of Lincoln, which burned Conquet in 1558. In 1559 he has instructions to sail north with 14 royal ships taking artillery and supplies to Berwick and to deal with the French. He kept his fleet intact.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1558: Mary Queen of Scots, aged 16, marries the Dauphin of France, the future Francis II.

1559: 16 December: Expectation of a French invasion, Admiral Sir William Winter is with fleet to lie in the Firth of Forth, with instructions to observe the French. He sailed from Gillingham, Kent with 14 vessels with orders to proceed to the Firth of Forth to watch for the French and if attacked to sink and destroy. He left Queenborough on the 27th December and sailed from there in January 1560 when the fleet was driven into Lowestoft, Suffolk by a gale and kept there for a fortnight. It sailed north on 15 January 1560 and was driven back into the Humber but on 20 January 1560 sailed to Berwick, along the coast to Fife near Kinghorn and in front of Burntisland was garrisoned by the French, who attacked Winter, who captured the Forth and cut off French communications and sent a message to Norfolk (Dom. MSS, Rolls House 16.12.1559). (25.1.1560 Scotch MSS, Rolls House).
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1559: 16 December: Expectation of a French invasion, Admiral Sir William Winter is with fleet to lie in the Firth of Forth, with instructions to observe the French. He sailed from Gillingham, Kent with 14 vessels with orders to proceed to the Firth of Forth to watch for the French and if attacked to sink and destroy. He left Queenborough on the 27th December and sailed from there in January 1560 when the fleet was driven into Lowestoft, Suffolk by a gale and kept there for a fortnight. It sailed north on 15 January 1560 and was driven back into the Humber but on 20 January 1560 sailed to Berwick, along the coast to Fife near Kinghorn and in front of Burntisland was garrisoned by the French, who attacked Winter, who captured the Forth and cut off French communications and sent a message to Norfolk
(Dom. MSS, Rolls House 16.12.1559). (25.1.1560 Scotch MSS, Rolls House).
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1559: First cultivation of tobacco starts in Spain.

1559AD: Henry II of France is killed in a jousting accident. Succeeded by his son Francis II died 1560. Arises the rivalry of the Guises and the Bourbon (who are Protestants) in French political life.

1560: Active from 1560, John Dee. Not a mariner, but interested in colonisation. By 1560, "the English by contrast, so far from being at that time the heirs to generations of sea-goers, were newcomers to ocean trade and shipping".
From Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London, Macmillan, 1962., p. 1.

1560: Soon after 1560 John Hawkins moved to London and formed a syndicate of merchants and officials including alderman Sir Lionel Ducket and Sir Thomas Lodge, who were already engaged in Gold Coast trade, and Benjamin Gonson (death date not identified yet) and Sir William Winter (who dies the next year). This syndicate period may mark the time when a rather unexpected nexus of interest developed - between "naval men" and merchant-slavers.

1561: A company of English Guinea merchant adventurers includes Sir William Gerard, William Winter, Benjamin Gonson, Antony Hickman and Edward Castelin - and they sent out John Lok in ship "Minion". This syndicate sent two ships out in 1562 only to be harrassed by the Portuguese, and by now, Kormantin is already a focus point on African coast. A a minor English expedition sailed in 1563.
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. 73-75.

1561: Richard Eden, geographer, "cosmographer" and promoter of colonisation. In 1561, Eden published The Art of Navigation. (In 1563, English sailors made a second voyage to Florida.) Eden had close links with Cabot above, Richard Chancellor and Stephen Borough. A friend of Sir John Cheke, Eden also knew the Spanish historian of Peru, Zarate. Eden dedicated a book to Northumberland, given the Earl/Duke's interest in a voyage to Cathay. (Little is known of Eden's family here.)
Taylor, Tudor Geography, p. 20. Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 43.

1561: Bristol merchant John Frampton trades to Cadiz and Lisbon, then overland to Malaga to buy wines. The Inquisition searches his ship. Frampton was pirated and a decade later still petitioned the admiralty for redress.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 45.

1561: By 1561-1562, Thomas Cobham, the brother of a peer, guilty of various piracies and has shown religious prejudice by murdering a friar. Martin Frobisher conducts similar piracies about now.
Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 42ff.

By 1561, John Hawkins had links with a member of an important Canarian family of Genoese descent in Tenerife named Pedro de Ponte from whom he got information about the African and American trade and Hawkins's pilot, Juan Martinez, was Sevillian. The Canaries were free to English merchants under a treaty and there was a factory of the Company of English Merchants trading with Spain.

1561: Gold Coast venturers include treasurer of Navy Benjamin Gonson and secretary of Navy, Sir William Winter, who had use of four navy ships. The queen finds the equipment and £500 for vittles. Merchants paid the crews,cargo, repairs, undertook to hand on one-third of the profits. John Lok makes another voyage in 1561.
A formal charter party for an African voyage by Queen's ship Minion is found in Landsdowne ms 113, ff9-17, see Williamson, Age of Drake, pp. 34-35.

On Sir William Winter see website: http://www.pillagoda.freewire.co.uk/ADMIRAL.htm

1561-1562: The French Wars of Religion: "Throughout France, members of the rival creeds (Catholic and Huguenot) attacked each other, killing, burning, raping, torturing, and looting. The atrocities were as outrageous as they were cruel. In a frenzy of Protestant iconoclasm, churches were desecrated and their clergy hunted down like vermin; one Huguenot captain wore a necklace of priests' ears while the infamous Baron des Adrets made Catholic prisoners leap to their death from a high tower. Even the dead were attacked; at Orleans a Reformist mob burnt the heart of poor Francois II and threw Joan of Arc's statue into the river. The Counter-Reformation was not yet in evidence so Papist fanatics were rare but nonetheless Catholics were goaded into fury.

At Tours two hundred Huguenots were drowned in the Loire while the bodies of those slaughtered at Sens came floating down to Paris. That grim old soldier Blaise de Montluc made Protestant captives jump from the battlements and remarked with satisfaction that all knew where he had passed by the trees which bore his livery - a hanged Huguenot; on one occasion he strangled a pastor with his own hands." As Pascal said a hundred years later, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as they do from religious conviction."
From: Desmond Seward, The First Bourbon: Henri IV, King of France and Navarre. London, Constable, 1971., p. 143

1562: Maritime history: Legaspi sails in Philippines area.

1562: Capt. John Hawkins has on his own account three ships in 1562. In 1562-1563, England passes an Act legalizing the purchase of slaves. From W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti.

1562 from 1530: (H. R. Fox Bourne, English Merchants: Memoirs, p. 136, old Master William Hawkins of Plymouth, 1530, 1531, 1532, with ship Paul of Plymouth, 250 tons to coasts of Brazil, coast of Guinea, to Brazil to sell to the Indians, his sons William Hawkins a merchant and shipowner in London and John, a "naval hero'. he began the slave trade, three ships outfitted from London, one backer being Alderman Duckett, got 300 slaves from Sierra Leone, in 1562, later used one of the largest ships available in England, later a slave partner with Sir Francis Drake.

1562: Re Hawkins: The African coast was a favourite haunt of French pirates and privateers (mainly Huguenots, who were the finest sailors) who lurked amongst the islands and ravaged the coasts of Senegal and the Spanish West Indies. The difference between a pirate and a privateer was that the latter had Letters of Marque from a monarch or a government licensing them to do what pirates did illegally. William Winter was a privateer who raided the African coast with Letters of Marque from Elizabeth I. English privateers were first licensed by Henry VIII to seize French goods carried under the Spanish flag whereupon Charles V seized all English goods in Flanders and suspended trade with England. Huguenots seamen from Rouen and Dieppe, La Rochelle and Bay of Biscay practised piracy and raided the Caribbean. Under the provisions of the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis in 1559 everything below Tropic of Cancer was considered fair game for corsairs.

1562: John Hawkins, reputed to "begin the English slave trade", (but see an earlier Hawkins of the 1530s entering that trade), with three ships outfitted from London, one backer being London Alderman Duckett. Hawkins gets 300 slaves from Sierra Leone, in 1562, and later uses one of the largest ships available in England. Later Hawkins becomes partner in slaving with Sir Francis Drake.

1562: [John] Hawkins sails from Plymouth in October 1562 to the Canaries, his chief ally amongst the Spanish there being one Pedro de Ponte. Thence Cape Verde, while Ponte dealt with Hispaniola (Jamaica). Hawkins got about 400 slaves, some from Portuguese ships. In April 1563 Hawkins got to north of Hispaniolo, Puerto de Plata, then to La Isabela, bartering slaves for goods, pearls, hides and sugars, some gold.
1562: Frenchman Jean Ribault leads an expedition to Florida in 1562. About now, Elizabeth I wanted Thomas Stukely to go to Florida with Ribault, but Stukeley found Channel privateering more lucrative. Another Frenchman, a Huguenot, Rene de Laudonniere, sailed for Florida in 1564 with approval of French government.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 47, p. 60.

1562: First slave trading English venture in 1562, under John Hawkins (son of William earlier trading to Brazils, sailing from Plymouth. (Walvin cites The First Voyage of John Hawkins, 1562-1563, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations... [12 Vols.] Glasgow, 1904.)
Elton says Hawkins has ideas of peacefully invading Spanish monopoly. He made a final profit of 60 per cent on a round-trip. By time he returns, relations between Spain and England are deteriorating.
James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London, Harper Collins, 1992., p. 303, p. 341.

1562: John Hawkins, reputed to have "began the English slave trade", (but see an earlier Hawkins of the 1530s entering that trade), with three ships outfitted from London, one backer being London Lord Mayor Duckett.
Merchant adventurer Sir Lionel Duckett; He had three daughters with dowry of 5000 pounds in Tudor money. Fox-Bourne, Merchant Memoirs. Duckett's staff worked with copper and silver, and in cloth manufacturing. Duckett had a company with Cecil, and the Earls of Pembroke, to construct waterworks to drain mines. Taylor, Tudor Geography, p. 107. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 81.

1562: Hawkins got 300 slaves from Sierra Leone, in 1562, and later used one of the largest ships available in England. Later Hawkins becomes partner in slaving with Sir Francis Drake.

1562: [John] Hawkins sails from Plymouth in October 1562 to the Canaries, his chief ally amongst the Spanish there being one Pedro de Ponte. Thence Cape Verde, while Ponte dealt with Hispaniola (Jamaica). Hawkins got about 400 slaves, some from Portuguese ships. In April 1563 Hawkins got to north of Hispaniolo, Puerto de Plata, then to La Isabela, bartering slaves for goods, pearls, hides and sugars, some gold.
1562: Frenchman Jean Ribault leads an expedition to Florida in 1562. About now, Elizabeth I wanted Thomas Stukely to go to Florida with Ribault, but Stukeley found Channel privateering more lucrative. Another Frenchman, a Huguenot, Rene de Laudonniere, sailed for Florida in 1564 with approval of French government.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 47, p. 60.

1562: Voyage of Legaspi in Philippines.

1562: First slave trading English venture in 1562, under John Hawkins (son of William earlier trading to Brazils, sailing from Plymouth. (Walvin cites The First Voyage of John Hawkins, 1562-1563, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations... (12 Vols.) Glasgow, 1904.)
Elton says Hawkins has ideas of peacefully invading Spanish monopoly. He made a final profit of 60 per cent on a round-trip. By time he returns, relations between Spain and England are deteriorating.
James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London, Harper Collins, 1992., p. 303, p. 341.

1563: Stress of urbanisation: French parliament begs the king to prohibit vehicles from the streets of Paris.

1563: England: Anthony Jenkinson makes another trip to Russia, at Moscow by 20 August, 1563, one of his companions then is Edward Clarke who went home with Jenkinson's letters. Then from London came a second expedition to Russia of May 1564 with Thomas Alcock.

1563: William's brother George Winter (Clerk of Ships, died 1580) of Dyrham, Gloucestershire (which he purchased from Sir Walter Dennys in 1571 (13 Elizabeth I) is mentioned in an order from Elizabeth dated 16 July 1563 to Lord Clinton, Lord High Admiral asking him to deliver certain stores to George Winter "Clerk of our Ships" (Add. MSS Vol. 5752) a position he held until he died in 1582.

1564: Death of Michelangelo and birth of English playwright, William Shakespeare. Note: Michelangelo: The received wisdom that he is a homosexual is dismissed. From a book review, September 1999. See James Beck, Three Worlds of Michelangelo. Norton, 1999.

1564: King of Moluccas Islands, Indonesia, cedes his territorial rights to king of Portugal. Portuguese now link Indian Ocean trade to the New World via Philippines.

1564-1567: Muscovy Co. loses leader as Richard Chancellor dies, replaced by Anthony Jenkinson.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 37.

1565: Spanish colonise Florida.

1565AD: India: Of the Hindu kingdoms surviving, Vijayanagar survives till destroyed in 1565 by Muslims.

1565: Philippines: An expedition from New Spain commanded by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, establishes a first Spanish settlement in Sebu, Manila, on the island of Luzon, is occupied in 1571, partly to gain a link to existing trade with China. From J. H. Parry, The European Reconnaissance: Selected Documents. London, Macmillan, 1968., p. 255

1565: 30 May: Anthony Jenkinson addresses memorial to Elizabeth 1 re north-east passage to Cathay, but nothing comes of ideas. Jenkinson back in Russia by 23 Aug. 1566, obtains monopoly of White Sea trade, but more trouble with Czar.

1565: Francis Drake sails with John Lovell on a slaving voyage from Guinea to South America.

1566: Invention of the full stop, as a punctuation mark, by Aldus Manutius the Younger, author of a punctuation handbook, Interpungendi ratio. He was grandson of the Venetian printer who invented "the paperback book".

1566: Maritime history: Mendana's first voyage.

1566: Sir Humphrey Gilbert, promoter of navigation, and his brother Adrian active by now. Humphrey Gilbert writes on discovering Cathay, "a mix of sense and nonsense". Dee spoke of a "Southern Continent" (Australia?). (See 1574.)

1566: Mendana's first voyage.

1566: Elizabeth I has financial stake in John Hawkins' second voyage of plunder undertaken in defiance of views of the Spanish.

1566: John Lovell follows in Hawkins' maritime footsteps, but finds Spanish ports closed to him, and he is remembered only as he had Francis Drake (born c.1540) with him. Drake's father a chaplain at Chatam dockyard. (This John Hawkins born in 1532).

1566: Sir Humphrey Gilbert, promoter of navigation, and his brother Adrian active by now. Humphrey Gilbert writes on discovering Cathay, "a mix of sense and nonsense". John Dee speaks of a "Southern Continent". (See 1574.)
Elton, Tudor England, pp. 336ff.

1566: On 9 November 1566 John Lovell, on his way to the Indies sailed to Cape Verde with four ships Paul, Salomon, Pasco and Swallow, seized a Portuguese vessel with negroes, wax, ivory and other merchandise. In February 1567 he captured a ship with a cargo of sugar and negroes, close to Santiago, capital of the Cape Verde Islands, killing some of the crew, as well as a ship from Lisbon bound for Brazil and two more off the Island of Maio.

