# Further India/The East India Companies, and After

​CHAPTER V
THE EAST INDIA COMPANIES, AND AFTER
THERE is a certain characteristic irony in the fact that the nation whose king enjoyed the title of "The Eldest Son of the Church" should have been the first of all the peoples of Europe to set at defiance the Bull of Alexander VI. In 1528 the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier of Dieppe sailed from France, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and penetrated as far south and east as Sumatra, where Jean, the leader and the inspiring genius of the adventure, died in the following year. His friend, the poet Pierre Crignon, who sailed with him, says of his dead captain:
"C'est le premier François qui a découvert les Indies jusques à l'isle de Taprobane, et si mort ne l'eust pas prévenu je crois qu'il eust été jusques au Moluques."
This, however, was not to be, and though the French broke through the ring-fence of Portugal before any other nation of Europe had ventured to do so, their efforts were isolated and of no importance. The first organised chal- lenge to the monopoly enjoyed by the Portuguese in Asia emanated from the city of London, England once again playing the part which has earned for her so much hatred among the nations of the Continent—that of chief thwarter of individual ambitions.
During the concluding twenty years of the sixteenth ​century history in Europe made itself apace. The United Provinces had achieved their independence; Spain and Portugal had come under the sceptre of Philip II, who thus united in his single person the sovereignty of the discoveries in the Eastern and the Western world, which had been made by the two great nations of the Peninsula; the globe had been circumnavigated by Drake and by Cavendish; and most important of all, in so far as the fate of the East was concerned, the pride and strength of the greatest maritime peoples of Europe had been humbled to the dust by the defeat of the Invincible. Armada. During the sixteenth century the trade of Asia poured into Lisbon, carried thither in Portuguese bot- toms, and its distribution throughout the countries of Europe was mainly conducted by the traders of Holland. Philip's decree forbidding Dutch merchants to reside in or to hold commerce with Lisbon was a blow directed against the material prosperity of the Netherlands; but though for a time the measure caused considerable dis- tress, it served in the end as a stimulant to the Hollanders inciting them to find their way to Asia on their own account, and thus to break up the monopoly so long enjoyed by Portugal and partially shared by Spain.
The first expedition, which had for its object the estab- lishment of direct commercial relations between English merchants and the East, sailed in 1591, three years after the defeat of the Armada. It consisted of a fleet of three vessels under the command of Raymond and Lancaster, and the enterprise was conducted upon lines as frankly piratical as the heart of an Elizabethan could desire. On ​the way to the Cape of Good Hope a "Portugal carawel laden by merchants of Lisbon for Brasile" was snapped up, containing "divers necessaries fit for our voyage: which wine, oyle, olives and capers were better to us than gold," as Edmund Barker, Lieutenant, appreciatively re- cords. In June, 1592, Lancaster, after cruising off the north of Sumatra, reached "Pulo Pinaon" (Penang), where he decided to await the change of the monsoon. Here many men died of sickness, and when Lancaster put to sea his company numbered only thirty-three men and one boy, "of which not twenty-two were found for labour and helpe, and of them not a third part sailors." None the less the adventurers did not hesitate to give chase to "three ships, being all of burthen sixty or seventy tunnes, one of which we made to strike with our very boat," though her consorts were spared because the goods they contained belonged to natives of Pegu, and not, like those which she contained, to the hated "Portugals." In September Lancaster sailed southward into the Straits of Malacca as far as Pulau Sămbîlan, a little group of islands situated near the mouth of the Pêrak River, where he lay in wait for shipping passing to and from Malacca. He succeeded in effecting the cap- ture of two important Portuguese vessels, which made only a poor resistance, and then, "douting the forces of Malacca," as well he might, he made his way northward to Junk Ceylon, back to Sumatra, and thence to the Nic- obars. After short stays at the first and last of these places, he proceeded to Ceylon, where it had been his in- tention to await a fitting opportunity to fall upon the ​Portuguese ships sailing from India, but his crews had had their fill of wanderings and adventures, and as their leader was stricken down by sickness at this juncture, they insisted upon sailing for the Cape. Lancaster's voyage could hardly be accounted much of a success, but it was memorable because it was the first attempt made by the English to strike right into the heart of the Por- tuguese empire in the East. Drake and Cavendish had both passed through the Malayan Archipelago, and each had done his best to cause trouble to the Spaniards be- fore ever Lancaster sailed from Plymouth; but Caven- dish, at any rate, had had some not unfriendly inter- course with the Portuguese merchants in Java, and both he and Drake had come by the Cape Horn route, and had sailed for the Cape of Good Hope without attempting to penetrate into the Straits of Malacca. Lancaster, on the contrary, though in effect he accomplished little, sailed round Africa by the great Portuguese highway; harried Portuguese shipping from the Atlantic to the mouth of the Pêrak River; and captured vessels almost within sight of the great Portuguese stronghold of Malacca. This was a considerable achievement, for he had given practi- cal demonstration of the fact that the position of the Portuguese in the East was by no means unassailable, and hc brought back with him some valuable information, not only regarding routes and trade, but also on the subject of the political situation in Asia.
