Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/167

 *

ostensibly, to discover other lands, and to develop new sources of commerce. The spirit of enterprise which had fitted out fleets of privateers was equally ready to adapt itself to more laudable, if not in every instance to more legitimate sources of gain, and, during the whole of the disreputable exploits and expeditions to which we have briefly alluded, the rage in England for commercial adventure had become quite as great as that which had a century before prevailed in Spain and Portugal.

The voyages of Hawkins to the coast of Guinea and to the West Indies in 1562 and 1563 had given fresh vigour to the spirit of adventure. In 1565 Richard Johnson, Alexander Kitching, and Arthur Edwards were sent by the Russia Company into Persia by way of the Caspian Sea, a journey in those days of great peril and of the most tedious character, where they obtained for their employers numerous commercial privileges. In December of the following year, George Finner, a shipowner of Plymouth, set sail on his own account with three ships and a pinnace to Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, where he had a desperate but successful encounter with seven large Portuguese vessels off Terceira.

In 1576 the celebrated Martin Frobisher equipped an expedition with the view of reaching China by a north-west passage. It consisted of only the Gabriel of twenty-five tons, and of another vessel of similar size, the Michael, with a pinnace of ten tons; yet the difficulties to which the English merchant ships were exposed, by reason of the length of the voyage to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope, combined with the hostile policy of the Portuguese and