1567: By now, Dutch ships from West Friesland and Zeeland have anchored in Spanish Havana, Cuba. Gradually, the Dutch became interested in the following commodities from the West Coast of Africa, the West Indies and the Amazon-Orinoco area: palm oil, balsam oil, gums, white incense or mastix, orange dye called annatto, Brazil wood, other aromatic woods, pearls, gold and silver, salt, animal hides, tobacco, sugar, ginger, canafistula, sarsparilla, cochineal, dyewoods, cacao. indigo, Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 54.

1567: Francis Drake commands Judith 50-tons on the third slaving voyage of his kinsman, John Hawkins, on which voyage, only Drake's and Hawkins' ship escape from an encounter with Spanish at San Juan de Ulua. In following years, Drake becomes most successful of the English corsairs annoying the Spanish main.
(Encyclopedia Britannica entry, Drake).

1567: Hawkins equips his third fleet, in which voyages Elizabeth I has shares.

Follows material on London Lord Mayor 1568 Thomas Rowe and his Lord Mayor son for 1607, Henry Rowe.
Descendants of Merchant Tailor Robert Rowe and sp: Miss Notknown
2. Sir, Lord Mayor Thomas Rowe Thomas Merchant adventurer (c.1569) sp: Mary Gresham
3. Robert Rowe (c.1551) sp: Elinor Notknown 4. Coloniser, EICo trader, Sir Thomas Rowe (b.1581;d.1644) sp: Eleanor Cave (m.1613) 3. Rowe Elizabeth sp: Sir William Garrard (d.17 Nov 1607) 3. London Lord Mayor William Roe London (c.1590) 3. London Lord Mayor Sir Henry Rowe (c.1607) sp: Miss Notknown
4. Susan Rowe wife2 (c.19 Sep 1582;d.16 Jan 1645/1646) sp: Gov. EICo London alderman William Halliday (b.1610;d.14 Feb 1623/1624)
5. Miss Halliday sp: Sir Henry Mildmay

1568AD: -Circa 1600 Period of national unification in Japan begins when feudal lord, Oda Nobunaga, captures capital, Kyoto.

1568: Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain.

1568AD: Japan: Regional Lord Oda Nobunaga first seized Kyoto (Azuchi Momoyama Period). Castles. Hirajiro versus Yamashiro, break of power of Buddhist monk armies & Ashikagas.

1568-1600AD: Japan: Age of Unification.

1568: England: William Cecil (Burghley) effectively becomes chairman of joint-stock company managing about a third of the slaving voyages of John Hawkins. The Earls of Leicester and Pembroke also heavy investors, but most profit of the third Hawkins' voyage was booty is recaptured by the Spaniards in Sept. 1568 at San Juan de Ullao. He has much trade with the Canary Islands.
Who's Who / Shakespeare, p. 110. See also G. R. Elton, Tudor England.

1568: Civil war in France.

1568: December 1568 Spanish ships take borrowed Genoese money to pay the army in Netherlands of Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alba, scattered by Huguenot pirates, find refuge in the ports of Fowey, Plymouth and Southampton. William Hawkins, mayor of Plymouth (John's brother) helped to unload treasure there which Elizabeth promptly seized, saying she would borrow the money from the Genoese herself. Philip retaliated by seizing all English ships and sailors in Spanish ports, Elizabeth threw all Spaniards and Flemings in London into prisons and seized their goods, far more valuable than the original Spanish cargo.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1568: December 1568 Spanish ships take borrowed Genoese money to pay the army in Netherlands of Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alba, scattered by Huguenot pirates, find refuge in the ports of Fowey, Plymouth and Southampton. William Hawkins, mayor of Plymouth (John's brother) helped to unload treasure there which Elizabeth promptly seized, saying she would borrow the money from the Genoese herself. Philip retaliated by seizing all English ships and sailors in Spanish ports, Elizabeth threw all Spaniards and Flemings in London into prisons and seized their goods, far more valuable than the original Spanish cargo.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1568: Cecil Burghley effectively became chairman of the joint-stock company managing about a third of the slaving voyages of John Hawkins. The Earls of Leicester and Pembroke also heavy investors, but most profit of the third Hawkins' voyage was booty was recaptured by the Spaniards in Sept. 1568 at San Juan de Ullao. He had much trade with the Canary Islands.
Who's Who / Shakespeare, p. 110. See also G. R. Elton, Tudor England.

1569: January, Hawkins returns from his third voyage slaving and later sent out as a privateer. In 1569 Walter Raleigh gained war experience when men of Devon raised a body of horse for service under Coligny.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 102.

1569: By 1569 the Portuguese conception of shape of Australia had found its way to the "international" maps of Mercator, and Spaniards such as Mendana, and by 1569, Mercator had changed his mind about what lay south of Java, adopting the Dauphin map propositions.
McIntyre, Secret Discovery of Australia, p. 53, p. 133.

1569: And earlier, Hawkins' third voyage. Much capital invested including some from Elizabeth who loans two ships. Drake was on Judith. Origins here of Drake's revenge against the Spanish. John Oxenham on this voyage, hanged at Lima. Hawkins' right hand man was sailor Robert Barrett, burnt alive in market-place at Seville.
A. L. Rowse, Elizabethan Garland, pp. 99ff.

1569: January, Hawkins returns from his third voyage slaving and later sent out as a privateer. In 1569 Walter Raleigh gained war experience when men of Devon raised a body of horse for service under Coligny.
Williamson, Age of Drake, p. 102.

1569: The English lose the cloth staple at Antwerp, the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish under Alba and the trade in Mediterranean centred in Seville. Cecil established a new centre in Germany that year and William Winter in command of 7 of the Queen's ships, convoyed fleet of merchantmen to Hamburg taking cloth, spices sugar, pepper, hides, dyes and wines captured by the Channel rovers.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1569: And earlier, Hawkins' third voyage. Much capital invested including some from Elizabeth who loans two ships. Drake was on Judith. Origins here of Drake's revenge against the Spanish. John Oxenham on this voyage, hanged at Lima. Hawkins' right hand man was sailor Robert Barrett, burnt alive in market-place at Seville.
A. L. Rowse, Elizabethan Garland, pp. 99ff.

1569: A small number of merchants in 1589 proposed a voyage to Far East by way of Cape Good Hope, using ships Susan, Merchant Royal and Edward Bonaventure, owned by Paul Bayning and Thomas Cordell, of Venice Co., men also in Spanish trade and leading privateers, these ships plus one other were used in "pathbreaking" voyage of James Lancaster to India Ocean in 1591-1592. (Brenner, p. 21.)

1570: Japan: Nagasaki is opened to western trade.

1570: August: Huguenot Pourtholt, lying at Plymouth, offers Admiral Winter ten chests of money if he would "but wink at an attack on the Spaniards." Huguenot traders from La Rochelle sell salt and wine, buying gunpowder with the proceeds, use Plymouth as a base of operations for their piracy as well as a market for their goods. There is an entry in Cecil's diary of an agreement by the Huguenot leader to deliver salt and wine to the value of £10,000. (Murdin 766).
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor for 1570-1571 Sir Rowland Hayward
Descendants of George Hayward and sp: Margaret Whitebrooke
2. London Lord Mayor Sir Rowland Hayward (b.1520;d.5 Dec 1593) sp: Joan Tillesworth wife1 sp: Catherine Smythe wife2 (b.1564)
3. Sir John Hayward 3. Susan Hayward wife1 (d.1592) sp: MP Henry Townshend (b.1537;d.1621) 4. MP, journalist, Hayward Townshend (b.1577;d.1603) sp: Francasina Neville Illegit 3. Elizabeth Hayward sp: MP Richard Warren (b.1545;d.1598) sp: Thomas Knyvett Lord Knyvett Baron Knyvet of Escrick (b.1548;m.1597;d.1622) 3. Alice Hayward sp: MP Sir Richard Buller 4. Francis Buller sp: Thomasine (Honywood) Honeywood 4. Thomasine Buller sp: Josias Calmady 3. Joan Hayward sp: John Thynne 4. MP Sir Thomas II Thynne (b.1578;d.1639) sp: Catharine Howard wife2 sp: Maria Audley wife1 (m.1601) 3. Catherine widow Hayward wife2 (d.1632) sp: Sir Richard Sondes (b.1571;m.1609;d.1645)

1571: Digges' theodolite for surveying and aiming.

1571: In 1571 William Winter attacked Tenerife (Simancas Trans. 1571, p. 339.) William Winter (probably Sir William's son and not the Admiral himself who was now getting too old for such adventures) was taken prisoner by the Spanish in the Canaries and nearly brought before the Inquisition but escaped in time. Sir William Winter was involved in the slave and Guinea trade with John Hawkins with whom he later fell out.
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1571: The Battle of Lepanto; 117 Turkish galleys taken and 80 lost, only 12 Christian vessels were lost.

1571: Foundation by Spanish of city Manila, the Philippines.

March 1571: With Cecil's connivance, John Hawkins (who had briefly served Philip II when he was king of England) went to the Spanish ambassador, Gerau de Spes, an avowed enemy of the English, to offer his fleet at Plymouth. Hawkins' confidential servant and friend George Fitzwilliam, who had sailed with him from Plymouth on 18 October 1564 on his second slaving voyage, had been captured in San Juan de Ulua with 29 other English seamen in 1569 and sent to a Spanish prison in Seville but released in 1570 after he had a letter sent by Hugh Tipton, a prominent English businessman in the city. Fitzwilliam, a relative of Jane Dormer, duchess of Feria (the childhood playmate of Edward VI) had a hand in uncovering the Ridolfi Plot. As Hawkins' agent, he offered ships to Philip II to help put Mary on English throne. A plan arose to assassinate Elizabeth and install Mary. When Fitzwilliam returned to England with letters from the Duke of Feria (who died shortly afterwards) and his son to Hawkins, he was sent from Plymouth to London to Cecil (created Lord Burghley in February 1571) with a letter. Three days after Hawkins wrote, the Duke of Norfolk was sent to the Tower. The bishop of Ross was told he no longer had diplomatic immunity as Mary's ambassador and confessed everything.
The duke was executed on 2 June 1572 and his son Philip, earl of Arundel died imprisoned in the Tower. (There were spies and counter spies, agents and double-agents in Walsingham's, Burghley's and Philip II's spy networks - the king of Spain spun such a complicated web that no one has ever been able to disentangle it. The Spanish spies used milk or lemon juice as invisible ink to write messages in codes and ciphers which showed up when the paper was heated.)
From websites on the Hawkins and Winter families cited elsewhere.

1571AD: Turks conquer Cyprus.

1572: France: St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, as Guise faction slaughters the Protestant factions of Paris.

1572: England: May 1572, Drake with two ships sets off from Plymouth to attack Spanish with 75 men. He tries to take "Darien". Gets some $40,000 of Spanish silver.

1572: England: Drake raided Nombre de Dios in 1572 to bring home £40,000. (See Neville Williams, Elizabeth 1: Queen of England. London. Sphere, 1971.) Elizabeth later knights Drake. Hakluyt's book becomes famous.

1572: News of Mendana's discoveries in Pacific reach England.
1572: Anthony Jenkinson ceases travelling. He married in 1567 Judith Mersh, daughter of London merchant John Mersh, governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers and of a company trading to Netherlands, who is related to Sir Thomas Gresham.

Follows family history material on London Lord Mayor 1573 John Rivers (parents unknown)
London Lord Mayor Sir John Rivers (b.1574) sp: Elizabeth Barne
3. Alice Rivers sp: MP Richard Inkpen (d.1577) 4. Elizabeth Inkpen sp: Mr Anderson
3. MP George Rivers (b.1553;d.1630) sp: Frances Bowyer
2. Miss Rivers sp: Robert Streatfeild (d.1559) 3. Henry Streatfeild sp: Alice Moody 4. Richard Streatfeild (b.1559) sp: Anne Fremlyn 5. Henry Streatfeild (b.1586) sp: Miss Notknown 6. Richard Streatfeild (b.1611) sp: Anne TERRY 7. Henry Streatfeild (b.1639) sp: Sarah Ashdown 7. William Streatfeild sp: Miss Notknown
6. Richard Streatfeild (b.1611) sp: Miss Notknown
2. London Lord Mayor Sir John Rivers (b.1574) - 2. Miss Rivers

1573-1620 Reign of emperor Wan Li in China: period of great paintings and porcelain-making; imperial kilns at Jingde produce vast quantities of "china" [ceramics].

1573: Walter Devereux *1541-1576), first Earl of Essex, unsuccessfully tries to plant an English colony in Ulster, Ireland, enviages Ireland as "England's Indies" and predicted that England would have to restrict emigration to Ireland as the Spanish had restricted emigrants to the Indies [the New World] Yet another English "colonist" of the Irish was Robert Dudley (1532-1588) the first Earl of Leicester. (In about 1155 the English had benefited from a papal assignment of their "lordship" over Ireland,before the time of William the Conqueror. As early as 1315 in the matter of land-holding, England with occupying Ireland had held traditional Irish tribal Brehon Law in contempt whilst denying the Irish recourse to English law. In 1315-1317, and since arguments had gone on since 1277, the Irish responded with military action against the English, helped by forces from Scotland.) (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York, Verso, 2002, pp. 31-45.)

1574: More to come

1575++: Reference item: 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.

Olde Wives Tales from Olde England

Life in the 1500s: some interesting things to ponder... submitted "from the Net"

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

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England is old and small, and they started running out of places to bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their bones to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence on the "graveyard shift" they would know that someone was "saved by the bell" or he was a "dead ringer."

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Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and were still smelling pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the b.o.

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Baths equaled a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

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Houses had thatched roofs. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the pets... dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs."

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There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. So, they found if they made beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, it addressed that problem. Hence those beautiful big four-poster beds with canopies. I wonder if this is where we get the saying "Good night and don't let the bed bugs bite..."

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The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors which would get slippery in the winter when wet. So they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed at the entry way, hence a "thresh hold."

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They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They mostly ate vegetables and didn't get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme: peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

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Sometimes they could obtain pork and would feel really special when that happened. When company came over, they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It was a sign of wealth and that a man "could really bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

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Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food. This happened most often with tomatoes, so they stopped eating tomatoes... for 400 years.

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Most people didn't have pewter plates, but had trenchers - a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms got into the wood. After eating off wormy trenchers, folk would get "trench mouth."

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Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the "upper crust".

More olde wive's tales from the Net - Where some expressions came from

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's."

Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle," is the phrase inspired by this practice.

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes...when you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That's where the phrase, "good night, sleep tight" came from.

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

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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.

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.

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.

1583: Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten proceeds to the East Indies, and later writes five big books 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.

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

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.)

