It was the desire to share in this East India commerce (which made Lisbon the wealthiest and most populous city of Europe) that led to so many attempts to discover a northeastern, a northwestern, and even a northern passage to India (directly over the pole), not only as shorter, but as avoiding any collision with the Portuguese and Spanish, who did not hesitate to maintain by force their respective exclusive claims to the passages by the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan. These attempts were at first confined to the English, beginning with that made by Sebastian Cabot, on his third and last voyage from England. The Dutch and Belgians were long content to buy Indian merchandise at Lisbon, which they resold in the north of Europe; but after the union of the Spanish and Portuguese dominions, in 1580, and the seizure, which soon followed, of the Dutch ships at Lisbon, and their exclusion from any trade with Portugal, the Dutch began to entertain, even more ardently than the English, the desire of a direct commerce with the far East. Drake, in his voyage round the world (1577-80), outward by the Straits of Magellan and homeward by the Cape of Good Hope, a track in which he was speedily followed by Cavendish (1586-88), led the way to the Indian seas; but the failure of Cavendish in a second attempt to pass the Straits of Magellan, and the capture, A. D. 1594, by Spanish-American cruisers in the Pacific, of Sir Richard Hawkins, a son of the famous Sir John Hawkins, who had attempted a voyage to Japan by the same route, served to keep up the terrors of that passage. Meanwhile, Captain Lancaster, as early as 1592, accomplished the first English voyage to India by the Cape of Good Hope. After a rather disastrous voyage, he returned in 1594, having been greatly delayed by his ignorance of the monsoons. A second expedition, destined for China, sailed in 1596, but perished miserably at sea. It is to the Dutch that the credit mainly belongs of first breaking in upon the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly of Indian commerce.[67]