the settlement. It proved a poor sort of satisfaction, for the Portuguese had removed their more valuable possessions and stores, and a quantity of inferior rice was about all that was secured in the way of loot.
If the Portuguese historian, Faria y Sousa, is to be trusted, the Dutch performed their part of the work of destruction with a special display of religious fanaticism. According to this writer a Dutch captain, entering the Church of Our Lady of Hope, hewed in pieces a crucifix which he found there. The story goes that Botelho, when he heard of the outrage, secured a fragment of the mutilated emblem and swore upon it that he would continue the war until the insult to the Faith was avenged. The Portuguese admiral was true to his vow. He died some time afterwards in a fight with a Dutch ship, the commander of which, who is believed to have been the brutal iconoclast of Bombay, was slain.
Incidents of this character were common in the long-sustained fight between the Dutch and the Portuguese. They grew out of the cruelties practised in the name of religion by the Inquisition at Goa upon the unfortunate Dutch and English captives who fell into the hands of the Goa government. Amongst the Dutch records is preserved a veritable human document in the shape of a diary of a Dutchman, one John van der Berg, who was imprisoned at Goa for four years, ending with April, 1624, two years before the occurrence related in the Bombay church. Van der Berg tells of his confinement for long months in heavy fetters, weighing 58½lb., in a dark dungeon "called by many people, Encenceye, or also Inferno." Here he underwent horrible tortures. One day his condition became so insupportable that he begged the jailor to put him to death.