During the last decade of the sixteenth century, indeed, the secrecy which the Portuguese had been at such pains
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Europe. A period was set to the time during which all detailed information concerning the geography, the trade, the politics and the peoples of the East was, in a sense, the exclusive and jealously guarded property of Portugal. The capture of the carrack, the Madre de Dios, by the English in 1592, on board which was a copy of the "Notable Register and Matricole of the whole Govern- ment and Trade of the Portuguese in the East Indies," furnished the merchants of London with much precious information which hitherto had been withheld from all the world, and this document became in fact the pros- spectus of the first British East India Company. Dr. Thorne, an Englishman who had long resided in Seville, also supplied his countrymen with a valuable report on the political and commercial relations of Spain and Por- tugal with the East. A similar service was rendered to the merchants of Holland by Jan Huygen van Lin- schoten, who had resided many years at Goa under the patronage of the Archbishop, Vincente de Fonseca, and had collected a great store of information relating to all the eastern lands with which the Portuguese held com- merce. Linschoten returned to Holland in September, 1592, and two years later the States General granted him. a license to publish his work. Its appearance, however, was delayed until 1596, as its author, who shared the then popular belief in the possibility of opening a trade-route to the Indies viâ the north of Europe and Asia, wasted this period upon a fruitless voyage undertaken with that object. Although his book was not given to the public ​until 1596, it seems probable that the manuscript was examined by many who were interested in the future of Holland's trade with Asia, and its subsequent publication, and translation into many tongues, dealt a tremendous blow to Portugal, for it contained a merciless exposure of the futility of her system and of the rottenness which was eating into the heart of her administration in the East.
On April 2, 1595, a fleet of four vessels, equipped by the newly established Dutch East India Company, sailed from the Texel, under the command of Cornelius Hout- man. The Cape route was followed, and in June, 1596, the fleet reached Sumatra. Coasting towards the south, Houtman passed through the Straits of Sunda, and made a considerable stay at Bantam, the town at the north- western extremity of Java, where a Portuguese factory was already in existence, and where the Dutchmen speed- ily obtained permission to establish a trading-post of their own. Their coming was, of course, viewed with great dissatisfaction by the Portuguese, and though the latter concealed their hostility, they set to work to intrigue against their rivals, and succeeded so well that serious misunderstandings arose between Houtman and the na- tives. After leaving Bantam, the Dutch adventurers passed to Jaccatra, the town upon the ruins of which Batavia, the modern capital of the Dutch East Indies, has been reared, and thence, coasting along the northern shores of Java, visited Bâli and Lômbok. At the latter place he found that his crews had been so much reduced that their number no longer sufficed to work all the ships,
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Ocean, doubled the Cape, and reached the Texel in Au- gust, 1597, having with him only eighty-nine men out of the company, 249 strong, which had shipped with him little more than two years earlier.
His voyage is chiefly interesting because it illustrates. the different policy adopted from the beginning by the Dutch, as compared with that of the Portuguese. The methods of the latter we have already examined: the qualities which characterised the Dutch system may be summed up in a few words. To begin with the Hollan- ders had in view a single object—trade. They evinced no desire to proselytise, or to insult the religious or social prejudices of the natives. They made no attempt at fili- bustering; behaved with considerable self-restraint in very trying circumstances at Bantam; and their generally peaceful and orderly behaviour made a deep impression on the Orientals who had become used to the license of the Portuguese. This favourable view of the newcomers was confirmed at a later period by better acquaintance with the Dutchmen, and Pyrard de Laval, for instance, tells us that at Bantam "the king had an affection to- wards them and the people loved them." Their claim upon the good will of the natives rested also to no small extent upon their open hostility to the Portuguese, and though they were guilty of many acts of piracy, they tried to make a distinction between the property of their European enemies and that of Asiatic traders. Speaking generally, both the Dutch and the English were well re- ceived in the East, principally because they were not ​Portuguese, and because their coming was known to be viewed with intense disfavour by those white men who had earned and deserved the hatred of the native popula- tions. Houtman, therefore, was able to bring back with him a very encouraging report of the prospects presented by the newly opened trade between Holland and the Indies, and so quick were the merchants of the Nether- lands to seize the advantages thus offered to them that by the summer of 1601—only six and a half years after the sailing of the first expedition—no less than forty-nine Dutch vessels had been sent out bound for Malaya viâ the Cape of Good Hope.
