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 Rh 1658 they had secured full possession of Ceylon. Much earlier, in 1619, they had founded Batavia in Java, which they made the centre of their East Indian possessions, as it still remains.

The English at first attempted to imitate the Dutch in their East Indian policy. The English East India Company was founded by Elizabeth in 1600, and as early as 1619 had forced the Dutch to allow them to take a third share of the profits of the Spice Islands. In order to do this several English planters settled at Amboyna, but within four years trade rivalries had reached such a pitch that the Dutch murdered some of these merchants and drove the rest from the islands. As a consequence the English Company devoted its attention to the mainland of India itself, where they soon obtained possession of Madras and Bombay, and left the islands of the Indian Ocean mainly in possession of the Dutch. We shall see later the effect of this upon the history of geography, for it was owing to their possession of the East India Islands that the Dutch were practically the discoverers of Australia. One result of the Dutch East India policy has left its traces even to the present day. In 1651 they established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which only fell into English hands during the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon held Holland.

Meanwhile the English had not lost sight of the possibilities of the North-East Passage, if not for reaching the Spice Islands, at any rate as a means of tapping the overland route to China, hitherto monopolised by the Genoese. In 1558 an English gendeman, named Anthony Jenkinson, was sent as ambassador to the Czar of Muscovy, and travelled from Moscow as far as Bokhara;