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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XXl. 



persuasive rack, to gain for themselves also credit in the next 

 world. They had very little scruple and curiously little sense of 

 what we should describe as propriety. 



For instance, the other day, when I was on leave, I went past 

 some islands called Pulau Condor which, for a long time, were one 

 of the great halting places of all the travellers between China and 

 the Straits, and the Straits and China, from the days of Marco 

 Polo and long before him. I was reminded that that was the scene 

 of the headquarters of a certain high Portuguese official named 

 Antonio Ferrao, who was sent on an embassy to a country called 

 Petani from Malacca, and when he got there learned, to his 

 extreme distress, that a certain ship in which he had invested 

 most of his fortune had been captured by pirates. He was told 

 the name of the pirate who had captured the ship in question. 

 When he learnt that all his best schemes had gone awry, he 

 incontinently threw his embassy overboard, raised a small troop 

 of desperadoes in Petani and set out, and for four years harried 

 the China seas, torturing a number of people to death in order to 

 convince them of the love of the God who taught above all things 

 the doctrine of the love of ones neighbour, and committed a 

 number of excesses of a most extraordinary character, according to 

 his own record, to his speedy enrichment. He was only, however, 

 acting in a way that was , at that time , the approved fashion of the 

 Portuguese in Asia. 



Similarly, the greatest Viceroy who ever served Portugal, 

 D' Albuquerque, when he went down from Goa in order to punish 

 the Sultan of Malacca, in the course of his voyage committed no 

 less than five acts of wanton piracy upon peaceful traders between 

 India and Sumatra and that again, as I would point out , was the 

 custom of the time and the spirit in which the Portuguese came 

 into Asia. 



But not so the Dutch and not so the British ; but not because 

 Mr. de Vos' ancestors or mine possessed any virtue that was 

 singularly superior to that of the Portuguese, but because they were, 

 after the manner of a well-known character in " The Old Curiosity 

 Shop," anxious to prove that Codlin was the friend, not Short. 

 Seeing that the Portuguese were already the possessors of a singu- 

 larly vile reputation in Asia, the new-comers strove, in every 

 possible way, to show that the Dutch and the British were not as 

 others, and that they were to be trusted and to be relied upon, 

 above all things, to destroy the Portuguese, but also to behave, 

 on their own account, in a manner that would be a splendid 

 contrast to the actions of their enemies. To a certain extent they 

 justified that claim, and I think these letters, which we have heard 

 to-night, are interestingly illustrative of the point of view which 

 the Dutch had succeeded — Britishers at that time were more 

 established in Malaya than this part of the world — in impressing 

 upon the native Rajas for the time being that the Portuguese 

 was the common enemy, against whom Dutch, British, and 

 natives were all banded together , and that the Dutch and the 

 British were both of them prepared to accept, more or less, the 