1597: Scotland: The Scots Poor Law is amended to make vagrants and their children into "workers" at a time when vagrants (hard to believe) make up about ten per cent of the population. They become subject to a court sentence of lifetime servitude to private employers. This provision is intensified and made more punitive in 1605. Mining interests found such provisions very useful as a method of "recruiting" miners. (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York, Verso, 2002., p. 218)

Follows material on London Lord Mayor 1597-1598 Sir Richard Saltonstall.
Descendants of Gilbert Saltonstall of Yorkshire 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

1598-1621: A London hosier and tobacco dealer active by 1598 was Thomas Claiborne, eldest son of Thomas Claiborne and Grace Bellingham. (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 121, p. 157, p. 596). It was apparently his brother, William, the surveyor of Virginia, who traded furs with the Susquehannock Indians and later backed the Kent Island project. William had some links with William Cloberry in London, who had influence as an English Secretary of State for Scotland and became a partner with Sir William Alexander's attempt to settle the matter of the proprietorship of Nova Scotia. The Kent Island project was intended to help provide provisions for Nova Scotia. Help with this plan had come also from a City of London trader and financier, John de la Barre. Maurice Thomson was also interested in promoting Kent Island. Regarding the Providence Island Company, by May 1638, William Claiborne was granted a commission to found a new settlement on the island of Ruatan off the coast of Honduras, which till 1642 was called Rich Island, when the Spanish overwhelmed it. (Maurice Thomson was also involved here). Brenner (p. 596) says Claiborne himself also kept a covetous eye on Maryland).

1621: Miles Standish and crew enter the inner harbour of Boston in September.

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.)

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.)

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.

On 20 March, 1602 was founded the Dutch East India Company (VOC). By 1605 the Dutch had the main Spice Islands but were driven out in 1606 by a Spanish expedition from the Philippines.
(Glen Barclay, A History of the Pacific: From the Stone Age to the Present Day. London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978., p. 32.)

The VOC had at the top a board of 17 merchants, and was a corporation with a modern style, not joint-stock, but permanent capital, and its policies finally led to violence.
(Ton Vermeulen, `The Dutch Entry into the East Indies', pp. 33-46 in John Hardy and Alan Frost, (Eds)., European Voyaging Towards Australia. Canberra, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Occasional Paper No. 8, 1990., p. 37. Mukherjee, Rise and Fall / East India Co, pp. 111ff.)

1600S: Reference item: Chris and Carolyn Caldicott, The Spice Routes: Chronicles and Recipes from around the World. Fances Lincoln, 2001.

16002: Reference item: Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956.

Pre-1600?: The little-known Englishman and vicar, armchair navigator, 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.)

1600s: Residents of Persia and India begin eating and drinking opium mixtures for recreational use. Portuguese merchants carrying cargoes of Indian opium through Macao direct its trade flow into China.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1605:Reference item: Victor von Klarwill, (Ed.), The Fugger News-Letters, Being a Selection of Unpublished Letters from the Correspondents of the House of Fugger during the Years 1568-1605. (Authorized translation by Pauline de Chary) New York/London, GP Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1925.

Reference item:

See: Chris and Carolyn Caldicott, The Spice Routes: Chronicles and Recipes from around the World. Fances Lincoln, 2001.

1602: Spain has had seven years of plague and famine and expels 275,000 Christianized Moors over six years beginning in 1602. (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. New York, Verso, 2002., p. 5)

1603: Reference item: Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956. (On a noted financier of the day))

1600: William Gilbert's "De Magnete" synthesizes, predicts vacuum in outer space.
About 1600: A physicist William Gilbert uses the word, "electric".

1600: C16th generally: Roland Fletcher, Assoc. Professor of Archaeology, Sydney University, thinks that one million people lived around Angkor Wat in the C16th. Similar-size populations lived in Edo (now Tokyo), Beijing, Sian (now Xi'an), Sukhothai in Thailand, and Pagan in what is now Burma.

1600++: tobacco and coffee consumption skyrockets in Europe.

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

Circa 1600: Abbas I (reigns from 1587 to 1629) introduces reforms in Persia and expands territories.

1600: Charles E. Nowell, The Great Discoveries and the First Colonial Empires. Ithaca, 1954.*

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

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

1601: Raleigh helps suppress the rebellion of Essex and presides at execution of Essex as captain of the guard.

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

Circa 1601: France: With all these distractions the King did not neglect his cares of state. He and Sully laboured to increase the Royal revenues. It is impossible to exaggerate the nightmare complexity of the Ancien Regime taxation system with its crazy mosaic of regional and social variations in assessment and imposition, its host of levies, dues and tariffs, ordinary and extraordinary, direct and indirect, sometimes nominal, sometimes crushing and frequently self-defeating, and its hydra-headed multitude of exemptions, the whole administered by a battening host of greedy officials; Dallington shuddered at 'the infinite number in all France, upon why they lie, as thick as the Grasshoppers in Egypt'. Why this chaotic system could not be simplified was of course a question of fundamental law; the rights of those who levied taxes had to be protected no less than the rights of those who were exempt from them, official posts being sacrosanct. All that Henri and Sully could hope to do was try to work this fantastically cumbersome and antiquated engine: it was a question of oil rather than spare parts, let alone new machinery.
They had first to combat the now almost traditional practices of embezzlement and plain theft which devoured the greater part of the revenue, and to force those who collected monies due to the King to pay them into his treasury. Much of the Royal income from indirect taxes reached him through the agency of 'farmers' whom the impossible system made indispensable; at least they had an incentive to extract the maximum from the unfortunate taxpayer. By cutting their percentage Sully made an immediate profit without impairing the tax farmers' greedy industry. Unlawful exemptions were set aside and corrupt assessments readjusted."
...Sir George Carew (the English ambassador) wrote: "When Sully first came to the managing of the revenues, he found... all things out of order, full of robbery, of officers full of confusion, no treasure, no munition, no furniture for the king's houses and the crown indebted three hundred million (that is, three hundred million pounds sterling). Since that time, in February 1608, he had acquitted one hundred and thirty millions of that debt, redeeming the most part of the revenues of the crown that were mortgaged; that he had brought good store of treasure into the Bastille, filled most of the arsenals with munition, ... but only by reducing that to the king's coffers which was embezzled by under-officers."
From Desmond Seward, The First Bourbon: Henri IV, King of France and Navarre. London, Constable, 1971., p. 143.

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

1601: England enacts a new Poor Law.

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

1602: 20 March: Organisation by attorney-general of Holland, Johan van Oldebarnvelt, who realised the need for an organised monopoly, which 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.)

1602: Formation of Dutch East India Company.

1602: Lawrence Hyde about 1602 is railing in England against the system of monopolies.

1602: Bartholomew Gosnold charts the coast of lower Maine and Massachusetts, and gives names to Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.
See K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

1602: Raleigh sells his Irish estates to Richard Boyle. Raleigh finds he disagrees with James I re conflict with Spain, and is also expelled from Durham House. is dismissed from captaincy of guard, deprived of his monopolies and of government of Jersey.

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

1602: 20 March: Organisation by attorney-general of Holland, Johan van Oldebarnvelt, who realised the need for an organised monopoly, which 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.)

1602: By 1602-1604 in Guinea trade are Charles Leigh and his brother Oliph (sic). Charles Howard/Nottingham deals with shipowning merchants Robert and William Bragg who also handle war business. Allied to Cecil were Sir Thomas Myddleton and Sir Richard Hawkins; also in Cecil's circles Thomas Alabaster an Anglo-Iberian trader of Seville. Myddleton has a partner, Nicholas Farrar.
See Andrews, Chapter five of the Spanish Caribbean, pp. 110 ff.

1603: Japan: Tokugawa Shogunate, Edo Period.

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

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

1603: England: Raleigh on 19 July 1603 is committed to Tower of London, unsuccessfully tries suicide, on trial by November 1603, facing an unfair attorney-general Sir Edward Coke and sentenced to death. Raleigh is sent to the Tower to 19 March, 1616. His estate is confiscated from Raleigh's son by James I and only part repaid.

1603: Mariner Martin Pring on ship Speedwell re-surveys the areas of lower Maine and Massachusetts surveyed by Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602 and sails up Piscataqua River. Samuel de Champlain operates from short-lived French settlement of St. Croix at border of Maine/New Brunswick, sketches the coast north to Cape Cod (area also surveyed by George Weymouth). These surveys excite little real interest although some London and Plymouth merchants formed a trading-colonizing company that took the name of Raleigh's ill-fated settlement of Virginia.
Verbatim from K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Between 1604-1606, one of King James I's court was Sir Edward Michelbourne, one of the founders of the East India Company. However, James I also licenced one English and one Scots courtier to make their own voyages to the East, against the interests of the infant Company. Michelbourne became an interloper, as he'd fallen foul of the Company in London by not paying his dues. By 1604, Michelbourne had obtained from James a license to make an independent voyage to Asia, to China and Japan, in violation of the earlier royal charter, and he cruised as a pirate for two years; he returned to England in 1606 and shortly died. The East India Company desired but did not gain redress for the damage he'd done their reputation till 1609. (Later, Charles I when he backed Courteen's endeavours behaved much as James I had - distrustfully). (The East India Company "recalled" earlier distributing some 70,000 pounds in bribes to win a new charter, about or after 1604.)
(Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, pp. 71-79.)

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

1604: The Dutch later become aware that Englishman Charles Leigh had maintained the first English colony on the Wiapoco River by 1604. By 1600 the Dutch were on the Xingu River with two forts. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 76.
Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 76.

1604: In 1604, James I licensed Sir Edward Michelborne to trade in China and elsewhere in the east. In 1609 (in an example of the unreliability of monarchs) James was persuaded to allow the establishment of a Scottish East India Company, which infringed the charters of the East India, the Levant and the Russia Companies. Some companies were forced to buy out their rivals.

1604: By 1604 in the English Caribbean trade are new men John Eldred and Richard Hall, talking to Sir Robert Cecil in 1604 of such trade, some Dutch names given, some Genoese, John Williams of London, Edward Savage a London merchant a go-between, Charles Howard earl of Nottingham and Lord High Admiral 1585-1619 is a political ally of Sir Robt Cecil and a privateer too.

1605: First Dutch sightings of Australia. Torres sails in Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea.

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

1604+: The first French East India Company was founded in 1604 - with letters patent granted by Louis XIII, but this effort was still-born. (See Mukherjee's book here on French activity.) In 1623, Coen, "the real founder of the Dutch eastern empire", tortured and killed ten Englishmen at Amboyna, the Spice Islands, ousting the English except from Bantam at Java. This soured English-Dutch relations and also, as a shifting of focus, led England to concentrate on the Indian mainland. The English remembered the Amboyna incident bitterly for generations.
(On Coen, see Om Prakash, The Dutch Factories in India, 1617-1623: A Collection of Dutch East India Company Documents pertaining to India. New Delhi, Manoharial Publishers, 1984.)

1605: Time of troubles in Russia.

In 1606, as returning interloper, Michelbourne had warned the Company that the English at Surat could expect trouble from the Portuguese (Middleton later fought the Portuguese; so did Captain Thomas Best of Company Voyage 10). With the English East India Company, 1607, Voyage 3, Captain Keeling and his second-in-command, Captain William Hawkins, had orders to open trade at Surat, or Red Sea ports, before going to the Archipelago. Hawkins here was ex the Levant Company and spoke Turkish (it is hard to align the career of this Hawkins with what we find on the other Hawkins' of Plymouth, treated earlier in these files.) James I meantime had written to the King at Surat. (There was at one time a Captain Keeling with a Lt. William Hawkins on Hector.)
(Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800.)

Otherwise, in 1606, James I also with one charter established the London and Plymouth Companies, giving them grants extending 200 miles inland of "America". In early 1607, three ships under the command of Captain Christopher Newport (ex Mediterranean and Asia trades) carried 100 men and four boys to the Chesapeake. (Here, Sir Thomas Smith/Smythe, the leading merchant of the Virginia Company of London, was the same man also interested in the East India Company). Another Virginia Company investor was George Calvert (1578-1632), Lord Baltimore, a Catholic whose title had been granted by James I. Calvert had been the king's principal secretary of state but resigned, and he also invested in the New England Company.
(Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 21-22, pp. 42ff.)

In 1606, a few days before Christmas, sailed from London the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to begin the American colonisation.
(R. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 3.)

The third East India Company voyage was in 1607, sailing for the Red Sea. The Company's fourth voyage was commanded by Alexander Sharpie (who receives uncommon little attention from historians). In January 1608, Sir Edward Michelbourne led an independent interloping voyage and found Surat unsafe. In 1608, William Hawkins (was he of the noted Plymouth family?) went to Surat, then to Agra, the Mogul Imperial capital, for permission to open trade on the Indian sub-continent. The Portuguese were represented at the Mogul Court by Jesuits, who succeeded in having Hawkins expelled in 1611. So the English East India Company's first bid to move into India ended in failure. Another move was made by Best in 1612. Later followed Sir Thomas Roe's visit to the Moguls.

From 1607 the English East India Company ceases using its own ships and begins to charter ships.
Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 95.

Following this commercial decision, a list of notables with links to both the Virginia Company and also the East India Company would include:
Thomas Dyke (active 1617), interested in the 1612 voyage for a north-west passage, investor in the East India, Virginia and Bermuda companies;
Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously.
John Dyke, of the Rich/Earl Warwick faction controlling the Virginia Company by 1624, owner of some privateering ships used by the second Earl of Warwick, and a deputy-governor of the Providence Island Company;
Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 63.
The dissident Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629), MP, of the Rich faction of the Virginia Company as its treasurer 1619-1621, also East India Company investor;
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 70-100. Who's Who /Shakespeare, pp. 214ff.

William Paget (1572-1628/29), fifth Baron Paget;
GEC, Peerage, Paget, pp. 283ff. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Asshurst, p. 18; Lorimer, Amazon, p. 215, Note 3. By 1612 he had invested in the East India, Virginia and Bermuda companies. He was a member of the council of the Virginia Company, 1611-1612 and actively promoted colonisation and colonial trade.
(Privateer, Christopher Newport. An East India Company investor, he commanded the Virginia Company voyage of 1606.
K. R. Andrews, `Christopher Newport of Limehouse, Mariner', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, 11, 1954., pp. 28-41. D. B. Quinn, `Christopher Newport in 1590', North Carolina Historical Review, 29, 1952., pp. 305-316. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 36, p. 84; Rabb, Enterprise, p. 221.
(Richard Weston, first Earl Portland. (GEC, Peerage, Denbigh, p. 179; Portland, p. 583ff. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 605; Hervey, Arundel, p. 262.) a Catholic and friend of Spain, who in 1624 was a Commissioner for Virginia, a navy comptroller and a commissioner of the East India Company; Gabriel Barber of the Bermuda and Virginia companies (died 1633):
( Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 63, p. 125.)
Thomas Cordell (died 1612);
London Lord mayor Ralph Freeman.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 73-103.)

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

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

1606: Ships chartered by Elizabeth I are instructed to purchase the finest Indian opium and transport it back to England.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

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

1607: Under William Keeling, third expedition of ships of English East India Co. to spice islands, with instructions to keep ahead of the Dutch, with £17,600 of gold bullion and only £7000 worth of English-produced goods. Also sailing is David Middleton, captain of a small ship, Consent (at Table Bay by 24 July 1607), who knew Gabriel Towerson, who had been left at Bantam in the spice islands by David's brother Henry in 1604. David Middleton sailed for the Celebes Islands, where he bought cloves (and slaves) and sailed for England. Middleton spent £3000 and reaped more than £36,000.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1606: Privateer Christopher Newport: An East India Company investor, he commands the Virginia Company voyage of 1606.

