As the 16th century turned into the 17th, few would have predicted that Britain would become a major sea power with an empire on which the sun never set. Sir Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580, but he was only the first Englishman to do so. In fact, the first such voyage started out from Spain in 1519 and was led by Ferdinand Magellan until his death in 1521, at which point Juan Sebastián Elcano, the Basque sea captain, took over and completed the first voyage round the globe on 6 September 1522.
On his three-year expedition, Drake sacked many Spanish ports and towns in the Americas, captured several Spanish ships, and found hospitality in Portuguese trading posts around Asia and Africa. He was hardly exploring terra incognita and (despite John Cabot’s voyage from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497) England was, in Ian Friel’s words, ‘a latecomer to oceanic enterprise’. The Portuguese and Spanish had reached Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the 15th century, and had already divided the world outside Europe between them under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. More than a century later, England had nothing to show by way of an oceanic empire other than the failed attempt to set up a colony in Roanoke, Virginia, and one tiny settlement – Jamestown – established in May 1607 (see CA 330).
Neither did the omens look very positive when James I, after whom the American settlement was named, arrived at Deptford on 30 December 1609 to launch two new ships built by the East India Company (EIC). That organisation had been formed exactly ten years previously, having been granted a royal charter on 31 December 1599 by Elizabeth I which allowed the EIC a 15-year monopoly on trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa. That trade was largely theoretical: each of the EIC’s early voyages was numbered, and the first had taken place as recently as 1603. James I renewed the Company’s charter for an indefinite period in 1609, and the ships he planned to launch were due to sail on the EIC’s sixth voyage.
