Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/194

 *cial operations, be able to contend successfully with the formidable Dutch and Portuguese monopolies which had been established in the East, and, though Portugal and Spain were then beginning to decline from the exalted position they had so long held, Holland, in possession of public liberty and a wise system of commerce, was in the zenith of her commercial and maritime greatness, and proved a rival whom the most enterprising of English merchants might well hesitate to encounter.

But by this time the rapacious extortions of the Portuguese, combined with their cruelties, had so excited the natives of India against them, that there was great rejoicing when the overwhelming naval power of the Dutch dealt a fatal blow to their ascendency in the East. When, however, the Dutch power predominated, the people of India, in shaking off the yoke of their former tyrants, found that they had only changed their oppressors. In 1638 the Dutch expelled the Portuguese from the trade of Japan, and in 1656 Ceylon was surrendered to them. Their settlements at the Cape of Good Hope formed from an early period a convenient point whence they could direct their shipping eastwards; and the most common vessels they then employed in the trade (as may be seen from the imperfect sketch on next page) were so much in advance of even the best vessels then in the service of the English East India Company, that it is not, for these and other reasons, surprising that the Company should have had considerable difficulties in competing successfully with the Dutch, and at times in raising capital sufficient for their purposes.