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We were led to this by, it seems, a renegado captain of the Hollanders, who found himself ill used by De Ruyter for his good service, and so come over to us, and hath done us good service; so that now we trust him, and he himself did go on this expedition. The service is very great, and our joys as great for it.

With some fourteen thousand men, and one hundred and sixty vessels of which six were the Queen's ships of war, including the famous Revenge and the Dreadnought, and the rest armed merchantmen, English, and forty Hollanders and with a contingent of fifteen hundred Dutchmen under Nicolas van Meetkerke and Van Laen, the adventurers set sail from Plymouth on the 18th of April, 1589.

In 1517, King Emanuel of Portugal sent a fleet of eight ships to China, and an embassy to Peking; but it was not until after the formation of the Dutch East India Company, in 1602, that the use of tea became known on the Continent, and even then, although the Hollanders paid much attention to it, it made its way slowly for many years.

It is however sufficiently amusing to see those excellent Hollanders nobly claiming that "the sea was as free as air" when the right to take Scotch pilchards was in question, while at the very same moment they were earnest for excluding their best allies and all the world besides from their East India monopoly.

It was, in truth, the only way to succour the place. The scheme was quite practicable. Leicester recommended it, the Hollanders seemed to favour it, Commandant Groenevelt and Roger Williams urged it.

In May 1576, a peace was patched up which promised to give neither party undue ascendancy. The great danger of the winter months that Alencon and the Huguenots would make common cause with the Netherlanders had passed; and Elizabeth thought she could now afford to decline both the marriage and the entreaties of the revolted States. But the impending collapse of the Hollanders was averted.

And the working upon that newest harbour was as dangerous to the Hollanders as Bucquoy's dike-building to the Spaniards, for the pioneers and sappers were perpetually under fire from the batteries which the count had at, last successfully established on the extremity of his work.

The lower classes were rather accustomed to plough the sea than the land, and their harvests were reaped from that element, which to Hollanders and Zeelanders was less capricious than the solid earth.

Knowing however, that it was not the Armada alone which could endanger the safety of England, as it was too weak for any enterprise on land, without the assistance of the Prince of Parma and his army in Flanders, she therefore appointed thirty ships of the Hollanders to lie at anchor off Dunkirk, where the prince and his army were to have embarked in flat bottomed boats, which were built on purpose and all in readiness for the expedition to England.

The Hollanders protested that there was no design whatever, so far as they knew, against his princely dignity or person. All were ready to recognize his rank and services by every means in their power. But it was desirable by conciliation and compromise, not by stern decree, to arrange these religious and political differences. The Stadholder replied by again insisting on the Synod.