CATHAY! FOR centuries its siren cadence lured European adventurers over land and sea. The Spanish searched to the west while the Portuguese penetrated ever further south down the coast of Africa. Within five years of Columbus's arrival in the Bahamas Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the ancient emporium of Calicut on the Malabar coast of India. Although the Spanish had failed to reach China, the silver they acquired in America fuelled the European trade with the East for centuries. The Portuguese systematically established control over the eastern seas through powerful fortifications at Mozambique, Ormuz, Diu, Goa, Cochin, Colombo, Malacca, and fortified factories in the Moluccas, with access to Chinese products through a settlement at Macao. Denied the use of the southern sea routes by the great Catholic powers legitimized by Papal Bull, the English sailed by the northeast and the northwest to find markets for their surplus woollen cloth. They believed ‘… the fittest places are the manifold islands of Japan and the northern parts of China and the regions of the Tartars next adjoyning’, but none of the expeditions was successful.

In the last two decades of the sixteenth century English seamen dared to venture into the southern ocean, confident in their ability to take on the huge Portuguese carracks. In 1578 Drake sailed by the Strait of Magellan and circumnavigated the world. Emboldened by the defeat of the Spanish armada, Elizabeth I licensed an expedition which sailed by the Cape of Good Hope to search for countries between Calicut and China not settled by the Portuguese ‘for the ventinge of our comodities … but especially our trade of clotheinge’. Commercially it failed, but two English ships sailed round the Indian seas as far as the Malay peninsula without interference from the Portuguese. Merchants of the Turkey and Levant companies travelled widely overland in Persia and India, supplementing the knowledge of navigating to the eastern seas with valuable information about markets and products. Linschoten, a Dutchman who had worked for several years for the Portuguese in Goa, vastly increased this knowledge by publishing Portuguese sailing directions and full information on Portuguese possessions in the East.