East India Company
The East India Company (EIC), also known as the Honourable East India Company (HEIC) or the British East India Company and informally as John Company, Company Bahadur, or simply The Company, was an English and later British joint-stock company. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with Mughal India and the East Indies, and later with Qing China. The company ended up seizing control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent, colonised parts of Southeast Asia, and colonised Hong Kong after a war with Qing China.
Cornelis de Houtman
Cornelis de Houtman, brother of Frederick de Houtman, was a Dutch explorer who discovered a new sea route from Europe to Indonesia and who thus begun the Dutch spice trade. At the time, the Portuguese Empire held a monopoly on the spice trade, and the voyage was a symbolic victory for the Dutch, even though the voyage itself was a disaster. Houtman was also a spy, having worked against the Portuguese by bringing back to the Netherlands privileged nautical information obtained during his stay in Portugal.
William Baffin
William Baffin was an English navigator and explorer. He is primarily known for his attempt to discover a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, during the course of which he was the first European to discover Baffin Bay in present-day Canada. He was also responsible for exceptional surveys of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf on behalf of the East India Company.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was a Dutch merchant, trader and historian. An alternative spelling of his second name is Huijgen.
Dutch–Portuguese War
The Dutch–Portuguese War was an armed conflict involving Dutch forces, in the form of the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company, against the Portuguese Empire. Beginning in 1602, the conflict primarily involved the Dutch companies invading Portuguese colonies in the Americas, Africa, India and the Far East. The war can be thought of as an extension of the Eighty Years' War being fought in Europe at the time between Spain and the Netherlands, as Portugal was in a dynastic union with the Spanish Crown after the War of the Portuguese Succession, for most of the conflict. However, the conflict had little to do with the war in Europe and served mainly as a way for the Dutch to gain an overseas empire and control trade at the cost of the Portuguese. English forces also assisted the Dutch at certain points in the war. Because of the cargo of conflict, this war would be nicknamed the Spice War.
Seydi Ali Reis
Seydi Ali Reis (1498–1563), formerly also written Sidi Ali Reis and Sidi Ali Ben Hossein, was an Ottoman admiral and navigator. He commanded the left wing of the Ottoman fleet at the naval Battle of Preveza in 1538. He was later promoted to the rank of fleet admiral of the Ottoman fleet in the Indian Ocean, and as such, encountered the Portuguese forces based in the Indian city of Goa on several occasions in 1554.
Red Dragon (1595)
Scourge of Malice or Malice Scourge or Mare Scourge was a 38-gun ship ordered by George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland. She was built and launched at Deptford Dockyard in 1595. The Earl used her as his flagship during raids on the Spanish Main, where she provided additional force to support his fleet. She was later renamed Red Dragon; the East India Company used her for at least five voyages to the East Indies. The first recorded performance of the play Hamlet took place on Red Dragon in 1607 while she was anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone.
Battle of the Gulf of Oman
The Battle of the Gulf of Oman was a naval battle between a large Portuguese armada under Dom Fernando de Meneses and the Ottoman Indian fleet under Seydi Ali Reis. The campaign was a catastrophical failure for the Ottomans who lost all of their ships.
Henry Middleton (captain)
Sir Henry Middleton was a sea captain and adventurer. He negotiated with the sultan of Ternate and the sultan of Tidore, competed against Dutch and Portuguese interests in the East Indies but still managed to buy cloves.
Military history of Bassein
The military history of Bassein encompasses the period from 1526, when the Portuguese established their first factory at Bassein, until 1818, when Bassein lost its strategic importance following the defeat of the Marathas by the British.
Bantam Presidency
Bantam Presidency was a presidency established by the British East India Company and based at the Company factory at Bantam in Java. Founded in 1617, the Presidency exercised its authority over all the Company factories in India, including the agencies of Madras, Masulipatnam and Surat. The factors at Bantam were instrumental in founding the colony of Madraspatnam in 1639 with the Fort St. George, which later grew into the modern city of Madras. The Presidency of Bantam was twice downgraded, first in 1630 before being restored in 1634 and for the second time in 1653, when owing to the hostility of Dutch traders, the Presidency was shifted to Madras. Bantam remained an agency under the suzerainty of Madras and then Surat till the 1680s, when trade was moved to Bencoolen in Sumatra. The factory at Bantam survived until the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 when all the British colonies in the East Indies were handed over to the Dutch in return for recognition of British primacy over the Malay Peninsula.
Suvali Beach
Suvali Beach was previously known as Swally or Swally Beach. Suvali Beach is an urban beach along the Arabian Sea situated near the village of Suvali in the Hazira suburb of Surat in Gujarat State, India. The black sand beach lies 25 kilometres (16 mi) from the centre of Surat and is the cleanest beach in India.