CONTINUATION OF THE EARLY VOYAGES OF THE ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY TO INDIA. INTRODUCTION. In the immediately preceding chapter, we have given a series of the first twelve voyages fitted out by the English East India Company, in the prosecution of their exclusive trade to India, as preserved by Samuel Purchas; and we now mean, chiefly from the same source, to continue the series for a few years longer. At the close of the last voyage of the foregoing chapter, Purchas informs us, that "The order of reckoning must be now altered, because the voyages of the company were for the future set forth by means of a _joint stock_, instead of by particular ships, each upon a separate subscription, having separate stocks and factories; the whole proceedings being, in the sequel, at the general risk of, and accountable to the entire society or company of adventurers." He farther adds, "That the whole of these joint-stock voyages had not come into his hands; but that such as he had been able to procure, and were meet for publication, he had inserted in his Collection." The learned historiographer of the East India Company[120] gives rather a different account of the former series of separate or unconnected voyages, than that which we have taken from Purchas, terming the last voyage in our former chapter only the _ninth_, while Purchas denominates it the _twelfth_. [Footnote 120: Ann. of the Hon. E.I. Co, I. 162.] This difference, which is not at all material, may have arisen from Purchas having considered some of the ships belonging to _single_ adventurers or subscriptions, which made separate voyages or parts of voyages, as _separate_ adventures. We come now to a new era in the mode of conducting the English exclusive trade to India, of the motives for which the Annals give the following account.[121] [Footnote 121: Id. I. 165.]