Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/261

 ANTWERP A MART FOR EASTERN TRADE 203 direct traffic with Lisbon was small, although we find Henry VII granting a charter in 1500 to a joint com- pany of English and Portuguese adventurers, and Por- tuguese merchants figure among the residents in Lon- don with whom the Venetians were in 1507 licensed to trade. But between Antwerp and London an enor- mous traffic grew up. Antwerp not only supplied Eng- land with the precious stones, fine fabrics, spices, drugs, and dyes of the East, but she took in return and dis- tributed to Europe the raw materials and manufactures of England, as a long list of these exports and imports in 1560 shows. In 1550 the Emperor Charles V found that the Eng- lish merchants employed twenty thousand persons in Antwerp, and he refrained from imposing the Inqui- sition on the city, lest it should drive the Englanders away. They did business with a Portuguese colony on the Scheldt, and no fewer than three hundred wealthy Spanish families had their domicile in Ant- werp. Over five hundred vessels are reported to have sailed in or out in one day, and the ships and small craft were said to aggregate ninety-two thousand a year. This centre of the world's traffic, Dives Antwerpia, almost at our doors, gave an impulse to the mercantile spirit in England. " Clear-sighted persons at court ' advised, as early as the reign of Henry VULL, a policy of colonial enterprise in place of interference in the continental wars. " Let us," they said, " in God's name, leave off our attempts against the terra firma, as the natural situation of islands seems not to suit