Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 2 (Stockdale).djvu/399

] tarily chosen to follow him in his banishment. We were penetrated with compassion, when we heard from the mouth of this unhappy man the occasion of his ruin. His name, he told us, was Piromongolo; he was of the village of Calibongou, in the dependency of the Government of Samarang. He had paid 350 rix dollars to become a freeman of that place, but was supplanted by another person, who offered a still larger sum for the same privilege; and those who had received his money, instead of returning it to him, thought fit to put him out of their way by banishing him to Ceylon, where he was to be in the same confinement with many others of the inhabitants of the Moluccas, who are sacrificed by the Dutch to their revengeful disposition, or pretended political interests. Amongst the injuries that had been heaped upon him, he had been accused, he said, of being a sorcerer. Though he assured us, with a great deal of simplicity, that if he was one, he had never known any thing about it; but at any rate he was sure that those who had robbed him of his three hundred and fifty dollars, were a much more dangerous kind of sorcerers than he.

The salary which the different Governors of the Island of Java receive from the Dutch Company very moderate; but then the abuses are connived at, which result from the very ample