A landing on Australian soil has been claimed for the French navigator Paulmyer, Sieur de Gonneville, in 1503, and Guillaume le Testu of Provence is asserted to have sighted the coast in 1531. There were certainly, about 1527–39, French pirates in the Malay Archipelago. There are similar early Portuguese claims to the first view of the island-continent. When Torres had passed through the strait which bears his name, south of New Guinea, in 1606, and when, in the same year, the crew of a Dutch vessel, the _Duyfken_, effected a landing in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the first definite steps were taken towards the exploration of Australia. By 1665 the Dutch had worked out and charted a general sketch of most of the western seaboard; in 1696 William de Vlamingh re-charted a large part of it with fair accuracy. In the meantime, in 1642, Abel Janszoon Tasman had sailed from Batavia to Mauritius, thence south-eastward, till he struck the southern and eastern coasts of Tasmania, whence he passed on to obtain the first sight of New Zealand. The exploration of the Australian coasts from the direction of the Pacific belongs to following chapters. During this period England began to interest herself in the East Indian trade, and the great efforts which were made to reach Eastern Asia by way of the arctic region will be discussed in the following chapter. In 1591 James Lancaster made an adventurous voyage to the Malay Peninsula; the formation of the East India Company followed. In 1600 Lancaster, in its employ, started again for the East, and laid the foundations of English commerce in the Spice Islands, visiting the Nicobars, Sumatra, and Java. He was accompanied on this voyage by Davis, famous for his work in the Arctic, who was killed on a further voyage in Eastern waters in 1605. The work of the East India Company led to the undertaking of many important voyages of discovery. In 1607 Captain Hawkins travelled to Agra and the court of the great Mogul, and a factory was started in Japan in 1613. The men in the employ of the East India Company were not, however, the first Englishmen to reach Japan: William Adams, a trader, had been forced to anchor off the island of Kiu-shiu in 1600. He had been very kindly received, but had not been allowed to return home. Permission, however, was at length granted to him, and, after helping to found an English settlement in Japan, he spent the rest of his life in the service of the East India Company. On one of the early expeditions sent out by the trading company in 1612, under Captain Best, the first foothold of the British in India was gained by the establishment of factories.