Early English travel to India has long been associated with two things: trade and empire. This largely held true for much of the English presence in India – trade from the seventeenth century and empire from the mid eighteenth century. But the very first English arrivals to India were inspired by neither commerce nor conquest, but by Christ. Father Thomas Stephens was the first English traveller to India to voyage there by sea. His objective was to join fellow Jesuits in Goa on their missionary cause among the Hindu communities. Stephens made the journey in 1579 aboard a Portuguese ship. However, he was not the first Englishman believed to have reached those Asian shores. That distinction can be traced back seven centuries earlier to one Sighelm, Bishop of Sherborne, and the court of King Alfred the Great (d. 899 CE).

Little is known of this early medieval English travel to India apart from the fact that it seems to have happened. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, originally compiled during the reign of Alfred, records that the king dispatched Sighelm in 883 bearing gifts of alms for Christian communities in India. William of Malmesbury (d. 1143), an Anglo-Norman monk and historian famed for his chronicle of early English history, Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the Kings of the English), also records Sighelm’s pilgrimage, with the additional details that the bishop completed the journey to India and returned to England bringing with him ‘brilliant exotic gems and aromatic juices in which that country abounds’. Even in God’s service, then, India’s treasures and fragrant commodities took centre stage.

Sighelm’s apparent travel to India took place long before the Portuguese had opened a direct path by sea around the Cape of Good Hope, in 1498. His journey would therefore have taken him overland; a long, laborious and expensive route. Perhaps that is in part why there doesn’t seem to be a record of any English traveller having journeyed to India for the next several centuries. It was Father Thomas Stephens who finally followed in his medieval predecessor’s footsteps. However, this time the journey would be by the somewhat swifter Portuguese route by sea, and there would be no return.

This blog is extracted from Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World by Lubaaba Al-Azami (John Murray £25 pp320). To order a copy go to Travellers in the Golden Realm by Lubaaba Al-Azami | Hachette UK. 

Title image: Alfred the Great King of Wessex, accessed here: https://britishheritage.com/history/british-hero-alfred-great-king-wessex