1601 1602 1603 1604 1605 1606 1607 1608 1609 1610
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England sends what will be her last fleet against Spain, with William Monson as vice admiral (see 1596); the Royal Navy captures the great carrack St. Valentine.
The Ottoman peasant military leader Karayazici Abdülhalim dies as troops from Constantinople try to suppress his Jelali forces, which he has withdrawn to Urfa in southeastern Anatolia as the (third) Celali Revolt continues for a 7th year (see 1598). His brother Del Hasan seizes Kutahya in western Anatolia, and although the sultan Mehmed III will win him and his followers over by granting them governorships, the revolt will continue at Aleppo under the command of Janbuladoglu and in western Anatolia under the leadership of Yusuf and Kalenderoglu (see 1610).
English mariner Bartholomew Gosnold explores "New England." Sponsored by William Shakespeare's patron Henry Wriothesley, 29, 3rd earl of Southampton, Gosnold has sailed from the Azores and is the first Englishman to set foot in the region. Gosnold sails from Maine to Cape Cod, which he so names after "coming to anker" in the harbor of what will be called Provincetown. He names Martha's Vineyard after his eldest child, builds a house on Cuttyhunk (he calls it Elizabeth's Island), trades with the natives, and returns with a valuable cargo of sassafras (believed to be a specific for syphilis), furs, and other commodities, leaving smallpox in his wake.
Santa Catalina Island gets its name November 25 as Basque navigator Sebastian Viscaino lands on the island off the west coast of North America on Santa Catalina's Day. Viscaino anchors a few days later some 325 miles up the coast in an "excellent harbor" that he names after the count of Monte Ray, viceroy of New Spain, who sent out the Viscaino expedition from Acapulco in April. Crews of the expedition's three ships are scurvy-ridden and 16 men have died (see Gaspar de Portolá, 1769).
The United East India Company chartered March 20 by the Staats-General combines various companies to eliminate cutthroat competition. It receives a 21-year monopoly and sweeping powers to wage defensive wars, make treaties, and build forts in the Indies. This new Dutch East India Company (Veernigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) doubles and even triples European pepper prices (see 1607).
James Lancaster's English East India Company fleet arrives in June at Achin in northern Sumatra (see 1601). Portuguese traders have antagonized the local ruler, and he is happy to meet the victors over Portugal's Spanish ally in 1588. Finding no ready market for his wrought iron and clothing stores, Lancaster engages a large Portuguese galleon, defeats her, and plunders her cargo of jewels, plate, and merchandise, some of which he trades for pepper at the Dutch port of Bantam in Java (see 1603).
Capodistria-born Italian physician Santorio Santorius, 41, devises a rudimentary pulse clock (see thermometer, 1612). He has adapted an invention of the astronomer Galileo Galilei to his medical practice.
Anglican priest and scholar Alexander Nowell, dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, dies at London February 13 at age 93 (approximate). His sermons have often antagonized the queen, but the "Small Catechism" that he inserted before the order of confirmation in the Prayer Book of 1549 will be supplemented in 1604 and remain the Church of England's official catechism for the next 4 centuries.
Nonfiction: The City of the Sun (La città del sole) by Tommaso Campanella, now 34, who has written the socialistic work while imprisoned at Naples by the Spanish Inquisition (see politics, 1599). Campanella envisions an ideal commonwealth in which no man is allowed more than he needs, private property and poverty do not exist, and the people are governed by enlightened men of reason; Virgidemiarus (sixth of six volume) by Leicestershire-born moral philosopher Joseph Hall, 28, whose first volume appeared 5 years ago.
Oxford's Bodleian Library is founded by collector of medieval manuscripts Sir Thomas Bodley, 57, who married a rich widow at Oxford 5 years ago and has spent a fortune on restoring and enlarging a library that was established in the early 14th century by Thomas de Cobham, endowed with books and money by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, completed in 1450, but closed in 1550 by commissioners of the late Edward VI (see Stationers' Company, 1610).
Poetry: Observations in the Art of English Poesie by Thomas Campion advocates use of unrhymed "quantitative" meters derived from classical examples rather than rhymed accentual meters.
Theater: All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare (who has based his plot on a story by the late William Painter): "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,/ Which we ascribe to heaven" (I, i); Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare, whose setting is the Kronborg Castle completed at Elsinore in 1585: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!" (I, ii); "Neither a borrower nor a lender be;/ For loan oft loses both itself and friend,/ And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry" (I, iii); "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (II, ii); "To be, or not to be—that is the question./ Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing, end them . . . For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,/ The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,/ The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,/ The insolence of office, and the spurns/ That patient merit of the unworthy takes,/ When he himself might his quietus make/ With a bare bodkin?" (III, i).
Bartholomew Gosnold anchors in the harbor of what will later be Provincetown and notes in his log that he "tooke there a great store of Cod Fysshes."
1601 1602 1603 1604 1605 1606 1607 1608 1609 1610
