A trade with China had been a major objective of English adventure since the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Muscovy Company had had its origins in an attempt to find a northeast passage around the Scandinavian peninsula leading to Cathay--Marco Polo's fabulous kingdom of northern China. The explorers found instead a profitable trade with the territories of Ivan the Terrible, but the Muscovy merchants continued to support a variety of ventures seeking the establishment of an Oriental trade. Their agents looked into the possibilities of an overland trade through Russia to Cathay, and experimented none too profitably with a trans-Russia trade with Persia. They gave their support to renewed attempts to find a northeast passage and claimed a right of license for the numerous efforts that were made in Elizabeth's reign to find a northwest passage around or through North America. Failing in these efforts, the English merchants finally had challenged Portugal's monopoly of trade with the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth in 1600, had gotten off to a good start, and was destined to become one of the great empire builders of Britain's history. In 1606, however, the East India merchants had had just enough experience with the new trade to begin to appreciate some of its difficulties, as in the need to employ larger and more expensive ships than were standard in England's maritime trade and the great distance to China by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps, after all, some route through America might have the advantage over the Cape route. In the opinion of the late Sir William Foster, through many years historiographer of the India Office, this was a chief reason for the interest Sir Thomas Smith took in Virginia. Let it be noted that Sir Thomas' interest in Virginia outlasted the hope that a successful search for a passage to China might be based on Jamestown. Nevertheless, the point may help to explain the marked emphasis on this hope that one finds at the beginning of the project. Instructions to the first expedition directed the choice of a seat on some navigable river, and added, "if you happen to discover divers portable rivers, and mongst them any one that hath two main branches, if the difference be not great make choice of that which bendeth most toward the North-West, for that way you shall soonest find the other sea." The other sea, of course, was the Pacific, or as Englishmen were likely to say, the South Seas, whose waters also washed the shores of China. Vain as was this hope of trade with the Orient through America, it was destined for survival, in one form or another, through many years. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, it would be a principal argument for the construction of a trans-continental railway.