Introduction

Edward Fenton’s voyage of 1582 ‘for China and Cathay’, sponsored by the Privy Council, was officially intended to establish the first English trading base in the Far East, but since it was a signal failure it has attracted little attention from historians. It is generally known, moreover, only from the narrative of the vice-admiral, Luke Ward, which Hakluyt printed in 1589. This he subsequently cut to barely half its original length for inclusion in the Principall Navigations of 1599–1600, and it is from the latter version that modern reprints have been made. Fenton’s own Sea Journal has never been published—the manuscript was one of those collected by Samuel Pepys—and it alone records the last six months of the voyage. For early in 1583 Ward ‘lost company’ with his General off the coast of Brazil, while two months earlier still young John Drake had taken himself off with the Bark Francis, to the consternation of the mariners in the two great ships. For as he vanished, so there vanished also their dream of sharing out another shipload of Spanish treasure such as Sir Francis had brought home, and in the secret hope of which so many of them had embarked.