Elizabeth I was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death on 24 March 1603. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the last monarch of the House of Tudor. Elizabeth was the...

Sir James Lancaster 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 the 10th of April 1591 he started from Torbay in Devon, wit...

Willem Cornelisz Schouten was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company. He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean. In 1615 Willem Cornelisz Schouten and his younger brother Jan Schouten sailed from Texel...

Frederick de Houtman was a Dutch explorer, navigator, and colonial governor who sailed along the coastal regions of western Australia on the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies from 1595 until 1597, during which time he made observati...

Piet Pieterszoon Hein (Heyn) was a Dutch naval officer and folk hero during the Eighty Years' War between the Netherlands and Spain. Hein was born in Delfshaven (now part of Rotterdam), the son of a captain, and he became a sailor while he...

Dirk Hartog was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer. Dirk Hartog's expedition was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artifact to record his visit,the Hartog plate. His name is sometimes alte...

Jan Pieterszoon Coen was an officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century, holding two terms as its Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies. He was long considered a national hero in the Netherlands, for provi...

Witte Corneliszoon de With was a famous Dutch naval officer of the 17th century. On his first sea voyage to the Dutch East Indies on 21 January 1616 when he was sixteen, as a cabin boy on Captain Geen Huygen Schapenham's ship the Gouden...

Jan van Riebeeck was a Dutch navigator and colonial administrator who arrived in Cape Town in the Dutch Cape Colony at the behest of the Dutch East India Company. He also spent some time in Malaysia as part of his profession and served a...

Hendrick Hamel was the first Westerner to provide a first hand account of Joseon Korea. After spending thirteen years there, he wrote "Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666," which was subsequently published i...

Willem Hesselsz de Vlamingh was a Dutch sea-captain who explored the central west coast of Australia (then "New Holland") in the late 17th century. Vlamingh joined the VOC (Dutch East India Company) in 1688 and made his first voyage to Bata...

William Penn was an English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was an early advocate of democrac...

Thomas Twining was an English merchant, and the founder of Twinings of London. The son of a fuller who moved to London when the boy was nine years old, Thomas was at first apprenticed to a weaver. He changed careers, however, and worked for...

Major-General Robert Clive, also known as Clive of India, Commander-in-Chief of British India, was a British officer and privateer who established the military and political supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal. He is credited with...

Warren Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal, from 1772 to 1785. He was famously accused of corruption and impeached in 1787, but after a long trial he was acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1814....