Japan and the Japanese

COLLISIONS OF THE DUTCH AND ENGLISH.
sailed from London under the command of Martin Pring, who,
twelve years before, following up the discoveries of .Gosnold, had
entered and explored the first Englishman to do so Penobscot
bay and river, on the coast of what had since begun to be known
as New England. Pring sailed first for Surat, where the Company
had a factory, and where he assisted the native prince against the
Portuguese, with whom he was at war. On the 17th of June, 1G18,
he arrived at Bantam, whence he proceeded, in September, to Jaca-
tra, a city of the natives, the site of the present Batavia. There he
received news that the Dutch in the Moluccas, not content with driv-
ing out the Spaniards, had attacked the English also, making prisoners
of the merchants, whom they had treated with great harsh
ness. News had also reached England of these Dutch outrages, and
to make head against them, the Company, not long after Pring's
departure, despatched Sir Thomas Dale also well known, to
readers of American history, as high-marshal of the colony of Vir-
ginia, one of its first legislators, and for three or four years its
deputy governor with a fleet of six
large ships, with five of which
he joined Pring in November, 1618, in the Bay of Bantam, assum-
ing the command of the whole, including
there.
others which he found
Both fleets were in a very leaky condition, and after some skir-
mishing with the Dutch, and the capture of a richly-laden Dutch
ship from Japan, the English sailed for the coast of Coromandcl, to
refit and to obtain provision, which could not be had on the coast
of Java. Having arrived at Musilapatam, Dale died there August
9th, 1619. Toward the end of the year, Pring, who succeeded
in the command, returned again towards the Straits of Sunda,
and on the 25th of January, 1620, met, off the coast of Sumatra,
three English ships of a new fleet, from which he learned that four
others of the squadron to which they belonged had been surprised
while at anchor off the coast of Java, and taken by the Dutch;
that another had been wrecked in the Straits of Sunda ; and that the
Dutch were in pursuit of two others, with every prospect of taking
them.
As the Dutch at Jacatra were three times as strong
as the
three squadrons now united under Pring, and as three of his larg-
est ships were very leakv, and the whole fleet short of provisions, it