During the reign of Elizabeth, our infantile commercial adventures were beginning to make themselves felt. Early in the sixteenth century there had been a few isolated cases of voyages to the Levant in search of wealth. From 1511 to 1534 we hear of certain “tall ships belonging to London, Southampton, and Bristol, which made voyages to the East, trading with Sicily, Crete, Chios, and sometimes Cyprus, Tripoli, and Beyrout in Syria”; but there appears to have been no systematic commerce carried on in English bottoms in those days, most of the trade between the Levant and England being conducted by the Venetians. So far back as 1513 we had a consul established at Chios, and in 1534 (Hakluyt, vol. ii, p. 98) we read of an exciting voyage made by _The Holy Cross_ and _The Matthew Gonson_ to Crete and Chios, both ships coming back much the worse for wear. In 1550 Captain Bodenham, with “the great Barke _Aucher_”, went to Chios, and three years later Anthony Jenkinson went to Aleppo, and got trading privileges “on a footing with the most favoured nations”. This was the actual foundation of our future capitulations, and the first commencement of our Levant Company. Up to this time the carrying trade between England and the Levant had been carried on, on ships called argosies, by the Venetians. Sir Paul Ricaut, son of a London merchant, who was born in 1620, was secretary to Lord Winchilsea, and consul at Smyrna for eleven years; he wrote, by the direction of Charles II, a work entitled _The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches_. He also wrote a book entitled _The Present State of the Turkish Empire_, a very interesting work, the first edition of which, Pepys tells us, was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. In this work he tells us that the ships known as argosies were so called because they were built at Ragusa for the Venetian merchants. “These vast carracks called argosies, which are so famed for the vastness of their burthen and bulk, were corruptly so denominated from Ragosies, ships of Ragusa.” The Ragusans, as merchants, were much to the fore in those days, prior to the great earthquake, and had, as we see from Dr. Covel’s diary, an ambassador of their own at Constantinople. “Your mind is tossing on the ocean; There, where your argosies, with portly sail,— Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood, Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,— Do over-peer the petty traffickers, That curt’sy to them, do them reverence, As they fly by them with their woven wings.” (Shakes., _Merchant of Venice_, Act i, Scene 1.)