James Lancaster

Sir James Lancaster VI (c. 1554 died 6 June 1618) was a prominent Elizabethan trader and privateer.

Lancaster came from Basingstoke in Hampshire. In his early life, he was a soldier and a trader in Portugal. On 10 April 1591 he started from Torbay in Devon, with George Raymond and Foxcroft, on his first great voyage to the East Indies; this fleet of three ships (Penelope, Marchant Royal and Edward Bonaventure) was the earliest of the English overseas Indian expeditions. Reaching Table Bay (1 August 1591), and losing one ship off Cape Correntes on 12 September, the squadron rested and refitted at Zanzibar (February 1592), rounded Cape Comorin the following May, and reached the Malay Peninsula having arrived at Penang in June. Here he remained on the island until September of the same year and pillaged every vessel he encountered.

After a later crossing to Ceylon, the crews insisted on returning home. The return voyage was disastrous with only twenty-five officers and men surviving to reach England in May 1594. Lancaster himself reached Rye on 24 May 1594. His Indian voyage, like Ralph Fitch's overland explorations and trading, was an important factor in the foundation of the East India Company. In the same year he led a privateering expedition against Pernambuco and Recife in Brazil, aimed at seizing the cargo of a storm-damaged Portuguese carrack which had put in there on its way back from India. Unlike the East Indies voyage, this was (according to Hakluyt's account) highly professional in its conduct and very successful; after picking up a chance-met separate squadron under Captain Henry Middleton, he led an assault landing, seized the town and (with the assistance of a flotilla of Dutch traders who also threw in their lot with him) held it for several weeks and embarked the carrack's cargo along with local produce such as Brazil-wood (the source of a valuable red dye used in the woolen textile industry).

...
Wikipedia