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72
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(APRIL, 1924
Veer reported "We get fire to the St. Sebastian and the Bon Jesus, which communicated itself to the Bon Aventure. The crews, consisting of about 200 men, among whom were 150 whites, tried to save themselves by swimming to the shore. Not twenty of them were saved. We killed some and made seventy-two prisoners, among whom were the Captain and superior officers. Whilst we were still engaged in rescuing the men in the water, throe hundred barrels of powder took fire on the Bon Aventure, with the result that a great number of the enemy were killed, and we lost six men” (Ind. Off., Dutch Records).
284. In 1641 or 1642 the Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese (Marsden, 330n., 444; Begbie, p. 48).
285. On the 8th March 1642 the Dutch Governor of Mauritius concluded a treaty with the native King of Antongil in Madagascar, engaging the latter not to sell rice or slaves to any one but the Agents of the Dutch East India Company (Dehérain, p. 37).
286. In 1642 the Japanese having completely evacuated Formosa, the Dutch occupied the whole island. It now became their business to check the pirates who infested the coasta of China (Zuniga, I, 276).
287. In 1643 a Dutch officer named Gayland plundered one of the Courteen ships, the Bona Esperanza, in the Straits of Malaoca, and in the same year another of these ships, the Henry Bonaventure, was plundered by the Dutch near Mauritius. Letters of reprisal were given to the Courteon Company in 1666 by Charles II. (Justice, p. 463.) In 1644 the Dutch abandoned Mauritius but reoccupied it in 1650.
Danes. 288. The Danes had settled themselves at Tranquebar in Tanjore about 161869 (Abbé Raynal, II, 129). Apparently they had contined themselves to peaceful paths in trade an long as possible, but as we have seen (para. 230 above) their ships were attacked by the Portu. guese as early as 1618 and now they appear to have thought a show of foroe (designated as piracy by their rivals) was necessary to their prestige and security, for on the 9th July 1645 Cornelis Van der Lyn, Governor of Batavia, wrote home :-"We are charged with acts of piracy committed by the Danes. The latter keep up their policy, but make no captures of any importance and do but little trade (Ind. Off., Dutch Records).
Malays and Spanish. 289. In 1645, in reprisal for Malay attacks on the Philippines, the Spaniards sent an expedition against Borneo, which plundered and burned the coast villages and carried off from two to three hundred prisoners to be sold as slaves (Chin. Repos., IV, 449 ; Crawford, II, 524).
Chinese. 290. In 1639 thirty thousand Chinese revolted against the Spaniards in the Philippines, and were not forced to submission until their number was reduced to seven thousand (Craw. furd, II, 522). This appalling slaughter was not, I believe, matched for a hundred years, when, in 1740. ten thousand Chinese were, on suspicion of a conspiracy, massacred by the Dutch in Batavia (Ibid., 663, see para. 614 below).
291. In 1646 the pirate Chinchilung (see para. 252 above ) fell into the hands of the Tartars. In 1645 his influence had secured the election of Tang Wang as Emperor, but, for some reason or other, Tang Wang refused to acknowledge Koxinga as his father's heir, and Chinchilung began to intrigue with the Tartans (Boulger, II, 276). According to the Ambassades Nemorables, he was now so powerful that he had “ got into his hands the whole Indian trade.
69 The Imperial Gazetteer says the settlement was made in 1020,
