Using the Virtual Voyage

The Virtual Voyage is an interactive role-play exercise, based on facts from the company's first few voyages. We have taken the best prices and exchange rates available from the historical record of the early 1600s. This interactive uses these to calculate what might have happened had the captain of that first East India Company voyage acted differently.

The interactive relies on Macromedia Shockwave, a piece of software that allows data about students' voyages to be stored. This can be downloaded and installed using the button on the Virtual Voyage page. If you are planning to use this interactive with a number of students in an IT room, make sure that Shockwave is installed on all the machines before the lesson as installing it can take a little while and can sometimes be difficult if you are on a network. Ask your IT support technician or ICT teacher to help.

Alternatively, you may wish to download and use the program file version of the Virtual Voyage. Although this requires you to download quite a large file (approx. 4.5Mb), it means you can then use the application without being connected to the web, and without the Shockwave plug-in. You may like to copy the program to a number of different machines, or use it across a school network. Click here to download the file; when prompted, choose 'Save the file to disk' and download it to a suitable hard disk location. Once download is complete, use Run from your Windows Start button and select the downloaded file BLVV.EXE to run the application.

Your students can therefore take control of this voyage and make a number of choices during the course of the voyage that will affect the eventual outcome. Along the way they can also divert to "fact stops" to find out more about a particular topic. Here is what they will face.

On beginning the game students have two methods of raising money. They will get a better result by persuading their subscribers they will make a profit. This makes the point that the primary purpose of the company from the beginning was profit, and that making money by equal trade with other cultures was considered of paramount importance. The amount of money they have left (after buying ships) will directly affect the amount of goods they can export to the East Indies, and therefore how much they can exchange for in the East Indies.

There are three types of cargo that students can take: Iron, Broadcloth and Spanish Rialls. Different amounts of each cargo can be gained by moving "sliders". Only one of these items will be valuable enough in the East to ensure a full cargo and a healthy profit. Which one this is can be found by reading The Company's Story .

After setting sail, the student will be faced by one of three perils, drawn at random by the computer. (If they only play once, they will not see all the different perils. This is why it is useful for students to play the game twice, three times or more). They will either have to:

	face down a Mutiny (which teaches a lesson about life for the crew on a ship), or
	weather a Storm (in which they could lose 10, 20 or 30% of their cargo, selected at random by the computer), or
	decide what to do with a Portuguese Carrack (either commit piracy or leave it in peace)

If, at the outset, they remembered to bring extra provisions for their crew, the mutiny should present no problem. They can also take advantage of James Lancaster's insight that the feeding of lemon juice to the crew prevented scurvy. The storm is a matter of chance, and the student cannot affect the outcome. The possibility of piracy was one that was available all the time for the early East India Company crews (although it was generally frowned upon by the Directors in London, especially later on). In this case, piracy is a good way of increasing profits.

On arrival in the East Indies, students are presented with three exchange options. Information in The Company's Story should give a good idea about which of these is most likely to generate a healthy profit. In this limited computer model, there are no costs (in terms of crew and time) that are incurred by visiting the Spice Islands, but it would be useful to remind students of the potential perils of the longer journeys. This helps to explain why the first voyage of the East India Company failed to make a profit.

The computer automatically calculates a profit margin for the student on their return to England and offers the option of replaying the game. Since this game can be played quite quickly, it is expected that most students will play it more than once, experimenting with different choices to create different outcomes.

Prices, and how we arrived at them

The buying price of goods in England (iron, broadcloth and rialls) is a matter of record. The Court Records of the East India Company have full inventories for the ships. Of course, the cargoes on these ships was much more varied, but we have presented the main ones here to keep the interactive simple.

It is much harder to say what was (a) the exchange value of pepper and spices to English goods when in the East Indies and (b) the selling price of pepper and spices in England. The reason for this is that they varied over time, and also that there are not complete records of selling prices. Therefore the exchange rates and selling prices used in this interactive have been largely extrapolated from the profit margins on the first two voyages wherever a definitive figure was not available. A complication on the first voyage when it returned in 1603 (the attempted Royal embargo on the sale of pepper) drove the price of pepper down in relation to its normal value. The 1603 figure has been used, even though for other voyages the selling price would have been higher.