century, saw the sails of a Dutch
fleet arriving in his harbours. Very soon negotiations were opened, and
the distant republic undertook to protect the Mahometan king against his
Catholic master. The new friendship was founded upon trade monopoly, of
course, but at that period at least the islanders were treated with
justice and humanity by their republican allies. The Dutch undertook to
liberate their friends from bondage, while the King of Ternate, panting
under Portuguese oppression, swore to have no traffic, no dealings of any
kind, with any other nation than Holland; not even with the English. The
Dutch, they declared, were the liberators of themselves, of their
friends, and of the seas.

The international hatred, already germinating between England and
Holland, shot forth in these flaming regions like a tropical plant. It
was carefully nurtured and tended by both peoples. Freedom of commerce,
freedom of the seas, meant that none but the Dutch East India Company--so
soon as the Portuguese and Spaniards were driven out--should trade in
cloves and nutmegs. Decrees to that effect were soon issued, under very
heavy penalties, by the States-General to the citizens of the republic
and to the world at large. It was natural therefore that the English
traders should hail the appearance of the Dutch fleets with much less
enthusiasm than was shown by the King of Ternate.

On the other hand, the King of Tydor, persisting in his oriental hatred
towards the rival potentate in the other island, allowed the Portuguese
to build additional citadels, and generally to strengthen their positions
within his dominions. Thus when Cornelius Sebastian, with his division of
Ver Hagen's fleet, arrived in the Moluccas in the summer of 1605, he
found plenty of work prepared for him. The peace recently concluded by
James with Philip and the archdukes placed England in a position of
neutrality in the war now waging in the clove islands between Spain and
the republic's East India Company. The English in those regions were not
slow to avail themselves of the advantage. The Portuguese of Tydor
received from neutral sympathy a copious supply of powder and of
pamphlets. The one explosive material enabled them to make a more
effective defence of their citadel against the Dutch fleet; the other
revealed to the Portuguese and their Mussulman allies that "the
Netherlanders could not exist without English protection, that they were
the scum of nations, a