Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ABEL JANSEN TASMAN: EXPLORER. SHE seventeenth century may be called the century of Companies. The English, the French, the Spaniards, and the Dutch seem - almost simultaneously to have recognised the great principle of Co-operation in the furtherance of commercial enterprise. In the year 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted to certain merchants of the city of London a charter to trade to the Eastern Indies, reserving to them all rights and privileges and constituting them a body corporate. This charter was the foundation of that great power, afterwards known as " John Company." Eleven years afterwards, Gerard le Roy, an adventurer of daring and genius, obtained a similar privilege for the French. Still later the Emperor Charles VI. created at Ostend a commission known as the " Imperial Company " which died strangled in its birth by political intrigue, while the Danes, under Christian IV., established a trading company in 1612. The Co-operative Society that at present concerns us, however, is that of the Dutch. The greed of Phillip of Spain strove to secure to himself all the commerce of those magnificent islands of the Pacific to which the daring spirits of the old world were hastening. Phillip knew that a monopoly of trade was the first step to universal Empire. He seized upon the passage into the Baltic hoping to become master of the commerce of the North. He intended to build a city at the straits of Magellan, and there establish such a colony as might, to use the words of old Harris, " put it out of the Power of other Nations to trouble the Commerce of the South Seas or find a passage that way to the Indies." Now Phillip's revolted subjects in the Netherlands had already begun to make a figure in trade, and the instant Spain mastered Portugal she forbade the Dutch to purchas...