Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/196

 152 THE END OF THE STKUGGLE There, amid terrible privations, yet stubbornly " af- fiant of a happy plantation," they renamed the little group Charles's Islands, and held out against fever and dysentery for eight months, dying " like sheep in- fected " under the equatorial sun and rain. In May, 1625, the skeleton survivors were so reduced as to im- plore the clemency of the Dutch, who in pity fetched them back to Batavia. The commander Verholt, be it recorded, showed them all " care and courtesy," al- though he himself and many of his crew caught the disease. Nor did Dutch compassion end with their bare deliverance. They received the rescued men with kindness and granted them a factory house at a mod- erate price, the Dutch governor-general and our presi- dent, in an effusion of good feeling, exchanging chains of gold. The Dutch had, in fact, accomplished the two fixed purposes of their policy— our expulsion from the Spice Archipelago and our complete subjection at their Ba- tavian headquarters in Java. Their harshness had been deliberately designed to this end, and, with the excep- tion of Van Speult's judicial slaughter at Amboyna, they had kept fairly within their treaty rights. Their double object being now achieved, they allowed their national good nature free scope. But the excess of cor- diality wore off, and the English soon became impa- tient of the restraints which the Dutch thought them- selves entitled to impose. In July, 1627, we find our President Hawley bitterly complaining of the treatment meted out to his countrymen.