Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company 1550–1650
David Howarth
(Yale, £25)
FAR off the coast of Senegal, too, and on the Company’s Fourth Voyage, the ships put on the first performance on water of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.’ Shakespeare had, in fact, come to mind before reading these words in David Howarth’s fascinating, multi-layered book. Not Hamlet, however, but The Merchant of Venice, in particular, Shylock’s appraisal of the titular merchant Antonio’s creditworthiness: ‘Oh, no, no, no, no; my meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in supposition: he hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies… and other ventures he hath, squandered abroad.’
‘Venture’ (thereby ‘adventurers’) at this time was on the cusp of meaning. For centuries, it had meant something yet to happen and, therefore, subject to fortune and chance. Its sense of ‘risky undertaking’ dates
