1832.] 
ISLAND OF JAVA< 
271 
on the Dutch ships in her ports, and it was many years before 
the aggression was atoned for. The English, however, still main- 
tained their settlement at Bantam, which they had even made the 
capital of their eastern possessions. But the constantly increasing 
power of the Dutch, and the greater attractions presented to the 
English on the continent of India, induced them gradually to re- 
linquish their insular stations, with the exception of a few on the 
coast of Sumatra. They finally withdrew their estabhshment 
from Bantam, in sixteen hundred and eighty-three. 
The Dutch, now without a rival on the island, monopolized the 
whole trade, and became more insolent than ever. They had 
always assumed a high tone from their first landing, which was 
the cause of all the quarrels, massacres, and other acts of atrocity 
of which they were perpetually guilty. Such is ever the case 
with colonial rulers situated so far from the immediate reach or 
control of the mother country. But there was a period when the 
government of Holland seriously contemplated the project of 
transporting its wealth, its enterprise, and its subjects to another 
hemisphere, and fixed upon Batavia, already the seat of its eastern 
commerce, as the capital of its new empire. This plan was in 
agitation in the summer of sixteen hundred and seventy-two, when 
the French troops under Louis the Fourteenth had overrun the 
territory of Holland. But what that repubhc only contemplated^ 
the King of Portugal afterward put in practice. Had the gov- 
ernment of Holland removed to Java, it is probable there would 
not have been so much cause of complaint against the cruelty 
and injustice of itheir Batavian governors, as now stains the page 
of their colonial history. 
The Chinese emigrants and their descendants in Java, have 
been and still are subject to restraints and extortions from the 
Dutch government at Batavia, as unnecessary and impolitic as they 
are unjust ; for this class of inhabitants are the most inoffensive 
and the most industrious on the island. And yet the Dutch affect 
to be suspicious of them, and often punish them without a cause, 
on pretence of their being concerned in some conspiracy against 
the government. Such an event, says Barrow, occurred in the 
year seventeen hundred and seventy-two, when the supposed 
chief of such a conspiracy, who we believe was a Dutchman, 
with twenty of his alleged adherents, were condemned to suffer 