1606: Execution of some Gunpowder plotters including descendants of Sir William Winter, earlier a noted naval administrator.
On the Gunpowder Plot, see website: (broken link?) http://www.gunpowder-plot.org/news/1998_04/wintour1.htm

1606: Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629), associated with the Virginia Company as treasurer 1619-1621, also active with the Somers Island Company (1606-1621) and a member of the East India Company. His brother George (died 1644) was a treasurer of the Virginia Company, his sister had a daughter who married a governor of Virginia, Sir Francis Wyatt.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 70-100. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, pp. 339ff. Who's Who /Shakespeare, pp. 214ff.)

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

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

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

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

1607: English colony of Virginia founded in America.

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

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

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

1607: Under William Keeling, third expedition of ships of English East India Co. to spice islands, with instructions to keep ahead of the Dutch, with £17,600 of gold bullion and only £7000 worth of English-produced goods. Also sailing is David Middleton, captain of a small ship, Consent (at Table Bay by 24 July 1607), who knew Gabriel Towerson, who had been left at Bantam in the spice islands by David's brother Henry in 1604. David Middleton sailed for the Celebes Islands, where he bought cloves (and slaves) and sailed for England. Middleton spent £3000 and reaped more than £36,000.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1607: English colony of Virginia founded.

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

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

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

1609: England makes a "plantation" of six counties of Ulster, Ireland. (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York, Verso, 2002., p. 31.)

1610: Samuel Eliot Morison, European Discovery of America. (Two Vols.) Boston, 1971-1974.*

1610: David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America. New York, 1974.* Also, Set Fair for Roanoke. Chapel Hill, 1984.*

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

Virginia to 1749: how it grew out of Amazon ventures:

Virginia. A word applied to tobacco. The name comes from Virgin, from the Virgin Queen, England's unmarried Queen Elizabeth. The area's name first referred to parts of North America not held by the Spanish or the French. Raleigh's piratical English colony on Roanake Island had failed, but England tried again, slightly north, with a venture sponsored by The London Company, or, the Virginia Company.
(On the merchants behind the first Virginia Company, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 98ff.)

James I in 1606 with one charter established the London and Plymouth Companies, granting them land extending 200 miles inland of the Virginian coast.
(A few days before Christmas 1606, sailed from London the ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to begin the American colonisation; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 3. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 93-94. C. M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History. Four Vols. New Haven, 1934-1936.)

In early 1607, three ships and 144 men under the command of Captain Christopher Newport, ex the Mediterranean and Asia trade, carried 100 men and four boys to the Chesapeake Bay. They entered the bay in April 1607, landing on Cape Henry. The new colony elected local councillors, selected a peninsula up the James River, and established there on 31 May, 1607, the first permanent English settlement, called Jamestown, the first of some 13 British colonies-to-be. Richmond is the capital of Virginia, today. Norfolk is the next largest city. The coastal plain or Tidewater region was flat and swampy enough to be called Dismal Swamp. It is cut by four large tidal rivers, the Potomac, the Rappahanock, The York and the James, which empty into Chesapeake Bay. By 1697 the best Tidewater lands had been taken up and some soils were found exhausted; so began the settling of the Piedmont.

At the western end the Tidewater rises and provides the Piedmont, which stretches south to the North Carolina boundary. Rising abruptly in the piedmont is the Blue Ridge, and between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian plateau further west is the Shenandoah Valley, which has provided one of the world's memorable songs inspired by great rivers, songs that are often wide and sweeping, reflective, pensive if not outrightly melancholy.

As troubles reigned in Virginia, the numbers of newcomers were cut to only 38 by the end of 1607. The Virginian colonists held out, however, and more supplies plus additional settlers arrived in January and October 1608. A new charter of May 1609 abolished the original 1606 patent and a local governor with near-dictatorial powers was appointed. A large expedition, nine ships, sailed from England in May 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates as deputy-governor.
(On the English discovery of Bermuda, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 14. As a comparative view, (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 59) in 1609 there were 176 traders active in the unregulated trade with Spain.)

Two ships were lost in the Bermudas, the others arrived in May 1610 to find the people at Jamestown had barely survived "the starving winter". More settlers arrived however.

James I thought tobacco smoking horrible, loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to lungs, and he blasted it anonymously in a pamphlet, A Covnter [sic] Blaste to Tobacco by R.B. anno 1604.
(Richard B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry. Yale University Press, 1950., p. 116.)
Aware of lung cancer, modern medicine would agree with him. As early as 1610 the Virginia Company experienced trouble in covering the expenses of voyages, since many investors had defaulted on the second and third payment of their stocks. By 1612 it had to use lotteries to keep solvent. In 1611 Sir Thomas Dale was given authority in Virginia. In 1612 a third and final charter was given to the Virginia Company over the Bermuda Islands. This charter was more liberal in that each person transporting himself to Virginia would be granted 50 acres, and the company also set up subsidiary, private joint-stock companies to settle larger areas. And so, agriculture.

From 1612, John Rolfe tried tobacco planting using a Trinidad variety which found favour with the English. He married the Indian princess Pocahontas and thereby obtained some eight years of peace with the Indians of the area.
(In 1616, as a convert to Christianity, the wife of John Rolfe, and mother of a son, with several other Indians, Pocahontas sailed to London and was presented as a princess to the king and queen. She intended to return home in 1617 but took ill and died at Gravesend to be buried there. She was one of a line of indigenous people to visit England, including, from the Pacific, Tahitians and Australian Aboriginals. For example, Aboriginals Bennelong with Governor Arthur Phillip, Mydidie with Sir Joseph Banks. Like Pocahontas, several of these indigenes died in England, although Bennelong returned to Sydney. On John Smith and Pocahontas, see Ch. 4 in Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London, Methuen, 1986.)

The new governor became Thomas West, Lord De La Warre. ( Thomas West (1577-1618), Lord De La Warre.
Following sections reply heavily on Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire.)

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

1607: The Plymouth Company of England, the second Virginia Co. group, focuses attention on New England. They sent an expedition under George Popham to Sagahadoc (modern Popham Beach), to Maine, the Kennebec River. Their ship is 30-tonner Virginia, built by Digby, and not, as sometimes said, the first vessel built in America, as about seven ships earlier built by Spanish or French had preceded her. Virginia sails between England and her colony for another 20 years.

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

1608: Champlain founds Quebec for France in Canada.

1608: Death of London merchant John I Smythe.
(Hasler, The House of Commons, 1558-1603, p. 403).

1608: Lippershey invents telescope; Galileo makes astronomical observations.

An impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor 1608-1609 Sir Humphrey Weld
Descendants of John Weld sp: Joanna Fitzhugh-45664
2. London Lord Mayor Sir Humphrey Weld (c.1608/1609;d.1610) sp: Anne Wheeler
3. Sir John Weld Kt (d.1662) sp: Frances (has issue) Whitmore (d.1656)
4. Sir John Weld Kt Banneret (d.1674) sp: Hon. Mary Stourton (m.1648) 4. Humphrey Weld (d.1684) sp: Clara Arundell (m.1638) 5. Mary Weld sp: Carlingford Earl2 Carlingford (d.1690) 4. William Weld sp: Miss Notknown 5. William Weld sp: Elizabeth Sherburne (m.1672) 6. Humphrey Weld (d.1722) sp: Margaret Simeon (m.1701) 7. Edward Weld of Lulworth Castle (b.1705;d.1761) sp: Hon. Catherine Elizabeth Aston (m.1727;d.1739) sp: Mary Theresa Vaughan wife2 (m.1740;d.1754) 8. Edward Weld Of Lulworth (b.1741;d.1775) sp: Maria Mary Anne Smythe Fitzherbert (b.1756;d.1837) 6. Humphrey Weld (d.1722) sp: Margaret Simeon (m.1701) 7. Edward Weld of Lulworth Castle (b.1705;d.1761) sp: Miss Notknown 5. William Weld 4. Margaret Weld sp: Sir William Bowyer Bart1 (b.1612;d.2 Oct 1679) 5. Sir William Bowyer, Bart2 (b.1639) sp: Frances Cecil 6. Cecil Bowyer sp: Julian Parker 7. Sir William Bowyer, Bart3 (b.1710) sp: Lady Anne Stonhouse (d.22 May 1785) 8. Sir William Bowyer, Bart4 (b.1736;d.Apr 1799) sp: Anne Carey (m.26 Aug 1776;d.25 Dec 1802) 8. Lt-General Henry Bowyer 8. Vice-Admiral George Bowyer (b.1739;d.6 Dec 1799) sp: Henrietta Brett wife2 (m.4 Jun 1782;d.Nov 1845) 9. Sir George Bowyer Bart6, MP sp: Anne Hammond Douglas (m.19 Nov 1808;d.1844) sp: Margaret (Widow Downing) Price wife1 (d.18 Sep 1778) 8. Richard (Atkins) Bowyer-Atkins Bowyer Judge-Advocate (b.1745;d.21 Nov 1820) sp: Elizabeth Brady of Dublin (m.3 Feb 1773) 8. Penelope Bowyer

1609: Englishman Henry Hudson in service of the Dutch enters Delaware Bay. See later history of Pennsylvania.

Follows an impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor 1610-1611 Sir William Craven
Descendants of William Craven and sp: Beatrix Hunter(?) widow (d.1547)
2. London Lord mayor Sir William Craven (c.1610;d.1618) sp: Elizabeth Whitemore Whitmore
3. Whig, Carolina activist, William Craven Earl1 Craven (b.1608;d.9 Apr 1697) 3. 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) 4. William Herbert Earl1 Powis, Royalist, Mqs1 Powis (b.1626;d.2 Jun 1696) sp: Lady bedchamber Elizabeth Somerset (m.Jul 1654;d.11 Mar 1690/1691) 4. Mary Herbert (b.Oct 1623) sp: George Talbot Lord Talbot (b.1620;m.Jan 1639;d.Mar 1644) 4. Urania Herbert sp: MP Coulson Fellowes (b.1696;d.1769) 3. John Craven Baron Craven, Died Young, of Ryton (b.1643;d.1648) 3. Thomas Craven Unm, Died Young (b.1617;d.1637) 3. 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) 3. Mary Craven wife1 sp: Thomas Coventry Baron2 Coventry (b.1606;m.2 Apr 1627) 4. George Coventry Baron3 Coventry (b.1628;d.15 Dec 1680) sp: Margaret Tufton 4. 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 (Grimes) spinster Graham wife2 (m.16 Jul 1695;d.1724) 2. Henry Craven (d.1604) sp: Margaret Notknown (d.1613) 3. William Craven (b.1571) 3. Thomas Craven (b.1578) 3. Robert Craven (b.1574;d.1661) sp: Margaret Shearwood (d.1670) 4. Sir William Craven Of Lenchwick (b.1610;d.1655) sp: Elizabeth Fairfax 4. Thomas Craven of Burnstall (b.1611;d.1682) sp: Anne Proctor (d.1681) 4. Henry Craven (b.1608;d.1634) 4. Sir Anthony Craven (d.1670) sp: Elizabeth Pelnets 2. Anthony Craven, of Darley (d.1604) sp: Margaret Notknown (d.1613) 3. William Craven

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

1609: 12 September, English explorer Henry Hudson on Half Moon has discovered Delawere Bay, then sails into the New York river that now bears his name. The Dutch meantime are interested in furs from Indians on the Hudson River and in 1613 they make a post below Albany for such trade.

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

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

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

1610: Arrival of tea in Europe from China.

1611: The Dutch establish an outpost in Africa - Maure or Fort Nassau - and their first governor on the Gold Coast is Jacob Adriaenszoon Clantius. The climate of the area in the next few years took 1000 Dutch lives. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 75.

1611: English establish factory at Masulipatam, India.

1611: England by 1611 had engaged the first killing of a "Greenland whale". Early English whalers included Thomas Edge and Marmaduke of Hull; William Baffin's name was attached to Baffin Bay. In 1618 arose the Scottish East India and the Greenland companies, but the Dutch companies for such ventures were larger than the English companies. The English whalers sailed from Leith, Yarmouth (sent by soap manufacturers), but whaling declined during the Civil War. (By 1671, George Turfry and Co. were whaling, but the industry seemed on its last legs, attempts to re-establish it failing. (Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade. London, Adam and Charles Black, 1978).

An impression of the family history of London Lord Mayor 1612-1613 John Swinnerton,
1. Morocco trade merchant John Swinnerton (d.Oct 1608) sp: Miss Notknown
2. Wine merchant and customs farmer Lord Mayor John Swinnerton (b.1564;d.8 Dec 1616) sp: Buckfolde Thomasine - 3. Swinnerton Richard

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

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

August 1611: Sir Henry Middleton's latest EICo fleet so far has accomplished nothing.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1612: Sir John Davies (1569-1626) considers English colonization in Ireland and writes A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued .... Davies was Solicitor-General 1603-1606 for James I in Ireland,and was later Attorney-General for England. Davies surveyed the history of England's interests in Ireland from 1160 to the plantation of Ulster in 1609. (Cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York, Verso, 2002., p. 44. See also, Hans S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland. Cambridge, 1985.)

1612: In 1612 the Mayor of Bristol is Thomas Povey, entertaining Queen Anne (of Denmark) when she visited his city. (Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, Vol. 5, p. 147, p. 155, p. 162). Reasons connected with the origin of English chattel slavery will mean the name Povey is repeated.

1612: Jurist Hugo Grotius publishes his book Mare Librum: A Discourse on the right which the Hollanders claim of trade to India.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1613: The Dutch make extra efforts to control their imports from the Guianas and to colonize there, but are destroyed by Spaniards from Trinidad. But by 1615, the Dutch returned to Cayenne on the Waipoco and on the Amazon. Theodore Claessen of Amsterdam placed 280 colonists at Cayenne, but these people went to Surinam. Of these people, Capt Aert Adriaenszoon Groenwegen (who had been in the service of the Anglo-Dutch house of Sir William Courteen Senior) became rather "romantically mysterious". Groenwegen later served the Spaniards as a factor on the Orinoco, but then went to Zeeland, and met promoter-burgomaster Jan de Moor of Flushing. de Moor found the official support of the States of Holland and recruited Pieter Lodewijksz and his son Jan Pietersz, just returned from the Guianas planting tobacco, for work on the Wild Coast/Amazon area. Plus a fleet of three ships under Michiel Geleynsse, to make a colony on the Wiapoco. These were not the only Dutch endeavours about now.
Groenewegen's work was funded by Jan de Moor "in co-operation" with William Courteen. Groenwegen left Flushing in 1616. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 79ff.

1613: The Hague, Holland. Dutch and English negotiators meet (till 1615) to try to promote peace in trade.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1613: East India Co. factor John Jourdain sails from Bantam to Amboyna in spice islands to buy cloves and spices. Jourdain gets on badly with the Dutch, including Jan Coen.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1613: English establish factory at Surat, India.

1613: Thomas Argall in ship Treasurer sails to Mount Desert on Maine Coast, America, to thwart French efforts there to plant a colony.

