After one or two unsuccessful expeditions, an armament was fitted out and put under the orders of Drake.  This courageous and successful navigator accomplished more than the most sanguine had anticipated.  He returned to England in the month of May, 1580, after a voyage which occupied him nearly three years; bringing home with him great riches, and having made most favourable arrangements with the king of the Molucca Islands.

His success was followed up by Cavendish and others in 1600.  The English East India Company, in the meanwhile, received their first charter from the government, and had now been with various success carrying on the trade for upwards of fifty years.

During the time that the Dutch were vassals to the crown of Spain, it was their custom to repair to Lisbon for the productions of the East, and afterwards to distribute them through Europe; but when they quarrelled with Philip, they were no longer admitted as retailers of his Indian produce:  the consequence was, that, while asserting, and fighting for, their independence, they had also fitted out expeditions to India.  They were successful; and in 1602 the various speculators were, by the government, formed into a company, upon the same principles and arrangement as those which had been chartered in England.

At the time, therefore, to which we are reverting, the English and Dutch had been trading in the Indian seas for more than fifty years; and the Portuguese had lost nearly all their power, from the alliances and friendships which their rivals had formed with the potentates of the East, who had suffered from the Portuguese avarice and cruelty.

Whatever may have been the sum of obligation which the Dutch owed to the English for the assistance they received from them during their struggle for independence, it does not appear that their gratitude extended beyond the Cape; for, on the other side of it, the Portuguese, English, and Dutch fought and captured each other’s vessels without ceremony; and there was no law but that of main force.  The mother countries were occasionally called upon to interfere, but the interference up to the above time had produced nothing more than a paper war; it being very evident that all parties were in the wrong.

In 1650, Cromwell usurped the throne of England, and the year afterwards, having, among other points, vainly demanded of the Dutch satisfaction for the murder of his regicide ambassador, which took place in this year, and some compensation for the cruelties exercised on the English at Amboyne some thirty years before he declared war with Holland.  To prove that he was in earnest, he seized more than two hundred Dutch vessels, and the Dutch then (very unwillingly) prepared for war.  Blake and Van Tromp met, and the naval combats were most obstinate.  In the “History of England” the victory is almost invariably given to the English, but in that of Holland to the Dutch.  By all accounts, these engagements were