Meanwhile, on December 31st, 1599, the Charter of Incorporation of the first British East India Company had been granted, "Being a privilege for fifteen years to certain adventurers for the discovery of the trade of the East Indies, namely, George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland and 215 knights, aldermen, and merchants." A capital of £72,000 was subscribed, and on February 16th, 1600, Lancaster sailed from England in command of the first fleet of the East India Company. Taking the Cape route, he reached Achem (Acheh) on June 5th, 1602, delivered a letter addressed by Queen Elizabeth to the king of that state, established good relations with him. and his people, and opened a factory in his capital. A Portuguese ambassador from Malacca tried vainly to in- duce the King to have no dealings with the Englishmen, but the Achehnese had from the first constituted them- selves the especial defenders of the brown man's birth-
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any Europeans who were enemies of the hated race. Lancaster not only carried on his trade in Acheh with- out molestation under the protection of its king, but actually used the place as his base of operations for a piratical raid which he presently made upon the Portu- guese in the Straits of Malacca—an expedition which resulted in the capture of one very rich prize. On his re- turn to Acheh a treaty of friendship was made with the King, and Lancaster coasted along Sumatra, passed through the Straits of Sunda, and opened a factory at Bantam. Thence he sailed for England, leaving behind him eight men and two factors, the chief of whom was Master William Starkey, whose purely mercantile charge must be regarded as the germ out of which there grew in the course of time Great Britain's enormous empire in the East.
Bantam itself had been first visited by the Portuguese in 1511, when, immediately after the fall of Malacca, Henrique Lemé, one of Dalboquerque's captains, touched at the port. Houtman, as we have seen, established a trading-post there in 1596, at which time a Portuguese factory was already in existence, and the station now founded by Lancaster became later the principal Presi- dency of the British East Indies to which the agencies of Madras, Bengal and Surat were alike subordinate. The importance of Bantam for both the English and the Dutch lay in the fact that it furnished a convenient centre from which to trade with Sumatra for pepper, and especially with the Moluccas for spices, the latter being ​the most precious produce in the East. No sooner had the Dutch power in the Malayan Archipelago attained to sufficient proportions than a descent was made upon Amboyna, which was captured by Van Nek in 1599, al- though the Portuguese had a fort on Tidor. Two years later the Portuguese sent a fleet under André Furtado, "to expel the rebel Hollanders," and for the moment Amboyna was retaken. Aided by the Spaniards, who were now strongly established in the Philippines, the Portuguese tried in 1603 to annex Ternate, but the at- tempt failed, and in 1605 the Dutch made another swoop upon the Moluccas, their leader, Van der Hagen, driving the Portuguese not only out of Amboyna but also out of Tidor. Two years later Pedro de Acuña, the Spanish Governor of the Philippines, attacked the Dutch and de- prived them of all their possessions in the Moluccas, ex- cept Amboyna.
Meanwhile, in 1606, the Dutch under Matelief laid seige to Malacca itself, thus striking at the very heart of the Portuguese power in Southeastern Asia, and it is to be noted that the Sultan of Johor took part in the cam- paign against the successors of Dalboquerque. It was in these latter years that the Portuguese began to reap the crop of hatred which they had sown among the natives of the East during the preceding century. The Portuguese Viceroy, Martin Affonso de Castro, sailed from Goa to the relief of Malacca with the greatest armada which had ever quitted that port. In the first instance he attacked Acheh, whose king had, as usual, befriended the enemies of Portugal, and was heavily repulsed. He then passed ​into the Straits of Malacca, forcing Matelief to raise the siege, but was immediately after trounced most soundly by that redoubtable Dutchman in a great sea fight. For the moment, however, Malacca itself was saved, but a death-blow to the prestige of Portugal in Malaya had been dealt, and from that moment the fate of the first conquerors of Malacca was sealed. Matelief, flushed with victory, sailed to the Moluccas, where in the following year he succeeded in driving the Spaniards out of Tidor. Till 1611 this island was held by the Dutch, but in that year it was retaken by the Spaniards together with the island of Banda, though soon after the Dutch reestablished themselves in Ternate. In 1641, however, Malacca fell before the joint attack of the Hol- landers and the Achehnese, and passed into the keeping of the former, as also in the course of time did the Moluccas and most of the islands of the Malayan Archi- pelago.
