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 PEACE RELATIONS STRAINED 75 discovery. This popular plea, although put forward in official documents, cannot be accepted by an honest historian. But it explains that sense of having been overreached which embittered English feeling to the Dutch. The situation was in fact incompatible with peace. Yet Holland and England were not only at peace in Europe, but were the joint champions of a great relig- ious cause. Nor could either country at once forget that, but for Elizabeth's coldness to the Dutch overtures, the English queen might have been the sovereign of the united nations. On the arrival of the English ships in the East in 1602, the commanders of the two Protes- tant fleets joined against the Portuguese; and, as we saw, the plunder of a Portugal ship supplied the return cargo for the first voyage of the London Company. But the Dutch quickly perceived that the English were both weak and inconvenient neighbours in the Archipelago. Each English voyage worked with a small capital, and raised the local prices by eagerness to secure a freight. The Dutch abstained for a time from hostili- ties, yet strove to frighten the natives from dealing with the newcomers by representing them as buccaneers. When the island chiefs found that the English, instead of making piratical descents, came with money in their hands, and parted with it more freely than the Dutch, this device failed. The Dutch next tried bribery, and in 1603 were said to have offered twelve thousand dol- lars to the natives of Pularoon if they would not trade with the English. The death of Elizabeth in 1603, and