1614: Whaling history: John Smith has an expedition to discover more of the whaling fishery off the coast of Maine, New England, reporting a great number of whales and the richness of the cod resources. Full-time American whaling probably stemmed from 1640 with the English of Nantucket Island. Although the Indians of the outer Long Island area of New York had earlier been whalers. 1614 is a marker year for the "first chartered commerce" of New York.
K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988., p. 229.

1614: A small English ship under Richard Welden moves amongst the spice islands, dealing with English already there including John Jourdain.

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

1614: John Smith of the colony of Virginia sails along the coast of New England to Cape Cod . Stocks of fish are found, sold to Spanish or English for £1500, a large profit for the times.

1615: Coffee is introduced to Europe.

14 May 1615: Armed conflict breaks out between Dutch and English in the spice islands.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1615: England: James I requires glass to be made only with coal.

1615: Sir Thomas Roe goes as official ambassador of James I to the Mogul Court, Delhi, India.

1615: By 27 June, 1615 the East India Company agent at Firando, Japan, is Mr. Wickham, who wanted to buy tea from Macao. (Misra, p. 19).

1615: Edward Wright, a little-known navigator and mathematician, dies 1615. Wright knew the navigator John Davis. Wright lectured on navigation for the East India Company, and had gone with George Clifford Lord Cumberland to the Azores.
Who's Who/ Shakespeare, p. 274.

1616: June: The Dutch commonwealth is fully liberated. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, p. 75.

1616: Groenewegen's work in 1616 was funded by Jan de Moor "in co-operation" with William Courteen. Groenwegen left Flushing in 1616 with three ships, and founded a settlement 20 miles up the Essequibo River, using an abandoned Portuguese fort; and he married the daughter of an Indian chief, to rule his colony for nearly 50, dying in 1664 aged 83, a wealthy man. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 79ff.

1616: John Smith of Virginia publishes book, Description of New England (an early pitch for real estate development). This helps to promote a series of new New England settlements, such as Plymouth in 1620, established by Pilgrims.

1616-1617: Raleigh obtains freedom from the Tower, where he has been occupied writing, with "discreditable means". He promises James I to find a gold mine in Guinea without bothering the Spanish, despite warning of Spanish ambassador, and James I agrees, though if Raleigh commits piracy he will be executed when he returns. Raleigh sails on 17 March, 1617, ill-equipped, and reaches mouth of Orinoco River by 31 December, 1617. Raleigh is ill and remains at Trinidad. He sends on Lawrence Keymis and his son Walter Raleigh, and a cousin of Walter. They encounter Spanish and Walter Jnr is killed. Keymis suicided when reproached by Raleigh Snr. for this outcome. When Raleigh returned home the king's threat is made good and Raleigh is executed 29 October, 1618.
(Encyclopedia Britannica, entry on Raleigh.).

23 December, 1616: Arrives at Run, a small spice island (an atoll) in the Indian Ocean, English ship Swan Capt. Nathaniel Courthope. James I has ordered that the ship reach their destination in secret. (The spice trade can bring profits in London of up to 60,0000 per cent.) (From: Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader who Changes the Course of History. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.

1616: Governor of Virginia Sir Thomas Dale arrives back in London with Indian woman, Pocahontas. Dale's next work for English expansionists is to go to the spice islands, where he arrives about January 1619 with a new East India Company fleet.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1616: Nathaniel Courthope leaves his East India Company job as factor at Sukadana and returns to Bantam in the spice islands. Where he meets EICo merchant John Jourdain, who is from Lyme Regis in Dorset, England.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

October 1616, John Jourdain gives Nathaniel Courthope use of two ships in the spice islands, Swan (Master John Davis) and Defence to make for the Island of Run. Courthope begins to make fortifications.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

November 1617: Spice Islands, English ship Speedwell meets three Dutch vessels which humiliate Speedwell. By now, English feel tired of Dutch using physical force.

23 December, 1616: Arrives at Run, a small spice island in the Indian Ocean, English ship Swan Capt. Nathaniel Courthope. James I has ordered that the ship reach their destination in secret. (The spice trade can bring profits in London of up to 60,0000 per cent.) (From: Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader who Changed the Course of History. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.

1617: Japan: Renewed persecution of Christians (fumie- walk on crucifix- test).

In 1620 came the abandonment of the charter of the Amazon Company. By February 1621, Sir Nathaniel Rich had wanted to see the establishment of a West India Company.
(Sir Nathaniel Rich, (1585-1636), knighted in 1617, was the senior business manager for the second Earl of Warwick, with Maurice Thomson evidently reporting to him. Nathaniel was grandson by illegitimate descent of Richard, first Baron Rich. Nathaniel's father Richard (died 1610) had been a Virginia colonist. DNB entry for Nathaniel Rich. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 242. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 195, Note 1.)

From 1618 erupted a squabble between the Sandys/Smythe factions for the role of treasurer of the Virginia Company.
(Here, the present writer would agree more with Brenner's analysis than with Bliss' analysis. The solution to the problem with the Virginia Company lay in finding a mode of government which fitted a plantation production system novel to the English; not, as was the Sandys plan, of finding ways to transplant English community life in a new environment. It rather seems as if Rich, the puritan Earl of Warwick realised more astutely than many others that an individualistic Puritanism that discriminated less against common folk - colonists - could solve this problem more easily).

1618: English merchants in search of slaves establish a fort on James Island at mouth of River Gambia, West African coast.

Spring 1618: Spice Islands: Three English ships are sent to reinforce Nathaniel Courthope on Island of Run.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1618, Bohemian Revolt in Europe: Outbreak of the Thirty Years' War.

30 December 1618, an English fleet gathers off Jakarta, Indonesia, eleven ships under Sir Thomas Dale, to fight seven Dutch ships under Jan Coen. Dale allowed the Dutch to escape unharmed. (Dale dies on 19 July 1619.)

1618: In 1618 James I commutes a sentence of death to transportation because the convicted person was a carpenter, and carpenters were needed in Virginia. If this commutation was mercy, it was mercy instituting a regime long to be corrupted in the history of British colonialism.

1618: Sir William St. John, active circa 1618, of the Guinea Company. (St John is active from 1618 in the Guinea Company, and saw some developments which culminated in the company selling Kormantin on the West African Coast to the English East India Company in 1657.
Sir Percival Griffiths, A Licence to Trade: The History of the English Chartered Companies. London, Ernest Benn, 1974.)

In 1618, Rich/Earl Warwick sent his ship Treasurer to plunder the Spanish West Indies; then he sought to use Virginia as a base for similar pirating. However, by 1620, Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629) and his circle intervened in this, and brought information to the Privy Council and the Spanish ambassador.
(Relevant here is Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, Chapter IV, The New-Merchant Leadership of the Colonial Trades.)

How far the colonising faction led by Warwick should be regarded as "aristocratic" or "commercial" remains unclear. Answering to Warwick in commercial matters from 1619, it appears, was his kinsman Sir Nathaniel Rich. (Newton regards Nathaniel Rich as the business head of the Warwick faction.) And some opponents of Sandys included an East India Company officer and alderman, Morris Abbot, a Levant Company officer Christopher Barron, and some top Merchant Adventurers including William Essington, William Palmer and Edward Palmer.
(Sir Nathaniel Rich is noted thus in Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16.)

Sir Thomas Smythe led another anti-Sandys faction of merchants including Sir John Wolstenholme and Sir William Russell, both leading crown financiers, plus merchants Hugh Hamersley, alderman Robert Johnson, Nicholas Leate, Anthony Abdy, John Dyke, Humphrey Slaney, Robert Bateman, Thomas Styles, Richard Edwards (all Levant Men), William Canning and Humphrey Handford (of the French trade and an importer of European wares).
(On the rivalry between the camps of Sandys and Sir Thomas Smith, see Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16.

In 1619, Sandys supplanted Smith as treasurer of the Virginia Company. In the Sandys camp were Wriothesley, Earl Southampton, Lord Cavendish (William Cavendish (1551-1625), first Baron Cavendish, first Earl Devonshire), and John and Nicholas Ferrar. Sandys saw "direct links between power and freedom, company profits and colonial prosperity". Lord Cavendish also had one-eighth of the Bermudas. It might also be noted that Frances, sister of Lord Cavendish, married William Maynard, first Baron Maynard, son of secretary of the treasury for Lord Burghley, Sir Henry Maynard. Frances' brother Charles, an auditor of the Exchequer, married Essex Corsellis, daughter of a colleague of Maurice Thomson, Zegar Corsellis, a Dutch financier name. In later generations, Cavendish women married Charles Lord Rich and Robert Lord Rich.
(GEC, Peerage, Maynard, p. 599. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 621.)

The "Rich faction", the faction of the second earl of Warwick, remained extremely active, although the extent to which it owed its Virginian interests to its earlier Amazon interests is debatable, and has not yet been traced in detail by historians. In 1618 the second Earl of Warwick had become an original member of the Guinea Company, newly-incorporated to engage in profitable trade in Negroes.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 34-36.)

In 1618 the ship Treasurer Capt Daniel Elfrith was fitted with a Savoy Commission as a man-o-war; she carried the first shipment of Negroes ever sold in Virginia, and her arrival provided Warwick's enemies in Virginia with reasons to attack. They accused him of piracy, though Elfrith said the Negroes been obtained properly.
(Here, Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 36, notes with irony that the same man, Warwick, who introduced Negroes slaves into British America also introduced the charter of Massachusetts, later the foremost abolitionist state.)

At the time of the ship money dispute, the value of the Rich navy was so great that Warwick obtained a commission modelled on the lines of Queen Elizabeth's commission to the anti-Spanish privateer, George Clifford (1558-1605), the thirteenth Lord Clifford, and third Earl of Cumberland , who according to Newton in European Nations in the West Indies had been "more prominent than any other English nobleman as a leader of corsairs; since 1587 he had organised and fitted out at his own expense no less than eleven expeditions against Spanish commerce", with his twelfth attempt being his last.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 37ff. R. G. Marsden, `Early Prize Law', English Historical Review, April, 1910. Arthur Percival Newton, (Ed.), The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, Black, 1933., p. 115. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 70. GEC, Peerage, Cumberland, p. 568; Clifford, pp. 294ff. Some of Cumberland's commercial associates were Thomas Cordell (Mercers, and Levant Co.), William Garraway, Sir John Hart, Paul Bayning, John Watts.)

1618++: So, the anti-Sandys faction included Smythe and the Rich/Warwick factions. There was a tendency to first destroy the Virginia Company in order to save it, and at the time, James I's treasurer was Sir Lionel Cranfield.
(Lionel (1574-75-1645), first Earl Middlesex, was early in his career, to 1622, a merchant adventurer. Rabb, Enterprise, p. 21, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 68. GEC, Peerage, Middlesex, pp. 689ff.)

The pro-Sandys faction from 1618, the year of the "Great Charter" of the Virginia Company included William, first Baron Cavendish, and Wriothesley, Earl Southampton, plus brothers John and Nicholas Ferrar.

Squabbling over Virginia, and with company reforms of 1618, Sir Edwin Sandys' "gentry party" battled Sir Thomas Smythe's "merchant party" for the position of treasurer of the Virginia Company.
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 99-100.)

Sandys' gentry party from 1618 ousted the Smythe faction, but still found it hard to keep Virginia supplied financially. London merchants withdrew from Virginian adventures, till 1623 when they joined forces to regain control of tobacco handling. Just who gained that control is difficult to find, but by 1617, Virginia was shipping 50,000 pounds weight of tobacco per year, and her planters were developing a boom mentality. By 1638, Virginia exported two million pounds of tobacco.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 113.)

Dissolution of the Virginia Company:

In 1619, the Earl of Warwick took a prominent part in financing Roger North's Guiana expedition, and in 1620 he was granted a seat on the council of the revived Plymouth Company for New England, and went to its meetings. As to linkages between Puritans, Warwick/Rich was a neighbour of Sir John Bourchier, whose daughter Elizabeth had recently married Oliver Cromwell. Warwick as organiser of the Guiana Company had wanted to settle there some of the separatists of Robinson's congregation at Leyden, but the dissolution of the Guiana Company meant that Company looked to North Virginia instead, hence the sailing of the Mayflower in August 1620. (The captain of the Mayflower seems to have been Capt. Peter Andrews, who engaged in Virginia and West Indies tobacco planting. Andrews was brother-in-law of the ship's owner, Samuel Vassall)
( Vassall was a Presbyterian City man and a navy commissioner who married a daughter of the London-Levant merchant, Abraham Cartwright. He was once interested with Pym in suppressing an Irish rebellion. He refused to pay ship money, was a wholesale clothier, imported eastern currants and silks, and also tobacco, flax and hemp. With Mathew Cradock he became a co-founder of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Vassall probably owned the Mayflower, taking the original Puritan Fathers to America. William Vassall was a Massachusetts Bay colonist.
Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 59-60, p. 193, Note 22. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 151ff.)

(It was later, by 13 January, 1630 that Warwick obtained for the Mayflower puritans a grant of the second Plymouth patent.)

Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, was the eldest son of Robert (1559/60-1618-19), the first Earl Warwick and third Baron Rich, and great-grandson of Richard, first Baron Rich, chancellor of the Court of Augmentations to Henry VIII, founder of the family fortunes, a Puritan and a contemporary of John Preston.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 192ff. GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff; Newhaven, p. 539.)

The Rich family were anti-Spanish and therefore distasteful to James I. The second Earl of Warwick continued the earlier privateering expeditions of his forebears; in 1614 he became one of the original members of the Somers Isles Company. In 1618 he had 14 shares in the Somers Isle Company and one of the divisions of the Islands was called Warwick Tribe (sic, a peculiar appellation). In 1616 he and his father fitted out two ships with a Savoy Commission to rove in the East Indies. In fact, the second Earl of Warwick, and his commercial associates busily united the themes of anti-Spanish activity, interest in Virginia, and trade in the zones desired by the English East India Company. The anti-Spanish vehemence of Warwick's day lasted long in English cultural life, and was once expressed once Australia had been settled, by the Enderby whalers, by way of fantasies about attacking parts of the western coasts of South America. On one album of English folk songs can be found two anti-Spanish lyrics:

Take this scone to wear this horn, it was the crest when you were born,
Your father's father wore it and your father wore it too...
Hal-an-Tow, jolly rumble-o, We were up, long before the day-o.
To welcome in the summer, to welcome in the May-o.
The summer is a comin' and the winter's gone away-o.
What happened to the Spaniards, that makes a greater boast though?
Why they shall eat the feathered goose, and we shall eat the roast-o.
Hal-an-Tow. Jolly rumble-o. We were up, long before the day-o.

And again:

And now I will tell of brave Elliott, the first youth that enters the ring,
and so proudly rejoice I to tell it, ... he fought for his country and king.
When the Spaniards besieged Gibraltar t'was Elliott defended the place,
and he soon caused their plans for to alter, some died, others fell in disgrace...
(From (1) Hal-an-Tow and (2) Earsdon Sword Dance Song, sung by The Watersons, Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ceremonial Folk Songs. Topic Records, UK. 12T136.