After the final defeat of the Portuguese and the con- quest of Malacca the power of Holland in Malaya grew rapidly. By means of superior energy and enterprise the Dutch contrived to engross the greater part of the spice- trade, leaving to the English traders only an insignificant residue. In 1682, by fomenting an insurrection headed by the son of the King of Bantam, they succeeded in driv- ing the British out of Java, which they then annexed. little by little, till they had made themselves masters of the whole. The English fell back upon Sumatra, where they held factories in Acheh, at Priaman, Fort Marlborough, and at Bengkulen, stations which became of less and less ​importance as England gradually began to win a new empire in India. On the mainland the Dutch estab- lished trading-posts in Pêrak and Sêlângor, but through these were presently withdrawn. Malacca was held until 1795, when it was attacked and taken by the British; it was restored to Holland in 1818 under the Treaty of Vienna, but six years later was exchanged for Beukulen, and this time passed finally into the keeping of Great Britain. The East India Company had meanwhile founded a settlement on the island of Penang, which was leased by them from the Râja of Kedah in 1786, and in 1798 the territory on the mainland, now known as Prov- ince Wellesley, was purchased for $2,000. Sir Stanford Raffles, whose statesman's eye saw the strategic and com- mercial value of the position, obtained the cession of the island of Singapore from the Sultan of Johor in 1819, but the territory immediately behind the town of Malacca was not brought under British jurisdiction until 1833- An English expedition invaded and took possession of Java in 1811, but in 1818 the island was restored to Holland. The remaining British settlements on the is- land of Sumatra were ceded to the Dutch by a treaty concluded in 1871, under the provisions of which Hol- land abandoned all claims in the Malay Peninsula, and with the extension of British influence throughout the Native States of the mainland, which began in 1874, the real exploration of this Malayan region had its beginning. Up to this time the Malay Peninsula, in all save its coast-line and its ports, at some of which small Dutch factories had from time to time been established, was ​a complete terra incognita to Europeans. The story of its subsequent exploration will be told in a later chapter.
To return now to the doings of the East India Com- panies in the other lands of southeastern Asia, it was not until 1618 that trade began to be conducted by the Brit- ish with the valley of the Irawadi, the exploitation of which by Portuguese adventurers has already been noted. Cu- riously enough the first of the Company's factors to visit Burma came, not from India, but overland from Siam. In 1618 the factor at the Siamese capital, Lucas Anthon- ison by name, sent a sub-factor, one Thomas Samuel, up the Menam to Zengomay (Chieng Mai), to investigate the prospects of trade in that place, which shortly before. had passed into the hands of Siam. The forces of the King of Ava retook Chieng Mai while Samuel was still there, and the unfortunate merchant was carried to Pegu with all his property, and soon afterwards died there. He was not the first white man to accomplish the journey from Ayuthia to Pegu, since the Portuguese contingent which aided the Peguan army in its invasion of Siam in 1548 must have traversed approximately the same line of country; but his arrival led indirectly to the opening up of commerce with that country by the agents of the British Company. Anthonison, who had meanwhile been trans- ferred to Masulipatam, no sooner heard what had befallen Samuel than he despatched two sub-factors to Burma, ostensibly to enquire for the dead merchant's effects, but really with a view to establishing trade. He was badly served by his agents, who tried to keep the commerce of Burma in their own hands and to discourage its exten​sion, but none the less British intercourse with the country shortly afterwards became freer than it ever was again until after the annexation of Pegu in 1852. The East India Company had settlements at Prome, Ava and Sir- ian, and a trading-post somewhere on the confines of China, at a place which in all probability was Bhamo, on the Irawadi, over 300 miles above Mandalay. The Dutch Company also had a considerable trade with Burma, pos- sessing factories in the upper districts, and, it is said, occupying the island of Negrais. From 1631 to 1677 they had a factory at Sirian, once the capital of the ill-fated de Brito, and Valentyn attributes their abandon- ment of trade with Burma to the constant wars which in this region made peaceful commerce impossible. The British trade also languished, but between 1680 and 1684 the Company reestablished its factories in Burma, and in 1686-7 the island of Negrais was surveyed and taken nominal possession of by the English. In 1695 Nathaniel Higginson, the Governor of Fort St. George, sent Edward Fleetwood and Capt. James Lesley to Ava with presents to the King, out of which the sender, who instructed his agents to haggle manfully, hoped to make a profit in the form of return-gifts. A grant for a new factory at Sirian was obtained, and a Resident was appointed there to su- pervise the trade, but almost immediately afterwards a gen- eral expulsion of foreigners took place, and thenceforth the East India Company had no direct financial stake in Burmese commerce. Sirian, however, continued to be the residence of British and other foreign merchants, and when the Siamese and the Peguans, leagued together ​against Ava, took the place in 1740, these strangers were not molested. Three years later Sirian was retaken by Ava, and subsequently