us
covers an important period in the development of India and in
the expansion of British power.

When the East India Company had been in existence eleven years it
possessed hardly more than the rudiments of factories in the Indies,
while the Dutch boasted fully a dozen regularly established
trading-settlements, from most of which they had ejected the Spaniards
and Portuguese.

France, no longer restrained by Spain and the Pope, naturally looked
jealously on these efforts of Englishmen and Dutchmen to exploit the
East to their own advantage. In 1609 we learn that the subjects of Henry
IV, "who had long aspired to make themselves strong by sea," took the
opportunity of a treaty made between James I and the French King to "set
on foot this invention, a society to trade into the East Indies," with a
capital of four million crowns. Becher, the English ambassador at Paris,
wrote in 1609 to Lord Salisbury that Dutch seamen were being "engaged at
great pay and many of their ships bought." The States-General strongly
remonstrated against this proceeding, and threatened to "board the
French ships wherever they found them, and hang all Flemings found in
them." This threat appears to have been effectual, and the project was
abandoned. A little later, in 1614, the French again projected taking
part in the East India trade, and accounts were current in London
concerning ships and patents from King Louis, but this, too, ended
lamely and nothing practical was effected for full half a century.

The company always had before it the danger of attack by Spanish or
Portuguese, and its captains and agents were put perpetually on their
guard. But it never seems to have occurred to the court of committees
that there was any danger to be apprehended from the Dutch, so that they
were all the more astonished and chagrined at the failure to establish
trade with the Moluccas, where the natives were so friendly to the
English and offered them every facility, but, owing to Dutch oppression,
in vain.

In the first voyage James Lancaster had established factories at Achin
and Bantam. In the second voyage Sir Henry Middleton was instructed to
endeavor to found a factory on the island of Banda. He carried on some
trade, but neither he nor his successor in the third voyage, Captain
Keeling, was able to override the opposition of the Dutch and secure a
foothold. In the instructions issued to the last-named he was requested
to establish, i