ous application to his
studies. His dark brow, and morose air, shewed the cruelty of his
disposition: Yet he loved and protected the Indians, either from a
natural disposition, or because he deemed them fit instruments to
forward his designs. In order to gain the natives in his interest, he
preferred them to many vacant offices under his government, in direct
opposition to repeated instructions from the Company, to bestow the
principal offices on Dutchmen or other Europeans. After carrying on
his designs with much dexterity, and having acquired by gifts a vast
number of dependants, ready to support his purposes, some of the
faithful servants of the Company sent such clear and distinct
information of his proceedings to Holland, as sufficiently evinced his
real intentions, in spite of all his arts to conceal them. At length
the Company sent out Mr Versluys to supersede him in the government
of Ceylon, with orders to send him prisoner to Batavia. As soon as he
arrived there, abundance of informations were preferred against him,
for a variety of crimes both of a private and public nature, into
all of which the council of justice made strict inquisition, and were
furnished with abundant proofs of his guilt. In the end, he freely
confessed that he had caused nineteen innocent persons to be put to
death, having put them all to the torture, extorting from all of them
confessions of crimes which they had never even dreamt of committing.
He was accordingly sentenced to be broken alive on the wheel, his body
to be quartered, and his quarters burnt to ashes and thrown into the
sea.

Such was the deserved end of the traitor and tyrant Vuist; yet
Versluys, who was sent expressly to amend what the other had done
amiss, and to make the people forget the excesses of his predecessor
by a mild and gentle administration, acted perhaps even worse than
Vuist. Versluys was by no means of a cruel disposition, wherefore,
strictly speaking, he shed no blood, yet acted as despotically and
tyrannically as the other, though with more subtilty and under a
fairer appearance. His great point was not the absolute possession of
the country, but to possess himself of all that it contained of value.
For this purpose, immediately on getting possession of the government,
he raised the price of rice, the bread of the country, to so
extravagant a height that the people in a short time were unable
to purchase it, and were soon reduced to beggary and a starvin