PREFACE
THIS work covers the period which intervened between Drake's circumnavigation of the world at the close of the sixteenth century and the founding of Calcutta at the end of the seventeenth century. Those were the years in which the initial efforts were made by the English to establish themselves in the East as traders. It was, as far as this part of the world concerned, preeminently the age of the adventurer—the merchant adventurer, if you will, but still of the true adventurer who seeks fortune by his daring enterprise and his mother wit. For varied interest and picturesqueness, there is no more fascinating period than this in the whole of the Empire's past. Tragedy and comedy mingled their elements in what was in essence one of the most romantic dramas of the world's history. Men started out to build up a commercial connexion, and they ended in laying the foundations of a dominion over alien peoples more wonderful than that of Rome in her palmiest days. How this was accomplished is told in the accompanying pages, but the author's aim has been not so much to write an exhaustive history as to bring into prominence the personalities of those who were engaged in this great work—to show what
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