Page 211 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

THE BLACK TRAGEDY OF AMBOINA 211

Eastern seas “ without sharing or suffering the English
or any other to encroach thereupon.” “ Trust them not
any more than open enemies,” he wrote, “ and give no
way to the shortening of the sovereignty and common
good, nor of the respect, reputation and countenance of
the same, not weighing too scrupulously what may fall
out.” The Dutch policy, in fine, must be what it always
had been, to exclude its rivals absolutely from any real
participation in the trade of the Eastern islands.
Thus it was that all over this part of the East wherever
the two races were in contact there was in spite of the
Treaty friction and distrust, and as time wore on a rapidly
widening alienation verging at points on open hostility.
When the fateful year 1623 dawned the English had
scattered about the islands a number of small factories,
eking out a precarious existence on the slender resources
provided by the Company. The principal establishment
was at the capital of Amboina, the headquarters of the
Dutch Government and the chief seat of the spice trade.
On the same island, at Hitoe and Larica, were branch
agencies, while on the adjacent large island of Ceram were
factories at Cambello and Luhu. They were all miserably
equipped—it would seem almost from the correspondence
of the time that they were in the last stages of financial
decadence. The question of abandonment, indeed, had
been seriously discussed in the later months of 1622 and
had apparently only been postponed until fuller advices
could be received.
English interests at the period were in the principal charge
of Gabriel Towerson, who figured in an earlier chapter of
the narrative as the husband of Mrs. Hawkins, the enter­
prising Armenian lady of Agra. Towerson appears to