PLAISTED first appears in the East India Company’s records towards the end of 1740, when the Court of Directors granted his petition for leave to go to Bengal ‘to get his livelyhood in the seafaring way there’ (Court Minutes, 7 Nov. and 3 Dec. 1740). This means that he hoped to obtain the command of a vessel engaged in the local trade permitted to the Company’s servants, and implies some experience in navigation. Later (1747) he declared that he had been at Genoa, Leghorn, Messina, etc.; so probably he had already made one or more voyages to the Mediterranean. Further, his assertion in 1748 that he ‘was regularly brought up and educated in fortification and gunnery,’ including apparently the elements of surveying, suggests that he had had some military training. And this is all we know of his earlier life.