DUTCH CRUELTY TO ENGLISH TRADERS 113 " we earnestly desire speedily to be released from this bondage.' ' A similar attempt was made in the island of Pularoon to extort confessions against the English by cruel torments of the natives. Thus was rehearsed alike in the capital of Dutch India and in the distant Nutmeg Isles, that tragedy of torture which was so soon to be enacted at Amboyna. In the still remoter seas, as we learn from a letter of Richard Cocks, dated Nagasaki, 10th March, 1620, the Hollanders, with seven ships at Japan, had, " with sound of trumpet," " pro- claimed there open war against the English, as their mortal enemies.' ' The Clove and Nutmeg Isles, including among them Amboyna, Banda, and Pularoon, lay, it will be remem- bered, at the southeastern end of the Spice Archipelago. The Dutch claimed the sovereignty over them, by the conquest of Amboyna from the Portuguese in 1605, and in virtue of many treaties. The English had a set of counter-claims based on the free surrender of Pularoon to us in 1616, of Lantor or Great Banda in 1620, and on compacts with other chiefs. We had also an agency at Amboyna under the Dutch-English treaty of 1619. The Dutch with an overwhelming force expelled us from Lantor and Pularoon in 1621 - 1622. Our gallant agent, Nathaniel Courthorpe, who, in " much want and misery," held Pularoon from 1616 to 1620, sometimes with but thirty-eight men to resist the " force and tyranny" of the Hollanders, had been mortally wounded in a sea-fight, and threw himself overboard rather than see his ship strike her flag.
