islands, preventing them from entering into traffic with each other, or learning from mutual intercourse to plant such things as would be of greater value to themselves than their present produce, though less beneficial to the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch at the same time secure to themselves the benefit of supplying all their necessities at their own rates, no doubt not very moderate. This may possibly sufficiently account for the expense they must have been at in printing prayer-books, catechisms, etc., and teaching them to each island in its own language rather than in Dutch, which in all probability they might have as easily done, but at the risk of Dutch becoming the common language of the islands, and consequently of the natives by its means gaining an intercourse with each other.
