Briefly, this was brought about as follows. We mentioned on an earlier page that though the Portuguese jealously guarded the secret of the India route, they were quite willing to dispose of these Indian goods. One of these marts, to which merchants came from other countries in order to purchase, was Lisbon. The second was Antwerp, which was convenient for the merchants of Northern Europe. England, by the way, had done a good deal of overseas trade between London and Antwerp for centuries, so this additional East Indian trade made the visits of our merchantmen even more important, and thus many first realised what India meant commercially, and could mean to them. And similarly the people of the Low Countries became equally impressed with what they learned. Thus very naturally we see in 1593—the actual year in which the Levant Company had obtained their extended charter—the first of a series of efforts made by Dutchmen to reach Asia by a north-east passage. And we must not omit to mention the very great influence which Jan Huygen von Linschoten, a native of Haarlem, had. The latter was a great student of geography, at a time when all knowledge of this kind was rare. For a while he was resident in Lisbon, where he amassed a large amount of invaluable data concerning the East—its harbours, configuration, trade-winds, and so on. Lisbon, in fact, was just the place in which all the East Indian information naturally collected itself. Later on Linschoten himself proceeded to India and dwelt at Goa, in the train of the Portuguese Archbishop, but in the year 1592 he returned to Europe, and the tales which this traveller told concerning India astonished the slow-reasoning minds of his fellow-countrymen. In the year 1596 he published a most valuable book dealing with the East, affording charts and maps and no end of information which would be priceless to any who might venture on a voyage to India. An English translation appeared two years later, and it certainly had a great influence on the founding of our first East India Company. So important was the book, indeed, that it was also translated and published in French, in Latin and German.
As for Holland, the tangible result was that four ships were fitted out, and under Cornelis Houtman were sent in 1595 to the countries situate the other side of the Cape of Good Hope, beyond the Indian Ocean. Houtman’s voyage had been a success, for in the year 1597 he returned, bringing with him a treaty made with the King of Bantam, which was the means of opening up to Holland the Indian Archipelago. This voyage convinced even the most sceptical, and a new era had begun, in which Holland was to grow rich and powerful, a great commercial country and of considerable strength at sea. The handsome seventeenth-century buildings which you still find standing in Holland to-day, and the brilliant seventeenth-century Dutch painters of portraits and shipping scenes, are surviving evidences of a wonderful prosperity derived for the most part from the East India trade of that time.