Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/50

22 pate the enemy. Both sides possessed armed ships and fortified stations; but although the Dutch had many more forts and a much larger territory than the English, their policy of seizing all the points of vantage had the drawback that it involved them in quarrels with the native chiefs and crippled their capital by heavy military charges. After protracted negotiations, however, a treaty was at last arranged between Holland and England in 1619 on the basis of mutual restitutions and compensations. The news, we learn from the correspondence, reached India just in time to prevent "a bloody encounter between eleven of our best ships and seventeen of the Dutch."

This treaty, which was made for twenty years, actually lasted less than twenty months, and seems to have been little regarded in the East Indies, where the necessities of commercial competition went on multiplying disputes and reciprocal violence, until one particularly atrocious outrage brought matters to a climax. The massacre by the Dutch of almost all the English at Amboyna in the Moluccas in 1623 was a piece of cruel iniquity that bred long and fierce resentment against Holland among, the English merchants and mariners of that generation, and heated the animosities that broke out later between the two nations in Europe.

The preponderance of the Dutch in the Spice Islands, and their dangerous enmity, had undoubtedly much weight in diverting English trade toward the Asiatic continent, and thus in making the factories on the Indian seacoast the principal object of our atten-