was burned by the Peguans, when the British, whose Resident, Mr. Smart, had acted, as be. fitted his name, with duplicity in his dealings with both parties, were obliged to retire. Negrais was settled from Madras in 1753, while war was once more raging be- tween Ava and Pegu, and two years later the British factory at Bassein was destroyed by the former. A mis-, sion under Captain Baker was sent to Ava to ask for redress and to offer the support of the Company, which had been prudently withheld until the defeat of the Peg- uans had become a manifest certainty. Baker was badly received, and when he spoke of "assistance" the King bared his thighs, smote them with his palms, laughed in- sultingly in the envoy's face and asked him what he thought such a king as he had to do with aid from any man! In 1757 another envoy, Ensign Lister, was sent up the Irawadi to Ava, and as the result of a most hu- miliating interview, a new factory was opened at Bassein. In 1759 Negrais was practically abandoned, only a small staff remaining there in charge of the buildings, and the entire population of the island, including ten Europeans, was treacherously murdered very soon afterwards by the Burmese. The weakness which characterised the deal- ings of the Company with Burma was never better ex- emplified than by the action taken on this occasion, for the envoy sent to plead for redress was received with con- tempt and insult, and there the matter ended. Bassein was now abandoned, but some trade was carried on with Ran​goon until 1794, the merchants doing little business, while the Company's agents possessed no political influence, and occupied for the most part positions of great humiliation.
Over Chittagong and Assam, however, the Company had established its hold, and when in 1794 the Burmese sent 5,000 armed men into the former province "to ar- rest robbers dead or alive," the British at last showed fight, and the Burmese yielded without forcing the issue. The following year Capt. Michael Symes was sent upon his famous embassy to Ava, a mission of which he sub- sequently wrote an elaborate account. He was accom- panied by Lieutenant Woods, who made the first reliable survey of the Irawadi from Rangoon to Ava, and by Dr. Buchanan, who collected a great deal of information bearing upon the districts traversed. This was the only really important achievement of the mission, for Symes was treated with the utmost insolence, was presented to the King, in circumstances of intense humiliation, upon a kodau, or "beg-pardon day," and effected nothing of any importance. He moreover carried away with him a wholly exaggerated idea of the might of Ava, and though Cox, the next envoy, corrected his predecessor's erroneous impressions, Symes was regarded at the time as the more reliable authority, and his book was probably not with- out its effect in leading the Government of India into continuing the weak-kneed policy which had too long been followed towards the arrogant Burmese Court. Be- tween the time of Cox's visit and 1810 three other mis- sions were sent to Ava, each in turn to be subjected to insults which it is humiliating to recall, and on each ​occasion the King declined to take the slightest notice of the letters sent by the Governor-General, deeming it below him to have any dealings with one who was not a crowned head. All these missions followed the river route to Amarapura, the then residence of the King, and no material addition was made to the information which had been collected by the officers attached to Symes's mission. Ava during the whole of this time continued to treat foreigners with the utmost contumely, and in 1805, for instance, all the British subjects in Rangoon were imprisoned, owing to some misunderstanding which arose over the seizure by the Company of a ship in whose cargo the Burmese authorities were in some way interested. The Company, however, was long-suffering, and it was not until Chittagong had been repeatedly raided that war was at last declared. Sir Archibald Campbell ascended the Irawadi and reached Prome on April 4th, 1825, where he went into cantonments until the end of the rainy season. The land column under Cotton, operating in conjunction with him, had been heavily repulsed by the Burmese at Donabyu, but other- wise the resistance offered had been poor. In September the King sent down from Ava to know on what terms the British army would retire. The reply was that Arakan and Tenasserim must be ceded to the Company. The King declined, and hostilities were renewed, the Burmese being badly beaten a little north of Prome. As the British army continued to advance, the King decided to sue for peace, and on February 24th, 1826, the peace of Yandabu was signed, whereby Tavoi, Mergui, and ​Tenasserim—together constituting the long strip of coun- try lying between the Bay of Bengal and the frontiers of Siam—were ceded to the British, and with Arakan be- came the foundation of our Burmese empire.
The same year John Crawfurd was sent to negotiate the commercial treaty which had been provided for in the terms of peace, but the Court of Ava had not yet. learned its lesson, for though his reception compared favourably with those accorded to his predecessors, he met with both impertinence and bad faith. On Decem- ber 31st, 1829, Major Burney was appointed British Resi- dent at Ava, a position which he held with distinction for eight years, only retiring to Rangoon and sailing for England after the usurpation of the crown by the savage and arrogant King Tharawadi had robbed him of all in- fluence. With the appointment of Burney to this post at Ava a new chapter opens in the story of the explora- tion of Burma, but its details will have to be examined by us later on.
