terrible pestilence which carried off hundreds of victims before it was stayed. The surviving Englishmen, recalling Thomson's dying words, saw in these visitations signs of the Divine wrath at the doing to death of their innocent fellow-countrymen. Even the superstitious natives traced a connexion between the misfortunes which overwhelmed them and the ruthless act which had practically extirpated the English. Their sense of justice, dulled though it was by ages of oppression, was sufficiently strong to see in the procedure which had encompassed the deaths of Towerson and his associates a degree of turpitude which called aloud to heaven for vengeance. Hence it was that the days following the execution were a period of gloom in Amboina for the islanders, and maybe for Van Speult and his associates a time of dark communings and remorse.
When in due course the news of the tragedy reached Batavia the little English colony there were fired with righteous indignation. The president of the factory immediately drew up a protest against Van Speult's "presumptuous proceedings" in "imprisoning, torturing, condemning and bloodily executing his Majesty's subjects," and "in confiscating their goods in direct violation of the Treaty, whereby the King was disgraced and dishonoured and the English nation scandalized."
Carpentier, the Dutch Governor-General, treated the protest somewhat coolly, but in his despatches home he showed a full appreciation of the gravity of the issue that had been raised. While he expressed belief in the existence of a conspiracy, he condemned strongly the methods of the trial. De Bniyne was selected for special censure. He "called himself a lawyer and had been taken into the Company's service as such," but he "should have shown
