قصة الكتاب :
Thomas Best led the English East India Company’s Tenth Voyage from February 1612 to\r\nJune 1614. There were two ships, the Dragon of 600 tons and the Hosiander of 213 tons,\r\nsupported by a capital of £46,000. The choice of a seaman, Thomas Best, rather than a\r\nmerchant, as ‘general’ of the voyage may have been a response to the loss of the Ascension\r\non the Fourth Voyage and to the prospect of further fighting with the Portuguese. His\r\ninstructions are not known because the Court Minutes are missing between January 1610 and\r\nDecember 1613, but the general object was to find Indian goods which could be sold for the\r\nspices of the Malay archipelago. The difficulty was not only the armed hostility of the\r\nPortuguese but the continuing lack of permission to trade from the Mughal authorities.\r\nWilliam Hawkins had thought too optimistically he had succeeded with the emperor Jehangir\r\non the Third Voyage and Sir Henry Middleton had tried without definitive success on the\r\nSixth in 1611.