Turning next to Siam, we find that intercourse between this country and the Dutch East India Company began as early as 1604, before a decade had elapsed since the sailing of the first vessels from the Texel; and in 1608 a Siamese mission was sent to the Dutch factory at Bantam. It was not, however, until 1634 that a Dutch post was established in Siam, and in 1663 the Company withdrew its agent, averring that its agreement with Siam had been violated by the latter. That Siam saw the removal of the factors with regret is proved by the fact that in the following year an embassy was sent to Batavia, by means ​of which friendly relations were once more established. These continued unabated for some years, the Dutch agent in 1685 being the first foreigner ever admitted to the presence of the King. In 1706, however, a differ- ence arose once more, and this time the Dutch were obliged to ask for such terms as the Siamese were dis- posed to grant to them. Subsequently the trade between the Hollanders and Siam languished and almost ceased. In 1740 an effort was made to restore the former state of things, the King of Siam making friendly overtures to the Dutch, but the negotiations led to nothing, and so completely did the intercourse between the Dutch and the Siamese cease that when Bowring visited Bangkok in 1857, he found no trace remaining there to show that the connection, which had lasted for more than a century, had ever existed.
A remarkable figure in the history of Siamese relations with the West is that of Constantine Phaulkon, or Fal- con, a Greek of Cephalonia, who ran away to England in about 1640, when he was a mere child, and afterwards sailed for the Indies in one of Old John Company's ships. Later, having acquired a vessel of his own, he was wrecked near the mouth of the Menam, passed some years in Siam, and learned the language of the country. Sailing from Siam, he had the misfortune to be again wrecked on the coast of Malabar, his whole ship's com- pany perishing, while he alone escaped, carrying with him a sum of 2,000 crowns. Naked and in a sorry plight, he was roaming the shores upon which he had been cast, when he lighted upon another shipwrecked mariner, ​even more destitute than himself, who was also the only survivor of his crew, and the moment this man opened his mouth to speak Constantine discovered that he was a native of Siam. Enquiry led Constantine to ascertain the fact that this waif was a high official who had been de- spatched by his King on an embassy to Persia, of all places,—yet another proof, were any such needed, of the extent of the inter-Asiatic intercourse which existed prior to the domination of the East by white men and the wily Greek, whose charity, we must suspect, was not untainted by self-seeking, invested his all in a ship, in which he con- veyed his new-found friend back to Siam. The man whom he had thus so handsomely befriended recommended him to the officials in Siam, and Constantine presently won for himself great renown by his skilful manipulation of the accounts of some Muhammadans, whereby he proved that far from the King being in their debt, they owed the monarch a substantial sum of money! At an Oriental Court tact and wisdom such as this were sure of recogni- tion, and Constantine rose in the public service until he at last occupied the proud position of Prime Minister. He attained this eminence in 1665, and at Lopburi in the Menam valley there are still extant the ruins of the works which were built under his direction. During his youth in England he had abandoned Catholicism, and had be- come an Anglican, but the Jesuits, who long ere this had established missions in China and in other parts of the Far East, found him out and won him back to the faith of his fathers. Thereafter Constantine appears to have cherished a desire to convert the King of Siam to Chris​tianity, and it was largely through his agency that the missions of which Père Tachard and Père Choisi were the chroniclers were despatched to the Court of Siam by Louis XIV in 1685 and 1687. These embassies, the second of which was under the leadership of the Chevalier de Chaumont, were mainly composed of Jesuits, and their sole object was the conversion of the King. They were well received, and the Chevalier de Chaumont was care- ful to submit himself to none of the humiliating observ- ances which, until a much later period, were exacted from British envoys to the Court of Ava; but the King, albeit he was a most liberal-minded monarch, far in advance of his age and race, had no intention of adopting an alien faith. De Chaumont, therefore, presently returned to France; but the Jesuits remained behind, and for a period occupied positions of importance in the Siamese service. They were instrumental in helping to suppress a rebellion headed by a Muhammadan, in which some refugees from Macassar took part, but they gradually became hateful to the nobles and the people of Siam, and were eventually massacred to a man, Constantine himself being ignomin- iously executed.