The Earl of Warwick's Savoy commission was obtained for considerable money from Scarnafissi, the agent of Charles Emmanuel I, who was then on a money-seeking mission to England. In the East, the Rich ships took a Mogul ship worth £100,000, which was recaptured by an East India Company ship; there followed a long dispute with the Company, though while it proceeded, Rich was "constantly at the Company", borrowing stock ordnance and stores for his ships.

1619: The first Negroes arrived in Virginia in 1619 in a Dutch ship. Initially, most Negroes were indentured, not enslaved, but later, atrocious legislation by Europeans successively eroded any ideas or sentiments protecting the rights of Negroes so as to justify slavery, where human beings were owned as property. The local assembly, the House of Burgesses, became the first of its kind in the New World. By 1619 the urge on American soil for self government asserted itself very quickly, and by 1641 the colony was well established.

Regroupings in London of Virginia merchant factions:

One early Virginia Company investor was a magnate of the Levant and East India companies, Sir Thomas Smythe, whose plantation efforts were unsuccessful.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 97-98, p. 154.

Sir Thomas Smythe in 1623 became governor of the Bermuda Company, to be succeeded in that role by his son-in-law, alderman Robert Johnson.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 98; Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 70).

Regrettably, confusion still exists about the genealogy of Sir Thomas Smythe. Here, however, arises a further genealogical mystery concerning a Lord Mayor of London about 1518, Sir Thomas Mirfyn. The implications are as follows - Mirfyn's possible longer descendancy via a son Edward and a daughter Frances involves the later names Palavicino, Cromwells, Earls Fauconberg, the later Edens, the eighth Marquis Tweeddale, other Cromwellians, second Baron Ashburton (that is, Baring), and Barringtons of the Rich faction. If the same Sir Thomas Mirfyn had a daughter Joan who married Lord Mayor Andrew Judd, then Mirfyn's shorter or other descendancy would include names such as customs receiver, "Customer" Smythe (died 1591), Knightleys as republicans, Lord Mayor Rowland Hayward, Roper/Lords Teynham; and perhaps some members of the Rich faction.)

By 1616, Smythe, a London alderman, had been sometime governor of the East India, Muscovy, French and Somers Islands companies. His son-in-law was Robert Johnson, a director of the Levant and East India companies who became a governor of the Bermuda Company. Smythe became one of the leading merchants of the Virginia Company of London, but he remained interested also in the East India Company.
(The Rich family, Earls Warwick, had a large interest in Bermuda; and the second Earl of Warwick became governor of the Bermuda Company in 1628. Alison Olson, Making The Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790. London, Harvard University Press, London. 1992., p. 17.)

Sir Horatio Palavicino (1540-1600) was an Elizabethan financier from a Genoese family who died a remarkably wealthy English commoner. By 1592 he had tried to corner the world supply of pepper (does anyone ask if this had relation to reasons for the establishment of either the English or Dutch East India companies?) He had children by his wife Anne Hoftman, who as widow married the Royalist, Sir Oliver Cromwell (died 1626). Several of Cromwell's children by his first wife, Elizabeth Bromley, married Palavicino's children. Sir Horatio lived in the notable parish, St Dunstan's, Tower Ward.
Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956.)

Another of the "Virginia Magazine" was Sir John Wolstenholme, a leading London financier and a customs farmer as well as East India Company director. Other Virginia investors included William Essington, a leading Merchant Adventurer who was a son-in-law of the Merchant Adventurer, Sir Thomas Hayes, a Lord Mayor of London; William Canning, a noted Merchant Adventurer, was also deputy-governor of the Bermuda Company and several times master of the Ironmongers. (Ironmongery became important items of trade on the African slave coasts).
(Another noted Virginia Company investor was George Calvert (1578-1632), Lord Baltimore, a Catholic with a title granted by James I. Calvert had been the king's principal secretary of state but resigned; he also invested in the Virginia Company and the New England Company, and spent money on a Newfoundland colony, Avalon. Later his son Cecilius acquired land which became the colony of Maryland. Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, 1607-1763. London, Macmillan, 1965., pp. 21-23, pp. 42ff. GEC, Peerage, Baltimore, p. 393.)

With the arrival in London of James I after the death of Elizabeth I, earlier English interest in anti-Spanish privateering abated somewhat, but interest in Amazon adventures was retained, especially by the first and/or the second Earl Warwick. The descendants of Amazon adventurers gradually developed an interest in Caribbean plantations, which also allowed them to retain an anti-Spanish spirit. Meanwhile, seven or more Levant Company merchants had helped establish the East India Company in 1599-1600, and that grouping had little interest in the Caribbean, or anti-Spanish activity. But from about 1618, some figures interested in Amazon adventures firmed their interest in Virginian business.

1619: At the Virginia Company Court meeting, April 28, the treasurer says that His Majesty has sent a man suspected of deer stealing to Virginia. The same year the King sent another 50 people to Virginia. Roderick Cameron says that 1619 seems to be the earliest actual recording of transportation to a colony, "a hundred dissolute persons" being sent to Virginia by order of James I. (Roderick Cameron, Australia: History and Horizons. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson., pp. 48ff).

Follows an impression of family history of London Lord Mayor 1619-1620 Sir William Cokayne
Descendants of Levant trader, London Lord Mayor Sir William Cokayne (b.1561;d.1626) and sp: Mary Morris wife2
2. Martha Cokayne wife1 (b.1605;d.Jul 1641) sp: Montagu Bertie Earl2 Lindsey Lord Willoughby (b.1608;m.18 Apr 1627;d.25 Jul 1666)
3. Robert Bertie Lord16 Lord Willoughby, Earl3 Lindsey (b.1630;d.Sep 1655) sp: Elizabeth Wharton wife2 (d.1 Jul 1669) sp: Mary Masingberd wife1 sp: Elizabeth Pope 3. Bridget Bertie (b.1629;d.7 Jan 1703/1704) sp: Thomas Osborne Duke1 Leeds Earl1 Danby (b.20 Feb 1631;m.1653;d.26 Jul 1712) 3. Elizabeth Bertie wife4 (d.20 Jul 1683) sp: Baptist Noel, Visc3 Campden, Royalist (b.13 Oct 1611/1612;m.6 Jul 1655;d.20 Oct 1682) 3. Hon Charles Bertie, Co. Lincoln sp: Mary Tryon sp: John Ramsay Earl1 Holderness (b.1580;m.Jul 1624;d.28 Feb 1625/1626)
2. Elizabeth Cockayne wife2 (b.Mar 1609;d.Feb 1667) sp: Levant trader, Sir Thomas Rich, Bart, of Berks (b.1661;d.15 Oct 1667) 3. Sir William Rich, Bart (d.1711) sp: Lady Anne Bruce (c.1698) 3. Mary Rich sp: Sir Robert Gayer, KB sp: Thomas Fanshawe Visc1 Fanshawe (b.1596;m.24 Jun 1629;d.26 Mar 1665) 3. Thomas Fanshawe Visc2 Fanshawe (b.Jun 1632;d.May 1674) sp: Catherine Ferrers wife1 sp: Sarah Widow Wray Evelyn wife2 (d.Oct 1717) 2. Charles Cokayne Visc1 Cullen (b.4 Jul 1602;d.May 1686) sp: Mary O'Brien (m.24 Jun 1627) 3. Brien Cokayne Visc2 Cullen (b.12 Sep 1631;d.Jul 1687) sp: Elizabeth Trentham (m.1657) 2. Mary Cokayne wife2 (b.Oct 1598;d.6 Feb 1650/1651) sp: Charles Howard Baron3 Effingham of Effingham, Earl2 Nottingham (b.17 Sep 1579;m.22 Apr 1620;d.3 Oct 1642) 2. Abigail Cokayne sp: John Carey Earl2 Dover, Visc2 Rochford, Baron5 Hunsdon (b.1608;d.26 May 1677)

January 1619: Spice Islands: Former Gov of Virginia Sir Thomas Dale arrives about January 1619 with a new East India Company fleet for the spice islands.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

July 1619: East India Englishman John Jourdain sails from spice islands for India via Malay Peninsula, meets three Dutch ships, and is killed.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1620: In 1620, the aldermen of London want 100 street children sent to Virginia, and get their way without protest. The tradition arises of people being "disappeared", especially in Middlesex. In 1620, Sir Thomas Smith is allowed to ship 20 people to the Somers Islands (Bermuda).

1620: The Mayflower sailed for North America (Cape Cod) in September 1620, landing at Plymouth; the settlement is annexed to Massachusetts in 1691.

18 October 1620, Spice Islands, Islanders of Great Banda rise up against the Dutch and turmoil results. Courthope wonders if they will come to his aid against the Dutch. But the Dutch (Jan Coen) end killing Courthope about the 20th October. The Dutch end renaming Jakarta as "Batavia". Coen becomes Gov-General of Dutch East Indies.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1620: From 1620, Scottish colonisation of Nova Scotia gives a small stimulus to trade. To end of king's reign, a slump, blamed on a shortage of specie, mistaking effect for cause, as Davies notes. Throughout his reign, James is in debt, unsound national finances rebound on business fortunes, James rarely repays money he borrows, and inflicts losses on individuals, and since he has no money with which to reward his followers, he often grants monopolies or permits them to accept bribes in order that others can gain monopolies - to 1625

1620: (Wood on Bentham, p. 330), The City of London "sent a swarm of 100 children to America".

In 1620, James I had stepped in to stop the Rich faction using Virginia and the Somers Islands (Bermuda) as bases for privateering against the Spanish in the West Indies. Later the king made the Rich faction abandon their efforts with Guiana. (Charles 1 gained the throne of England on 27 March, 1625.) In 1621 James 1 revoked the lottery funding the Virginia Company and in 1621-1622, James 1 tried unsuccessfully to back the Smythe faction in the battle for the position of treasurer of the Virginia Company. By 1623, when Sandys' faction thought they had convinced the king their views on the government of Virginia were sound, the king amazed them when in 1624 there was declared a vacancy of the Virginia Company charter, and with some involvement from Sir Nathaniel Rich, control of the company was given to Lord President Mandeville.
(Viscount Mandeville, first Earl Mandeville, sometime treasurer, Henry Montagu (1563-1642). His family turned part Whiggish; his son Edward was anti-ship money, a Cromwellian peer, although he later assisted the Restoration. GEC, Peerage, Manchester, p. 365; North, p. 657. The new governor of Virginia was Sir Francis Wyatt (a descendant of the Wyatt plotters early in the career of Elizabeth I), who had married a niece of Sir Edwin Sandys).

Charles I when he examined the Virginia Company situation dealt with two Sandys supporters, the Earl of Dorset and William, first Baron Cavendish.
(Earl Dorset, This was Richard Sackville (1589-1624)), third earl of Dorset, an investor in the Virginia Company by 1609.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 194, Note 5).

He was married to Anne Clifford, daughter of the anti-Spanish "privateer", George Clifford, third Earl Cumberland. Anne Clifford also married the anti-Spanish Philip Herbert, fourth Earl Pembroke, who was also interested in the Virginia Company, and was patron of Sir William Courteen Snr. in squabbles over the development of England's Caribbean interests. The first Earl of Dorset, sometime treasurer, Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), was of the descendants of Lord Mayor Geoffrey Boleyn.
(GEC, Peerage, Dorset, p. 422.)

Thus, the third earl of Dorset, as consulted on "colonisation" represented, as it were, two powerful families who had been affronted by Henry VIII's treatment of his wives; the Parrs and the Boleyns. )
Baron Cavendish: In 1624, (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 113), Virginia had only 1000 colonists. On 1 March, 1624, the House of Commons' motion regarding seizure of departing East India Company ships, became part of the Smith/Smythe/Sandys squabble. Treasurer Cranfield had backed Sandys' opponents. The Commons gave some backing to Sandys and his gentry men trying to retain control of the Virginia Company. Maurice Thomson et al, were led by Smythe and backed by the Rich faction, the Earl of Warwick. At first, Charles and Cranfield had backed the merchants in their fight with Sandys; by 1624, Charles and Cranfield had destroyed Sandys tobacco monopoly, dissolved the old Virginia Company, and reconstituted it with merchants plus the Rich faction.

Behind the whole squabble seems a view taken in England, that one was either for or against the right of the individual in Virginia to own property, manage resources and make a profit in ways new to traditional English life and politics. Sandys lost the battle because his assumptions, while "democratic" enough in some ways to disaffect the king, were not well-fitted to the system of production which at the time was stimulating a boom mentality. What the king wanted finally was sufficient control over trade and profits, and so he conceded some ground on questions of colonial government, resulting in Virginia's new independent House of Assembly.)

Also as part of developing trends, in 1620 the City of London sent "a swarm of 100 children" to Virginia; street children.
(F. L. W. Wood, `Jeremy Bentham versus New South Wales', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. XIX, Part 6, 1933.. pp. 329-351; here, p. 330. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, p. 24, pp. 35-37. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 273.)

In this, London's aldermen got their way without protest. The tradition was arising, of people being "disappeared", especially from Middlesex. So, in the American colonies, by 1619, after the struggle between the Smythe/Sandys factions for control of the Jamestown settlement at Virginia, instructions were received for the formation of a local government, the House of Burgesses, which became more democratic in ideas than anything in England or Europe (as Ver Steeg notes). But the need for labour led a demand for slave, convict and indentured labour that would also mean that over time, that any nascent sense of "democracy" was to be corrupted by equations of rights to citizenship with rights arising from property ownership; meaning that citizenship would be offered to fewer European individuals, and denied to those of other races.
(This theme is traced with some feeling in James Michener's novel, Chesapeake, although Michener there makes little mention of transported convicts. Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 32-33.)

How colonisation provoked the transportation of offenders:

In 1620, Sir Thomas Smith (Smythe?) had been allowed to ship 20 people to the Somers Islands (Bermuda). (Within a few decades, the term "being Babadosed" came to mean being kidnapped to work on Barbados. Long later, the term was "Shanghaied"). By the 1640s, many younger people on Barbados had arrived after being kidnapped. Later, other new inhabitants included London thieves and whores, Scottish and Irish soldiers captured in Cromwell's campaigns. Cromwell did much to encourage the transportation of people deemed undesirable, but not before certain trends had earlier been set by the second Earl of Warwick, his associates, and those who answered to them. Between 1623-1624 the newly-organised Dorchester Company was granted permission by the Council of New England to fish and trade. By 1626 the company - with some members prominent Puritans - had established a settlement at Salem, promoting the idea of a Bible Commonwealth.
( By 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company was formed with a charter from the Crown. Some Levant Company men investing in Massachusetts Bay Colony included Francis Flyer, Matthew Craddock, Samuel Vassall, Nathan Wright, men already active in America trade. It is difficult not to see them co-operating with "the Rich faction". The Massachusetts Bay Company members were merchants, some fishing men of the Dorchester Company, some London merchants and some Puritan gentry. (In 1630, some seventeen English ships sailed for Massachusetts, with 1000 persons plus provisions and animal stock).)

