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Updated: June 1, 2025
We were so troubled at Amboina by musquitoes, a sort of gnats, that we had every night to put ourselves into a bag before we could go to sleep, as otherwise these insects bit us so intolerably that we could get no rest.
It was a barbarous and cruel act; and when the news of the "massacre of Amboina," as it was called, reached England, there was loud indignation and demands for redress. But the quarrel with Spain over the marriage of the Prince of Wales had driven James I at the very end of his life, and Charles I on his accession, to seek the support of the United Provinces.
The fleet proceeded on the 4th of April to Amboina, and on the 28th sailed for Batavia, where they arrived on the 29th of August. Here the fleet was separated, part being sent on an expedition against Malacca, and others to other places, so that here the voyage of the Nassau fleet may be said to end, without having completed the circumnavigation, at least in an unbroken series.
Continuing the same course all the 27th, we got sight of Amboina early in the morning of the 28th, bearing due N. about six leagues distant. We now stood directly for the island, and about noon came just off the harbour, a joyful sight to us then, though we soon had cause to think it the worst thing that had befallen us.
To the S.W. of this is the other island of Cabeses, a pretty high island, on which the Dutch always keep a corporal and two soldiers, who go two or three times all over the isle to see that no cloves are planted, and if they find any to cut them down and burn them, lest any other nation might be able to procure that commodity, in which case Amboina would become of little value, as cloves are its only valuable product.
Here captain Schouten and Jaques Le Maire went ashore, and were kindly entertained by the general Laurence Real, admiral Stephen Verhagen, and Jasper Janson, governor of Amboina.
At this time we were boarded by a large Indian proa, on board of which was a freeman of Amboina, whom we acquainted with our great want of victuals, having had nothing for a great while to support us except a scanty allowance of spoilt flour and water, and so very little of that as hardly sufficed to keep us alive.
Cloves, although they are said originally to have been the produce of Machian, or Bachian, a small island far to the eastward, and only fifteen miles to the northward of the line, and to have been from thence disseminated by the Dutch, at their first coming into these parts, over all the eastern islands, are now confined to Amboina, and the small isles that lie in its neighbourhood; the Dutch having, by different treaties of peace between them and the conquered kings of all the other islands, stipulated, that they should have only a certain number of trees in their dominions; and in future quarrels, as a punishment for disobedience and rebellion, lessened the quantity, till at last they left them no claim to any.
For instance, he states that in 1653, when a lieutenant in the Dutch service was leading a party of soldiers along the sea-shore in Amboina, he and all his company saw the mermen swimming at a short distance from the beach with long and flowing hair, of a colour between gray and green and six weeks afterwards, the creatures were again seen by him and more than fifty witnesses, at the same place, by clear daylight.
Eighteen Englishmen were seized, and though there was no evidence against them, except what was extorted by torture and afterwards solemnly denied, twelve, including Towerson, were executed. Carpentier admitted that the proceedings were irregular, and they were in any case unnecessary, for a despatch recalling Towerson was on its way to Amboina.
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