, upon becoming master of Lisbon, was to close
the Tagus to the Dutch, his one-time subjects, who had revolted eight
years before. As a result of the revenge thus taken by the Spanish
tyrant, the Dutch were faced by the necessity of themselves going in
quest of the Indies if their flag was not to disappear from the seas.
Their opportunity came a dozen years later when a venturesome
Hollander, Cornelius Houtman, who was risking imprisonment and even
death by trading surreptitiously in the forbidden city on the Tagus,
succeeded in obtaining through bribery a copy of one of the secret
charts. The Spanish authorities scarcely could have been aware that he
had learned a secret of such immense importance, or his silence would
have been insured by the headsman. As it was, he was thrown into prison
for illegal trading, where he was held for heavy ransom. But he managed
to get word to Amsterdam of the priceless information which had come
into his possession, whereupon the merchants of that city promptly
formed a syndicate, subscribed the money for his ransom, and obtained
his release. Thus it came about that shortly after his return to
Holland there was organized the Company of Distant Lands, a title as
vague, grandiose and alluring as the plans of those who founded it. In
1595, then, nearly a century after da Gama had shown the way, four
caravels under the command of Houtman, the banner of the Netherlands
flaunting from their towering sterns, sailed grandly out of the Texel,
slipped past the white chalk cliffs of Dover, sped southward before the
trades, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and laid their course across the
Indian Ocean for the Spice Islands. When the adventurers returned, two
years later, they brought back tales of islands richer than anything of
which the Dutch burghers had ever dreamed, and produced cargoes of
Eastern merchandise to back their stories up.

The return of Houtman's expedition was the signal for a great outburst
of commercial enterprise in the Low Countries, seekers after fortune or
adventure flocking to the Indies as, centuries later, other
fortune-seekers, other adventurers, flocked to the gold-diggings of the
Sierras, the Yukon, and the Rand. On those distant seas, however, the
adventurers were beyond the reach of any law, the same lawless
conditions prevailing in the Indies at the beginning of the seventeenth
century which characterized Californian life in the days of '49. The
Dutch warred on the n