Renewed anti-Spanish feeling after the Sandys/Smythe squabble:

Puritanism remained a strong theme in politics. In 1628-1629 were parliamentary confrontations with the crown over unparliamentary taxation, forced loans, arbitrary imprisonment, and Arminianism and persecution of Puritans. A political opposition grouped around the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and Sir Nathaniel Rich and their colonizing ventures.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 148ff.

It would appear that Brenner is the first historian to strongly link the second Earl of Warwick with the formerly unreported extent of the trading engaged by Maurice Thomson and Thomson's associates. To date, it seems arguable that the significance of the Earl of Warwick's commercial efforts have been understated. On Warwick and some of his aristocratic-investor connections.
See also, Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, pp. 194ff. It is given in Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, A&C Black, 1933., pp. 172ff, that Warwick's efforts should be associated with English efforts seen in the Virginia Company, North's unsuccessful settlement of the Amazons, and the settlement of the American New England - as well as with the anti-Spanish Providence Island Company. Warwick was greatly responsible for the promotion of the English use of chattel slavery - and this is said far too seldom by historians.)

Warwick was probably encouraged by conflict with Spain, as it is almost as though having won his part of the Sandys/Smythe squabble, the Earl of Warwick wished to renew his anti-Spanish fervour, fully aware that English commercial shipping would now sweep wider from Africa, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Virginia, and north on the Canadian coasts.

From 1625, England was to be at war with Spain, then with France. One of England's responses was to promote privateering again, in a context where proposals for the establishment of an English West India Company as well as for improvements to the navy were common. "A group of MPs associated with the second Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich", became vocal. Warwick was a "privateering magnate" and "was to lead the Providence Company in a private war with Spain".
(Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 36-37. [Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 39] has Winthrop at Massachusetts believing by 1640 that the Providence Island Company had lost £120,000. Bliss writes, by the early 1640s, "Meanwhile, parliamentary leaders like the Earl of Warwick were as aware as anyone of the potential for sugar to fuel the sinews of war.")

Andrews in Ships, Money and Politics writes, Warwick was "the only great shipowning aristocrat of his time, patron and chief entrepreneur of westward colonization, especially in the West Indies and the Somers Islands"... Is this remark significant? "The only other peer with a considerable interest in shipping [was] the Earl of Carlisle..." However, it remains difficult to find ship men or traders associating with Carlisle. As he worked to "plant" the Caribees, Carlisle relied even more than Warwick did, on merchant backing. Carlisle's clique of merchants being led by Marmaduke Roydon.
Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, p. 156, p. 183. There is little information however on Roydon's family history or career, and his associates seem surprisingly few.

Later regarding Barbados, the associates of the Earl of Carlisle (family name Hay) were such as Peter Hay, James Holdip. Carlisle's backers included Marmaduke Roydon, William Perkins, Alexander Bannister. The Barbados experience acclimatised English people to managing chattel slavery.
Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 33.

These men Hay had kinsmen, Sir James Hay and Sir Archibald Hay who helped shore up the influence of the Earl of Carlisle, re rent collections. The new governor, Henry Huncks, threatened Peter Hay with physical violence. But the Hays did however understand colonial reluctance to undertake trade regulation if there was a share in colonial government a la issues later rising with the outbreak of the American Revolution].)

There seems however to be little evidence that Carlisle was interested in maritime activity before he developed ambitions to dominate the English efforts in the Caribbean. In fact, little is found in books on the merchants Carlisle used, and his commercial activities, as distinct from his political influences, remain rather blank to the historian. And further, Carlisle's interests cannot be properly understood without reference to Courteen's investments on Barbados - and much else. Perhaps, Carlisle was constrained to use shipping deployed by merchants whose greater loyalty was to the Earl of Warwick?

In 1628 the second Earl of Warwick took over the governership of the Bermuda Company to make it a Puritan project. By 21 June, 1628, Digges and Rich had again put forward a plan for a West Indies company; Rich had a bill pre-written. An associated idea was to "breed up mariners". Similar plans were expressed in late January 1629. (In August 1628 the Dutchman Piet Heyn (sic) reportedly took a Spanish treasure fleet for £1,200,000.)
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 267-268.)

1620++: Nova Scotia has been given attention by Scots colonists in 1620, but in 1629, Britain had abandoned her efforts on Nova Scotia as part of Charles I' peace plan with France. (Otherwise, Englishmen regularly entertained fantasies of sending convicts to Nova Scotia until after 1788). (Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 326.) Also in 1620s, James I grants land between Middle of New Jersey Coast and Newfoundland plus monopoly of offshore fishing to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and others in Council for New England.

June 1621: Dutch States-General charter the new Dutch West India Company to trade to South Africa, America, West Indies, Far East.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1621: William Claiborne, a colonist of Virginia, born circa 1587 in Cliburne, Westmoreland, England (died 1677 in Virginia) was possibly a son of E. W. Claiborne (Cliburne); his mother was Grace Bellingham. [Dictionary of American Biography, 1928]. In June 1621 he was appointed surveyor of the colony of Virginia; later, secretary of the colony, then treasurer. He was given much land, disliked Catholics, and dealt with the London firm Cloberry and Co. Claiborne obtained a semi-monopoly of a large trade territory by 1631 per William Alexander, secretary of state for Scotland. This led to troubles with Lord Baltimore regarding Maryland, as Claiborne by then was a partner with Robert Ingle. Baltimore would not recognise such Scots-based claims. (See Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 185). William Claiborne by 1638-1642 was associated with the Providence Island Company which intended to harass the Spanish, and also with the founding of an English colony at Ruatan, Honduras. (A relevant title here is J. H. Claiborne, William Claiborne of Virginia. 1917.
A descendant, Colonel Leonard Claiborne died in 1694 at Carlisle Bay, Jamaica, a son of one William Claiborne. Presumably there will be extensive material on the Claibornes of Virginia. Leonard Claiborne, son of Colonel William Claiborne of Virginia, settled in Jamaica where he was a colonel in the militia of St. Elizabeth's, killed in a repulse of the French in 1694 at Carlisle Bay. By his wife Martha he is supposed to have had two daughters, Katherine and Elizabeth. Elizabeth remains unknown. Catherine is supposed to have married Apt John Campbell of Inverary, Argyleshire, (Black River, Jamaica) who had gone to "Darien" and on his return to Jamaica was one of the custos of St. Elizabeth's. The published sources available to Dorman do not indicate if Campbell and Katherine Claiborne-Campbell had children; it seems they did not.

1622: In 1622 arose the first association of an English ship and Australia, on 25 May, 1622 when the East Indiaman Tryal Capt. John Brooke wrecked on a reef north of the Monte Bello Islands. Brooke had been relying on a 1620 southern route recommended by Capt. Humphrey Fitzherbert of the ship Royal Exchange, who had used the southern route to the Indies but seen no "South Land". Brooke sighted land near North West Cape but misunderstood Fitzherbert's directions and wrecked, losing 92 lives and much treasure. (In June 1681 the English ship London Capt. John Daniel came in sight of the coast of New Holland, making a sketch of Wallabi group that was later used as a chart by Alexander Dalrymple the East India hydrographer [and rival to Capt. James Cook]). The next major sighting of an Australian coast was made by William Dampier.

1602: W. L. Marvin, The American Merchant Marine, 1602-1902. 1902. *

1623: R. M. Baynes, History of Staten Island from its Discovery. 1887. *

1623: W. T. Bonner, New York, The World Metropolis, 1623-1923/4. (Two Vols) 1925. *

In 1623, Buckingham and Charles had returned from their mission to Spain, determined to end the Spanish match. Their stance seemed to open ways for a rise in anti-Spanish feeling generally. Buckingham and Charles wanted to resurrect the careers of the anti-Spanish Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton...
(This was Thomas Wriothesley, (1607-1667) fourth Earl Southampton; or his father, Henry, (1573-1624), third earl, an investor in the Virginia and East India companies, also interested in finding the north-west passage. The third earl was a backer of the Sandys faction in the Sandys/Smythe squabble over the treasuryship of the Virginia Company.)

....and the Earl of Oxford, lately imprisoned by James. They welcomed William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and also the second Earl of Warwick. (Another figure to be mentioned is the great Puritan minister, John Preston, linked to Calvinist ministry, who had tutored the Earl of Warwick's son). Also with close ties of friendship to Lord Saye was the puritan Sir Richard Knightley (1593-1639).
(One of Knightley's wives was Anna Courteen, daughter of Sir William Courteen Senior. Knightley's cousin Sir Valentine Knightley was a member of the Virginia Company. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 69. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Knightly. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 261.)

As Saye became an ally of Buckingham, there was also alliance with the parliamentary opposition. Buckingham even managed to recruit "the mighty earl of Pembroke", who hated Buckingham.
(Philip Herbert (1584-1649/1650), fourth Earl Pembroke, whose first wife was Susan De Vere and second, Anne Clifford. This fourth earl was given a grant of Barbados but he lost it to Earl Carlisle; by 1627-1628 he held this grant in trusteeship for Courteen Senior (as noted in DNB , entry for Courteen).

Pembroke in 1645 was Commissioner of Admiralty. In 1637 Pembroke with others was given a grant of the province of Newfoundland, which area became "a nursery of seamen". He was in the Virginia Company by 1609, East India Company by 1611, North West Passage Company by 1612 and was privateering by 1625. He and his brother were councillors for Virginia. He or his father appear to have been patrons of Courteen's early attempts to settle Barbados; whether he was double-crossed by the Earl of Carlisle remains unclear.
Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 516. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 188. Lorimer (Ed.), Amazon, p. 291, Note 2. GEC, Peerage, Carnarvon, p. 44; Pembroke, p. 415; Oxford, p. 253; Dorset, p. 424; Clifford, p. 295. One of this earl's daughters, Mary, married Sir John Sydenham, Bart, (1642-1696) (Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 516.). He was of the same family line as Elizabeth Sydenham, the second wife of privateer, Sir Francis Drake.)

A secretary of state, and a Buckingham protégé, was Sir Edward Conway, who tried to turn James to an anti-Spanish position and to recover the Palatinate. There was arising, a joint Anglo-Dutch move against Spain in the Caribbean, which may also have come to the notice of the Anglo-Dutch merchant, Sir William Courteen senior.

By 1623, writes Davies, James 1 was economically weak, with little credit given him for the good years. He restricted and disorganised trade by adding burdens, a rationalisation being that extra trade would result from peace with Spain. Earlier in James I's reign there had been new enterprises such as the East India Company and the Russia Company, and developments such as Scottish colonisation in Nova Scotia. Too little however was ever reported of Maurice Thomson till Brenner published his research.
(Here, one should also see Newton, Colonising Puritans.)

The extraordinary range of trading engaged by Maurice Thomson (agent for the second Earl of Warwick) and his associates is all the more remarkable if a brief tour is made of the fringes of English settlement and interest patterns of the decades 1600-1640, since it is helpful if the aspirations of a wide range of merchants is known as England expanded.

By Charles' proclamation of 13 May, 1625, Charles rejected Sandys' views on the government of Virginia as smacking too much of "popular government".
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 19-24.)

In short, from 1618, the Sandys faction's views on the management of Virginia were brought undone by bad luck, the outcomes of earlier problems, and too much leaning to popular government. (One suspects the king realised that those with the most powerful grip on rising tobacco production, and import, including the Rich faction, had the political views he could live with more comfortably!) Sandys' faction between 1618-1622 sent over 3500 colonists to Virginia, mostly young men, but their policy of diversifying the economy and discouraging tobacco planting failed.

It appears to the present writer that the level of tobacco profits from 1618, problems on the ground in Virginia, plus disputes over how to govern Virginia - popularly, or within the confines of some kind of royal charter - blasted the Sandys faction. The extent of Charles' enthusiasm for controlling the tobacco trade is not explained in Bliss's political analysis - but till April 1623, Charles had favoured his father's outlook on managing Virginia - and the views of the Sandys faction. It seems then that the Earl of Warwick with the help of Sir Nathaniel Rich and later, Maurice Thomson, created means of dominating trade to Virginia - perhaps at the cost of abandoning their anti-Spanish prejudice, and not without the aid of some Dutch capitalists.

By 1624, the Virginia Company's charter was dissolved and declared vacant, and the Crown took over the colony. Charles I had stepped in and Virginia (along with the Bermudas, (the Somers Islands) and New England, became England's first royal colony. The Sandys faction, or the "old Virginia Company" meantime, consisted of customs farmer Sir John Wolstenholme, George Sandys, Sir John Danvers, Sir Robert Killigrew, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir Robert Heath, Sir John Zouch, the Ferrar brothers John and Nicholas, Heneage Finch, Gabriel Barber and Sir Dudley Digges.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 132.)

This faction had little interest in the Caribbean, which was also part of their undoing, since their commercial enemies were linking business between West Indian islands and Virginia. On 15 July, 1624 a new commission was issued by James I to "the merchant party" and also to members of the Rich faction. If there had been linkages between the Rich/Warwick faction, and Sandys' gentry/merchants faction, they were probably cast more in terms of Puritan affiliation, where religious viewpoint helped shape views on the government of colonies, than in terms of more traditional or gentry politics.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 30ff.)

What hampers many historians' treatments of the era is failure to recognise the role of Puritan nobles in what is termed, the anti-Sandys merchant faction.
(The Virginia Company was dissolved by the Crown, and in 15 July 1624 a new commission issued by James I to the merchant party and Rich faction, 41 members including Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir James Cambell and Sir Ralph Freeman, and, plus ten commissioners who were leading officers in the government of James I. But with the death of James I, this new commission was abrogated and Charles I never re-established it. So many of the City's merchants withdrew from trade with Virginia, except for some remaining, including Samuel Vassall and Matthew Craddock, plus Humphrey Slaney who traded with his son-in-law William Cloberry. Some others remaining were Edward Bennett (Levant), Nathan Wright (Levant), Benjamin Whetcomb (sic) (Levant), Anthony Pennyston (Levant), Richard Chambers (Levant), and Wm. Tristram (Merchant Adventurer).
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 103, p. 216.

These were some of the merchants involved by the time William Claiborne in Virginia was promoting the Kent Island project. And so, a newer generation of Levant Company men, different to those first involved with the creation of the East India Company, were becoming interested in North American trade.)

Meanwhile, Warwick's chief business manager, Sir Nathaniel Rich, was understudied by a man who seems more like a merchant banker than a merchant with a great many associates, Maurice Thomson.

( Scattered material on Maurice Thomson surfaces in various books, but he has never been treated comprehensively.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 120ff.

When the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624, William Tucker and Maurice Thomson were partners and brothers-in-law, and were leading Virginia development. Another brother-in-law of Tucker was William Felgate. By 1626, Maurice Thomson had returned to London to organise trade for Virginia, which suggests he had earlier lived in Virginia. Given his timing, one suspects that Thomson had astutely gauged the extent to which Puritan ideology would continue to remain an ally of the production system developing in Virginia.)

It is still not entirely clear that either Sir Nathaniel Rich or the powerful and puritan second earl of Warwick were fully involved in all the schemes in which Maurice Thomson became involved, yet, the schemes had a seamlessness of interest and push about them which suggests a continued high-level and successful inspiration, presumably from Warwick.

