After the Great Fire of 1666, at the age 7, he departed for the East Indies and arrived at Fort St George, Madras (now Chennai) in 1669.
[2] His experiences during the next decade were recorded in a manuscript passed down the Eliot/Howard family and published as A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal in 1905.
At the age of 30, Bowrey returned home to Wapping as a passenger on the Bengal Merchant in 1689, married Mary Gardiner in 1691, and acted as a consultant to independent East Indies ventures[4] and published the first Malay-English dictionary in 1701.
The most notable was the Prosperous taken by pirates in Madagascar and the Worcester seized by the Scots in Edinburgh, an incident that hastened the union of England and Scotland.
[7] Subsequently, Bowrey turned his energies to a number of varied projects, including his collaboration with Daniel Defoe in the founding of the infamous South Sea Company.