Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/215

 Eastern seas "without sharing or suffering the English or any other to encroach thereupon." "Trust them not any more than open enemies," he wrote, "and give no way to the shortening of the sovereignty and common good, nor of the respect, reputation and countenance of the same, not weighing too scrupulously what may fall out," The Dutch policy, in fine, must be what it always had been, to exclude its rivals absolutely from any real participation in the trade of the Eastern islands.

Thus it was that all over this part of the East wherever the two races were in contact there was in spite of the Treaty friction and distrust, and as time wore on a rapidly widening alienation verging at points on open hostility.

When the fateful year 1623 dawned the English had scattered about the islands a number of small factories, eking out a precarious existence on the slender resources provided by the Company. The principal establishment was at the capital of Amboina, the headquarters of the Dutch Government and the chief seat of the spice trade. On the same island, at Hitoe and Larica, were branch agencies, while on the adjacent large island of Ceram were factories at Cambello and Luhu, They were all miserably equipped—it would seem almost from the correspondence of the time that they were in the last stages of financial decadence. The question of abandonment, indeed, had been seriously discussed in the later months of 1622 and had apparently only been postponed until fuller advices could be received.

English interests at the period were in the principal charge of Gabriel Towerson, who figured in an earlier chapter of the narrative as the husband of Mrs. Hawkins, the enterprising Armenian lady of Agra. Towerson appears to