110 THE END OF THE STRUGGLE or of the angry isolated Dutch agents, a thousand miles apart, with their forts and prison cells. Coen himself believed that the treaty alone stood in the way of his triumph over the English. Our Ad- miral Dale, stricken with fever, and fearful lest the Bantamese might sacrifice the English to make terms with the Dutch, had shipped off our goods and factors from Bantam in the summer of 1619, sought an asylum for them on the east coast of India, and there died. The English ships that remained in the Archipelago seemed destined to fall to the Dutch, who captured two of them in July, 1619, and four others off Sumatra in October. Our alliance with the Prince of Bantam, to capture the half-built Dutch fort at Jacatra (Batavia) in the beginning of that year, furnished Coen with a cause of war against us, and placed him in the right from the point of view of European diplomacy. The arrival, early in 1620, of the treaty of July, 1619, snatched the prey from between his hands. " The Eng- lish ought to be very thankful to you," he wrote to the Dutch directors in Holland, " for they had worked themselves very nicely out of the Indies, and you have placed them again in the midst.' ' If, however, he had to obey the treaty, he could use it for his own ends. The English would have liked to resettle at Bantam, but Coen resolved not only to destroy the trade of that port but to force the English to live under his own eye at Batavia. After some nego- tiation the joint Council of Defence, established in Java by the treaty, agreed to blockade Bantam in 1620, and
