114 THE END OF THE STRUGGLE Herman van Speult, governor of the neighbouring island of Amboyna, was regarded at headquarters as " too scrupulous " in his fiscal administration. In January, 1623, the Governor-General Coen, when de- parting for Europe, enjoined strict justice, and men- tioned Amboyna as a place where no English encroach- ments were to be allowed. " Trust them not," he said, " any more than open enemies . . . not weighing too scrupulously what may fall out." His farewell instruc- tions merely reiterated the principles on which he had always insisted. " Trust the English no more than a public enemy ought to be trusted," he wrote two months previously to Banda, the agency nearest Am- boyna. This policy of suspicion, and of " not weighing too scrupulously what may fall out," was now to be enforced with a stupid violence which the great gov- ernor-general might perhaps have anticipated, but which he would have been the first to condemn. By the beginning of 1623 the Dutch found them- selves completely masters of the Clove and Nutmeg Archipelago. At the principal clove island, Amboyna, they had, according to the English statement founded upon depositions on oath, a fortress garrisoned by two hundred Dutch soldiers, with three or four hundred native troops, including some thirty Japanese, and further protected by eight vessels in the roadstead. The English numbered eighteen men, scattered between five small factories on different islands, very badly off, with a few slaves, " just six and all boys." In their house at Amboyna only three swords, two muskets,
