The ten years that elapsed between the battle of Swally in 1612 and the British capture of Ormuz in 1622 sufficed to decide the issue in the struggle for supremacy between the British and the Portuguese. The latter, unwillingly linked to the dying power of Spain, were already decadent, and on the 20th of January 1615 a great Portuguese armada, consisting of six great galleons, three smaller ships, two galleys and sixty rowed barges, was defeated for the second time in Swally roads by Captain Nicholas Downton, in command of four British vessels. In 1618 the English opened trade between Surat and Jask in the Persian Gulf, and in 1620 gained a victory over the Portuguese fleet there. Early in 1622 the English fleet gained a second decisive victory, and captured Ormuz, the pearl of the Portuguese possessions in Asia. From this date onwards India and the Persian Gulf lay open to the English as far as Portugal was concerned, and before Portugal broke loose from Spain in 1640 her supremacy in Asiatic seas was hopelessly lost. In 1642 she partially and in 1654 finally accepted the situation, and opened all her Eastern possessions to English trade. Rivalry with the Dutch. The struggle with the young and growing power of Holland was destined to be a much more serious affair than that with the exhausted power of Portugal. The Dutch had just emerged victorious from the struggle with Spain, and were pulsing with national life. In 1602 the Dutch routed the Portuguese near Bantam, and opened the road to the Spice Islands. In 1603 they threatened Goa, in 1619 they fixed their capital at Batavia, in 1638 they drove the Portuguese from Ceylon and in 1641 from Malacca. When Portugal emerged in 1640 from her sixty years' captivity to Spain, she found that her power in the Eastern seas had passed to the Dutch, and thenceforward the struggle lay between the Dutch and the English. The Dutch were already too strongly entrenched in the Indian archipelago for English competition to avail there, and the intense rivalry between the two nations led to the tragedy of Amboyna in 1623, when Governor Van Speult put to torture and death nine Englishmen on a charge of conspiring to take the Dutch forts. This outrage was not avenged until the time of Cromwell (1654), and in the meantime the English abandoned the struggle for the Spice Islands, and turned their attention entirely to the mainland of India. In 1616 the Dutch began to compete with the English at Surat, and their piracies against native vessels led to the Mogul governor seizing English warehouses; but soon the native authorities learnt to discriminate between the different European nations, and the unscrupulous methods of the Dutch cast them into disfavour. Madras settlements.