226 THE FIRST ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY so as not " to forego the opportunity of the concluding of the peace. Whereupon the adventurers " resolved to postpone their voyage to more propitious times. Meanwhile they set to work to make out a good case for a grant of privileges on a wider scale. This incapacity for knowing when it was beaten appears throughout the whole career of the company. If it suc- ceeded or if it failed, it went on. The adventurers drew up an ingenious document intended to gain their point whether the peace was concluded or not. They asked the Privy Council to require from the Spanish com- missioners a list of all Spanish possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope. Foreseeing that Spain would not consent to this, they themselves set down the names of twenty-one places, from Sofala on the East African and Diu on the northwest Indian coast, to Macao in China and Manila in the Philippines, to which they admitted the Spaniards and Portuguese had a right. " Yet there remaineth," they went on to say, as recorded in the State Papers, " that all the rest rich kingdoms and islands of the East, which are in number very many, are out of their power and jurisdiction, and free for any other princes or people of the world to repair unto." Of these they enumerated seventeen countries or kingdoms, from Madagascar off Africa to " the rich and golden island of Sumatra," " the most mighty and wealthy empire of China," " and the rich and innumerable isles of the Moluccas and the Spicerie." Their list acknowledges the Spanish claim to the old