During the eighteenth century intercourse between Europeans and Siam was confined to the visits of a few traders and missionaries, and Hamilton's Account of the East Indies, published in Edinburgh in 1727, is probably the best work on the lands of southeastern Asia which that period produced. It shows, however, an intimate knowledge of nothing save the ports and coast-lines, all information relating to the interior being derived from ​native sources of no great accuracy. Hamilton may be regarded as typical of his class and age, and a study of his work shows us how slow was the progress of know- ledge of these regions after the great discoveries of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. The missionaries, as ever, were ubiquitous and scornful of risk, but they were for the most part inarticulate for us, and when in 1821 John Crawfurd was sent to Bangkok and Hue on a special embassy, George Finlayson, in his account of the mission, writes of these countries as though they were in some sort being rediscovered. Hitherto, he declares, they had been "almost unknown to us." Craw- furd and his party were coldly received in Siam, and after a short stay at the capital they coasted as far as Pulau Kondor, touching at several islands on the way. They visited Saigon, where they met a M. Diard, "a lively, well-educated Frenchman," and passed thence to Hue by water after calling in at Turon. At the Court of Cochin- China they found that French influence was predominant, but permission to trade was granted by the King to the East India Company, and the mission then returned over- land to Turon. Five years later Burney, afterwards Resident at Ava, was sent to Bangkok to enlist the co- operation of the Siamese against Burma, with which the British were then at war, but he was not too well received, and the peace of Yandabu was concluded before any active steps had been taken. We have now traced the history of European intercourse with Siam up to the time of the first Burmese war, and as the detailed exploration of the country is a work that belongs to the last seventy ​years of the nineteenth century, it will be more conven- ient to continue the narrative in a later chapter.
Turning finally to Indo-China—namely, Cochin-China, Kambodia, Annam, Tongking, and the Laos country in the valley of the Mekong,—we find that after the first settlements had been formed by the Portuguese during the sixteenth century, as has already been related, the British and Dutch East India Companies both established factories in this region. The English had their factory on Pulau Kondor, now the penal settlement of Saigon, establishing it there in 1616, but a mutiny of the Com- pany's Macassar troops, who had been kept on after the expiration of the terms of their agreement, led to its abandonment. This, and the English factory at Pĕtâni, from the possession of which we were ousted by the Dutch, were practically the only ventures of the Com- pany on the shores of the China Sea. The East India Company of Holland founded a factory in Cochin-China in 1635, in competition with the Portuguese, who had been established there some fifty years earlier, and the Dutchmen had also a trading-post at Pnom Penh, the cap- ital of Kambodia. To them, moreover, belongs the dis- tinction of having been the first to explore the interior by the Mekong route. In 1641 some Laos traders having come from Pnom Penh to Batavia in one of the Company's vessels, Van Dieman, the Governor, decided to attempt the establishment of commercial intercourse with their country. To this end he deputed a sub-factor named. Gerard Van Wusthof to visit Laos, then more or less. united under the King of Vien Chan. The story of this ​remarkable expedition will be examined in more detail in a later chapter in connection with the French mission of 1866, but it may be mentioned here that the party as- cended the Mekong as far as Vien Chan and resided there some months. This journey, however, was not repeated, and did not lead to the opening up of Laos, as in 1642 the Portuguese contrived to cause the Dutch factor, Jeremias de Wal, to be murdered while on a journey to Pnom Penh, and after that the Dutch factories in Cochin-China and Kambodia were abandoned. The Portuguese themselves never penetrated far into the in- terior, though an Italian missionary priest, named Leria, reached Vien Chan in 1642, and later travelled overland into Tongking. His example, however, found no imita- tors, and from his time until late in the last century Laos. was not visited by missionaries.
For a space after the departure of the Dutch the Portuguese who remained in possession excrcised con- siderable influence at the Court of Kambodia and in the delta of the Mekong, but towards the end of the seven- teenth century the native officials, instigated it is said by China, organised a general massacre of the white men, dealing a blow to the power of the Portuguese in this region from which it never again recovered.
From that time onward, the intercourse of Europeans with the lands of Indo-China was confined to the mission- aries and to a few visits from traders. Most of the mission- aries were Frenchmen, though a proportion came from Spain, and the latter half of the seventeenth century saw the growth of French influence in these regions. The ​French Bishop, Pigneau de Béhaine, is the commanding figure in the drama. He was born in 1741, came out to Cochin-China, built a church at Saigon, and so won the confidence of the King Ngueyen Anh, afterwards better known as Gia Long, that he was actually entrusted with the custody of his son, whom he took to Paris in 1787 and presented at the Court of Louis XVI. France was at the moment over-busy with her internal affairs, being as she was on the eve of the great Revolution, and be- yond a gift of arms and a treaty of alliance, the main pro- visions of which were never fulfilled, nothing tangible re- sulted at the time from Béhaine's mission. Subsequently, however, the existence of this treaty was recalled to mind, and the fact was made a foundation upon which to base France's right to interfere in the affairs of Indo- China.
