The English at first attempted to imitate the Dutch in their East Indian policy.  The English East India Company was founded by Elizabeth in 1600, and as early as 1619 had forced the Dutch to allow them to take a third share of the profits of the Spice Islands.  In order to do this several English planters settled at Amboyna, but within four years trade rivalries had reached such a pitch that the Dutch murdered some of these merchants and drove the rest from the islands.  As a consequence the English Company devoted its attention to the mainland of India itself, where they soon obtained possession of Madras and Bombay, and left the islands of the Indian Ocean mainly in possession of the Dutch.  We shall see later the effect of this upon the history of geography, for it was owing to their possession of the East India Islands that the Dutch were practically the discoverers of Australia.  One result of the Dutch East India policy has left its traces even to the present day.  In 1651 they established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which only fell into English hands during the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon held Holland.

Meanwhile the English had not lost sight of the possibilities of the North-East Passage, if not for reaching the Spice Islands, at any rate as a means of tapping the overland route to China, hitherto monopolised by the Genoese.  In 1558 an English gentleman, named Anthony Jenkinson, was sent as ambassador to the Czar of Muscovy, and travelled from Moscow as far as Bokhara; but he was not very fortunate in his venture, and England had to be content for some time to receive her Indian and Chinese goods from the Venetian argosies as before.  But at last they saw no reason why they should not attempt direct relations with the East.  A company of Levant merchants was formed in 1583 to open out direct communications with Aleppo, Bagdad, Ormuz, and Goa.  They were unsuccessful at the two latter places owing to the jealousy of the Portuguese, but they made arrangements for cheaper transit of Eastern goods to England, and in 1587 the last of the Venetian argosies, a great vessel of eleven hundred tons, was wrecked off the Isle of Wight.  Henceforth the English conducted their own business with the East, and Venetian and Portuguese monopoly was at an end.

[Illustration:  RUSSIAN MAP OF ASIA, 1737.]

But the journeys of Chancellor and Jenkinson to the Court of Moscow had more far-reaching effects; the Russians themselves were thereby led to contemplate utilising their proximity to one of the best known routes to the Far East.  Shortly after Jenkinson’s visit, the Czar, Ivan the Terrible, began extending his dominions eastward, sending at first a number of troops to accompany the Russian merchant Strogonof as far as the Obi in search of sables.  Among the troops were a corps of six thousand Cossacks commanded by one named Vassili Yermak, who, finding the Tartars an easy prey, determined at first to set up a new