AN ALMADIA. CHAPTER III THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE ENGLISH AND THE DUTCH FOR THE EASTERN ARCHIPELAGO 1601 - 1623 OUR real struggle for the Indian trade was to be with a very different rival. The decline of Spain and Portugal left the two Protestant sea-powers of the North face to face in the Asiatic seas. Holland entered on the contest in the patriotic flush of achieved inde- pendence, and with the same newly born sense of na- tional unity which nerved Portugal for her heroic explorations two hundred years before. England had left behind her the spacious age of Elizabeth; before her stretched the crooked diplomacy and domestic dis- orders of a dynasty which could never become English at heart, and which had in the end to be cast forth. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century the States-General played the leading maritime part in Europe, as the Portuguese House of Aviz had played it in the first half of the sixteenth. The magnificent position which Holland thus won, 68
