When the first of these expeditions had failed, and while the result of the second was still unknown, some merchants of Amsterdam fitted out a fleet of four vessels, which in the year 1595 sailed to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Before this date, however, a few Netherlanders had visited the eastern seas in the Portuguese service, and among them was one in particular whose writings had great influence at that period and for more than half a century afterwards. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was born at Haarlem, in the province of Holland. He received a good general education, but from an early age he gave himself up with ardour to the special study of geography and history, and eagerly read such books of travel as were within his reach. In 1579 he obtained permission from his parents, who were then residing at Enkhuizen, to proceed to Seville, where his two elder brothers were pushing their fortunes. He was at Seville when the cardinal king Henrique of Portugal died, leaving the succession to the throne in dispute. The duke of Alva with a strong Spanish army won it for his master, and shortly afterwards Linschoten removed to Lisbon, where he was a clerk in a merchant’s office when Philippe made his triumphal entry and when Alva died. Two years later he entered the service of a Dominican friar, by name Vicente da Fonseca, who had been appointed by Philippe primate of India, the see of Goa having been raised to an archbishopric in 1557. In April 1583 with his employer he sailed from Lisbon, and after touching at Mozambique--where he remained from the 5th to the 20th of August, diligently seeking information on that part of the world--he arrived at Goa in September of the same year. He remained in India until January 1589. When returning to Europe in the ship _Santa Cruz_ from Cochin, he passed through a quantity of wreckage from the ill-fated _São Thomé_, which had sailed from the same port five days before he left, and he visited several islands in the Atlantic, at one of which--Terceira--he was detained a long time. He reached Lisbon again in January 1592, and eight months later rejoined his family at Enkhuizen, after an absence of nearly thirteen years. [Sidenote: Work of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten.]