ALLEGED ENGLISH PLOT AT AMBOYNA 117 " Wailing and weeping by reason of their extreme tor- tures with burning, they were carried by slaves to prison, for it was not possible of themselves to go on their feet." Such was the statement made by the stew- ard of the Dutch factory regarding the affair. The handful of English, ran the improbable tale, had solemnly sworn on New Year's ~- i ?«. Day to seize the fort upon the ar rival of an English ship, or dur- ing the absence of the Dutch governor, and had employed to corrupt the Japanese sol- diers so unlikely an agent as a drunken barber, or bar- ber-surgeon, Abel Price. This man already lay in the Dutch prison for threatening to set fire to a house in a frenzy of liquor. On February 15th, as the records show, he, too, was haled to the torture- chamber, and made to " confess whatever they asked him." The English treated as ridiculous the story that eight- een men, scattered over the two islands of Amboyna and Ceram, at the factories of Amboyna, Hittou, La- rica, Loho, and Cambello, should dare conspire to take a fort from two hundred Dutch and three or four hun- dred native soldiers with eight Holland vessels in the harbour, and they went about their business as usual. But Van Speult, now armed with the confession under torture of his prisoner, the drunken English barber, A SHIP OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. After a contemporary print.