Béhaine's visit, however, attracted the attention of Frenchmen to this distant corner of the world, and a number of adventurers of that nationality visited Annam. By their aid and that of Bêhaine, King Gia Long suc- ceeded in conquering the whole of the ancient kingdom of Annam, from the Gulf of Siam to the frontiers of China, thus uniting under a single sceptre Cochin-China, Annam and Tongking. His gratitude to the white men who had assisted him in this work led him to show an unwonted measure of tolerance to the preachers of the Christian religion. When Béhaine died in Saigon in 1789 he was ac- corded a state funeral, and the monument erected by his patron over his grave still ranks as one of the most in- teresting historical relics of the place. By 1802 Gia Long ​had made himself master of his whole kingdom, and for eighteen years more he ruled it with an iron hand and extended open tolerance to the Christians. In 1820, however, he died, and his successor, Minh Meng, ex- pelled the French and persecuted the native Christians before he had been four years upon the throne. A second massacre of missionaries-for the Roman Catholic priests of the Société des Missions Etrangères returned again and again to the charge, as also did the Spanish missionaries, occurred in 1851, and a war vessel was sent to destroy the forts at Turon. In 1857 Bishop Diaz, a Spaniard, having been brutally murdered by the authorities, France and Spain took joint-action with the result that Cochin-China was invaded by a Franco-Spanish expedition. It was not, however, until the hand of France had been freed by the signing of the Treaty of Peking in 1860, which put an end to the war with China, that really effective action was taken, and Cochin-China was ceded to France.
Kambodia meanwhile had been invaded during the latter half of the eighteenth century by Siam and Annam, and had gradually become subservient to both. In 1857 her King, Ang Duong, appealed for aid to France, and a French protectorate over the kingdom was proclaimed by France shortly after the accession of his successor Norodon in 1859. Siamese influence continued to be predominant at the Court of Kambodia until 1863, when Siam was bought out by France, the provinces of Siam- reap and Batambang being ceded to her without the knowledge or consent of the unhappy Norodon, whose ​protests, however, were unavailing. These provinces had, as a matter of fact, been occupied by Siam for many years, and from the French point of view it was all-im- portant that Siam's demands should be satisfied, and that a clear field should be left in which the influence of France might operate unchecked. Captain Doudart de Lagrée, of whom much more hereafter, occupied for some time the post of Resident at the Court of Kambo- dia, and it was on the eve of his departure on the great journey of exploration which cost him his life, that the rebellion of Pu Kombo broke out in that State. Noro- don was aided by French troops who rescued him from a precarious position in the beleaguered town of Pnom Penh, and this led to the increase of French ascendency, so that to-day though Kambodia is nominally only a protectorate of France, its finances and administration are entirely in the hands of Frenchmen.
In Tongking a Dutch factory had been established in 1637, but it was abandoned in 1700, and after that time no permanent European colony appears to have been formed in this kingdom. Tongking was conquered and annexed by Annam in 1802, after which period it was in- frequently visited by Europeans, save only a few mission- aries, until the Frenchman Dupuis, of whom something will be said in a later chapter, attempted to make the Song Koi River a highway of communication and trade with China. This led to interference on the part of France, and eventually to the practical annexation of the country after a period of prolonged and harassing warfare.
The glance which we have now taken at the history of ​European intercourse with all the lands of the great Indo- Chinese Peninsula, from the coming of the British and Dutch East India Companies to 1826 in the case of Burma and Siam, to the date of the active interference of France in the case of Cochin-China, Kambodia, Annam and Tongking, to the eve of British expansion in the Na- tive States in the case of the Malay Peninsula,--has been necessitated, not because it adds very materially to our information on the subject of the exploration of these countries, but because it is from these periods that the most important part of our story begins. The establishment of European supremacy, or at any rate the wide extension of European influence, were necessary preliminaries to the great task of exploring the Hinterland of Indo-China which had been kept jealously closed to white men from the early days of the seventeenth century when the whole of the East not yet learned be- gun to fear and suspect her invaders. The true explora- tion of Burma dates from the appointment of a British Resident to Ava after the first Burmese war; that of Siam was a work left for accomplishment to the last quarter of the nineteenth century; the interior of the Malay Peninsula was almost entirely unknown when Pêrak and Sĕlângor were placed under British protec- tion in the early seventies of the last century; while the valley of the Mekong was first revealed to Europeans with some fulness of detail by the De Lagrée-Garnier expedition of 1866-1868. It is with the last named jour- ney, as being at once the most important and in many respects the most interesting, that we shall now deal.