Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/202

 who had managed to secrete their terrible krises fell upon the invaders and cut a number of them to pieces before they themselves were killed. The English portion of the crew took no part in this incident on either side, but their neutrality did not save them from the resentment of the Dutch who treated them with persistent cruelty during their subsequent confinement.

Courthope was intensely mortified at the surrender of the ship. He declared in a letter describing the fight that rather than have yielded as Cassarian had done he "would have sunken right down in the sea first." He spoke no more than the truth; his whole being was animated with the feeling that to yield would be a disgrace not to be borne. Yet nothing hardly could have been more desperate than his position at this juncture. His small force had been weakened considerably by sickness and his supplies were so reduced that the garrison were compelled to exist largely on bread made from the fruit of the sago tree. On the other hand the Dutch had eight ships and two galleys fully armed ready to make a descent upon the island at the first favourable opportunity. For their advent Courthope, to use his own words, looked "daily and hourly," and he could not disguise from himself that the issue must go against him, the odds being what they were; though he consoled himself with the grim reflection that "if they win it, by God's help I make no doubt but they shall pay full dearly for it with much effusion of blood."

When news reached Courthope as it did later that the English prisoners were being cruelly illtreated by their captors he indited a letter of strong denunciation of the inhumanity of the Hollanders to one of the captives.