The first English ship sailed to the East Indies in the year 1591; but the voyage was rather a warlike than a commercial one, the object being to attack the Portuguese; and even in this respect it was very unfortunate.  A similar enterprize, undertaken in 1593, seems, by its success, to have contributed very materially to the commercial intercourse between England and 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 expel all Europeans but themselves.