The seventeenth century, then, saw a wonderful incentive to the English Merchant Navy just because the East was calling. And, as a result of this, there followed in due succession the creation of the East India Company, the wonderful and famous East Indiamen built chiefly at Blackwall; then, after the long monopoly came to an end, the famous Blackwall sailing ships of the Wigrams and Greens, the historic clippers, and finally the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. From the year 1582 for the next three hundred years from Blackwall, on the River Thames, sailing ships year after year made their way to the Orient, and it is to my mind one of the most remarkable continuities in the history of human things. It is certainly one of the most, if not the most, critical of periods in the development of the commercial marine. What Portsmouth has been to the British Navy, the village of Blackwall has been to the British Mercantile Marine. From the Blackwall yard were launched hundreds of East Indiamen; from here came improved and novel designs for the sailing ships that were to win and retain against all competitors commercial supremacy at sea for the British nation. But for these craft the trend of English history, of the world’s history, would be entirely different. There would have been neither the cause nor the means of a powerful navy; nor of Colonial expansion; nor would the position which Britain possesses financially have been possible. I am omitting intentionally for the present the development of the American trade, for that came later. It was the Eastern overseas trade in the merchant ships of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which was responsible for an enormous part of the national wealth, many of our costliest buildings and institutions, the founding of illustrious families, and indirectly the awakening of Japan. All this dates back to Prince Henry and Vasco da Gama—to the finding of a sea route to the East. It was in April 1582 that the first ship left for the East—when the _Edward Bonaventure_ sailed from Blackwall, joined the flagship _Leicester_ at Southampton, and, four weeks out from the London river, accompanied the two other ships. They made a futile attempt to reach India west about, and because the Spanish Fleet were in the neighbourhood of the Magellan Straits, had to return to England. In 1595 Holland sent four ships round the Cape of Good Hope, and two years later the expedition came back, after making a treaty with the King of Bantam and thus opening up the Indian archipelago. In 1599 a number of merchants in London petitioned Elizabeth for permission to have a monopoly to trade with the East Indies, and on the last day of the following year this privilege was granted for fifteen years, and thus the first East India Company began.