The Council of the Hakluyt Society have resolved to reprint the narratives of the voyages of Sir James Lancaster, from the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, in order that they may be brought together in one volume. Lancaster was one of the leading seamen of the reign of Elizabeth, and he commanded the two first English voyages to the East Indies. He was afterwards on the direction of the East India Company; he was a great promoter of voyages of discovery; and, as such, his name was immortalised by William Baffin, who called one of the chief portals of the Arctic Regions—“Sir James Lancaster, his Sound”.

We learn from himself that, in his early years, he had been in Portugal in the capacities of a soldier and afterwards of a merchant. In 1591 he sailed on his first voyage to the East Indies; and two accounts of this adventurous expedition, and of its disastrous termination among the West Indian Islands, were published by Hakluyt. The first was written by Hakluyt from the mouth of Edmund Barker of Ipswich, a lieutenant; and the second by Henry May. Lancaster returned to England in May 1594, after an absence of more than three years.

In the autumn of 1594, Lancaster was again in command of three ships fitted out by Aldermen of London, with his old lieutenant, Edmund Barker, in the viceadmiral. On this occasion, a successful piratical attack, in which Barker lost his life, was made on the Portuguese settlement of Pernambuco. The expedition returned to Blackwall in July 1595.