Now Master Thorne was a very shrewd investor. “In a fleete of three shippes and a caravel,” he says, “that went from this citie armed by the marchants of it, which departed in Aprill last past, I and my partener have one thousand foure hundred duckets that we employed in the sayd fleete, principally for that two English men, friends of mine, which are somewhat learned in Cosmographie, should go in the same shippes, to bring me certaine relation of the situation of the countrey, and to be expert in the navigation of those seas, and there to have informations of many other things, and advise that I desire to know especially.” His idea was that our seamen should obtain some of the Portuguese “cardes” (_i.e._ charts) “by which they saile,” “learne how they understand them,” and thus, in plain language, crib some of the Portuguese secrets.
Thorne shows that he was no mean student of geography himself. Already he possessed “a little Mappe or Carde of the world” and pointed out that from Cape Verde “the coast goeth Southward to a Cape called Capo de buona speransa” (the Portuguese name for the Cape of Good Hope). “And by this Cape go the Portingals to their Spicerie. For from this Cape toward the Orient, is the land of Calicut.” “The coastes of the Sea throughout all the world I have coloured with yellow, for that it may appeare that all is within the line coloured yellow is to be imagined to be maine land or islands: and all without the line so coloured to bee Sea: whereby it is easie and light to know it.” Now Thorne had obtained this “carde” somehow by stealth: by rights he should not have possessed it, for the Portuguese, as already mentioned, were most anxious that their Indian secrets should not be divulged. He therefore begs his friend not to show anyone this chart else “it may be a cause of paine to the maker: as well for that none may make these cardes, but certaine appointed and allowed for masters, as for that peradventure it would not sound well to them, that a stranger should know or discover their secretes: and would appeare worst of all, if they understand that I write touching the short way to the spicerie by our Seas.”
We see, then, the determined desire to obtain the required information about a route to India obtained from the study of the very charts which the Portuguese made after some of their voyages, and by sending Englishmen out in their ships sufficiently expert in cosmography to learn all that could be known. It must not be forgotten, at the same time, that there were also land-travellers who journeyed to India and brought back alluring accounts of India. Cæsar Frederick, for instance, a Venetian merchant, set forth in the year 1563 with some merchandise bound for the East. From Venice he sailed in a vessel as far as Cyprus: from there he took passage in a smaller craft and landed in Syria, and then journeying to Aleppo got in touch with some Armenian and Moorish merchants whom he accompanied to Ormuz (on the Persian Gulf), where he found that the Portuguese had already established a factory and strengthened it, as the English East India Company’s servants were afterwards wont, with a fort. From Ormuz he went on to Goa and other places in India. Already, he pointed out, the Portuguese had a fleet or “Armada” of warships to guard their merchant craft in these parts from attack by pirates. Proceeding thence to Cochin, at the south-west of India, he found that the natives called all Christians coming from the West Portuguese, whether they were Italians, Frenchmen or whatever else: so powerful a hold had the first settlers from the Iberian Peninsula gained on the Indians. We need not follow this traveller on his way to Sumatra, to the Ganges and elsewhere, but it is enough to state that the accounts which he gave to his fellow-Europeans naturally whetted still more the appetites of the merchant traders anxious to get in touch with India by sea. He told them how rich the East was in pepper and ginger, nutmegs and sandalwood, aloes, pearls, rubies, sapphires, diamonds. It was a magnificent opportunity for an honest merchant to find wealth. “Now to finish that which I have begunne to write, I say that those parts of the Indies are very good, because that a man that hath little shall make a very great deale thereof: alwayes they must governe themselves that they be taken for honest men.”