Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/288

 22'8 THE FIEST ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY Queen Elizabeth, while perhaps smiling at the short cuts of merchant diplomacy, gravely referred the me- morial to the learned Fulke Greville. His reply to Sir Francis Walsingham does not carry the case much AN ELIZABETHAN GALLEON. further, but it forms the masterpiece of East Indian political geography in the Elizabethan age. Taken along with the map of the world in 1600 Shakespeare's " new map with the augmentation of the Indies/' scored over by lines and curves like Malvolio's fantas- tically smiling face in " Twelfth Mght ' : -it marks the exact point which English knowledge of the Asiatic seas had reached, when the East India Company started on its independent career of maritime discovery.