India; for a fleet of the queen's ships and some merchant ships having
captured a very large East India carrack belonging to the Spaniards or
Portuguese, brought her into Dartmouth: if she excited astonishment at her
size, being of the burthen of 1600 tons, with 700 men, and 36 brass cannon,
she in an equal degree stimulated and enlarged the commercial desires and
hopes of the English by her cargo. This consisted of the richest spices,
calicoes, silks, gold, pearls, drugs, China ware, ebony wood, &c., and was
valued at 150,000_l_.

The increasing commercial spirit of the nation, which led it to look
forward to a regular intercourse with India, was gratified in the first
year of the seventeenth century, when the queen granted the first charter
to an East India Company. She seems to have been directly led to grant this
in consequence of the complaints among her subjects of the scarcity and
high price of pepper; this was occasioned by the monopoly of it being in
the power of the Turkey merchants and the Dutch, and from the circumstance
that by our war with Portugal, we could not procure any from Lisbon. The
immediate and principal object of this Company, therefore, was to obtain
pepper and other spices; accordingly their ships, on their first voyage,
sailed to Bantam, where they took in pepper, to the Banda isles; where they
took in nutmeg and mace, and to Amboyna, where they took in cloves. On this
expedition the English established a factory at Bantam. In 1610, this
Company having obtained a new charter from James I., built the largest
merchant ship that had ever been built in England, of the burthen of 1100
tons, which with three others they sent to India. In 1612 the English
factory of Surat was established with the permission of the Great Mogul;
this was soon regarded as their chief station on the west coast of India.
Their first factory on the coast of Coromandel, which they formed a few
years afterwards, was at Masulipatam: their great object in establishing
this was to obtain more readily the cloths of Coromandel, which they found
to be the most advantageous article to exchange for pepper and other
spices. For at this time their trade with the East seems to have been
almost entirely confined to these latter commodities. In 1613, the first
English ship reached a part of the Japan territories, and a factory was
established, through which trade was carried on with the Japanese, till the
Dutch persuaded the emperor to e