Ralph Fitch (1550 – 1611) was a gentleman, a merchant of London and one of the earliest British travellers and merchants to visit Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, South Asia, and Southeast Asia including the court of Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. At first he was no chronicler but he did eventually write descriptions of the Southeast Asia he saw in 1583–1591, and upon his return to England, in 1591, became a valuable consultant for the English East India Company.

Early life and Family

Family

Fitch's place of birth has long been a mystery but recent research indicates that he was most likely born in All Saints' parish, Derby.

Career Travelling

In February 1583, he embarked in the Tyger for Tripoli (the seaport of Aleppo) in Syria, together with merchants John Newberry and John Eldred, a jeweller named William Leedes and a painter, James Story, all financed by the Levant Company. Here Eldred stayed behind to trade, while Fitch and the others sailed down the Persian Gulf to the Portuguese fortress and trading station at Ormuz, where they were promptly arrested as spies on the 9th of September (at Venetian instigation, they claimed, as the Venetians resented the 16th-century Portuguese commercial monopoly in the Indian Ocean that called an end to centuries of Venetian, Genoese and Pisan – plus Catalan – dealings with Arab middlemen, down from the Middle Ages) and sent as prisoners to the viceroy of Portuguese Goa and Damaon (September to October).

On the 5th November 1583, they came upon the city of Diu, the strongest town belonging to Portugal in this area, while being transported as prisoners to Goa.

Through the sureties procured by two Jesuits (one being Thomas Stevens, formerly of New College, Oxford, the first Englishman known to have reached India by the Cape route in 1579), Fitch and his comrades regained their liberty on the 22nd of December 1583.

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He departed Serrepore on the 28th of November 1586, and pushed on by sea and rivers to his destination of Pegu.

  • Fitch's journey is referred to indirectly by William Shakespeare in Act 1, Scene 3, Line 7 of Macbeth (circa 1606), where the First Witch cackles about a sailor's wife: "Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master of the Tyger."

Works

  • Aanmerklyke Reys van Ralph Fitch, Koopman te Londen, Gedaan van Anno 1583 tot 1591, (1706), Leyden, Van der Aa [https://archive.org/details/aanmerklykereysv00fitc]
  • Ralph Fitch, England's Pioneer To India And Burma: His Companions And Contemporaries, (1899), John Horton Ryley,
  • Ralph Fitch, Elizabethan in the Indies, (1972), Michael Edwardes, Faber & Faber, ISBN 057110133X.

See also

  • Chronology of European exploration of Asia
  • John Mildenhall

References

Bibliography

  • Hakluyt, Robert (1926). The Principal Voyages of the English Nation. Vol. 3. London: J.M. Dent.
  • Locke, J.C. (1930). "The First Englishmen in India: Letters and Narratives of Sundry Elizabethans Written by Themselves". The Broadway Travellers. Vol. 9. London: George Routledge & Sons.
  • "Fitch, Ralph." Encyclopedia of India. Encyclopedia.com. (April 15, 2026). <nowiki>https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/fitch-ralph</nowiki>
  • Williams, Neville (1975). The Sea Dogs: Privateers, Plunder and Piracy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  • Full text of "Ralph Fitch : England's pioneer to India and Burma : his companions and contemporaries, with his remarkable narrative told in his own words"
  • Account of the Voyage of Ralph Fitch, Merchant of London. This part of the account pertains to the year 1583.