lty had won and kept. But the
spirit of change was abroad in the world. Potentates and merchants under
the equator had been sedulously taught that there were no other white men
on the planet but the Portuguese and their conquerors the Spaniards, and
that the Dutch--of whom they had recently heard, and the portrait of
whose great military chieftain they had seen after the news of the
Nieuport battle had made the circuit of the earth--were a mere mob of
pirates and savages inhabiting the obscurest of dens. They were soon,
however, to be enabled to judge for themselves as to the power and the
merits of the various competitors for their trade.

Early in this year Andreas Hurtado de Mendoza with a stately fleet of
galleons and smaller vessels, more than five-and-twenty in all, was on
his way towards the island of Java to inflict summary vengeance upon
those oriental rulers who had dared to trade with men forbidden by his
Catholic Majesty and the Pope.

The city of Bantam was the first spot marked out for destruction, and it
so happened that a Dutch skipper, Wolfert Hermann by name, commanding
five trading vessels, in which were three hundred men, had just arrived
in those seas to continue the illicit commerce which had aroused the ire
of the Portuguese. His whole force both of men and of guns was far
inferior to that of the flag-ship alone of Mendoza. But he resolved to
make manifest to the Indians that the Batavians were not disposed to
relinquish their promising commercial relations with them, nor to turn
their backs upon their newly found friends in the hour of danger. To the
profound astonishment of the Portuguese admiral the Dutchman with his
five little trading ships made an attack on the pompous armada, intending
to avert chastisement from the king of Bantam. It was not possible for
Wolfert to cope at close quarters with his immensely superior adversary,
but his skill and nautical experience enabled him to play at what was
then considered long bowls with extraordinary effect. The greater
lightness and mobility of his vessels made them more than a match, in
this kind of encounter, for the clumsy, top-heavy, and sluggish marine
castles in which Spain and Portugal then went forth to battle on the
ocean. It seems almost like the irony of history, and yet it is the
literal fact, that the Dutch galleot of that day--hardly changed in two
and a half centuries since--"the bull-browed galleot butting through the
stream,"--[Oli