William Dalrymple opens his account of Ralph Fitch’s journey with a simple, confident claim: ‘Ralph Fitch was the first.’ Sent to the East by Sir Thomas Smythe’s Levant Company in 1583, on the company’s first expedition toward India. Fitch’s story is framed as a beginning, England’s first real attempt to see for itself what Spain and Portugal had spent a century quietly hoarding.
\nBut ‘first’ is a word worth pausing on, especially in a book about a company that would later become infamous for rewriting history in its own favour.
\nFitch’s journey certainly reads like a beginning. Arrested by the Portuguese and shipped in chains to Goa, he faced the threat of the strappado before being helped escape by Father Thomas Stevens, an English Jesuit who had settled in Goa years earlier. Stevens himself is where the story complicates: he had reached India by the Cape route back in 1579, four years before Fitch ever set out. So if the question is simply ‘who was the first Englishman to set foot in India,” Stevens holds that claim, not Fitch.
\nDalrymple’s claim, read carefully, is actually narrower and more precise than it first appears: Fitch was the first sent specifically by the Levant Company, as part of its first organised expeditions towards India, not the first Englishman to arrive there by any means. Stevens travelled as a missionary, alone, without a trading company behind him. Fitch travelled as a merchant, backed by capital, sent with a commercial purpose, to buy spices, gather intelligence, and return with information the Levant Company, and later, the East India Company, could act on.
\nWhat I didn’t expect to find was just how far that purpose carried him. According to a blog documenting the history of British Malaya1, Fitch arrived at Malacca in 1588, making him one of the first Englishmen to ever set foot on the Malay Peninsula, a detail that placed him, by extension the earliest seeds of English commercial ambition, in what is now Malaysia over four centuries ago. It was all in service of the same goal that sent him East in the first place: the spice trade.
\nThat distinction matters more than it might seem. Steven’s journey was personal and religious. Fitch’s was commercial and institutional, backed by subscriptions, driven by profit, and built to be repeated and scaled. It carried him further than he likely planned. In that sense, Fitch wasn’t the first Englishman to see India. He may have been something more specific, and arguably more consequential: the first sent by an English company with the explicit goal of turning what he saw, from India to the shore of Malacca, into a business.
\nPerhaps that’s the more interesting ‘first’ after all. Not who arrived, but who arrived on someone else’s payroll, already looking for what could be extracted, sold, and repeated.
\nThis piece draws from William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of The East India Company. A fascination with history, sparked by Dalrymple’s profoundly impactful book, made me want to write about it here.
\nRalph Fitch, Elizabethan adventurer and first Englishman to visit the Malay Peninsula ↩︎
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