THE DUTCH IN THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO 65 of her Indo-Portuguese trade, Lisbon and the Moluccas, the Dutch proceeded deliberately to establish them- selves at vantage-posts along the line of communica- tion. Into the military operations of the next half- century space precludes me from entering. Five dates must suffice to mark the further Dutch conquest of the Indian trade-route. Having made themselves a power in Java, midway between the Malay Straits and the Moluccas, they fixed their capital at Batavia on its northern coast, in 1619. In 1641 they captured Malacca from the Portuguese, and thus turned the straits into a Dutch waterway. From 1638 onwards they expelled the Portuguese from Ceylon, driving them from their last stronghold in 1658. They took possession of the great half-way house of Indo-European commerce, the Cape of Good Hope, and settled a colony there in 1652. When Portugal emerged, in 1640, from her sixty years' captivity to Spain, she found that her power in the Eastern seas had passed to the Dutch. In 1641 she surrendered for ever her exclusive claims to the spice trade by a treaty with Holland, on the basis of the Dutch retaining their conquests, and of free naviga- tion and trade to both powers in the Eastern seas. Holland's conquest of the Indian Archipelago was, in truth, a conquest by treaty not less than by war. Always ready to fight, she regarded fighting chiefly as an instrument of trade. Her object was not, as Portu- gal's had been, to take vengeance on the " nefandissimi Machometi secta " for the loss of the Holy Places in Palestine, or to swell the pride of a royal house by
