THE POLICY OF GOVERNOR COEN 159 21 - 31, January, 1623. He realized that the sea-power of Holland in the Archipelago must rest on a terri- torial basis with a territorial revenue, the absence of which had drawn forth from Cosme Annes, nearly a hundred years earlier (1549), the Portuguese lament: " We sit still, perishing without lands out of which to support ourselves or find shelter.' ' Albuquerque discerned the same need a century before. But Coen deliberately worked out what Albuquerque had per- ceived, and, unlike Albuquerque, he was backed by a nation which loyally supported its great servants in the East. He cherished no illusions as to how such a territorial sea-empire was to be acquired and maintained. It was easy to bring the scattered islands under subjection. The problem was to people them with workers. The idea of settling Dutchmen and Dutchwomen in suffi- cient numbers, although it had its attractions for Coen as for the other colonizing spirits of that age, he saw to be impracticable. He anticipated the conclusion which some of the European nations are only now reaching after long and cruel experience, that agri- cultural emigrants from the temperate zone perish in the tropics. The lands of the equator can be tilled only by equatorial races. The heathen whom the Papal Bulls had given to the Portuguese for an inheritance, to be converted with a rod of iron or dashed to pieces like a potter's vessel, were to Coen merely a cheap labour-force. The " ingathering of a multitude of peo- ple from all parts to people our country withall " was
