• Eastward Ho !
England's Quest of Eastern Trade. By Sir William Foster, C.I.E. (A. and C. Black. 15s.)
NATIONAL memory runs in grooves. British interest in Indian history rests on Clive and Hastings and the Mutiny, giving little attention to even Sikh and Maratha Wars (not to cite a score of campaigns nearly unknown ; for example, the Nepal one). Most neglected of all are the hundred and fifty years between Elizabeth and Plassey. The only book I recall which gives an adequate showing to the East India Company's foundation period is Mr. P. E. Roberts' History of British India, which has so many excellences that I am glad of every excuse to commend it. We shall never set this balance right, as regards the general public ; for you cannot find in these obscure but valiant years that " story with a girl in it " which the popular Press has discovered is the only kind its readers desire. But whatever serious public survives should take its eyes for a while from the names it knows and look at others.
Sir William Foster remarks that the Dictionary of National Biography is very defective " on the minor and even the major personalities of the period of the Elizabethan expansion, owing to its having been planned at a date when the import- ance of the subject was not fully recognized." What is more surprising is that even The (Ilford history of India should contain no mention of William Methwold, the greatest Englishman in India before Clive. The truth is, not only has undue attention been given to the later story, the whole eastward effort has been neglected while our minds went " Westward Ho " When we think of English seamanship and adventure, we think of Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher in American seas. Yet these men themselves knew eastern waters. Drake touched at the Moluccas in 1579. Baffin, who has left his name in the Arctic Ocean, was killed in is skirmish in the Persian Gulf, in 1623. And, great as is the talc of English enterprise westward, it contains nothing to surpass a hundred episodes in English enterprise eastward. In 1553, for example, Anthony Jenkinson interviewed at Aleppo Suleiman the Magnificent, and obtained a grant of free trade throughout the Turkish dominions. He had already travelled widely. In 1557, he journeyed from England to the White Sea, thence across Russia, displayed " the reddc crosse of S. George " for the first time on the Caspian, and reached Bokhara. In 1561, he and companions crossed Russia again, entered Persia and saw the Shah, opening up corn- mercial relations. In 1581, another Englishman, John Newbery, travelled down the Euphrates Valley and into Persia. In 1588, came the famous exploit of Newbery,
Leeds, Story, and. Ralph.Fitch, who, sailed in the ' Tiger ' "-to Aleppo," left Eldred and Shales in Basra, and were .captured by the Portuguese at Ormuz and taken to' , there three of them escaped, Newbery presently coolly -setting off• home across the Punjab and (one presumes) Afghanistan and perishing in some place unknown, and Fitch wandering over. India, Burma, and Ceylon, and ultimately returning to help in the foundation of the East India- Company. _
Sir William Foster, I take leave to think, is the best editor that ever lived. No allusion is too obscure for him to explain, no proper name too atrociously jumbled to decipher. Decade' after decade he has worked patiently at his work of illu- minating dark and most gallant passages of our history; book after book has come from him, making precious little stir, yet recognized at once by those who cared to see truth come to light. He is incapable of any work that is less than excellent ; he is also master of as good a narrative style as any man could desire, a delight to read, Slips are inevitable ; but no _ writer makes so few. In his latest book, I think " Japanese " (p. 170) should be " Javanese " ; I think that perhaps he dismisses too arbitrarily the old and respectable belief that the event which immediately precipitated the East India Company's foundation was the Dutch • Company's action in raising the price of-spices, especially pepper—after all, pepper was not a luxury, but a necessity. There are one or two places where compression has resulted in the most trivial misrepresentation of some event. And that is about the whole debit to set against the fullest and best narrative we have of a whole world of heroic achievement, in an age that seems as far removed in manner and thought as that of Marathon, He- has brought uncnspected facts to light ; he has adequately set.out those that were known before. In his own line he has never had his equal ; and I have been for years wanting a chance to say so. I hope. some readers, at any rate, will give fiction a rest, and take up England's
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