To secure the dominion of these, they compelled the princes of Ternate and Tidore to consent to the rooting up of all the clove and nutmeg trees in the islands not entirely under the jealous safeguard of Dutch keeping. For this they utterly exterminated the inhabitants of Banda, because they would not submit passively to their yoke. Their lands were divided amongst the white people, who got slaves from other islands to cultivate them. For this Malacca was besieged, its territory ravaged, and its navigation interrupted by pirates; Negapatan was twice attacked; Cochin was engaged in resisting the kings of Calicut and Travancore; and Ceylon and Java have been made scenes of perpetual disturbances. These notorious dissensions have been followed by as odious oppressions, which have been practised at Japan, China, Cambodia, Arracan, on the banks of the Ganges, at Achen, Coromandel, Surat, in Persia, at Bassora, Mocha, and other places. For this they encouraged and established in Celebes a system of kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves which converted that island into a perfect hell. Sir Stamford Raffles has given us a most appalling picture of this system, and the miseries it produced, in an official document in his History of Java. In this document it is stated that whole villages were made slaves of; that there was scarcely a state or a family that had not its assortment of these unhappy beings, who had been reduced to this condition by the most cruel and insidious means. There are few things in history more darkly horrible than this kidnapping system of the Celebes. The Vehme Gerichte, or secret tribunals of Germany, were nothing to the secret prisons of the Celebes. In Makásar, and other places, these secret prisons existed; and such was the dreadful combination of power, influence, and avarice, in this trade,—for the magistrates and princes were amongst the chief dealers in it,—that no possibility of exposing or destroying these dens of thieves existed. Any man, woman, or child might be suddenly pounced on, and immured in one of these secret prisons till there were sufficient victims to send to the slave-ships. They were then marched out chained at midnight, and put on board. Any one may imagine the terror and insecurity which such a state of things occasioned. Everybody knew that such invisible dungeons of despair were in the midst of them, and that any moment he might be dragged into one of them, beyond the power or any hope of rescue.