A company of Levant merchants was formed in 1583 to open out direct communications with Aleppo, Bagdad, Ormuz, and Goa.

They were unsuccessful at the two latter places owing to the jealousy of the Portuguese, but they made arrangements for cheaper transit of Eastern goods to England, and in 1587 the last of the Venetian argosies, a great vessel of eleven hundred tons, was wrecked off the Isle of Wight.
Henceforth the English conducted their own business with the East, and Venetian and Portuguese monopoly was at an end.
[Illustration: RUSSIAN MAP OF ASIA, 1737.] But the journeys of Chancellor and Jenkinson to the Court of Moscow had more far-reaching effects; the Russians themselves were thereby led to contemplate utilising their proximity to one of the best known routes to the Far East.

Shortly after Jenkinson's visit, the Czar, Ivan the Terrible, began extending his dominions eastward, sending at first a number of troops to accompany the Russian merchant Strogonof as far as the Obi in search of sables.

Among the troops were a corps of six thousand Cossacks commanded by one named Vassili Yermak, who, finding the Tartars an easy prey, determined at first to set up a new kingdom for himself.

In 1579 he was successful in overcoming the Tartars and their chief town Sibir, near Tobolsk; but, finding it difficult to retain his position, determined to return to his allegiance to the Czar on condition of being supported.
This was readily granted, and from that time onward the Russians steadily pushed on through to the unknown country of the north of Asia, since named after the little town conquered by Yermak, of which scarcely any traces now remain.