Following the settling of the Smythe-Sandys squabbling, a group newly-emerging in Virginian affairs had 41 or more members, including Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir James Cambell (Lord Mayor of London in 1629 and no relation to any Campbells of the extended Campbell family discussed here, who started on Jamaica in 1700). And Sir Ralph Freeman.
(Sir James Cambell; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 98ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 89-90.)

There were also ten commissioners who were leading officers in the government of James I, but with the death of James I, this new commission was abrogated, and Charles I never re-established it.

London merchants by the mid-1620s found that Charles (son of James I) and Buckingham were willing to confront London's Merchant Adventurers in order to try to find new sources of merchant or financial support. The Earl of Carlisle was a dependent of Buckingham, and as proprietor of the Caribbean, Carlisle became an unexpected winner in colonisation stakes, since neither he nor his kin had ever had any interest in maritime activity. (In early 1624, Buckingham did not scruple to stop an outgoing East India Company ship and get from the Company some £10,000 for himself and an extra £10,000 for the king.)
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 216.

On 1 March, 1624 came a House of Commons' motion regarding the seizure of departing East India Company ships, and such matters became part of the squabble between the Smythe and Sandys factions. When the Commons backed Sandys and his gentry men as they tried to retain control of the Virginia Company, this meant that they moved against Maurice Thomson's interests, which meant they moved against the interests of Robert Rich the second Earl of Warwick, and/or those of Sir Thomas Smythe. The treasurer, Cranfield, had backed Sandys' opponents. The king and Cranfield had backed the Sandys party of merchants, but by 1624, Sandys' tobacco monopoly was destroyed, the "old" Virginia Company was dissolved, and it was reconstituted with merchants including associates of the Rich faction.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 252.)

London's America merchants in the City became disconcerted by the stance adopted by the Commons, as they could not deal with America on a monopoly basis, as free trade was to become the rule. Brenner feels it would have been worse for Virginia if the monopoly style of trade had been continued to there, as it would have bled the colonists dry. Sir Francis Bacon suggested that noblemen and gentlemen would be more useful for the Virginia trade as they'd be more inclined to bear a loss than merchants who wanted quick gains. But the nobles were "not interested"; they invested on average a mere £35 each at one time in Virginia. Some gentry did back the "hundreds", or plantation deals, including Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Sir Richard Berkeley, but these were short-term operations. Finally it was seen that new Virginia capital came not from gentry or the greater merchants, so American trade was infiltrated by merchants from lesser backgrounds, including "mere mariners".
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 79, pp. 104-108, pp. 114ff, pp. 116-118.)

So, many of the City's earlier-involved merchants withdrew from Virginia/America trade. Some men remaining in American trade in the 1620s included Samuel Vassall (a name to be known also on Jamaica) and Matthew Craddock, plus Humphrey Slaney, who traded with his son-in-law William Cloberry. Some other investors remaining were Edward Bennett (Levant Company), Nathan Wright (Levant Company), Benjamin Whetcomb (sic) (Levant Company), Anthony Pennyston (Levant), Richard Chambers (Levant), and William Tristram (Merchant Adventurer).
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 103, p. 136.

1623: About 1623-1624 the newly-organised Dorchester Company is granted rights by the Council of New England to fish and trade; in 1626 this company, which included Puritans, established a settlement at Salem . Notions had arisen to create a "Bible Commonwealth". (Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, 1607-1763. London, Macmillan, 1965., p. 35).

1623: Sir Peter Proby, Lord Mayor of London and knighted in 1623. (See K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company. London, Longmans, 1960. (First published in 1957.) Note: Davies' book is unusual in that many names for reference are given only in the index. It appears that Davies or his editors wished that many names would not be placed in his text (?). (On Proby's descendancies, see GEC, Peerage for Rockingham; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 429.) Among Proby's descendants are included: Thomas Watson Wentworth (1693-1750) first Marquis Rockingham; and William Proby, active 1705, a Whig and an operator for the New East India Company at Surat, India.

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

1624: In 1624 the founding father of St. Kitt's (St. Christopher in the Caribbean) was Sir Thomas Warner, a Suffolk man a friend of John Winthrop the founder of Massachusetts. Warner had tried and failed in Guiana, then tried again at St. Kitts, which he occupied in 1624. His situation was risky for six years; when the French arrived in 1625 he was so weak he agreed to share the island with them. (Large numbers of Caribbean Indians were massacred one night in their hammocks). The English-French were all attacked in 1629 by the Spanish. Some English held on. When the Earl of Carlisle became Lord Proprietor of islands in the Caribbean he appointed Warner governor of St. Kitts. There was later an Edward Warner a Lt-Gov of Nevis. (Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. London, Jonathan Cape, 1973., p. 119).

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

1624: Virginia Company's charter stemming from 1607 declared vacant in 1624, Charles I had stepped in and Virginia (along with the Bermudas, (the Somers Islands) and New England, became England's first royal colony, and the local assembly, the House of Burgesses, became the first in the New World. and by 1619 the instinct on American soil for self government asserted itself very quickly, and by 1641 the colony was well established.

1624: The story from 1624-1627 about the Anglo-Dutch financier Sir William Courteen (died 1666) varies, but it seems he was double-crossed. By 1625 Sir Charles Courteen had noted that an English ship (said by some to have been connected to Warner mentioned above) had touched at Barbados, found it uninhabited, and possessed it in the King's name. Courteens later sent out ships and soon had up to 1800 people on the island, maintained by their employers. Courteens had begun useful cotton and tobacco plantations but the proprietorship of the island went into dispute whilst the slowness of Courteen's supplies threatened famine - a case of starving-in-Paradise, as later happened with the first British settlers at Sydney, Australia. Barbados however survived and by 1640 was exporting profitably, tobacco, cotton and indigo, not without the help of coerced labour.
(On Thomas Warner establishing Barbados in 1625, see C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies. Vol. 2, The West Indies, Second Edn, Oxford. 1905., cited in Lillian M. Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies: A Study in Colonial Administration Mainly in the Eighteenth Century. 1924. London, Frank Cass and Co., reprint 1971., p. 8).

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

1625: Charles I had risen to the throne on 27 March, 1625, after the end of the reign of James 1 (1603-1625, (James VI of Scotland). James of course had hardened the penal laws against Catholics. The response was a great Catholic uprising, a plan to blow up James I and the Parliament on November 5, 1605, the plot (involving 36 barrels of gunpowder) being discovered and giving rise to the legend of Guy Fawkes. (Davies, The Early Stuarts, p. 48, p. 337).

1625: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 33, p. 48, accession of Charles I in 27 March, 1625, after end of reign of James 1. Ireland, chronology, see James 1 (1603-1625), as James VI of Scotland, finally became King of England, stiffened the penal laws against Catholics, and a response was a great Catholic uprising, a plan to blow up James I and the Parliament on 5 November, 1605. Plot discovered, hence the legend of Guy Fawkes, and 36 barrels of gunpowder discovered. Attitude of James I: James I personally loved peace, but he misunderstood the situation in Europe, he despised the Dutch because from the point of view of divine right of kings, they were "rebels".

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

Active circa1630s: Italian banker Flavio CHIGI of Siena.

1625: On Martin Noell: Martin Noell became influential in West Indies business. He was also a friend of William Courteen, the financier who had done much from 1625 to create the original establishment on Barbados. Noell appears to have been married to a Miss Thurloe as Thurloe was a brother-in-law of Noell. I assume this is the same Sir Martin Noel referred to in Pares, Merchants and Planters. Noell became a well-known financier and he acted as an agent for Shaftesbury, for Barbados. (Shaftesbury's brother George married a daughter of a London sugar baker, Mr. Oldfield - Shaftesbury remained interested in sugar and Barbados from 1646). Fraser, Cromwell, p. 534, suggests Noell was knighted by Charles II, but died bankrupt. There was a Thomas Noell, a planter of Barbados. I have assumed Thomas was a brother with the other Noell names; but this is not a known fact. There was also a John Povey, Virginia Merchant, who worked with Nehemiah Blakiston, 1699-1721 as agents; their banker was Micajah Perry. The planter name John Randolph, resident in Virginia, also arises in that context. Martin Noell, Jnr, active by 1647, is noted in Pares, Merchants and Planters. On Nehemiah Blakiston: Blakiston was a collector of customs duties on the Potomac and a leader of Charles County, Maryland. He was active by 1689. [A useful title would be Bernard C. Steiner, 'The Protestant Revolution in Maryland'. Report, American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1897, Washington, DC 1898., pp. 289ff].

Martin Noell: Sources: (Brenner, pp. 175ff.) Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 386ff, for Noel of Brook. Martin Noell and Povey are noted in Newton, Colonising Puritans. See also, K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968., p. 64; See also, Penson, Colonial Agents; Alison Olson, 'The Virginia merchants of London: a study in eighteenth century interest group politics', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, Vol. 40, July 1983., pp. 363-388., here, p. 373.

The English historian, Brenner, has only recently outlined the career of a conspicuously successful seventeenth century London merchant, an early "expansionist" of the first founding of the British Empire, Maurice Thomson. [K. G. Davies mentions Thomson only briefly in Royal African Company]. Thomson seems almost the business manager of the extraordinarily energetic Puritan noble, Robert Rich (1587-1658), the second Earl of Warwick. In fact, Warwick's business manager was his kinsman, Sir Nathaniel Rich (1585-1636), so it is possible that Thomson answered to Sir Nathaniel Rich. Whatever the organisational details, Thomson and his brothers enjoyed remarkable commercial careers that have been insufficiently acknowledged in the earlier history of English colonisation.

1625: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 337), Sir Charles Courteen noted that an English ship had touched at Barbados, found it uninhabited, and possessed it in the King's name. Courteen soon sent out ships and soon had up to 1800 people on the island, maintained by their employer. Courteen began cotton and tobacco plantations. the proprietorship of the island went into dispute, Davies does not say how or why, and slowness of Courteen's supplies threatened famine. and the island survived, and by 1640 was exporting profitably, tobacco, cotton and indigo. Thomas Warner is establishing Barbados in 1625, (see C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies. Vol. 2, The West Indies, Second Edn, Oxford. 1905, cited in Penson, Colonial Agents, p.8.

1626: In 1626, George Villiers in his essay On Plantations had vainly - and a little surprisingly - emphasised the shame of taking "scum of people" to plantations, which they "only spoiled". (Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47). It appears Charles made an arrangement with the Earl of Carlisle (family name Hay) concerning proprietorship of certain Caribbean Islands including Barbados. The reverberations were to mean many years of political conflict (as to English arrangements that is) in the Caribbean Islands.

1627: More to come

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

1628: Sir Thomas Warner, coloniser of Barbados, governor of Antigua (1575-1648-1649).
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. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. Burke's Landed Gentry for Warner formerly of Framlingham.

1628: Sir William Courteen Senior (died 1636). He once devised a plan to settle Australia but failed to act.)
(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. 68. George Mackaness, 'Some Proposals for Establishing Colonies in the South Seas', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 24, Part 5, 1943., pp. 261-280 with Sir John Callender's proposal given pp. 271ff. Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously. DNB entries, various. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 125, pp. 171ff. Williamson, Caribee Islands. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984., pp. 278ff, pp. 301ff. On Courteens, see Shafaat Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century (in its Political and Economic Aspects). London, 1923. Ian B. Watson, `The Establishment of English Commerce in North-Western India in the Early Seventeenth Century', Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1976., pp. 375ff. Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff. Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, c. 1976., pp. 39ff. Also, Holden Furber, `The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, 1783-1796', ECHR, 10, (2), November 1940., pp. 138-147. Holden Furber, John Company at Work. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1948. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 183, Note 69. On Courteen's descendants, GEC, Peerage, Kent, p. 176; Hereford, p. 480; Maynard, p. 602; Valentia, p. 207.)

1628: By 1628, Barbados is already a thriving English colony, planting tobacco. In 1628 the Courteen House sent out more settlers, expanding the colony to 1600 people, "to strong for the Spaniards to challenge". Goslinga finds that the obscure history of the colonization of the Lesser Antilles is compounded by the fact that James I made his grants to rights to the Caribbean orally. Charles I later confirmed such grants with written documents, but was confused in designations to the Earl of Carlisle and the Earl of Pembroke. He writes, p. 259, "The Dutch firm of the Courteens also appears to have played a part in the general intrigue that renders inscrutable this entire episode". Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 212ff.

1628: Earl Warwick takes over governorship of Bermuda Co. to make it a puritan project, in 1629 many of similar view backed the Providence Island Co, to be theirs exclusively, and in 1629 the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nath Rich, Lord Saye and Sele, another puritan the Earl of Lincoln, patronized the Mass Bay Co. so these puritan ports siphoned off religious exiles. large link up, finally, of merchants and puritans, each influencing the other. (Brenner, p. 273)

Unexpectedly, Digges and Morris Abbot and his archbishop brother about the time parliament dissolved in 1629, went to the side of the crown, Abbott as Gov of EICo probably tried to help the Levant Co. top men from further radicalising, and cooled the EICo, so annoying the colonising nobles, so the opposition nobles Lord Saye, earl of Warwick and Lord Brook launched March 1629 an attack on the elite merchant leadership of the EICo, to promote their own alliances, which consisted of some of their own smaller investors. The battle went on for years.

1628: North America: On 9 March 1628 the Earl of Warwick makes a grant of land in Massachusetts to establish the New England Company (first governor is Matthew Craddock of Levant Co., and operator of Mystic River), an unincorporated predecessor of the Massachusetts Bay Co. Warwick had got the land in 1623 from the Council for New England, of which he was president in 1628, and he gave it to Dorchester Company people, and East Anglian gentlemen. (Brenner, p. 276.)

21 June, 1628: England: Digges and Rich again put forward idea for an English West India company; Rich had a bill pre-written. Part of an idea is to "breed up mariners". Similar plans in late January 1629. In August 1628 the Dutchman Piet Heyn (sic) reportedly took a Spanish treasure fleet for £1,200,000. (Brenner, p. 267).

1629: The Dutch form a West India Company. 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., p. 89.

1629: The English East India Company in London checks its books and is horrified to find it is more than £300,000 in the red. Clerical cost-cutting results.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1629: Colony of Massachusetts founded. In 1629, a new settlement at Salem includes six master shipbuilders.

1629: England: As early as 1629, a grant is made re the Carolinas, but no serious attempt to colonize till 1663, with eight proprietors, being Earl of Clarendon, Duke of Albemarle, Sir John Berkeley, Sir George Carteret, Earl of Craven, John Colleton, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (later Earl of Shaftesbury), and Sir William Berkeley. King only gave the Carolinas as this coalition was too strong to deny. most of these proprietors had other colonial interests, Colleton with Barbados, Sir Wm Berkeley as Gov. of Virginia, Carteret and John Berkeley involved with New Jersey. Carolina suitable for baronial estates. The Carolina system once the disgruntled Barbadians came provided a specialized plantation agriculture, promoted slave labour, reduced the flexibility of the existing local social system, articles of Carolina government drawn up by Ashley Cooper with help of John Locke, based on political ideas already outmoded in England itself. (Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 119-121.)