Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/162

 124 THE END OF THE STRUGGLE draw their oppressed factories from the Moluccas, Am- boyna, and the Clove and Nutmeg Isles. They had indeed thanked the Dutch president and council for agreeing to bring them away in Flemish ships. Orders in this sense were simultaneously sent to our agents at Banda and elsewhere. The Calendar of State Papers of the East Indies for 1622 - 1624 (p. 398) shows that while the tortured men lay waiting their doom, two Holland ships arrived from Batavia, bringing the letter from the English president and council ordering the withdrawal of our agency from Amboyna. " Which letter was opened and read by the Dutch governor while our people were yet in prison and not executed, and might well have secured him that there was no further danger to be feared of the English aid of ship- ping, whatever the English had through fear of torture confessed." The statement is confirmed by Van Speult's own admissions, and it gives a darker shade to his resolve on instant judgment. The public prosecutor was instructed to demand sentence. This, according to the minutes, he did with irregular brevity— twenty-one lines of writing in all. According to the Dutch procedure, his requisition should have given a summary of the facts and evi- dence, which it did not. It should certainly have speci- fied the separate names of the accused Englishmen, while it only contained that of Gabriel Towerson " and his creatures and accomplices.' ' These were not the omissions of ignorance. The " fiscal " who conducted the case was a lawyer, and in his haste for condemna-