The history of early English encounters with China is one of repeated failure and misunderstandings, and it begins with the failure of the English to even reach East Asia at all. When in 1497 the Italian Giovanni Caboto, sailing under an English flag and known in the anglophone world as John Cabot, sailed west in the hope of finding a route to China, he ended up in what is Canada today. He had planned to find a westward route to Asia, but instead discovered North America for the English, rather by accident. Later English expeditions between the 1550s and 1580s only got as far as today's Uzbekistan and Malaysia, and Martin Frobisher's repeated attempts in the 1570s to locate a north-west passage to China equally ended in failure. In 1637, the first English expedition reached China, or rather Macao, which was controlled by the Portuguese at the time. However, this expedition can hardly be counted as a success either: after a frustratingly long, and eventually futile, wait in the Portuguese harbour for a permit to sail up the Pearl River and trade there, the expedition decided to push forward without it – a decision that proved entirely detrimental to their plans of establishing trade relations. According to a chronicler on board, Peter Mundy, the Chinese side considered this effrontery, largely refused to deal with the English on mercantile terms and fired cannon balls until the English finally had to beat a humiliating retreat, promising to ‘never return to these shores’.

This contribution would like to focus on what is probably the most influential English text on East Asia from this early period: The Principal Navigations of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, first printed in 1589. Arguably, this text was crucial in shaping the English perspective on East Asia in the late sixteenth century, and continued to be so well into the seventeenth century, not least through Samuel Purchas's continuation Hakluytus Posthumus or, Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). Interestingly, Hakluyt's text was published decades before the English actually set foot in East Asia; with its help I would like to demonstrate in the following that the English failed Asia even before they managed to get there.