John Saris was chief merchant on the first English voyage to Japan, which left London in 1611. He stopped at Yemen, missing India and going on to Java, which had the sole permanent English trading station in Asia. Saris had spent more than five years there before, as a merchant, having gone with the East India Company Second Voyage, under Henry Middleton. He became Chief Factor there, but returned to London in 1610. Now arrived again, in 1612, Saris decided to send his other ships home, taking just one, the Clove, on to Japan, where it arrived in summer 1613.
One of the two Japanese suits of armour offered by Tokugawa Hidetada to John Saris for King James I in 1613, now in the Tower of London.
Captain John Saris tombstone - キャプテンジョンサリスの墓石
The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies, and later with East Asia. The company gained control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time.
James Lancaster commanded the first East India Company voyage in 1601
Red Dragon fought the Portuguese at the Battle of Swally in 1612, and made several voyages to the East Indies
The emperor Jahangir investing a courtier with a robe of honour, watched by Sir Thomas Roe, English ambassador to the court of Jahangir at Agra from 1615 to 1618, and others
A document with the original vermilion seal of Tokugawa Ieyasu, granting trade privileges in Japan to the East India Company in 1613