Dutch Maps and English Ships In The Eastern Seas

In 1598, Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Itinerario, the landmark expose of Portuguese Asia, was published in English translation. Thirteen years later, the Eighth Voyage of the English East India Company set out on England's first journey by sea to Japan. Richard Pflederer explores the connections between this important book and the beginnings of English trade in the Far East.

English commercial and political successes in Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been well described in popular literature, and today it may be hard to realise that England began its first tentative efforts in Asia about a hundred years behind the Portuguese and Spanish. In an age when navigational information was the primary commercial intelligence and secrecy in such matters was, in most countries, the law, the merchants of England possessed almost no knowledge of the exotic and sought-after trading destinations in Asia. Japan in particular was hardly more than a name or a vague concept in the mind of even the best-educated Englishman of the late sixteenth century.