Lewes Roberts

Expecting to attend university but compelled 'by adverse fortune or cross fate' to devote himself to commerce he was apprenticed in 1612 to Thomas Harvey, a London overseas merchant and member of the Drapers.

For Harvey Lewes Roberts visited such places as Newfoundland, Malaga, Algiers and Tunis and lived in France, Italy, the Ionian Islands, Constantinople and Asia Minor.

He was also a director of the East India Company for 1639–1640 but he fell ill at the time of the following election and he was not re-elected because he was, falsely, reported to have died.

Roberts had been well educated and had expected to attend university before he was obliged to be apprenticed to Harvey the overseas merchant.

He enjoyed the society of Izaak Walton and other literary men, and they returned the compliment in his own major work, The Merchants Mappe of Commerce, published 1638.