LEGAL STRENGTH OF THE DUTCH POSITION 145 criminal sentences, but also to delegate this function to the subordinate councils and proper officers of settle- ments at which the governor-general and council could not be present. In 1619 instructions had been duly given to Van Speult to administer justice as governor of Amboyna in civil and criminal cases. They were further enforced by th6 Dutch governor-general's ex- press sanction to Van Speult in October, 1622, to deal unhesitatingly with conspiracies. A candid examination of the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1619 shows that its jurisdiction clause referred only to questions of trade and joint defence, and left the criminal and civil jurisdiction untouched. Nor could the pronouncement of King James in 1623 seriously affect the issue, for the Dutch repudiated it as never having been accepted by (perhaps not even communi- cated to) their representatives. The States-General consistently maintained their civil and criminal juris- diction in their settlements throughout the Spice Archi- pelago. As a matter of fact, the English in the Dutch settlements had been steadily subjected to that juris- diction, although they groaned under it, and their very complaints to the directors in London prove their prac- tical submission to its most irksome forms. The general law of Europe at that time prescribed judicial torture as a proper and an almost necessary means for arriving at the truth. Dutch jurisprudence went so far as to declare that, in cases similar to that of Amboyna, a public prosecutor could demand sen- tence of death only on the confession of the accused.
