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 taking and curing of various fish, as an incentive to sea-faring life. The fleet that harassed the Armada in fact consisted of many merchant ships, fostered, perhaps, by such methods. The promotion of trading companies was steadily followed, but the grant of their charters was regarded with considerable jealousy by some of the merchants of the age. The Eastland Company was established in 1579, and traded with ports in the Baltic, possessing factories in Prussia. The Levant Company was started in 1581, and had factories in Smyrna. The famous East India Company was chartered in 1600, just at the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Though at first it was attacked at home as the monopoly of a few which injured the trade of other merchants, and had to maintain a strenuous competition with the Dutch, it did not cease to direct Eastern affairs until it was able to hand over the sovereignty of India to the British Crown. The Hudson Bay Company dates from the grant of a charter by Charles II. in 1670 to Prince Rupert and seventeen other noblemen and gentlemen, securing to them 'the sole trade and commerce' of a vast undefined tract of land and sea round Hudson's Straits. Though it now only trades as a private corporation, it retains its original possessions till 1869, when they were sold for £800,000 to the British Government, and transferred in the following year to the Dominion of Canada. All these successful trading companies were an immense assistance towards the formation of a commercial fleet. Indirectly they did more, for they may be said to have been instrumental in setting up that line of communications—by ports or islands—which forms a basis of Imperial expansion. Without the distant goals of the trading companies, it is doubtful whether it would have ever been thought worth while to hold Gibraltar, Cape Town, Ceylon, or Hong Kong, or the eastern settlements of Canada, to mention only some of the points or coaling-stations so valuable to British traffic. Thus, the energy of the trading corporations has helped to teach a wider lesson.