the produce of the East to the West. In the Middle Ages the Venetians had obtained their supplies of spices from vessels which had made their way up to the head of the Gulf and transferred them there either to caravans or to other craft which navigated the Euphrates to a point far in the interior easily accessible from the Mediterranean. The Portuguese when they went to the East took prompt measures to make themselves masters in a region which had so many famous traditions as a commercial centre. In the absence of effective rivalry at sea they were able to get into their own hands the entire overseas trade and to exercise a large control of the commerce of the whole of Southern Persia. When the English made their appearance in the Indian Ocean, Portuguese supremacy was unchallenged, and it seemed unchallengeable.
Fitch's narrative had thrown a good deal of light upon the position occupied by the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, and other information had been gleaned from representatives of the Turkey Company who penetrated to Persia from Constantinople, but the actual inspirer of the East India Company's earliest Persian venture was probably Sir Robert Shirley or Sherley, a gentleman adventurer who for a good many years in the opening of the seventeenth century figured on the diplomatic stage in Europe as ambassador to Shah Abbas, then ruler of Persia.
Robert Shirley's career supplies a curious and interesting page in the history of the early English adventurers in the East. Like so many of his class, he was a scion of a noble English family who had been driven abroad to seek his fortune by a pure love of excitement and change. He had originally gone to Persia in the train of his brother, Anthony, who after a period of buccaneering in Portuguese
