collision with the Portuguese who, with their historic stronghold at Malacca, were able to impose a formidable barrier to the progress of the adventurers. The Hollanders accepted the challenge with a spirit which doubtless took a keener edge from the memory of wrongs perpetrated in the Low Countries by the predecessors of the then ruler of Portugal and Spain. In one great fight ofi Malacca in 1606 the Dutch lost no fewer than 600 men killed. There were other actions less deadly, but whose cumulative effect must have been to place a great drain upon the Company's resources. With such stubborn determination was the war carried on that in 1607 it was stated in a communication from the English Ambassador in Spain to the Government in England that the losses incurred in the East Indies by the allied nations at the hands of the Dutch were of such a character as to have inflicted "in those places a wound almost incurable," In point of fact, within ten years of their first appearance in the Eastern Seas the Dutch had firmly established their power almost throughout the region in which the spice trade was actively prosecuted.
It would have argued an exceptionally generous temperament on the part of the Dutch, in view of the enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure they had made to secure a paramount position, if they had regarded the efforts of the English to engage in the spice trade in the Archipelago otherwise than with distrust and dislike. Rightly or wrongly they considered themselves the sole inheritors by virtue of their conquests of the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly, and they were the more disposed to adopt this view as they had from the very outset concluded with the native chiefs of the various islands, and notably with the King of Ternate, one of the Moluccas group, who stood
